– Comrade Enver Hoxha –
The first current which preceded modern revisionism in power was Browderism. This current was born in the United States of America and took its name from the former general secretary of the Communist Party of the USA, Earl Browder.
In 1944, when the victory of the peoples over fascism was clearly on the horizon, Browder came out publicly with a program which was reformist from start to finish. He was the first herald of that line of ideological and political capitulation which American imperialism was to strive to impose on the communist parties and the revolutionary movement. Under the pretext of the alleged change in the historical conditions of the development of capitalism and the international situation, Browder proclaimed Marxism-Leninism “outdated” and called it a system of rigid dogmas and schemes. Browder advocated giving up the class struggle and called for class conciliation on a national and international scale. He thought that American capitalism was no longer reactionary, that it could cure the ills of bourgeois society, and could develop in democratic ways for the good of the working people. He no longer saw socialism as an ideal, as an objective to be achieved. American imperialism with its strategy and policy had disappeared completely from his field of vision. For Browder, the big monopolies, the pillars of this imperialism, constituted a progressive force for the democratic, social and economic development of the country. Browder denied the class character of the capitalist state, and considered American society a unified and harmonious society, without social antagonisms, a society in which understanding and class co-operation prevailed. On the basis of these concepts Browder also denied the need for the existence of the revolutionary party of the working class. He became an initiator of the disbanding of the Communist Party of the United States of America in 1944.
“The Communists,” he wrote, “foresee that the practical political aims they hold will, for a long time, be in agreement on all essential points with the aims of a much larger body of non-Communists, and that, therefore, our political actions will be merged in such larger movements. The existence of a separate political party of communists, therefore, no longer serves a practical purpose but can be, on the contrary, an obstacle to the larger unity. The communists will, therefore, dissolve their separate political party, and find a new and different organizational form and name, corresponding more accurately to the tasks of the day and the political structure through which these tasks must be performed.”[1]
Browder took the Conference of allied powers which was held in Tehran in 1943 as his starting point and justification for the formulation of his bourgeois liquidatory theory and made a completely distorted and anti-Marxist analysis and interpretation of the results of this conference.
Browder presented the agreement of the anti-fascist allies to carry the war against Hitlerite Germany through to the end as the beginning of a new historical epoch, in which socialism and capitalism had found the way to co-operation within “one and the same world,” as he expressed it. Browder presented it as a duty to ensure that the spirit of co-operation and peaceful coexistence between the allied powers, which emerged from Tehran, should be applied not only between the Soviet socialist state and those capitalist states, but also within the capitalist country in relations between antagonistic classes. “Class differences and political groups now no longer have any importance,” said Browder. He considered the achievement of “national unity,” without incidents and in an atmosphere of class peace, the sole objective which the communists should set themselves, and he understood this national unity as a bloc uniting the groups of finance capital, the organizations of monopolists, the Republican and Democratic parties, and the communists and trade-union movements, all of which, without exception, he considered “democratic and patriotic” forces.
For the sake of this unity Browder declared that communists must be ready to sacrifice even their convictions, their ideology and special interests, that the American communists have applied this rule to themselves first of all. “The political aims which we hold with the majority of the Americans,” says he, “we will attempt to advance through the existing party structure of our country, which in the main is that of the peculiarly American ‘two-party system.’”[2]
Confused by the relatively peaceful development of American capitalism following the well-known reforms which the American President Roosevelt undertook in order to emerge from the economic crisis at the beginning of the 30’s, as well as by the rapid growth of production and employment during the war period, Browder drew the conclusion that American capitalism had allegedly been rejuvenated, that now it would develop without crises and would ensure the raising of the general well-being, etc.
He considered the American economic system to be a system capable of resolving all the contradictions and problems of society and fulfiling all the demands of the masses. He equated communism with Americanism and declared that “communism is the Americanism of the 20th century.” According to Browder, all the developed capitalist countries could resolve every conflict and go gradually to socialism by using bourgeois democracy, for which American democracy had to be the model.
Therefore, Browder considered that the task of American communists was to ensure the normal functioning of the capitalist regime, and declared openly that they were ready to co-operate to ensure the efficient functioning of the capitalist regime in the post-war period, in order to “ensure the greatest possible lightening of obligations which are a burden on the people.” According to him, this lightening of burdens would be done by the “reasonable” American capitalists, to whom the communists must extend the hand of friendship.
In conformity with his ultra-rightist concepts and submitting to the pressure of the bourgeoisie, after the disbanding of the Communist Party in May 1944, Browder announced the creation, in place of the party, of a cultural and illuminist association called the “Communist Political Association,” justifying this with the argument that the American tradition allegedly demanded the existence of only two parties. This association, organized as a network of clubs, was to engage mainly in “activity of political education on a national, regional and local plane.”
