History is a continuous flow, and there is always a great danger, therefore, in trying to locate that precise point in time when a turning point has occurred. Nevertheless, dialectics teaches us that while changes develop over a considerable period of time, the actual transformation from quantity into quality does frequently take place in a sudden and visible manner.
In this sense, we can locate the beginning of the present crisis of the international communist movement in the period 1956-57 when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, adopted and consolidated a general revisionist line and, over the next several years, succeeded in imposing this line on the great majority of communist parties in the world.
Emphasizing that a qualitative turning point took place in 1956-57 does not imply that all was well with the line and practice of the CPSU and the international movement prior to the rise of Khrushchev, or that the triumph of an all-sided revisionist line was the result of some nefarious conspiracy engineered by a coup d’etat within the leading circles of the CPSU. Quite the contrary. The task of unraveling and properly summing up the history of the international movement in the period from the Bolshevik revolution to 1956 remains one of the central rectification tasks before Marxist-Leninists. Such an undertaking is beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless, it is appropriate and even obligatory to offer some preliminary views on the matter; the question already is being explored and debated among all genuine Marxist-Leninists as part of the necessary effort to come to terms with the legacy which shaped the emergence and consolidation of modern revisionism.
Broadly speaking, the philosophical underpinnings of modern revisionism are to be found in a mechanical materialist world outlook which began to characterize the international communist movement in the 1930s. In particular, the emergence of such tendencies within the CPSU had a massive impact upon the whole Third International. The mechanical tendency to view history statically and develop political lines in a relatively one-sided fashion has often been glossed over because of the incredible difficulties faced and successfully overcome by the Soviets in their struggle to survive and consolidate proletarian power. However, although the hardships and inexperience make the errors understandable, they should not be excused or denied.
Many correct lines advanced by the Soviet party appropriate to the specific historical conditions were often held to be correct in an undialectical, unqualified fashion.
Critical examination of the contradictions inherent within an overall correct line were all too often discouraged and even suppressed in the name of the justified struggle against Trotskyism and other opportunist lines. As a result, lines were advanced and grasped in a somewhat simplistic fashion. The cadres were frequently not sufficiently trained to defend a line in an all-sided way or to take into account its various complexities. When conditions changed and lines had to be adapted accordingly, many cadres were ideologically disoriented–some abandoning the movement, others taking the new lines more on faith than analysis. When secondary contradictions inherent in certain lines came to the fore under changed circumstances, cadres were often poorly equipped to handle the ensuing problems. The prevalence of such a mechanical materialist approach coincided with and helped to foster a growing theoretical stagnation within the international communist movement.
The weakness of the movement’s theoretical calibre was compounded and reinforced in the organizational realm. While the Comintern parties, in the main, struggled correctly to uphold Leninist norms against the ultra-democratic views of Social Democracy and the factionalism of Trotskyism, they frequently erred in tendencies toward bureaucracy and commandism as manifested particularly in a serious mishandling of inner-party struggle and a distortion of the norms of democratic centralism. Party discipline was often imposed by administrative means as a substitute for rigorous debate and line struggle, weakening the party ideologically. The party’s correct insistence on its unity of action frequently was distorted to the totally incorrect insistence on “unity of thought”, leading to the view that serious inner-party debate was inherently factional. As a result, while several incorrect lines were defeated within the movement, the manner in which incorrect lines were isolated often served to weaken the party ideologically and organizationally.
In the Soviet Union, these errors spilled over into the party’s relations with the masses where non-antagonistic contradictions were often handled as though they represented urgent and immediate contradictions between the working class and the bourgeoisie. In the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a pattern of totally unjustified violations of proletarian democracy and socialist legality emerged which had grave negative consequences at the time and subsequently.
As a result of this whole process, the many invaluable advanced experiences of the CPSU in the unfolding of proletarian dictatorship in the concrete were obscured. In the main, these advanced experiences would demonstrate that for the most part the party held a correct line on the questions involved; but all suggestions that this experience should be critically analyzed and examined were viewed as either Trotskyist or the work of imperialist agents–or both. The irony of this concern was revealed in the mid-fifties when the long years of mishandling these contradictions erupted in the infamous “de-Stalinization process” which probably served the interests of imperialism and Trotskyism far more effectively than would have been the case if the problems and shortcomings had been addressed forthrightly in the first place.
