The second part of this series exposed the liberal and conciliationist approach towards the struggle against modern revisionism which is held in common by both Chinese revisionism and its American expression, U.S. neo-revisionism. Neither the Chinese revisionists nor the U.S. neo-revisionists believe in the necessity of a stern, irreconcilable and merciless struggle against revisionism and opportunism of all hues. They both reject the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin on this question. Both the Chinese revisionists and their American sycophants consider the principled struggle of the Marxist-Leninists against modern revisionism and all opportunism as “ultra-left,” “dogmatic” and “sectarian.” Instead, both the Chinese revisionist “theoreticians” and their followers in the U.S. hold that modern revisionism should be treated not as an enemy but as a so-called “wavering” and “middle force” to be “won over and united with.”
This article deals with the Chinese leadership’s extreme opportunist policy of forming alliances and “united fronts” with the modern revisionists. Such a policy is the inevitable product of the anti-Marxist-Leninist position that modern revisionism should be treated as a “middle force.” Throughout the whole course of the over two decades of struggle against Khrushchovite modern revisionism the Chinese leaders, with criminal methods, have tried to impose such a traitorous policy on the entire international Marxist-Leninist movement. The efforts of the Chinese in the direction of forming alliances with the modern revisionists – whether with the Khrushchovites in a “united front against U.S. imperialism,” or with the Titoites and other renegades allegedly “against Khrushchovite revisionism” – did great damage to and betrayed the struggle of the world’s Marxist-Leninists against Soviet modern revisionism. Furthermore, in recent years, the Chinese road of vacillation and conciliation with modern revisionism has gone completely bankrupt. It has collapsed into openly counter-revolutionary “three worlds” revisionism and an open alliance with U.S. imperialism and the most barbaric reactionaries and warmongers.
The Chinese catastrophe provides a serious warning to all those who would advocate conciliation and alliance with the revisionists, whether they are Khrushchovite, Titoite, Chinese or any other variant of revisionist betrayers of Marxism-Leninism. In particular, it sounds a warning to all those who are following just such a conciliationist course in the current struggle against Chinese revisionism.
The struggle against Chinese revisionism and its rotten anti-Leninist theory of “three worlds” has broken out in force. Just as the struggle against Khrushchovite revisionism has been and continues to be a life and death struggle on a world scale between the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist forces and the counter-revolutionary forces of imperialism and modern revisionism, so too with the present struggle against Chinese revisionism. In this great struggle it is, of course, out of the question and tantamount to betrayal to seek an ally in the Khrushchovite or other modern revisionists to fight the Chinese revisionists. Or, equally traitorous, is to seek unity with one group of “three worldist” followers of Chinese revisionism in the name of fighting Deng Xiaoping and Hua Guofeng in Beijing. However this is precisely what certain conciliators of Chinese revisionism are doing.
These conciliators proclaim that they are against the theory of “three worlds” and the present ultra-revisionist and counter-revolutionary Chinese leadership. But at the same time they are working to build alliances with various hardened “three worlders” and followers of Chinese revisionism on the pretext that these elements also have some contradiction with the present-day Chinese ultra-revisionist leadership. Thus they are making alliances with one faction of Chinese revisionism against the other. Some of these conciliators even find mutual support in the “RCP.USA,” a diehard “three worldist” sect that makes gangster-like attacks on socialist Albania. Thus, the obvious questions arise: What kind of serious struggle can you wage against the Chinese revisionist “three worlds” theory when you yourself are openly embracing the advocates of “Map Zedong’s theory of three worlds” and the loudest trumpeters of the anti-Marxist-Leninist theses of Chinese revisionism? How can you properly perform your duty of defending Marxism-Leninism and socialism from the frenzied attacks of the Chinese revisionists when you yourself are linked arm in arm with a bunch of rabid enemies of the international Marxist-Leninist movement, vilifiers of the glorious Party of Labor of Albania and of the brilliant Marxist-Leninist Comrade Enver Hoxha, and open enemies of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania?
It is abundantly clear to anyone with two eyes that to pursue such a course means to abandon the struggle against Chinese revisionism altogether. In reality, it means to merge with the Chinese and other revisionists in order to fight the genuine Marxist-Leninist parties. But these conciliators are blind to these obvious facts because they do not want to carry the struggle against Chinese revisionism through to the end. They say that they are against the “three worlds” theory and the open alliance of the Chinese revisionists with imperialism and reaction. But now, when the question of the ideological roots of the “three worlds” theory and the Chinese revisionist betrayal have been exposed in the anti-Marxist-Leninist and revisionist theses of “Mao Zedong Thought,” the conciliators want to retreat. Instead of systematically sorting out the question of Mao Zedong, the conciliators want to step back into alliances with the “three woridist” gangsters and enemies of socialism.