The Constitution of this association says: “The Communist Political Association is a non-party organization of Americans which, basing itself upon the working class, carries forward the tradition of Washington, Jefferson, Paine, Jackson and Lincoln under the changed conditions of modern industrial society,” that this association “…upholds the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution and its Bill of Rights, and the achievements of American democracy against all the enemies of popular liberties.”[3] Browder wiped out all the objectives of the communist movement. In the program of the Association there is no mention of Marxism-Leninism, the hegemony of the proletariat, the class struggle, the revolution or socialism. National unity, social peace, defence of the bourgeois Constitution and the increase of the capitalist production became its only objectives.
In this way, Browder went over from open revision of the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism and the revolutionary strategy and tactics to the organizational liquidation of the communist movement in the United States of America. Although the party was re-formed at its 13th Congress in June 1945, and the opportunist line of Browder was formally rejected, his influence was never eliminated in the Communist Party of the USA. Later, especially after 1956, the ideas of Browder flourished again and John Hayes in an article entitled “The Time for Change Has Come,”[4] once again demanded in the spirit of Browderism the turning of the Communist Party of the USA into a cultural and propaganda association. And in fact, that is what the Communist Party of the USA is today, an organization in which the revisionism of Browder combined with that of Khrushchev prevails.
With his revisionist concepts about the revolution and socialism, Browder gave world capitalism direct aid. According to Browder, socialism arises only from some great cataclysm, from some catastrophe, and not as an inevitable result of historical development. “We do not desire any catastrophe for America, even if such a thing would lead to socialism,” he said. While presenting the prospect of the triumph of socialism as very remote, he advocated class collaboration in American society and throughout the world. According to him, the only alternative was that of development by evolution, through reforms and with the aid of the United States of America.
According to Browder, the United States of America, which possessed colossal economic power and great scientific-technical potential, had to assist the peoples of the world, including the Soviet Union, for their “development.” This “aid,” said Browder, would help America maintain high rates of production after the war, ensure work for all, and preserve the national unity for many years. To this end, Browder advised the magnates of Washington that they should set up a “series of giant industrial development corporations for the various devastated and undeveloped regions of the world, Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America.”[5] “If we can face realities without flinching, and revive in modern terms the grand tradition of Jefferson, Paine and Lincoln, then America can face the world united, assuming a leading part… in the salvation of mankind…”[6] In this way, Browder became the spokesman and propagandist of the grand strategy of American imperialism, and its expansionist neo-colonialist theories and plans.
Browderism directly assisted the “Marshall Plan” through which the United States of America aimed to establish its economic hegemony in the different war-devastated countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, etc. Browder advocated that the countries of the world, and especially the countries of people’s democracy and the Soviet Union, ought to soften their Marxist-Leninist policy and accept the “altruistic” aid of the United States of America, which, according to him, has a colossal economy and huge surpluses which can and should serve all peoples(!).
Browder tried to present his anti-Marxist and counter-revolutionary views as the general line of the international communist movement. Under the pretext of the creative development of Marxism and the struggle against dogmatism, he, like all the earlier revisionists, tried to argue that the new epoch after the Second World War required a communist movement which would examine its former ideological convictions and relinquish its “old formulas and prejudices,” which, according to him, “cannot help us at all to find our way in the new world.” This was a call for rejection of the principles of Marxism-Leninism.
Browder’s views encountered the opposition of the communist parties of several countries, as well as of the revolutionary American communists themselves. Browderism was exposed relatively quickly as undisguised revisionism, as an openly liquidationist current, as a direct ideological agency of American imperialism.
Browderism did great damage to the communist and workers’ movement of the United States of America and some Latin American countries. Upsets and splits occurred in some of the old communist parties of Latin America, and these had their source in the activity of opportunist elements who, weary of the revolutionary struggle, grasped at any means with which American imperialism provided them to quell the revolts of the peoples and the revolution and to spread decay in the parties which were working for the education and preparation of the peoples for revolution.
In Europe, Browderism did not have the success it had in South America, although this seed of American imperialism was not left unabsorbed by those disguised anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist reformist elements who were awaiting or preparing the suitable moments to deviate openly from the scientific Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Although in its own time Browderism did not manage to become a revisionist current with broad international proportions, the other modern revisionists who came later revived its views and made them their own. These views, in various forms, remain the basis of the political and ideological platforms of the Chinese and Yugoslav revisionists, as well as of the Eurocommunist parties of Western Europe.
Not only Browderism, but also Mao Zedong thought, the theories and line which the Chinese leadership followed, responded to the American strategy for “restraining communism” and for the establishment of the hegemony of the United States of America over the post-war capitalist world.