These are some of the key factors which, in our view, frame the gradual rise of mechanical materialism and an accompanying theoretical stagnation within the international communist movement. In brief, correct lines were advanced and defended in a one-sided fashion, ideological vigilance was distorted into heresy-hunting, dialectics and defense of Marxist-Leninist methodology were neglected, and inner-party democracy was obviated, resulting in dangerous distortions in political line, ideology and organization.
To deepen our understanding of this process, let us examine it in terms of two of the most important questions that were posed before the movement in the late twenties and throughout the thirties: socialism in one country (and defense of the Soviet Union); and the United Front Against Fascism.
The most pressing task facing the Russian working class after the Bolshevik revolution was the securing and holding of state power. But the question was not one for the Russian proletariat alone. It was a decisive international question, because Soviet Russia had become the only place in the world where the working class was in power. To secure this revolution meant to secure a beachhead against the world imperialist system.
What were the prevailing lines around this question at the time?
The right opportunists, led by the Social Democrats of the Second International, held that the Bolsheviks should not have seized state power in the first place. Their hostility to the Soviet state was based on the view that capitalism was undeveloped in Russia and that the violent seizure of the state apparatus outside of the parliamentary process inevitably would lead not to socialism but to what they deemed a totalitarian society. World social democracy, therefore, sided directly with imperialism against Soviet power.
The “left” opportunists–Trotsky and his followers–argued that the principal task of the Bolshevik revolution was to carry the revolution forward directly in other countries, especially in Europe; that the only way to secure Soviet power was through the development of a world socialist system. Socialism in one country was impossible, they declared, not because the Bolsheviks would necessarily be unable to retain power, but because the ensuing result would not be socialism. The Trotskyists saw socialism coming into the world by a prescription not based on the actual circumstances encountered. Typically, this idealist world outlook manifested itself in the perennial characteristics of ultra-leftism–dogmatism and adventurism. Despite its “left” rhetoric, the Trotskyist line, if followed, would have resulted quickly in the loss of Soviet power.
In making an assessment of the history of the CPSU and the Comintern, therefore, we must begin by making an assessment of the general line upheld by the international movement in contrast to the two main opportunist lines opposing it. Quite correctly, the international movement upheld Stalin and the thesis of socialism in one country and, on that basis, developed the line calling for defense of the Soviet Union as the key task facing the international proletariat.
Had this line not prevailed, the first socialist country in the world could not have survived and the history of the 20th century would have been profoundly different.
But this essentially correct general line was developed, implemented and defended in a one-sided, mechanical way. It should be readily obvious that whatever nationalist deviations might have existed in the Soviet party at that time could find fertile ground in the line of socialism in one country; and, indeed, that narrow nationalists might well be able to gain influence in the party by becoming the most zealous opponents of the Trotskyist line. The failure of the CPSU to recognize this potential contradiction and call attention to the dialectic laid the foundation for a deep-seated nationalist deviation coming into the party and being legitimized by it. But the CPSU at the time held that any warning about a nationalist deviation was tantamount to a defense of Trotskyism.
Similarly, the Comintern was correct to hold that the building of socialism in the USSR was synonymous to the interests of the world revolution. But the Comintern, abandoning the dialectical method, denied even the possibility that there could be a contradiction between the state interests of the Soviet Union and the needs of revolution in other countries. Again, the very suggestion of such a possibility was deemed a negative concession to Trotskyism.
But dialectics teaches us that there are contradictions in all things; and the failure properly to identify contradictions is bound to lead to their mishandling, with ultimately negative consequences. The contradiction between the need to defend the Soviet Union and the needs of other revolutions is clearly a non-antagonistic one. But it is a contradiction nevertheless. The failure to recognize and identify this secondary, non-antagonistic contradiction was a reflection both of mechanical materialism and the already developing tendency toward nationalism.
The CPSU and the Comintern also developed the negative view that all-sided evaluations of the process of socialist construction in the USSR, which might note shortcomings due to objective conditions or line errors, were attacks on socialism in general.
Within the international communist movement, the leading experience of the CPSU, the material fact of its state power and the general line of seeing defense of the USSR as defense of the world revolution, created conditions which–in the absence of a struggle against the ideological weakening of the movement in this manner–gave rise to flunkeyism, marked especially by a general theoretical dependency of the Comintern and its member parties on the CPSU, and a tendency mechanically to follow the political line advanced by the CPSU. Such a relationship could not help but lead to a considerable measure of theoretical stagnation, a decline of active debate and struggle within the Comintern and within each party, violations of the norms of interparty relations and a tendency toward big party chauvinism.