The line of alliance with the modern revisionists, under whatever pretext it may disguise itself, is a line of damaging and betraying the entire glorious struggle waged by the Marxist-Leninists against modern revisionism. Both the Chinese revisionists and their neo-revisionist followers in the U.S. have provided a vast wealth of proof of this truth. By negative example they have confirmed ever more powerfully the only Marxist-Leninist line: that the Marxist-Leninist cause and the proletarian revolution can only advance without the modern revisionists, social-chauvinists and opportunists of all hues and in relentless struggle against these traitors to Marxism-Leninism and lackeys of imperialism.
It has been well documented by the Party of Labor of Albania how the Chinese Communist Party vacillated and wavered from the outset of the struggle against the betrayal of the Khrushchovite revisionists. And one of the principal planks of the Chinese leadership’s conciliation of the Khrushchovites was their extreme opportunist policy of a “common united front against U.S. imperialism including the modern revisionists.”
In the early 1960’s the Khrushchovite betrayal was open and complete, Khrushchov and his gang had proved themselves to be nothing but faithful accomplices and lackeys of imperialism, and the Party of Labor of Albania had alone launched the open polemic to repudiate the Soviet revisionists. It was at this time that the Chinese leaders launched their idea of a “united front against imperialism including the modern Soviet revisionists.” Under this centrist banner, even after the Communist Party of China itself joined the polemic against the Soviet revisionists, the Chinese polemics were toned down and at times even ceased, negotiations were held with the Khrushchovites and compromises were struck. Even in the heat of the open polemic, when the Chinese leaders had themselves declared that Khrushchov was a traitor, Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and company clung to the idea of uniting with the Khrushchov clique against imperialism. For example, in 1964 Mao and the others wrote to their “Soviet comrades” declaring that in the face of aggression from imperialism, China and the Soviet Union will in the end be united. This conciliatory policy was particularly tuned to those wavering parties which lacked the Marxist-Leninist nerve for the open fight against Soviet modern revisionism. And by bolstering these elements in their centrist position the struggle was damaged and a valuable service was provided the Khrushchovites.
The Chinese revisionist line of a “united front” including the revisionist tsars of the Kremlin was never fully consummated. However, in pursuing their typically pragmatic policy the Chinese ultra-revisionists are even now engaging in backstage negotiations for a reconciliation with Moscow, while simultaneously their paid dogs are barking about “striking the main blow at Soviet social-imperialism.” The failure of this “united front” cannot be attributed to any lack of desire on the part of the Chinese leadership. To the contrary, it failed because this “united front” came under fire from two directions.
On the one hand, such a “united front” came under fire from the Khrushchovites themselves. Reconciliation between the Chinese leadership and the Soviet revisionists through a “united front against imperialism” proved impossible. Though the Khrushchovites also propagated this idea to their own advantage, the Khrushchov clique could not accept such a “united front” on the Chinese terms. The Soviet revisionists refused to “share the leadership” of such a front as the Chinese demanded, and could accept so-called “unity against imperialism” only on the basis of the complete submission of the Chinese to themselves.
Furthermore, on the other hand, this centrist policy of a “united front including the Khrushchovite revisionists” came under stern fire from the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists, making this policy a very difficult one for the Chinese leadership. In particular, despite brutal pressure, the Chinese leaders failed to impose such a traitorous line on the Party of Labor of Albania which openly and courageously denounced such a centrist course. Throughout this period, the glorious PLA consistently fought for the Leninist stand on this vital question of principle. This stand was emphasized at the 5th Congress of the PLA held in 1965. In his Political Report to the 5th Congress, Comrade Enver Hoxha stressed:
With their entire policy and practice the Khrushchovite revisionists have placed themselves outside the anti-imperialist front. To include the revisionists in this front means to introduce the fifth column, the ’Trojan Horse,’ and to undermine it from within.
And the PLA further pointed out in regard to the struggle against revisionism:
...there can be no middle road. The ’golden mean’ is the line of reconciliation of opposites, which can never be reconciled. Nor can the middle road serve to disguise the deviations from Marxist-Leninist principles, because, if the fight against revisionism is not inspired by ideological motives, but only by certain economic and political motives on a national chauvinist basis, it is a mere bluff which is short-lived. Those who uphold this line in their stand toward the renegades from Marxism-Leninism are themselves in danger of slipping, sooner or later, into the positions of the latter....