At the beginning of 1945, at the time when Browder appeared on the scene and when a new American strategy under Truman was assuming its complete form, the 7th Congress of the Communist Party of China was held in that country. The Constitution which this congress adopted, states: “The Communist Party of China is guided by the ideas of Mao Zedong in all its activity.” Commenting on this decision, in the report which he delivered at the congress, Liu Shaoqi declared that Mao Zedong had allegedly refuted many outdated concepts of the Marxist theory and replaced them with new theses and conclusions. According to Liu Shaoqi, Mao Zedong had managed to give Marxism a “Chinese form.” He says: “The ideas of Mao Zedong are Chinese Marxism.”
These “new theses and conclusions,” this “Chinese form” of Marxism had nothing at all to do with any creative application of Marxism-Leninism in the concrete conditions of China, but were a denial of its universal fundamental laws. Mao Zedong and his comrades had a bourgeois-democratic concept of the development of the revolution in China. They were not for raising it to a socialist revolution. For them the model was the “American democracy” and they reckoned on the support of American capital for the construction of new China.
There were great affinities between the ideas of Mao Zedong and the opportunist ideas of Browder who, it must be said, had studied and thoroughly understood the anti-Marxist concepts of the Chinese leaders. Browder wrote: “What is called the ‘communist’ camp in China, because it is led by outstanding members of the Chinese Communist Party, is much closer to American concepts of democracy than is the so-called Kuomintang camp; it is closer in every way, including the wider scope given to ‘free enterprise’ in economic life.”[7]
Mao Zedong was for the unrestricted free development of capitalism in China in the period of the state of the type of “new democracy,” as he called that regime which was to be established after the departure of the Japanese. At the 7th Congress of the CPC he said, “Some think that the communists are against the development of private initiative, against the development of private capital, against the protection of private property. In reality, this is not so… the task of the order of new democracy, which we are striving to establish, is precisely… to ensure the possibility for broad circles of Chinese to freely develop their private initiative in society, to freely develop the private capitalist economy…”[8] In this way, Mao Zedong took over the anti-Marxist concept of Kautsky, according to which, in the backward countries the transition to socialism cannot be achieved without going through a lengthy period of free development of capitalism which prepares the conditions to go over to socialism later. In fact, the so-called socialist regime which Mao Zedong and his group established in China, was and remained a bourgeois-democratic regime.
In practice, the line which the Chinese leadership, headed by Mao Zedong, began to follow for restraining the revolution in China and shutting off its socialist perspective assisted American imperialism, which wanted to extend its domination, and the other imperialist powers, which were seeking to preserve their old domination.
In the post-war years, the anti-colonialist national liberation movements surged ahead on all continents. The British, French, Italian, Dutch, and Belgian colonial empires were collapsing one after the other under the waves of the popular uprisings in the colonies. The revolutions in most of these countries were bourgeois-democratic. However, in some of them, the objective possibilities existed for the revolution to be raised and assume a socialist character. Mao Zedong, with his views and activities, advocated the diversion of the anti-imperialist revolutions from the right course of their development; he wanted them to stop half-way, not to go beyond the bourgeois framework, so that the capitalist system was perpetuated. If we bear in mind the importance of the Chinese revolution and its influence among the colonial countries, the damage which the “theories” of Mao Zedong caused was great.
Mao’s line was that China, and following its example, Indochina, Burma, Indonesia, India, etc., had to rely on the United States of America and American capital and aid for their development. In fact this was acceptance of that new strategy which had been formulated in the departments of Washington and which Browder had begun to advocate in his own way.
The American envoys attached to Mao Zedong’s staff in the years 1944-1949 have described in detail the views, attitudes, activity and demands of Mao Zedong towards the United States of America. One of these envoys was John Service, political adviser to the commander of the American forces on the Burma-China front and later secretary of the American Embassy to the Chiang Kai-shek government in Chongqing. He was one of the first of the American intelligence agents who made official contact with the leaders of the Communist Party of China, although there were continual unofficial contacts.
Speaking about the Chinese leaders, Service admits: “Their outlook impresses one as modern. Their understanding of economics, for instance, is very similar to ours.”[9] “It is not surprising,” he continues, “that they had favourably impressed most or all of the Americans who have met them during the last seven years: their manners, habits of thought, and direct handling of problems seem more American than Oriental.”[10]
In essence, the liquidationist views of Browder about the party are found in the theories of Mao Zedong too. Just as Chinese communism was a wash-out, the Communist Party of China, too, was such only in name. Mao Zedong did not work to build a genuine Marxist-Leninist proletarian party. From its class composition, its organizational structure and the way it was built and the ideology which inspired it, the Communist Party of China was not a party of the Leninist type. Moreover, Mao Zedong had no consideration even for this party such as it was. He did whatever he wanted. During the so-called Cultural Revolution, he completely disbanded it, concentrating everything in his own hands and putting the army at the head of affairs.