We have placed considerable emphasis here on these negative features of the international movement’s experience because our present purpose is to help understand some of the historical foundations for that weakening of the movement’s ideological fiber which made possible the rise of revisionism and the consolidation of a revisionist line. At the same time, we emphasize that these negative aspects must be placed in the context of a line and practice by the CPSU and the international movement which were generally correct and which, we believe, must be defended overall. These were errors, and clearly we do not trivialize them, made in the course of the development, implementation and defense of a correct general line.
As with the line on socialism in one country, the strategic concept of the United Front Against Fascism developed in the early thirties in response to the actual political conditions of the period. It, too, was a correct line which developed in opposition to certain ultra-left tendencies and practices which had marked the work of the European parties, especially in the late twenties and early thirties.
Fascism arose in response to a number of needs of monopoly capital. One was the need for the most effective contention with capitalist rivals w other countries; second, fascism was the last-ditch alternative employed by monopoly capital in the face of the rising strength of the working class movement; and third, fascism was the means whereby a frontal assault against the Soviet Union could be mounted. These contradictions intersected in concentrated form in Germany, where a popular revolutionary tradition, a strong communist party and the deteriorating situation of the capitalists was moving the country ever closer to a revolutionary confrontation. At the same time, German capital was fighting for its survival in contention with British, French and North American capital. The latter, unwilling to give up their own colonies and spheres of influence to their German rivals in any redivision of the world, were enamored of the grand plan to have German capital seek its own expansion eastward and to recapture Soviet Russia for the world capitalist system. (This should be qualified somewhat; some sectors of western capital, while anxious to see the Soviet Union obliterated, saw that a German conquest in this direction would place the German capitalists in an exceedingly strong position against their capitalist rivals. This difference of views underlay much of the ruling class debate of the period.)
The strategy of the United Front Against Fascism developed in the wake of the Nazi takeover in Germany. The danger of similar takeovers in other countries was immediately posed and, on the basis of the German experience, a united front of the working class parties and a popular front including the anti-fascist peasantry, petit-bourgeoisie, and intelligentsia was proposed. Subsequently, as it became clear that there were sectors of monopoly capital fearful of the gains being made by their German rivals, the conditions emerged for a worldwide front against fascism which included western monopoly capital.
It is fashionable in certain left circles today to see the United Front Against Fascism–and particularly the Popular Front–as itself a revisionist thesis. These views, strongly influenced by Trotskyism and anarchism, thoroughly distort the content of the united front line and the historical conditions under which it was implemented.
In the period when the bourgeoisie in western Europe and North America in the midst of the Great Depression actively contemplated its fascist alternative, the strategy of the United Front of the Working Class to oppose the fascist danger was clearly correct. Likewise, in the period when the militaristic designs of Nazi Germany combined with Hitler’s ideological crusade against communism clearly indicated the seriousness of the threat to the Soviet Union, it was absolutely correct to expand the world anti-fascist front to embrace all those, including sectors of monopoly capital, who could be enlisted in that front. Whatever the intentions of those who stood up to the Nazi threat, objectively such a front represented a defense of the Soviet Union and therefore the interests of the working class.
The defeat of Nazi Germany by the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union, the US and Great Britain was the most profound verification of the correctness of the United Front Against Fascism. For communists to hold otherwise today is to place themselves outside history.
However, a mechanical and one-sided understanding and application of the United Front Against Fascism strategy in many countries had longterm negative consequences. In a number of cases, the party surrendered the leading role of the working class in building the united and popular fronts. We do not mean to say that it was always possible for the working class to play the leading role in the anti-fascist front or that the communists should insist on a guarantee that the working class will lead the front before they participate. Rather, we speak of the whole process of how the party conducts its work within the united front and how it educates the workers to the political objectives of the front.
Closely tied to the tendency to surrender the leading role of the working class was the tendency to liquidate the independent role of the Party. In the programs and propaganda of the period, it was frequently hard to distinguish the party from the front, and many negative concessions were made to the bourgeoisie in the interests of securing the anti-fascist alliance. In the US, this tendency ultimately led to the out-and-out class collaborationist line of Earl Browder and the liquidation of the party for a period.
The political successes of the united front cannot be overestimated. Not only did the strategy culminate in the wartime alliance that defeated Hitler, it also led to an enormous expansion of the communist parties themselves. Many workers were won away from social democratic leadership and, in a number of countries, the communists acquired a mass base and became the leading political force in the working class movement.