For the PLA, unity with the revisionists, even in the form of an “anti-imperialist front,” was inconceivable. The 5th Congress of the PLA expressed its firm opinion that:
...unity will be re-established in the communist movement and the socialist camp, but it will be re-established by the Marxist-Leninists without revisionists and traitors and in resolute struggle against them.[1]
While a common “united front” with the Soviet revisionists against U.S. imperialism was always pursued by the Chinese leadership, because of the situation it never fully materialized. (Of course, nothing rules out the prospect of such an alliance between the revisionist centers of Beijing and Moscow in the future.) For this reason, the Chinese have spread a thick veil of silence over their efforts in this direction. Nevertheless, the dirty methods of Zhou Enlai and co. and the opportunist activities of the Chinese leadership in its attempts to realize such a unity with the Soviet revisionists have been documented and scientifically exposed in Enver Hoxha’s brilliant new work Reflections on China.
Furthermore, the Chinese leadership sought to implement their rotten line of a united front with the revisionists also from another angle: unity with all and any revisionists, traitors and renegades who have contradictions or allegedly have contradictions with the Soviet revisionists in the name of “fighting Soviet revisionism.” Quite simply this is the line of unity with revisionism under the pretext of fighting revisionism. It is not a stand of fighting against modern Soviet revisionism, but of competing with it for the leadership of the revisionist camp.
In accordance with their policy of unity with revisionism, the Chinese leadership set up a whole string of alliances with the Titoites and other modern revisionist lackeys of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism. These alliances have a long, sordid and disgraceful history. These alliances have matured with time and their rotten fruit has ripened into public scandal and disgrace.
From the beginning of the struggle against Titoite revisionism, Mao Zedong and the Chinese leadership agreed with the flunkey of U.S. imperialism, Tito, against the great Marxist-Leninist, J.V. Stalin. Though they did not and could not admit this at the time, later they said as much with a great deal of fuss about “Stalin’s mistakes in regard to Tito.” The Chinese leadership took great care to cultivate their contacts with the Titoites and with the other revisionist traitors. In particular, the Chinese leadership regarded as comrades all the centrifugal, polycentrist currents in the modern revisionist camp, currents which competed with the Soviet revisionists in their ardent embrace of Tito, the U.S. imperialists and the entire Western imperialist bourgeoisie. The Chinese leadership carefully groomed its ties with the Yugoslav, Romanian, Polish, Czech and other revisionist lackeys in power in Europe. It also never severed its ties with the Italian, Spanish and other Eurocommunist scum. In 1970, the revisionist bootlicker of Franco fascism in Spain, Santiago Carillo, received a warm welcome in Beijing. And today the connections of the CPC with the Eurocommunists are being activated more than ever.
Of particular significance is the special relationship which has existed between the Chinese Communist Party and the Romanian revisionists. It is hardly a secret to anyone that Romania has been and remains one of the most openly revisionist states, without even a trace of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism in its line. In fact, that close comrade of the Chinese leadership, Ceaucescu, has been the devout pupil of the renegade Tito. It was from Tito that Mr. Ceaucescu learned to play the role of an errand boy and loyal vassal of both U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism and to please both masters at once. And thus, the Chinese interest in Romania goes beyond its important ties with Romania itself. For the Chinese leadership, COMECON and Warsaw Pact Romania has been a special bridgehead not only with Titoite Yugoslavia but also with the U.S. imperialists, Soviet social-imperialists and the other revisionists of Europe to boot.
Moreover, the Chinese leadership has placed more value in their alliances with the Yugoslav and Romanian revisionists than in their alleged “proletarian internationalist solidarity” with the Party of Labor of Albania and socialist Albania where the red flag of Marxism-Leninism has been held triumphantly aloft and where the dictatorship of the proletariat and genuine socialism have been consistently defended. Not only that, the Chinese leadership even wanted to place the Albanian communists, the outstanding shock troops of the international proletariat in its great struggle against imperialism and modern revisionism, under the direct tutelage of the Romanian and Yugoslav revisionist cliques. In a most despicable plot of Zhou Enlai’s, first hatched in 1968 and pursued through 1974, the Chinese tried with blackmail and brutal interference in Albania’s internal affairs to pressure socialist Albania to sign a defense pact and form a united front with the Titoites and Romanians and thus to entrust the defense of socialist Albania to these revisionist enemies.
It is clear that the Chinese leadership never wanted to rely on the international proletariat and ally with the Party of Labor of Albania and the other genuine Marxist-Leninist parties and groups in a common struggle against the Khrushchovite revisionists. To the contrary, the tactics of the Chinese leadership were geared towards the building up of a united front of bourgeois lackeys and revisionist scoundrels “who have contradictions with the Soviets.” Of course, to “fight modern revisionism” with such revisionist weapons as Tito, Ceaucescu, Carillo and the Eurocommunists is, in reality, to “fight” from a completely revisionist angle. This line shows the totally unprincipled, national chauvinist, centrist and conciliatory approach of the Chinese leadership towards the entire struggle against modern revisionism.
