First Published: Red Front, [organ of the Marxist-Leninist Organization of Britain], December 1968.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba and Sam Richards
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(This article is abstracted from a series of articles published in recent issues of “La Voix du Peuple” (“The People’s Voice”), organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belgium. The analysis made by our Belgian Comrades differs from that made by the M.L.O.B. in some minor points – the character of the state in People’s China prior to the counter-revolutionary coup of 1966, the precise date on which this coup began, the personal role of Mao Tse-tung. Nevertheless, the two analyses – made quite independently on the basis of Marxism-Leninism – correspond on all fundamental points.)
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Under the double pressure of world imperialism and modern revisionism, the majority of the Communist Parties foundered, ceased to be genuine Marxist-Leninist parties and became revisionist parties.
The regrouping of the Marxist-Leninist forces, the movement for the construction of new Marxist-Leninist Parties, which began in many countries in 1963-4, received a severe setback as a result of the manoeuvres of a neo-revisionist faction which in 1966 usurped the leadership of the Communist Party of China.
The ground had been prepared by preliminary manoeuvres: the organs of foreign relations and of state security had already been stuffed with agents of the “black” counter-revolutionary line. The army had been beheaded of its Marxist-Leninist leadership on flimsy pretexts. Then in August 1966 the cultural revolution, which had at first achieved great successes in socialist education, was turned from its original objectives by an anti-Marxist-Leninist group calling itself fraudulently “the proletarian headquarters” and transformed into a political counterrevolution. This counter-revolutionary group, representing the privileged strata of China, cunningly flattered the youth, especially the student youth, trying to make them believe that they had a vanguard political role to fulfil. Freeing the youth for a long time from study and productive work, it utilised them to attack the Communist Party and to try to intimidate the working class. Then, showing its true face, it ordered the army to launch attacks against the Party and the state organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as well as against the working people who rose to defend them; it placed under military control the industrial and mining enterprises, the secondary and higher schools, and the people’s communes. It set out to impose by force of arms a dictatorship of the reactionary classes, in particular of the old and new bourgeoisie.
The counter-revolutionaries in China could not use the “theories” of Khrushchovite revisionism, or they would immediately have been unmasked. They chose to imitate the counter-revolutionary rebels of Kronstadt, who in 1921 attacked the Soviet state under the colours of “ultra-revolution.” They put forward a neo-revisionist ideology which is a confused hodge-podge of reactionary conceptions culled from trotskyism, anarchism, old and new revisionism, social-democracy and even fascism.
The Chinese neo-revisionists have thrown overboard the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. They present as “Marxism-Leninism” a falsified version of the thought of Mao Tse-tung, in the form of truncated quotations out of context, emptied of political and class content. Among the false conceptions diffused by the Chinese neo-revisionists, they deny the necessity of a party of the Leninist type, the organised revolutionary vanguard of the working class. In its place they substitute on the one hand the worship of spontaneity, on the other the cult of personality, the absolute authority of one man. In the propaganda of the Chinese neo-revisionists, in fact, the cult of the individual has been raised to a level never before attained in the history of mankind, to such a level that one can only be amazed that he who is its object does not see that he is the victim of unscrupulous adventurers who are bringing discredit and ridicule upon him.
Having reconstructed the Communist Party in 1963 on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, the Belgian Marxist-Leninists have always applied the principle that the policy of the Party should be determined by itself. It was with joy that they found in 1963 the unity of views existing between the Belgian Party and the glorious Communist Party of China on all the great questions facing the international Communist movement. This unity of views was confirmed at the meetings which the delegation of the Communist Party of Belgium had in the People’s Republic of China in May-June 1964 with a delegation of the Communist Party of China headed by Comrade Liu Shao-chi and including Comrade Teng Hsaio-Ping.
But scarcely had this delegation returned to our country than the leadership of our Party perceived that, in practice, members of the international section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China were interfering in the struggle of true Marxist-Leninists in various countries to reconstruct genuine revolutionary, proletarian, Marxist-Leninist Parties. These manoeuvres included slanders, lies and intrigues.