Like Browder, who presented Americanism as the ideal model of the society of the future, Mao Zedong too, considered American democracy the finest example of state and social organization for China. Mao Zedong admitted to Service: “After all, we Chinese consider you Americans the ideal of democracy.”[11]
Along with their acceptance of American democracy, the Chinese leaders sought the establishment of close and direct links with American capital, sought American economic aid. Service writes that Mao Zedong told him, “China must industrialize. This can be done — in China — only by free enterprise and with the aid of foreign capital. Chinese and American interests are correlated and similar…
“The United States would find us more cooperative than the Kuomintang. We will not be afraid of democratic American influence — we will welcome it…
“America does not need to fear that we will not be co-operative. We must co-operate and we must have American help.”[12]
Today we hear such statements and requests every day from the disciples and collaborators of Mao Zedong, such as Deng Xiaoping, Hua Guofeng, and others who are achieving in practice the all-round links with American imperialism dreamed of and initiated by Mao Zedong. Now the Chinese strategy is orientated completely towards co-operation with the United States of America in particular, and world capitalism in general, and they began to support China politically and to influence it ideologically, so that it would obliterate any shadow of Marxism-Leninism from the minds and hearts of common people and thus carry out thorough-going political and organizational transformations towards the capitalist system, whether in the economic field, in the state organization, or in the organization of the party.
Objectively, the whole line of Mao Zedong for the construction of China and his concept of the development of the countries which liberated themselves from colonialism has served and gone along with the strategy of American imperialism. If close collaboration between China and the United States of America was not established at the start, this is explained by the fact that in the post-war years the Chiang Kai-shek lobby triumphed in America. At that time the “cold war” was at its height and McCarthyism prevailed in America. On the other hand, immediately after the war, the United States of America gave priority to Japan, thinking that first of all, it had to aid Japan or subjugate it from every point of view, to make it a powerful and obedient ally, to reconstruct the Japanese economy, and turn that country into a great bastion against the Soviet Union, and eventually against Mao Zedong’s China. Apparently, the USA was not sufficiently powerful to be able to provide aid for all parts of the world and to prepare them against the Soviet Union, against the system of socialism, therefore, it gave preference to preparing Europe and Japan, where the destruction was great and where socialism had become dangerous to world capital.
Without doubt, these were the factors that made the heads of American imperialism refuse to grasp the hand Mao Zedong held out to them immediately. Considerable time had to pass. The Chinese revisionist leaders had to give new proofs of their “love” for America before Nixon could go to Beijing and the Americans and all the others understand that China had nothing at all to do with socialism.
After the Second World War the Yugoslav revisionists were included in the great campaign of American imperialism and other reactionary forces that gathered around it, in the struggle against socialism and the revolution. This current, which represented revisionism in power, emerged at a crucial moment of the struggle between socialism and imperialism.
The period after the Second World War could not be a period of tranquility either for imperialism or for socialism. In the new conditions which had been created, imperialism had to cope with situations which were mortally dangerous to it, while socialism had to be consolidated, had to radiate and give its aid in the right way for the liberation and the progress of the peoples of the world. Not only had the wounds of the war to be treated and healed, but the class struggle had to be waged correctly, too, both within the countries where the proletariat had taken power and in the international arena. The victory over fascism had been achieved, but the peace was relative, the war continued with other means.
The socialist countries and their communist parties were faced with the task of working to consolidate their victories on the Marxist-Leninist road and to become examples and mirrors for the peoples and the other communist parties which were not in power. The communist parties of the socialist countries, also, had to temper themselves further with the Marxist-Leninist ideology, taking care that this was not turned into a dogma, but preserved as a revolutionary theory for action, a means to achieve profound social transformations, which is what it is in fact. In particular, after the historic victory over the fascist coalition, the socialist countries and the communist parties had to avoid becoming conceited, thinking that they were infallible, and forgetting or weakening the class struggle. This is the important thing Stalin had in mind when he stressed the need for the continuation of the class struggle in socialism.
Precisely in these circumstances the Titoites came out against Marxism-Leninism. Titoism did not throw off its disguise and come out openly against the revolution and socialism at the start, but, on the contrary, tried to camouflage itself while continuing to prepare the terrain for taking Yugoslavia back on to the course of capitalism and its transformation into a tool of world imperialism.
It is a recognized fact that Titoism leaned spiritually, politically and ideologically towards the West, towards the United States of America, that right from the start it maintained numerous political contacts and achieved secret combinations with the British and other representatives of world capitalism. The Yugoslav leaders opened all the doors to UNRRA, and by this means and under the pretext of aid with the stockpiles of clothing and food left over from the time of the war, the American-British imperialists tried to infiltrate into many countries of the world, and especially into the countries of people’s democracy. The aim of the imperialists was to prepare a more or less suitable terrain for operations of a more wide-ranging plan in the future. The Yugoslavs benefited greatly from the things UNRRA gave them, but for its part, UNRRA was able to exert its influence on the still incompletely built state mechanisms of the newly formed Yugoslav state.
