First Published: Global Digest, Vol. 3, No. 7, July 1966.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Global Digest Introduction: This text is condensed from the Ad Hoc Bulletin of April 1966.
The realities of our age have been conditioned by four historic events of this century: the Imperialist War of 1914-18, the Great October Revolution, the Anti-Fascist War of 1939-45, and the victory of the Chinese People’s Socialist Revolution in 1949.
World War I released a tremendous revolutionary upsurge throughout the world. Social Democracy playing its traditional role of reformism betrayed the working class which gave rise to German and Italian fascism and Japanese militarism.
The Great October Revolution ushered onto the stage of history the first Socialist state in the world. The heroic Soviet people, under the leadership of the Great Soviet Communist Party, and the Chinese people, under the leadership of Comrade Mao Tse-tung were the principal barrier along fascism’s road to the enslavement of the world.
At a terrible price in lives and human suffering, European fascism and Japanese militarism fell before the mighty onslaught of the socialist and democratic world forces.
Victory in World War II gave rise to powerful revolutionary and anti-imperialist forces all across the globe. Many countries in Europe embarked on the road to socialism.
In Asia, China also embarked on the road to socialist construction with the completion of the Great Chinese Revolution in 1949. The impact of the Chinese Revolution was felt across the world. It gave strength and direction to national liberation struggles which resulted in the creation of more than fifty new nations on the ruins of European colonial empires.
For the first time in history more than a billion people in Asia and Africa, behind the shield of an increasingly powerful socialist camp, were free to decide their own destiny.
The war destroyed fascism in Europe and militarism in Asia but it did not destroy reaction.
U.S. imperialism, which emerged from the conflict unscathed, became the undisputed leader of the world imperialist camp. It lost no time in stepping into the role of number one world oppressor, a position vacated by Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo.
In its new role of world oppressor, U.S. imperialism embarked upon three main strategical tasks: The “containment” of the Socialist world, the suppression of national independence, and the propping up of the dying European imperialist system which was in the process of disintegration.
The maneuvers of U.S. imperialism were doomed from the beginning. The imperialist underestimated the strength of the socialist camp and the revolutionary aspirations of the world’s peoples.
In the face of the new balance of world forces, the rivalry of the imperialist camp gave way to a temporary alliance of imperialist countries in a vain attempt to halt the advance of the world’s people toward Socialism and National Liberation. The world went into a prolonged period of “cold war”.
Far too many among the Marxist-Leninists of the world failed to grasp the essence of U.S. imperialism’s early moves for world domination. They remained chained to the wartime United Front concept.
The period 1949-1956 saw the completion of the Great Chinese Revolution, the death of Stalin and, soon thereafter, the betrayal of the October Revolution by the international revisionists, led by Khrushchov. It also saw the shift of the world revolutionary and anti-imperialist center from the Soviet Union to China.
By the example of the founding of the Chinese People’s Republic and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party joined by the heroic Albanian Party of Labour and other principled Marxist-Leninist movements throughout the world the strength and unity of the former colonial peoples of Asia and Africa became the main bulwark against world reaction led by U.S. imperialism.
A resolute struggle against the forces of world oppression and reaction can defeat U.S. imperialism.
Wherever the line of the revisionists and collaborator with imperialism is projected, the democratic and anti-imperialist forces have been disarmed. Wherever this line is successful, it has abetted and facilitated the setback and defeat for the forces against reaction.
Conversely, wherever the revisionist line has been repudiated and rejected and where a Marxist-Leninist line and policy has been followed, imperialism has been challenged and stopped in its tracks. Its oppressive nature has been resisted to the death.
History has thrown into the garbage dump the poisonous theories of revisionism. It has more decisively confirmed the view and positions of the CP of China and its allied defenders of Marxism-Leninism concerning the dispute over the nature of imperialism. Confirmed beyond doubt too, is the Marxist assessment that imperialism is the single source of wars of exploitation and aggression. That such war will continue to plague and retard mankind so long as imperialism is allowed to exist.
To extend the prestige and influence of the Party of Marxism-Leninism necessitates a consistent and steadfast projection by all communists as champions of the exploited and the oppressed against the forces of reaction. Those who “lead” our Party today are sick because for too long they have permitted bourgeois ideology to pollute their class outlook and infect them with the germs of reformism.
In essence, the leadership is without class conscientiousness and their latest labor, the New Party Program, is directed at everyone in general, including first and foremost the ruling circles, and to no one in particular – least of all the working class.
The defeat of revisionism is a primary pre-condition for the reconstituting of our Marxist-Leninist Party.
The unification of the American left around a common ideology based on the historically tested science of Marxism-Leninism is a monumental task. But the rebirth of our Party will take shape around the sharpening contradictions of U.S. imperialism and the developing class struggles. The unity of a Marxist-Leninist Party in America will be forged in that struggle, and the poisonous reformist theories will be consigned to history’s political graveyard.