The counter-revolutionary headed by Mao Tse-tung serves the interests of the Chinese capitalist class in foreign policy, as well as in home policy, just as the Soviet revisionist leadership serves the interests of the new class of Soviet capitalists in its home and foreign policies.
The Soviet capitalists are at present primarily concerned with economic inter-penetration with the capitalist countries of western Europe and the neo-capitalist countries of eastern Europe. Their ideological repudiation of armed struggle, which repudiation assists in the maintenance of imperialism or capitalism in these countries, is a reflection of this foreign policy.
The Soviet capitalists, having repudiated armed struggle, have lost much influence in the countries emerging from colonial and neo-colonial domination by imperialism, where armed struggle is clearly necessary for liberation from imperialism. Much of this lost influence has been acquired by the Chinese and Cuban capitalists who preach through their neo-revisionist spokesmen the necessity of armed struggle and condemn as “rightists” the revisionists who repudiate it. It must be noted, however, that both the Chinese and Cuban leaderships repudiate the need for leadership of national liberation struggles by Marxist-Leninist vanguard parties, thus striving to hold back these struggles at the stage of the bourgeois-democratic revolution – as has been done in China and Cuba themselves to date.
The Chinese capitalist class is striving to present the revisionist “thought of Mao Tse-tung” as the guiding ideology for national liberation, and to present the People’s Republic of China as the main beacon of national liberation struggle, primarily in order to build up spheres of influence in the countries emerging from colonial and neo-colonial domination, and to guide them along the path of capitalist development. Their “anti-imperialism” is not, however, merely propaganda. It is real enough, for one does not need to be a Marxist-Leninist to be anti-imperialist. The Chinese capitalist class is a developing capitalist class – not a class of monopoly capitalists, of imperialists – and it sees world imperialism, heeded by United States imperialism, as a main threat to their development of China into a powerful capitalist state, as well as to their plans for economic hegemony and political leadership over the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, which are emerging from imperialist domination.
The present leaderships of both China and the Soviet Union are revisionist leaderships which serve the interests of their respective capitalist and state-comprador capitalist classes. Therefore, the contradictions between the Chinese and Soviet revisionist leaderships are primarily contradictions of rivalry between two developing capitalist systems and the classes which dominate those systems. These inter-capitalist contradictions are expressed in “Marxist-Leninist” political terms for propaganda reasons, just as in 1940 the British imperialists expressed their rivalry with German imperialism in “anti-fascist” terms. The Chinese neo-revisionists are endeavouring to impose their counter-revolutionary military-fascist dictatorship under the false “left” mask of a “revolutionary struggle against revisionism”; it is, therefore, necessary for them to continue the criticisms of Soviet revisionism begun by their Marxist-Leninist predecessors – although they do so in an emasculated form increasingly emptied, of scientific content. On the other hand, the Soviet revisionists have been able to impose, and so far to maintain, their counter-revolution through the agency of the Communist Party, and regard with extreme disapproval the strategy of the Chinese neo-revisionists, in seeking to impose their counter-revolution through the destruction of the Communist Party. Their attitude to this question is well illustrated by their suppression of the open Hungarian counter-revolution of 1956 in favour of disguised “peaceful” counter-revolution through the agency of the Hungarian Party.
The spurious character of the present official Chinese criticism of Soviet revisionism is clearly shown by the fact that the programme of the Soviet Revolutionary Communists – which calls for the solidarity and fraternal assistance of all Marxist-Leninists to achieve the revolutionary overthrow of the Soviet revisionist world centre and of the reactionary state apparatus it has erected to serve the interests of the new Soviet state-comprador bourgeoisie – has never been published or referred to in any organ under the direct control of the Chinese neo-revisionists.