Right from the start, American imperialism and the whole of international reaction gave Titoism all their support because they saw in it the course, the ideology and the policy which led to the degeneration of the countries of the socialist camp, to the splitting and disruption of their unity with the Soviet Union. The activity of Titoism conformed completely to the aim of American imperialism to undermine socialism from within. But Titoism was also to serve the strategy of imperialism of paralysing the liberation struggles and weaning new states, which had just thrown off the colonialist yoke, away from the revolutionary movement.
From the beginning, the Yugoslav revisionists were against the theory and practice of the genuine socialism of Lenin and Stalin on all questions and in all fields. Tito and his group linked the country with the capitalist world and set themselves the task of transforming everything in Yugoslavia, including its policy, ideology, state organization, the organization of the economy and the army, in the direction of the Western capitalist states. Their aim was to transform Yugoslavia into a bourgeois-capitalist country as quickly as possible. Browder’s ideas, which were the ideas of American capitalism, found a place in the political and ideological platform of Titoism.
First of all, the Titoites revised the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism about the role and mission of the revolutionary state power and the communist party in socialist society. They attacked the Marxist thesis about the leading role of the communist party in all fields of life in the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Following the example of Browder in America, they liquidated the party in practice, not just because they changed its name, calling it the League of Communists, but because they also changed the aims, functions, organization and the role which this party was to play in the revolution and the construction of socialism. The Titoites transformed the party into an educational and propaganda association. They eliminated the revolutionary spirit of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and de facto went so far as to eliminate the influence of the party and to raise the role of the Popular Front above it.[13]
On the cardinal question of the party, in connection with the leading factor of the revolution and the construction of socialism, there is a community of political, ideological and organizational views between Browderism and Titoism. Since the policy of Titoism, like that of Browderism, is liquidationist and anti-Marxist on the decisive plan of the vanguard role of the party of the working class in the revolution and the construction of socialism, it is such in all aspects of its platforms.
The similarity of the views of the Titoites and those of Browder is apparent also in their stand towards “American democracy” which the Titoites took as a model for the construction of the political system in Yugoslavia. Kardelj himself has admitted that this system is “…similar to the organization of the executive power in the United States of America.”[14]
Following the liquidation of the party and the break with the Soviet Union and the countries of people’s democracy, Yugoslavia has been writhing in a chaos of economic-organizational operations. The Titoites proclaimed the state property “social” property, and camouflaged the capitalist relations of production under the anarcho-syndicalist slogan of “factories to the workers,” and set the detachments of the working class one against the other. The collectivization of small producers was called the “Russian way” and was opposed with the “American way” of the creation of capitalist farms and the encouragement of private peasant economies.
This transformation in the economic, political and ideological fields was bound to bring about the subsequent transformation of the state organization, the organization of the army, and the organization of education and culture and so it did. In the fifties they proclaimed their so-called self-governing socialism, which was used to disguise the capitalist order. This “specific socialism,” according to them, was to be built by relying not on the socialist state, but directly on the producers. On this basis, they preached the withering away of the state in socialism, denying the fundamental Marxist-Leninist thesis about the need for the existence of the dictatorship of the proletariat during the whole period of the transition from capitalism to communism.
In order to justify their course of betrayal and to throw dust in people’s eyes, the Titoites presented themselves as “creative Marxists” who opposed only “Stalinism” but not Marxism-Leninism. Thus, they proved once again that the slogan of “the creative development of Marxism and the struggle against dogmatism” is the favourite slogan common to every variant of revisionism.
The United States of America, Britain, European social-democracy, etc., gave Titoite Yugoslavia all-round political, economic and military aid and kept it alive. The bourgeoisie was not opposed to Yugoslavia’s formally retaining its “socialist” appearance, indeed it was interested in this. However, this kind of “socialism” had to be completely different from the socialism envisaged and built by Lenin and Stalin, which the Yugoslav revisionists began to attack, to call a “low form of socialism,” “state socialism,” “bureaucratic” and “anti-democratic.” Yugoslav “socialism” had to be a hybrid capitalist-revisionist society, but essentially bourgeois-capitalist. It had to be a “Trojan horse” which would get into the other socialist countries, in order to divert them from the road of socialism and link them with imperialism.
And in fact Titoism became the inspirer of revisionist and opportunist elements in the former socialist countries.