In August 1966 a delegation of the Central Committee of our Party met in Peking a delegation of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, headed this time by Kang Sheng, member of the Permanent Committee of the Political Bureau and counsellor of the group of the Central Committee charged with the cultural revolution. Kang Sheng declared that there were divergences of principle with the Communist Party of Belgium, and revealed himself as the spokesman of a neo-revisionist line hostile to Marxism-Leninism. After this surprise attack, Kang Sheng, behaving as representative of a “father-party”, unilaterally broke off the discussion, without giving our delegation any opportunity to reply to or to refute these anti-Marxist-Leninist concepts.
Following this, because our Party maintained its firm and correct Marxist-Leninist position and “permitted itself” the “effrontery” to ask for clarification of certain pronouncements issuing from the People’s Republic of China, the acts of open hostility multiplied until the Chinese Party unilaterally broke off relations with our Party.
Since March 1967 the counter-revolutionary group which has usurped positions of power in the People’s Republic of China has tried, but in vain, to subvert our Party. It has supported attempts by degenerate elements to split the Party; it has tried to bribe certain comrades and to blackmail others: it has collaborated with the reactionary Belgian police to try and seize property belonging to the Party; its agents have organised thefts of Party funds and indulged in threats of physical violence against our members; it has falsified our communiques in the bulletins of the Hsinhua News Agency. Imitating the shameful and scandalous practices of the Khrushchovite revisionists, it has overnight, without prior notice or even notification, unilaterally broken the commitments into which the Chinese Party entered into with the Communist Party of Belgium for the publication and circulation of various publications, leaving unpaid large sums of money which improperly fell upon our Party.
Such attacks have been made, according to an international plan, against Marxist-Leninist parties and organisations in various countries by the neo-revisionist headquarters of counter revolution in China.
With this new betrayal, with these new blows on top of those of world imperialism and Soviet revisionism, the Marxist-Leninist parties and organisations came up against extraordinary difficulties which led to the temporary disappearance of some of them, by degeneration and in other ways.
But, as we have seen in the case of the attack of the Soviet revisionists, the wish to liquidate the revolutionary vanguard of the working class is as vain as the wish to liquidate the class struggle. The class struggle “secretes” the Marxist-Leninist party, just as the brain “secretes” thought.
Betrayal, deception and violence by reformists, revisionists and “left” neo-revisionists can only hold back for a time the development and consolidation of Marxist-Leninist Parties.
While instigating disruptive activity against the genuine Marxist-Leninist parties and organisations in course of construction, the counterrevolutionary neo-revisionist clique in China has organised in various countries puppet organisations which it has baptised “Marxist-Leninist”, but whose role is merely to repeat the propaganda it dictates, to sow confusion, diversion and provocation among the working masses, and to thwart the development of genuine Marxist-Leninist Parties.
“L’Humanite Nouvelle”, the organ of a French organisation directed by a handful of false “Marxist-Leninists” recently published an article on the heroic struggle for national liberation of the Vietnamese people under the title: “NO NEW MUNICH!”. It is difficult to conceive of any greater insult than to bracket with the Nazi fifth column and the bourgeois leaders who capitulated to German fascism our Vietnamese Comrades who have fought for so many years with arms in their hands against imperialism, who have inflicted defeat upon the forces of U.S. imperialism and its allies.
There exists in Australia a false “Marxist-Leninist” party, the essential task of which is to publish each week stereotyped phrases of allegiance to the counter-revolutionary, neo-revisionist group which has usurped power in Peking. These puppets declare:
In a general way, one does not demand of revolutionary Australians that they make great sacrifices. This is because the revolutionary movement here is at a fairly low level. That is why we must take advantage of this situation to study, to examine ourselves critically and establish a correct balance between the needs of the revolution and our personal affairs. (“The Australian Communist”, March 1968 – retranslated from the French).
And these people have the cynicism to attack true Marxist-Leninist Parties who are fighting heroically, in particular the Workers’ Party of Vietnam!
