First Published: The Call, Vol. 7, No. 40, October 16, 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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As a result of the intense rivalry between the two superpowers, the U.S. and the USSR, the danger of a new destructive world war has increased and concern among the people has heightened. Throughout the world, as well as in this country, the genuine Marxist-Leninist parties and socialist countries are stepping forward to champion the cause of peace and delay the outbreak of war.
On the other hand, spokesmen for the superpowers as well as the revisionist and opportunist parties are filling the air with all kinds of propaganda which serves to support continued war preparations while at the same time promoting the myth of “detente” in the face of the massive arms race.
One of the key tasks of the Marxist-Leninist and revolutionary forces is to prepare the people against the war danger. This includes alerting them to the stepped-up war preparations and the root causes of war, supporting the countries and peoples of the world in their fight against foreign domination, and building opposition to the imperialist policy of appeasement which hastens the outbreak of war.
While the two superpowers are the forces bringing the world to the brink of war, it is especially the Soviet Union that is presently the most aggressive of the two. The USSR is the rising imperialist power trying to replace U.S. imperialism as the king of the world’s exploiters in much the same way as the Hitlerites went to war to become top dog nearly 40 years ago.
The imperialist spokesmen and the revisionist and opportunist leaders in this country all try to cover up the imperialist nature of the Soviet Union, each for its own reasons, and all play the game of appeasement. The appeasers inside the U.S. ruling class, for example, in order to defend their sphere of influence in the world, try to placate the aggressive Soviet drive or at least steer it away from Europe where most Soviet troops are now concentrated and towards China where the USSR has also massed a million troops on the border.
The revisionists and opportunists, meanwhile, from both a “left” and right stance, attempt to disarm the masses and leave them at the mercy of the warmongers. The very forces who have been in the vanguard of class collaboration themselves for over 20 years call those who criticize appeasement “class collaborators.”
The Communist Party, U.S.A., represents the most obvious example. They are the most open defenders of the myth of “detente,” presenting a disgusting echo of the Kremlin’s line. When Moscow says “jump,” Gus Hall’s clique at the head of the CPUSA simply asks “how high, sir?” From the invasion of Czechoslovakia to the use of Cuban troops in the Horn of Africa, the CP has been the most shameless apologist for Soviet aggression in the whole country.
According to Hall, anyone who raises his voice against both superpowers, rather than simply against the U.S., is guilty of “anti-Soviet” propaganda. Hall claims that those who demand an African solution to Africa’s problems, for example, are spreading “fairy tales about Soviet and Cuban ’demons’ in Africa.” (Hall, “The Crisis of Everyday Living,” p. 11) But to the African peoples, Cuba’s 50,000 soldiers permanently stationed on the continent are no “fairy tale,” but rather a bloody force defending Soviet interests.
Posing as “communists”, the CPUSA hopes to play on the anti-imperialist sentiments among the American people, who have long opposed the adventures of their own ruling class in Indochina and elsewhere. The CPUSA’s aim is to turn anti-U.S. imperialist sentiment into a welcome mat for Soviet social-imperialism in Africa and throughout the world.
According to the modern revisionists, the world’s people have only two choices, U.S. or Soviet domination. The third road of independence, liberation and revolution doesn’t exist for them. Rather, the people are seen as helpless and unable to determine their own destiny. The revisionists’ conclusion is that any talk about the Soviet “demons” means support for U.S. imperialism.
In this way, the CPUSA plays the role of a “fifth column” and is among the most vocal forces promoting appeasement. From Democratic Party politics to the trade union bureaucracy, the CP’s policy of forming alliances is determined entirely by the support the various opportunist leaders give to “detente” and appeasement. This is the foundation for their so-called “left-center” coalition in the labor movement, which sacrifices the interests of the workers for those of Soviet foreign policy.
Playing the appeasement game, only from the inside of the people’s movement, are the various “anti-revisionist” phonies, centrists and Trotskyists.