The Yugoslav revisionists carried out extensive undermining and sabotage work in these countries. Suffice it to mention the events in Hungary in 1956, in which the Yugoslav Titoites played a very active role to open the way to the counter-revolution and take Hungary into the camp of imperialism.
In his well-known speech at Pula in 1956, Tito himself has clearly and openly explained the place which Titoism occupies in the overall strategy of imperialism in undermining the socialist countries from within. At that time he declared that the Yugoslav model of socialism was valid not only for Yugoslavia, but also for other socialist countries, which ought to follow and apply it.
The Titoite concepts and theories about world development and international relations also conformed to the strategy of American imperialism. In his speech delivered in Oslo in October 1954, the main theoretician of Yugoslav revisionism, Kardelj, came out openly against the theory of the revolution, while advertising the “new” solutions which capitalism had allegedly found. Distorting the essence of state monopoly capitalism, which assumed wide proportions in many capitalist countries after the Second World War, he proclaimed it an element of socialism, while he called classical bourgeois democracy “a regulator of social contradictions in the direction of the gradual strengthening of socialist elements.” He declared that today “a gradual evolution towards socialism” is taking place, and this he called “an historical fact” in a series of capitalist states. These revisionist concepts, which in essence are identical with those of Browder, were included in the program of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and became a means of ideological and political diversion against the revolutionary and liberation movements of the proletariat and peoples.
On this basis, the Yugoslav revisionists elaborated their theories and practices of “non-alignment,” which came to the aid of the strategy of American imperialism to restrain the impulse of the anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the so-called third world and to undermine their efforts to defend their freedom, independence and sovereignty. The Titoites advised these peoples that their aspirations could be fulfilled by applying the policy of non-alignment, that is, of not opposing imperialism. According to the Titoites, the road to the development of these countries had to be sought in “active cooperation,” in “ever more extensive co-operation” with the imperialists and big world capital, in the aid and credits which they should take from the developed capitalist countries.
As to where the course which the revisionists of Belgrade advocate leads, the present-day reality of Yugoslavia makes this very clear. The collaboration with American imperialism, with Soviet social-imperialism and the other big capitalist states, the large amount of aid and credits which they have received from them have turned Yugoslavia into a country which is dependent on world capitalism for everything, into a country with its independence and sovereignty crippled.
The strategy of American imperialism and the whole struggle of the international bourgeoisie against the revolution and socialism received further, extremely great and much desired aid with the emergence on the scene of Khrushchevite revisionism. The Khrushchevite betrayal was the heaviest and most dangerous blow which has ever been struck at socialism and the peoples’ revolutionary liberation movement. It transformed the first socialist country, the great centre of the world revolution, into an imperialist country and a hotbed of counter-revolution. The repercussions of this betrayal on the national and international scale have been truly tragic. Not only have the peoples’ revolutionary liberation movements suffered from its consequences, and they are still suffering from them, but international peace and security have been placed in great danger.
As an ideological and political current, Khrushchevism has no great difference from the other currents of modern revisionism. It is the result of the same external and internal pressure of the bourgeoisie, of the same deviation from the principles of Marxism-Leninism, and of the same aim of opposing the revolution and socialism and preserving and strengthening the capitalist system.
The difference which does exist has to do only with the level of the danger which it represents. Khrushchevite revisionism always remains the most dangerous, the most fiendish, the most threatening revisionism. This is for two reasons: first, because it is a disguised revisionism. It retains its external socialist appearance and in order to deceive people and lure them into its traps, makes extensive use of Marxist terminology, and according to the need and the occasion, even of revolutionary slogans. By means of this demagogy it seeks to spread a thick fog so that the present-day capitalist reality of the Soviet Union will not be seen, and above all, its expansionist aims will be hidden in order to mislead the revolutionary liberation movements, and turn them into instruments of its policy. Second, and this is more important, Khrushchevite revisionism has become the ruling ideology in a state which represents a great imperialist power, a thing which gives it many means and possibilities to manoeuvre in broad fields and in large proportions.
Khrushchevism and the other revisionist currents have in common the liquidation of the communist party and its transformation into a political force which serves the bourgeoisie. In the Soviet Union too, the Communist Party of Lenin and Stalin has been liquidated. It is true that the party there did not change its name, as occurred in Yugoslavia, but it was stripped of its revolutionary essence and spirit. The role of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union altered, and its work for the strengthening of the Marxist-Leninist ideology was replaced with the distortion of the Marxist-Leninist theory, under different disguises, through empty phraseology and demagogy. The political organization of the party, like the army, the police and the other organs of the dictatorship of the new bourgeoisie, was transformed into an organization to oppress the masses, not to mention the fact that it also became the bearer of the ideology and policy of their oppression and exploitation. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union degraded, was weakened, and became a “party of the entire people,” that is, no longer the vanguard party of the working class, which carries forward the revolution and builds socialism, but a party of the new revisionist bourgeoisie, which causes the degeneration of socialism and carries forward the restoration of capitalism.
