The “open letter” attacks the Belgian Marxist-Leninists in the following terms:
“The C.P.C. leadership organizes and supports various anti-Party groups of dissenters who oppose the Communist Parties in the United States, Brazil, Italy, Belgium, Australia, and India. For instance, in Belgium the C.P.C. leadership is rendering support to the Grippa group which was expelled from the Party at the last congress. . . .
“Glorifying the dissenters and renegades who have found themselves outside the ranks of the communist movement, the Chinese leaders reprint in their newspapers and magazines slanderous articles from the publications of these renegade groups against the policy of the C.P.S.U., against the course of the entire world communist movement.”
It is worth noting that Drapeau Rouge [Newspaper of the revisionist Communist Party of Belgium – MIA Note], temporarily in the hands of the Belgian revisionists, has distorted this passage by omitting the sentence specifically referring to Belgium:
“For instance, in Belgium the C.P.C. leadership is rendering support to the Grippa group which was expelled from the Party at the last congress.”
Why? Because in Belgium to describe as anti-Party renegades Marxist-Leninists whose activities and devotion to service in the vanguard of the working class are well known, is an infamy which will perpetually disgrace its authors.
The “open letter” refers to Comrade Grippa by name. In Belgium there is no need to recall the fact that Comrade Grippa, a Party member since 1930, has always been an irreproachable and militant activist. This has always been so particularly in the most difficult circumstances – in the great prewar struggles; under the Hitlerite occupation, during which he was chief of staff of the Belgian Partisan Army and later a political prisoner at Breendonck and at Buchenwald; in 1950 during the activities against the return of Leopold III; during the great strike of December 1960-January 1961; and at the present time in the face of the joint attacks of the reformists of the Right-wing of the Belgian Socialist Party and of the revisionists who usurp the name of Communists.
* * *
The attack on the Belgian Marxist-Leninists by the Khrushchov group constitutes an unjustifiable interference in the affairs of our Party.
Birds of a feather flock together.
Khrushchov has long supported the revisionist splittists of the type of Burnelle, Moulin, Terfve and others just as he supports the traitor Dange, the lackey of the Indian reactionary bourgeoisie.
Khrushchov now proclaims this support openly. He approves the anti-democratic and splittist measures decreed in violation of the constitution of our Party, refusing even to hear the militants in the case. He praises the so-called “expulsions” of the Communists who firmly maintain the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary positions of the “Statement of the 81 Parties.”
He stands together with the revisionists in the Party leadership who have openly attacked the “Statement of the 81 Communist and Workers’ Parties,” the guide of the world communist movement.
He stands at the side of the revisionists who have betrayed proletarian internationalism, in particular during the counter-revolution in Hungary and with regard to socialist Albania, China and Cuba, and to the Congolese people struggling for their national liberation.
Khrushchov has been covered with praise by the representatives of U.S. imperialism, the principal force of aggression and war in the world. Spaak, that brilliant servant of the bourgeoisie, the man who stood for the recognition of Franco, the man of Munich, of the cold war and of NATO, also praises him.
The Belgian comrades who still have illusions about the true nature of the Khrushchov group will understand the true situation even if it is only by looking at the attacks on us in the “open letter.”
* * *
What is the meaning of the phrase “the C.P.C. leadership organizes and supports various anti-Party groups of dissenters. . . .”?
The reactionary and Right-wing social democrat press has, of course, seized on these provocative remarks. They are the same as those which the bourgeoisie has always used against revolutionaries.
For how many years have we not heard slanders from the bourgeoisie and its lackeys about “the hand of Moscow,” “under Moscow’s eye” and “Moscow gold” intended to further repression of Communists?
It was, in particular, beginning with just such lying accusations as these that the police of the capital staged in 1923 a fake “plot” and imprisoned the leadership of our Party, which included Comrades Joseph Jacquemotte and Henri Glineur among others.
The revisionists are using the same methods today against the Chinese Communist Party and other Marxist-Leninists.
The revisionists even seek the help of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state. According to a press report which has not been denied, Polianov, an editor of Izvestia and an envoy of Khrushchov to Spaak, asked the latter to close the Brussels office of the New China News Agency.
In Belgium the revisionist leaders are marching in step with Khrushchov. They go in for blackmail, publishing in their press lying accusations against specifically named comrades, thus exposing them to repression by their employers and the government.
In Drapeau Rouge of July 16, 1963, Burnelle attacked the editors of the IRCE radio station for broadcasting communiques issued by the Brussels Federation of the Party: this was, asking for government intervention to end such information.
The attitude of the revisionists is purely and simply tantamount to police provocation. These facts show the degree of degeneration which they have reached: the workers will judge them.
* * *
In order to discredit revolutionary action and the struggle of the working class the revisionists, like the bourgeoisie, pretend to see foreign influence in them.