Today the fruits of the Chinese leadership’s policy of “fighting the Soviet revisionists” with an alliance of other revisionists are fully apparent. The CPC, in harmony with its Yugoslav, Romanian and other “comrades,” has completely betrayed Marxism-Leninism and has formed an open alliance with imperialism and the most savage reaction. From the ideological standpoint, the present-day “anti-Soviet revisionism” of the Chinese is indistinguishable from the “contradictions with the Soviet revisionists” which the Titoites and the others might have. Obviously, these contradictions have their source not in the ideological conflict between Marxism-Leninism and modern revisionism but in the imperialist and social-imperialist rivalries, and in the counter-revolutionary ambitions of these revisionist cliques.
The Chinese experience is a powerful demonstration that the policy of a united front including the revisionists is a line of conciliation of revisionism and capitulation to imperialism. It is a line of unity with the traitors and enemies and of betrayal of Marxism-Leninism and the revolution.
As we have pointed out previously, the U.S. neo-revisionists also consider revisionism and opportunism neutral phenomena, “middle forces” to be “won over and united with.” And this has been expressed in their extremely flabby and conciliatory attitude towards these firefighters of the revolution. In practice, each of the neo-revisionist cliques has a series of ties and opportunist alliances in effect among the modern revisionists, trotskyists, cultural nationalists and opportunists of every shade. Moreover these ties and alliances are especially activated for the purpose of forming a holy alliance against their principal enemy, revolutionary Marxism-Leninism. Over the last decade it can be seen that, on the one hand, the Marxist-Leninists of the ACWM(M-L) and then of the COUSML (and now of the MLP.USA) have consistently pursued the course of unity of the Marxist-Leninists and the building of the Marxist-Leninist Party without the modern revisionists, trotskyites and other opportunists and in irreconcilable struggle against them. The neo-revisionists, on the other hand, have for over ten years fought the “ultra-left” and “sectarian” Marxist-Leninists with a policy of “unity” with everyone and anyone that could serve their struggle against Marxism-Leninism.
Look for example at the “RCP.USA’s” unabashed fondness for the French trotskyite professor Charles Bettelheim. The May 1979 issue of the “RCP” journal, The Communist, carried a major article praising this hack anti-communist ideologue. (Appropriately, this was the same issue in which the “RCP” launched its rabidly anti-communist and lumpen-style ravings against the glorious Party of Labor of Albania and Marxism-Leninism and in defense of the revisionist dogmas of Mao Zedong Thought.) Under the guise of a long-winded and obscure criticism of Bettelheim, the “RCP,” in fact, praises this trotskyite to the skies. They regard him as a true “anti-revisionist” thinker whose at times “pathbreaking ideas” have unfortunately gone somewhat astray in lacking absolute devotion to Mao Zedong.
Under subtitles such as “Bettelheim as Trotskyite” and “Bettelheim as Khrushchovite” this article correctly, though extremely politely, points out that: “Between 1951 and 1968 Bettelheim’s politics were an eclectic mishmash of a number of fashionable leftist trends, including Khrushchovite revisionism...Trotskyism and ’third worldism.’” Admitting that Bettelheim’s politics have not changed from 1968 to date, the article shows that “Trotskyite tendencies are deep-rooted in Bettelheim.” It is also clear from this article that the political economy of this “anti-revisionist” is in fact anti-Marxist-Leninist to the extent that Bettelheim has been hired out to the bourgeois-feudal government of India and other reactionaries as an economic advisor!
Nevertheless, such “small matters” as these don’t stop the “RCP.USA” from turning around and lavishing Bettelheim with praise. The “RCP” assures the reader that while Bettelheim’s line is not a “thorough-going revolutionary line” (p. 233), at the same time “Bettelheim can be said to programatically stand with those who oppose revisionism”! (More precisely, it is the “RCP” that can be said to “programatically stand” with those who support Trotskyism and oppose Marxism-Leninism!) And furthermore: “Marxist-Leninists should welcome his positive contributions” (p. 175); that “There is much that is positive about what Bettelheim has written” (p. 173); and that “for their time” Bettelheim’s trotskyite ideas “were in a sense pathbreaking and what he wrote helped many understand much better the true nature of the class struggle for socialism”! (p. 219)
According to the “RCP.USA,” this openly trotskyite and Khrushchovite element, this imperialist ideologue with a lifetime of work against the science of Marxism-Leninism, should be forgiven his ideological “weaknesses.” And moreover he should even be united with and welcomed by the Marxist-Leninists because this “prominent friend of China,” like the “RCP,” writes profusely in support of Mao and against Stalin and besides this he is critical of the present regime in China as well. In fact, “RCP.USA’s” only real criticism of Professor Bettelheim is that he lacks consistency in his trotskyite arguments in defense of Mao Zedong’s revisionist distortions of Marxism-Leninism.