Both the Australian puppets of the Chinese neo-revisionists and their counterparts of the Progressive Labor Party in the United States virtually accuse the Vietnamese Comrades of collaborating with U.S. imperialism:
There are elements in North Vietnam who, under the influence of the Soviet Khrushchovites, nourish the illusion that negotiations can bring results. Whoever heard of negotiating with a murderer who has suffered defeat! (“Vanguard”, April 18, 1968 – retranslated from the French).
Negotiations on Vietnam have become a vile fact of life. This development can have serious consequences for the heroic revolutionary forces of Vietnam and for the revolutionary and progressive forces throughout, the whole world. Although the people’s war has defeated the U.S. military machine in Vietnam, the process of negotiations is transforming this victory into a defeat for the revolutionary forces in Vietnam and the world. Far from leading to self-determination or peace for Vietnam, or for Asia, these transactions will help the United States to prepare for a great war aimed at revolutionary China, U.S„ imperialism, with the cooperation of the Soviet Union and North Vietnamese leaders, is going to utilise the negotiations to realise its aims of keeping a concentration of troops based in Vietnam. (“Progressive Labor”, June 6, 1968 – retranslated from the French).
The article in “Progressive Labor” goes on to slander the Vietnamese Comrades by confusing the stages of the revolution in trotskyite terms:
Worse, there is no perspective to transform the people’s war into a movement for socialism. Without the perspective to consolidate the people’s war into a dictatorship of the proletariat, the revolution is on the way to defeat. (ibid.).
The trotskyite diversionists of Progressive Labor suggest that the aim of the people’s war in the south should be “socialism now”, thus aiming to spilt the national front of the national-democratic stage of the revolution and aiding its enemies.
The puppets of the counter-revolutionary group in China, which has attacked the Communist Party of China and every Marxist-Leninist Party and organisation in the world, which is attacking the heroic Vietnamese people and its leaders, stands unmasked for what they are: counter-revolutionaries who objectively serve the imperialists.
After being silent during the months of the acute development of the inter-revisionist com dictions in relation to Czechoslovakia, the Hsinhua News Agency broke its long silence shortly after the armed intervention of the Soviet revisionists in Czechoslovakia.
In the countries under the revisionist yoke, capitalism is being restored. But this restoration of capitalism is a process, and it is essential to assess to what degree the degeneration of the superstructure and the base has proceeded concretely in each country. For the differences of degree in this process of degeneration constitute the source of inter-revisionist contradictions.
However, the neo-revisionists of China have made no attempt in their writings and speeches to analyse in what social conditions, on what social base, these inter-revisionist contradictions have developed.
Our Party, having made a deep Marxist-Leninist analysis of the situation, drew from it the conclusion that, in the present circumstances, there is nothing to choose between the revisionists of the Soviet Union and the ultra -revisionists of Czechoslovakia, that contradictions between them must be considered as contradictions between enemies of the people on both sides, that the sole means of turning to account the accentuation of these contradictions is
for the peoples of the Soviet Union, of Hungary, of Bulgaria, of Yugoslavia and of Czechoslovakia to transform this inter-revisionist conflict into a revolutionary civil war to re-establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism. (“La Voix du Peuple”, August 23, 1968).
The Chinese neo-revisionists have, however, concentrated their verbal attacks against the revisionists of the Soviet Union, and have been content merely to scratch the ultra-revisionism of Czechoslovakia. From this point of view, the position of the “left” neo-revisionists differs in no way from that of the French revisionists.
In a speech on September 2nd to the Vietnamese Comrades at the Embassy of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Chou En-lai adopts a position of bourgeois nationalism in making it a major reproach against the Dubcek ultra-revisionist clique that it had “called openly on the Czechoslovak people not to resist the massive intrusion of Soviet troops.”
According to Chou En-lai, therefore, if the ultra-revisionists of Czechoslovakia eventually “resist” the Soviet Union – in order to open the gates of Czechoslovakia more rapidly and more “independently” to direct colonisation without the “intermediary” of the Soviet revisionists – it would be necessary to applaud and support them!