Class struggle is the result of the existence of antagonistic classes. It makes the socialist revolution a historical necessity.
Social life and class struggle create class consciousness. The most highly conscious workers organize themselves into a vanguard party directed, in our age, by the teachings of Marxism-Leninism. Such a party is essential for leading the working class to final victory.
Class struggle is developing all over the world. This has given birth to international solidarity, to that proletarian internationalism which unites all the oppressed against the oppressors. Class struggle is thus also international.
As for revisionism, it is a product of imperialism.
“Bourgeois influence is the internal source of revisionism, and capitulation to imperialism is the external source.” (Moscow Declaration, 1957.)
It is therefore not at all surprising that revisionism, the main danger to the international communist movement at the present time, should be an international phenomenon.
However, since revisionism is the result of bourgeois influence there is no true unity among the revisionists. This phenomenon is well known. The corrupt parties of reformism of the Second International took the side of their own bourgeoisie on each occasion when the sharp contradictions among the imperialists set them against each other.
But one bond unites the reformists and the revisionists of every land: the hostility and hate they have for revolutionary movements, for Marxist-Leninists, and in the last analysis, for the struggles of the working class and the national-liberation movements.
In Belgium, the Communists have led several struggles against various deviations. Since 1945, for example, the chief dangers for our Party have been in turn: Right opportunism, “Left” opportunism, and finally revisionism.
In the last few years revisionism has threatened and is threatening the very existence of the Party. There have always been comrades who fought it on the basis of Marxism-Leninism.
After the 13th Congress in 1960, the disruptive efforts of the revisionists were redoubled. They unmasked themselves more and more. It is well known that from that time onwards more and more comrades took their stand against revisionism. From then on the majority of the Brussels Federation was opposed to the Political Bureau. From then on there was no meeting of the Central Committee where the revisionist line of the Political Bureau was not opposed by the Marxist-Leninist position.
For a long time the Political Bureau has been taking its inspiration from the revisionist Yugoslavs.
The conference of the 81 ’Communist and Workers’ Parties at the end of 1960 once again categorically and unanimously condemned the treachery of the Yugoslav revisionists. The Central Committee of the Belgian Communist Party approved this “Statement of the 81.”
Some months later, a national secretary and a member of the Political Bureau of the Belgian Communist Party went to Yugoslavia at the invitation of the Yugoslav authorities and with the ’agreement of the Political Bureau. These journeys were kept secret from the Party and the Central Committee.
It became clear later that Khrushchov was making less and less of a secret of his collusion with the Yugoslav revisionists. Thus the Political Bureau of the Belgian Communist Party found itself getting more and more support from the Khrushchov group. What followed is well known.
The revisionists have gone so far in their arrogance as to “expel” or “exclude” hundreds of comrades from the ranks of the Party in flagrant violation of the Party constitution and the most elementary rules of democratic centralism.
The Brussels Federation of the Belgian Communist Party held an extraordinary congress at the end of June in accordance with the constitution of the Party and achieved a Marxist-Leninist unity. The principal decisions of the congress were as follows:
1) The arbitrary and unconstitutional measures, the four expulsions at the congress at Anvers, the suspensions, the dissolutions of organizations, and the decisions which excluded from the ranks of the Party comrades and organizations who maintained Marxist-Leninist positions, were all declared null and void.
2) The Federal Committee which was formed at the Federal Congress in March was declared invalid because it failed in its duty and participated actively in the revisionist and splittist policies of the Political Bureau.
3) The present extraordinary Congress of the Brussels Federation of the Belgian Communist Party, which was being held in accordance with the Leninist rules on the running of the Party, elected a new Federal Committee, a new Federal Party Control Commission and Federal Financial Control Commission.
4) The Federal Congress demanded, and called on other federations to demand, a National Extraordinary Congress – a Congress of Marxist-Leninist Unity.
The activities of the Marxist-Leninists developed in other federations as well despite the threats of the Political Bureau, the bans put on information and the other sanctions which were heaped on them.
The truth of Marxism-Leninism will triumph over the lies of the revisionists. Such is the situation in Belgium.
* * *
Revisionism has also been pressing ahead with its schemings in other Communist Parties. At first it was through the actions of the Tito group which openly betrayed Marxism-Leninism that revisionism began its work of undermining. When the debate became public as a result of the unspeakable attacks of the revisionists, the Belgian Communists declared that the decisive forces of the international communist movement stood firm on Marxist-Leninist positions. We never had any doubts about this: the facts confirmed a Marxist-Leninist analysis.
Guided individually by the universal truth of Marx-ism-Leninism and on the basis of our own experiences of class struggle in our country and on the world scale we arrived at the same conclusions.
Faced with the splitting activity of the revisionists, we act and will act according to the precept: “Marxist-Leninists, Unite!”