Like Browder, Tito, Togliatti, etc., who preached the transformation of their parties into “associations,” “lea-gues,” “mass parties,” allegedly to adapt them to the new social changes which had occurred as a result of the development of capitalism, the growth of the working class and its political and ideological influence, etc., Khrushchev too justified the change in the character of the party as an alleged adaptation to the situation created in the Soviet Union, where allegedly the construction of socialism had been completed and the construction of communism had begun. According to Khrushchev, the composition of the party, its structure, role and place in society and the state had to alter in conformity with this “new epoch.”
When Khrushchev began to advocate these theses, the construction of communism in the Soviet Union not only had not begun, but moreover, the construction of socialism was not yet completed. True, the exploiting classes had been eliminated as classes, but there were many remnants of them still existing physically, let alone ideologically. The Second World War had hindered the broad emancipation of relations of production, while the productive forces, which constitute the necessary and indispensable basis for this, had been gravely impaired. The Marxist-Leninist ideology was predominant, but this does not mean that the old ideologies had been completely eradicated from the consciousness of the masses. The Soviet Union had won the war against fascism, but another war, with other means, and no less dangerous, had commenced against it. Imperialism, headed by American imperialism, had proclaimed the “cold war” against communism and all the poisoned arrows of world capitalism were aimed at the Soviet Union first of all. Great pressure was exerted on the Soviet state and the Soviet peoples, with the aim of instilling the fear of war amongst them, diminishing their revolutionary enthusiasm, and restraining their internationalist spirit and opposition to imperialism.
In the face of these internal and external pressures, Khrushchev surrendered and capitulated. He began to present the situation in rosy colours, in order to conceal his own pacifist illusions. His theses about the “construction of communism,” the “end of the class struggle,” and the “final victory of socialism” looked like something new, but in fact they were reactionary. They were the expression of the concealment of a new reality which was being created, of the birth and development of the new bourgeois stratum and its pretensions to establish its own power in the Soviet Union.
The line and program which Khrushchev presented at the 20th Congress of the CPSU constituted not only the line of the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union, but also the line of undermining the revolution, and of the subjection of the peoples to imperialism and the working class to the bourgeoisie. The Khrushchevites preached that at the present stage, the main road of transition to socialism was the peaceful road. They advised the communist parties to follow the policy of class conciliation and collaboration with social-democracy and other political forces of the bourgeoisie. This line assisted the attainment of those objectives for which imperialism and capital had long been fighting with every means, including arms and ideological diversion. It opened broad roads to bourgeois reformism and gave capital the possibility to manoeuvre in the difficult economic, political and military situation created for it after the Second World War. This is the explanation for all that great publicity which the bourgeoisie gave the 20th Congress of the CPSU all around the world and which called Khrushchev “a man of peace” who “understands the situation,” unlike Stalin who was for “communist orthodoxy,” “incompatibility with the capitalist world,” etc.
With their preachings of the peaceful road to socialism, the Khrushchevites sought to impede the communists and the revolutionaries of the world from preparing for and carrying out the revolution, and wanted them to reduce all their work to propaganda, to debates and electoral manoeuvres, to trade-union demonstrations and day-to-day demands.
This was the typical social-democratic line which Lenin had fought so fiercely and the October Revolution had overthrown. The Khrushchevite views, which were borrowed from the arsenal of the chiefs of the Second International, aroused dangerous illusions and discredited the very idea of the revolution. They did not prepare the working class and the working masses to be vigilant and to oppose the bourgeois violence, but urged them to remain submissively at the mercy of the bourgeoisie. This was also proved in the events in Indonesia and Chile, etc., with the communists and peoples of those countries paying very dearly for the revisionist illusions about the peaceful road to socialism.
Equally in favour of imperialism and the bourgeoisie and harmful to the revolution was the other thesis of the 20th Congress of the CPSU about “peaceful coexistence,” which the Khrushchevites tried to impose on the whole communist movement, extending it even to relations between classes, and between the peoples and their imperialist oppressors. According to the Khrushchevites, who presented the problem as “either peaceful coexistence or devastating war,” there was no other solution for the peoples and the world proletariat but to bend their backs, to give up the class struggle, the revolution and any other action which “might anger” imperialism and provoke the outbreak of war.