Can one doubt the opportunism of the neo-revisionists of China when Chou En-lai, “in the name of the great proletarian cultural revolution”, assures the ultra-revisionists of Rumania of Chinese support. According to this it is necessary to support the revisionists of Yugoslavia and the ultra-revisionists of Rumania when they oppose the Soviet Union merely because they oppose the Soviet Union. This is not Marxism-Leninism, but bourgeois nationalism and great power chauvinism.
For the neo-revisionist, counter-revolutionary gang in China is pursuing great-power chauvinist aims in order to try and carve out for itself, by a new division of the world, a “sphere of influence” alongside the super-powers of the United States and the Soviet Union, Thus the principal enemy of the Chinese neo-revisionists, the principal obstacle in the way of their desired redivision of the world, is not U.S. imperialism (in this connection the recent “overtures” of Humphrey towards the neo-revisionist clique in Peking is significant); their principal enemy is the revisionist clique in Moscow. That is why Chou En-lai and his colleagues merely scratch the Czechoslovak ultra-revisionists: on the one hand the activities of the Dubcek clique have objectively weakened the Soviet Union; on the other hand, they hope that this clique will enter, to a greater or lesser extent, the sphere of influence of the Chinese neo-revisionists.
Prior to 1966 the contradiction between the Marxist-Leninist leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the revisionist leadership of the Soviet Union was, ideologically and politically, the contradiction between Marxism-Leninism and revisionism. Today the contradictions between the Chinese neo-revisionist group and both U.S. imperialism and Soviet revisionism are contradictions based on their respective needs for a redivision of the world.
In accordance with this two-faced policy, “ultra-revolutionary” in words and opportunist in deed, the Chinese neo-revisionists have not hesitated, particularly in Africa, to support certain heads of state who are no more than pawns of neocolonialism. And where, for motives of great-power chauvinism, they have supported action against imperialism, they have sought to divert the anti-imperialist movement (as in Hong Kong) along the path of noisy pin-pricks which have had no significant political consequences.
On the other hand, acting as agents provocateurs, they have incited the revolutionaries of certain countries to fall into a trap, by instigating them to start unconsidered actions for which conditions were not ripe, sometimes with disastrous results for the revolutionary movement of those countries.
The revolutionary Chinese people, with the working class at its head, has fought back and is still fighting back heroically against the counter-revolutionary attack. The neo-revisionist faction which initiated the coup, under its false red flag, is at bay.
We exhort those in China who were revolutionaries and who now lend their names to such infamy: See that you are being manipulated by reactionaries! Break with the counter-revolution! Make a courageous self-criticism! Take your place once more in the ranks of the revolution! Do so without delay, for it is already very late! Otherwise, in the eyes of the revolutionary people of the world and of future generations, your names will be irretrievably linked to the memory of one of the greatest betrayals in the history of proletarian revolution!
We reaffirm here our complete fighting solidarity with the great and glorious Communist Party of China, with its militants and leaders who have been unjustly slandered and persecuted, with the Communists and workers of China who fight the counter-revolution.
We reaffirm here our approval of the propositions of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on the general line of the international Communist movement dated June 14th, 1963 – propositions which the “left” neo-revisionists have repudiated in practice.
Our Party, responsible to the working class and working people of our country, as well as to the world proletarian revolution, will lead an untiring struggle to expose, isolate and sweep away social-democratic reformism, modern revisionism, and “left” neo-revisionism, knowing that this is an indispensable condition for the victory of the fight against capitalism and imperialism.
By its activity in daily struggle, our Party prepares itself and calls on the working class and working masses to prepare themselves for the decisive battles for power, for the destruction of the bourgeois state machine, for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Our Party holds high, and will continue to hold high, the red flag of socialist revolution, of Marxism-Leninism.
Our Party wishes you, dear Chinese Comrades, success and victory in your hard struggle. For in the end all counter-revolutionary plots, manoeuvres, subversions, intrigues deceptions and repressions will meet with defeat. The socialist revolution will triumph.
LONG LIVE MARXISM-LENINISM!
WORKERS OF ALL LANDS, AND ALL OPPRESSED PEOPLES, UNITE!