A good example can be seen in the literature of one of the most vocal centrist groups, the Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC), which allies itself in a bloc with the Guardian newspaper. To those who are concerned with the massive Soviet arms buildup throughout the world, PWOC complains: “We are being asked to spend billions on real ships to counter Russian ghost ships–a vast red fleet that sails only in the Pentagon’s filing cabinets.” (Organizer, Aug.-Sept. 1978, P. 14)
This nifty bit of verbiage is designed to do two things. One is to equate opposition to Soviet expansionism with defense of U.S. military spending. The second is to cover up the existence of a very real Russian fleet which operates at will, from the Barents Sea to the Indian Ocean.
What PWOC calls a “ghost fleet” consists of more than 1,670 combat ships, the largest of any navy in the world. It includes 80 nuclear attack submarines as compared with the U.S. Navy’s 68. The Russian fleet is armed with hundreds of missiles and supplemented by the murderous Back-fire Bomber fleet.
To recognize these facts in no way means supporting increased U.S. naval expenditures. Rather it is an important part of shattering the illusions that many people still have about “detente” and about the nature of the USSR.
The fact that the opportunists are covering up these facts, claiming that the Russian fleet is “non-existent,” shows that they have swallowed the, revisionist propaganda, lock, stock and barrel. In contrast, the genuine Marxist-Leninists oppose the war preparations of both superpowers. They sharply attack the arms race of their own ruling class while helping to expose and oppose the Soviet war drive.
Others taking part in the cover-up and support for appeasement include the anti-China bloc, which is made up of such “anti-revisionists” as the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists (COUSML) and the Marxist-Leninist Organizing Committee (MLOC). In carrying out their slanderous attacks on People’s China and the genuine communists in this country, this bloc has quite naturally drifted into the ideological domain of the Soviet revisionists. Opposition to social-imperialism is quickly disappearing from their meager press while their main polemic seems to be aimed at China, the CPML and other Marxist-Leninists.
In the April 1977 issue of the RCP’s newspaper Revolution, for example, they scorned those who are ”indicting leading figures in the bourgeoisie for ’appeasement!’” Notice the use of quotation marks around the term appeasement. Perhaps the RCP should organize a defense campaign for those so unjustly “indicted.”
The same article contains the “evidence” on behalf of the “defendants.” The RCP claims that the U.S. ruling class policy towards the Soviets “is fundamentally opposed to the policy of appeasement practiced by Britain and France towards Germany before World War II when the allied imperialists hoped that unhinging the geopolitical balance would set the Nazis against the Soviet Union [our emphasis].”
So, according to the RCP’s counselor for the defense, today’s imperialists have changed their ways. The U.S. ruling class is no longer interested in driving the rising, aggressive upstart imperialists towards the socialist countries. The Sonnenfeldt Doctrine, the nurturing of the Soviet economy, Carter’s praise for the Soviet-Cuban “stabilization” of Angola–all this according to the RCP, is supposed to be “fundamentally” different from the policies of those who appeased Hitler. What better defense could Brezhnev or Castro ask for from the U.S. “anti-revisionists?” What more proof is needed to uncover the real class collaborators?
In fact the policy today of the most influential circles among the Western imperialists is very similar to that of Chamberlain and Daladier in the ’30s as earlier parts of this series have shown. Today as then, the war danger focused on Europe. The Hitlerites hoped to conquer the industrial potential of Europe and then go against the then-socialist Soviet Union. The Western imperialists talked of “peace and detente” and actually gave encouragement to the Nazis, hoping that they would turn East instead of West.
There is no fundamental difference between the policies of Carter, Kissinger and Rockefeller today, and the British, French and U.S. imperialists who appeased Hitler in the ’30s. The Munich atmosphere is with us once again.
As for COUSML, a long-discredited sect of police provocateurs, formed by the notorious agent Hardial Bains, they naturally go even further than the RCP in their “leftist” attack on what they call the “Klonskyite hysteria ’appeasement’”! (There go those quotation marks again.)
COUSML, vying with RCP and MLOC for the anti-China franchise in the U.S., denounces its rivals for not attacking China and not defending appeasement of fascism strongly enough. Furthermore, COUSML denounces anyone who has the nerve to raise “the specter of Soviet tanks rolling across the borders of Western Europe.” (“Reply to the Open Letter of MLOC”)
All these opportunists are stepping over each other to be the first to discount the Soviet presence in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Some, the COUSML and RCP, say that the two superpowers are equally dangerous to the world’s people, “to the same degree and same extent,” which objectively means covering over the real role of the USSR. Others like the centrist Guardian, take a slight poke at Soviet hegemonism, but insist that the world’s people treat the Soviet threat as a “secondary question at this time.” (See Irwin Silber’s “Shifting Power Balance Clouds ’Detente,’” April 12, 1978).