In fact the Khrushchevite views about “peaceful coexistence,” which were closely linked with those about the “changed nature of imperialism,” were practically identical with the preachings of Browder that American capitalism and imperialism had allegedly become a factor of progress in post-war world development. The prettifying of American imperialism and the false image created about it slackened peoples’ vigilance towards the hegemonic and expansionist policy of the United States of America and sabotaged the peoples’ anti-imperialist liberation struggle. Both as an ideology and a practical political line, Khrushchevite “peaceful coexistence” urged the peoples, especially in the new states of Asia, Africa and Latin America, etc., to extinguish the “hotbeds from which the flames of war might burst out,” to seek rapprochement and conciliation with imperialism, to take advantage of “international co-operation” for the “peaceful development” of their economy, etc. In its expressions, terms and other formulas, this line was the same as that preached by Browder, that in the conditions of the “peaceful coexistence” between the United States of America and the Soviet Union, wealthy America could assist restoration and advance of the whole world. It was the same line which Tito advocated and applied in Yugoslavia, which had opened the doors of that country to American aid, credit and capital. It was the same desire which Mao Zedong and other Maoist leaders had to build up China with American aid, but which the different circumstances and events had hindered up to that stage.
And the Soviet Union cannot escape American aid and the aid from the other Western countries any more than the Titoites, or today the Maoists can escape it. The integration of the Soviet Union and other revisionist countries linked with it into the world capitalist economy has assumed large proportions. These countries have become some of the biggest importers of Western capital. Their debts, at least those which are made public, amount to tens of billions of dollars. Sometimes because of changing circumstances, such as those caused by the events in Afghanistan at present, this process is slowed down, but it never stops. The capitalist interests of the two sides are so great that in special situations they override all their frictions, rivalries and clashes.
The Soviet revisionists used the thesis about “peaceful coexistence” not only to justify their policy of concessions to and compromises with American imperialism. This line also served and is still serving them as a mask to hide the expansionist policy of Soviet social-imperialism, in order to lower the vigilance and resistance of the peoples to the imperialist plans of the Soviet revisionist leaders for hegemony. The thesis about “peaceful coexistence” was a call of the Soviet revisionists to the American imperialists to divide up the world and rule it jointly.
The Khrushchevite revisionist line assisted imperialism and reaction to take advantage of the situation in order to launch an all-round attack on communism. Of particular assistance to this new attack on the revolution and socialism were the attacks and the slanders of the Khrushchevite revisionists on Stalin and his work.
The Khrushchevite revisionists started their campaign against Stalin in order to justify the anti-Marxist course which they had begun to follow inside and outside the country. They could not negate the dictatorship of the proletariat and transform the Soviet Union into a bourgeois-capitalist state, could not strike bargains with imperialism, without negating the work of Stalin. This is also the reason why the campaign against him was conducted with the accusations borrowed from the arsenal of imperialist and Trotskyite propaganda which presented the past of the Soviet Union as a period of “mass reprisals,” and the socialist system as “suppression of democracy” and a “dictatorship like that of Ivan the Terrible” etc.
But for all the slanders and attacks of imperialists, revisionists and other enemies of the revolution, the name and work of Stalin remain immortal. Stalin was a great revolutionary, an outstanding theoretician, who ranks with Marx, Engels and Lenin.
Life has proved the correctness of the analyses of the Party of Labour of Albania and its stands towards Khrushchevite revisionism and is confirming them every day. In the Soviet Union socialism has been destroyed and capitalism has been restored. Meanwhile, in the international arena, the stands and actions of the Soviet leadership have more and more revealed the social-imperialist character of the Soviet Union and its reactionary great power ideology. Thus, Khrushchevite revisionism has become not only the ideology of the restoration of capitalism and sabotage of the revolution and the peoples’ liberation struggle, but also the ideology of social-imperialist aggression.
To be continued…
Notes
[1] E. Browder, Tehran, Our Path in War and Peace, New York 1944, p. 117.
[2] Ibidem, p. 118.
[3] The Path to Peace, Progress and Prosperity, New York 1944, pp. 47, 48.
[4] Political Affairs, October 1956.
[5] The Path to Peace, Progress and Prosperity, New York 1944, p. 21.
[6] E. Browder, Tehran, Our Path in War and Peace, New York 1944, p. 128.
[7] E. Browder, Tehran, Our Path in War and Peace, New York 1944, p. 26.
[8] Mao Zedong, Selected Works, vol. 4, p. 364, Alb. ed.
[9] J. Service, Lost Chance in China, New York 1974, p. 195.
[10] Ibidem, p. 198.
[11] J. Service, Lost Chance in China, New York 1974, p. 303.
[12] Ibidem, p. 307.
[13] Tito declared in 1947: “Does the Communist Party of Yugoslavia have another program besides that of the Popular Front? No! The Communist Party has no other program. The program of the Popular Front is the program of the party, too.” (J.B. Tito, Speeches and Articles III. Rilindja, Prishtina 1962, Alb. ed. p. 145)
[14] E. Kardelj, Directions of the Development of the Political System of Socialist Self-administration, Rilindja, Prishtina 1978, p. 235.
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