As this example shows, in their struggle against Marxism-Leninism and to defend Mao Zedong Thought and the entire arsenal of Chinese revisionism, the neo-revisionists are more than willing to reach into the sewers for the slimiest allies, even for such inveterate trotskyites as Charles Bettelheim.
It should be noted in passing that Professor Bettelheim has been, in reality, a “prominent friend of China,” that is, of the Chinese revisionist leadership. To serve their dirty alliances with revisionism and imperialism the Chinese established an entire international network of bourgeois, revisionist, trotskyite and anti-communist so-called “friends of China.” In the name of the solidarity movement with China and under the hoax of “people to people friendship,” the Chinese leadership linked up not with the genuine friends of China and the people but with the most reactionary, imperialist and revisionist elements such as the trotskyite Charles Bettelheim, who was the chairman of the France-China Friendship Association, and with the modern revisionists including the Italian revisionist party through its society for “friendship” with China.
This brings us to another clear-cut example of the neo-revisionist practice of unity and alliance with the modern revisionists and opportunists of every stripe: that is their disruptive activities in the anti-imperialist solidarity movements. According to the neo-revisionists, what it means to build a broad front of support for the national liberation movements is to give all the pro-Khrushchovite, “three world-ist,” trotskyite and similar dregs their place inside this “broad front,” inside the coalitions, etc. But how can the pro-Khrushchovites, the ardent firefighters of the revolution and the liberation struggles of the oppressed peoples, and lackeys of imperialism and social-imperialism, “broaden” the solidarity movement? Similarly, how can the advocates of the anti-Leninist theory of “three worlds” – the theory that justifies “solidarity” with U.S. imperialism and the butchers of the oppressed people such as the fascist criminal Richard Nixon, the medieval Shah of Iran and the bloodstained dictator Pinochet of Chile – “broaden” the solidarity movement? These characters have not and will not lift a finger to support the liberation struggles but infiltrate the support movements for the sole purpose of subverting them in the interest of the Soviet, Chinese and other revisionists and imperialists and social-imperialists.
The truth of the matter is that in every case where the so-called broadening of the solidarity movement through unity with the revisionists and opportunists has been pursued, it has meant the real liquidation of the actual solidarity work. The solidarity movement can only be broadened by organizing the masses. However, lacking faith in the masses, the neo-revisionists instead open the doors only to the most rotten elements. A tea party of assorted revisionist, “three worldist” and trotskyite elements is the furthest thing in the world from developing broad support for the anti-imperialist struggles. To restrict the modern revisionists, “three worldists” and trotskyites from the solidarity movement does not mean restricting the breadth and scope of the movement in the slightest. To the contrary, building the solidarity movement through dirty alliances with the opportunist jackals means necessarily to restrict, curtail and to do great damage to developing the support of the broadest sections of the people for the anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles.
The solidarity movement, like the entire revolutionary movement, can only be built and strengthened on the shoulders of the proletariat. It is only the revolutionary proletariat and its Marxist-Leninist party which can develop the solidarity movement on the sound basis of proletarian internationalism, which can ensure that it is truly anti-imperialist and revolutionary and is not undermined and turned into a plaything in the hands of the revisionists and imperialists. Likewise, based on the working class and the vanguard party of the working class, the anti-imperialist solidarity movement can be a truly broad movement, brought deep and wide among the working masses and to all the genuinely progressive and anti-imperialist sections.
Thus the Chinese revisionist line of unity and alliance with modern revisionism and opportunism is a line of cowardly retreat from the battlefield against modern revisionism. It is to betray Marxism-Leninism and to desert the revolution and the working class. All revolutionary Marxist-Leninists have the duty to persevere on the road of Lenin who taught the proletariat that “The fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism.” Today, the great struggle of the international proletariat against U.S. imperialism, Soviet social-imperialism, Chinese social-imperialism and all reaction; the struggle which is being led by the Marxist-Leninist parties for the triumph of the revolution and socialism, can only advance without the Khrushchovite, “three worldist,” Titoite and other revisionist and social-chauvinist traitors and in merciless struggle against them.
[1] The above passages from the Fifth Congress of the PLA are taken from the History of the Party of Labor of Albania, pp. 602-05.