But they are all agreed that to warn the masses against the growing war danger and to raise the people’s resistance level is synonymous with “class collaboration.” All are agreed that China has “sold out” to U.S. imperialism because of her principled stand against appeasement.
In one way or another all are playing the game of the imperialists as developed in David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission and in the Kremlin’s planning councils.
The genuine Marxist-Leninists the world over are rallying the workers and broad masses in opposition to superpower war preparations as a component part of the class struggle for socialism and of the national liberation movements. While the revisionists and opportunists try to blind the masses to the arms race and superpower contention, the Marxist-Leninists are exposing the myth of “detente” and the policy of appeasement.
As China’s leader Hua Kuo-feng put it in his speech marking that country’s 29th anniversary last week: “We are opposed to appeasement. Together with the people all over the world, we are determined to combat superpower hegemonism and upset hegemonist world strategic plans to as to put off the outbreak of a world war and defend world peace.”
On the 40th anniversary of the Munich Pact, which in 1938 gave Hitler an open path in his conquest of Europe, Marxist-Leninists and anti-war forces gathered in that German city to warn the masses about the “shadow of Munich” hanging over Europe today.
A declaration issued by the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of France urges every effort against appeasement and the aggressive designs of the Soviet Union, while firmly opposing the contention between the two superpowers. A statement in the French Marxist-Leninist paper l’Humanite Rouge put it this way: “One of the lessons of Munich is that unpreparedness and show of weakness on the part of the world’s peoples and countries only serve to whet the arrogance and the aggressive appetite of warmongers.”
As to the charge that opposition to appeasement means “class collaboration,” it is only necessary to point out that historically the real class fighters who led the victorious struggle against appeasement and the defeat of Hitler fascism were the same revolutionaries who simultaneously defeated the ruling circles in China and elsewhere in Europe, bringing liberation and socialism to more than a fourth of the globe. The Trotskyites of that time, on the other hand, whose charges of “collaboration” are being echoed by today’s phony “anti-revisionists,” never fought the bourgeoisie, but served directly in their pay.
The U.S. Marxist-Leninists are stepping up their struggle against appeasement in many concrete ways. For example, they are actively rallying support against hegemonism. While carrying out their special duty to support the liberation movements in Puerto Rico, southern Africa, the Philippines, etc., where the U.S. ruling class is the most immediate enemy, they have also militantly exposed Soviet aggression from Czechoslovakia to Zaire. The defense of the right of all oppressed nations to self-determination is a component part of the struggle against appeasement.
Secondly, the anti-appeasement struggle in this country means heightening the demand for normalization of relations between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China. The U.S. government’s foot-dragging on implementation of the Shanghai Communique, which includes an end of military support for the Taiwan puppet clique, is directly tied to their fear of offending Moscow.
Fighting appeasement in practice, also means opposing the huge economic support that the U.S. monopolies give to the USSR in the way of wheat shipments and advanced technology; The bolstering of the Soviet economy will only hasten the war drive of the new czars.
From exposing the phony “peace” talks from SALT to Helsinki to the defense of Soviet bloc political prisoners along with those in the prisons of the U.S., the Marxist-Leninists are pursuing a genuinely internationalist line and uniting with all those who can be united to fight the two superpowers and their war preparations.
Of course there were and are still those revisionists, like Earl Browder in the ’30s, who will distort the correct policy of fighting revisionism in order to promote class collaboration or the reactionary policy of “relying on one superpower to fight the other.” But this danger cannot turn the real revolutionaries from their correct path. Revolutionaries have never been afraid of twists and turns or complicated situations.
Far from collaborating with the U.S. imperialists, the Communist Party (M-L) along with other communist groups, class fighters and progressive forces who stand against war and fascism are strengthening unity and heightening the class struggle against the monopoly capitalists.