However, as a result of focusing one-sidedly on the real problems of building a mass base in a non-revolutionary period and the need to defeat fascism, the positive accomplishments of the strategy increasingly became negative, obscurring the long-term revolutionary goals of the working class. All kinds of political illusions concerning bourgeois democracy and the nature of the state were cultivated within a number of parties in the imperialist countries. This was particularly in evidence during the post-World War II period.
As communists acquired mass following and important influence in the trade union movement while simultaneously losing their ideological bearings on the nature of the state, trade unionism, a form of economism, began to replace Marxism-Leninism as the ideological foundation of many of these parties. A number of them succumbed to the lure of substituting the achievement of immediate influence within the working class to the larger task of training the working class to the historic mission of the seizure of state power. Working in the conditions of bourgeois democracy, some parties developed illusions about the class nature of the state and could not imagine working under any other conditions. Adopting the line of “peaceful” and “democratic” transition to socialism led some to forge ties with social democratic forces and to cater to the bourgeois prejudices which still had a strong hold on the consciousness of the workers.
These indigenous reformist impulses in various communist parties were somewhat held in check as long as the largest and most influential party, the CPSU, held to a generally revolutionary course. But these parties were a receptive audience for the line advanced by Khrushchev in 1956. In fact, they had been actively clamoring for precisely the rightward turn signaled by the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Substantial opportunist tendencies in parties around the world could rapidly blossom into a full-blown revisionist trend once the headquarters of modern revisionism was established in the CPSU.
As a trend, modern revisionism is relatively sophisticated. This accounts in part for its stubborn persistence. However, the basic opportunist character of the revisionist line can be seen in its three major propositions:
1. The principal contradiction in the world is between the imperialist camp headed by US imperialism and the socialist camp headed by the USSR. That there was such a contradiction in 1956 is not subject to argument. The question is whether or not this was the principal contradiction in the world at that time.
In a broad historical sense, Marxist-Leninists have held that the fundamental contradiction of the present epoch is between capitalism and socialism. But the concrete expression of this fundamental contradiction takes a number of forms:
• The contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries;
• The contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed peoples and nations of the world;
• The contradiction between the imperialist countries and the socialist countries.
At any given time, the fundamental contradiction of our epoch between socialism and capitalism may be expressed principally through one of the above. (It is also possible that still another contradiction, that among the imperialist countries themselves, will emerge as the principal contradiction in the world at a given moment. In such a case, world war between two blocs of imperialist countries will either be coming to the fore or taking place.)
The view advanced by Khrushchev in 1956 that the principal contradiction in the world was between the imperialist camp headed by the US and the socialist camp headed by the USSR was actually a self-serving one that did not correspond to the international political realities. For it was already clear–and subsequent history has surely borne this out–that the principal contradiction at that time and since was between imperialism (headed by US imperialism) and the oppressed peoples and nations of the colonial and semi-colonial world. The imperialists themselves were well aware of this reality at the time.
From southeast Asia to northern Africa, from the oil-rich Middle East to the Caribbean, the colonial world was seething. French imperialism had already suffered a mortal blow in Vietnam, a defeat which US imperialism was trying to exploit by appointing itself the overseer of imperialism’s interests in southeast Asia. Nasser had come to power on the strength of a revolutionary upsurge of the masses in Egypt; Mossadegh had taken power in Iran and had then been overthrown by a CIA-engineered coup. The same thing had happened in Guatemala. Independence and liberation movements in Algeria, southern Africa, the Philippines, Latin America and the Arab countries were taking hold and had already become the spectre haunting the imperialist world system.
The two decades after the CPSU’s 20th party congress have provided eloquent verification that the principal contradiction in the world during this period was not, as the CPSU held, between the imperialist camp and the socialist camp, but on the contrary, between imperialism headed by US imperialism and the oppressed peoples and nations. We hold that this is still the principal contradiction in the world.
Clearly such a disagreement could have the most serious political consequences. In fact, the position of the CPSU represented a nationalist deviation, the logic of which would lead to the subordination of all class and national liberation struggles in the world to the national security interests of the Soviet state and automatically establish the foreign policy of the Soviet Union as the basic international line of the communist movement.
2. Peaceful coexistence between the US and the Soviet Union is the cornerstone of the international line of the world communist movement. This thesis is the inevitable expression of the CPSU’s position on the principal contradiction in the world.
It is important to differentiate between that which is correct and incorrect in the above. Basically, peaceful coexistence between countries can be summarized to mean mutual non-aggression, respect for each other’s territory and sovereignty, relations of equality, noninterference in each other’s internal affairs and normal trade and intercourse.
Clearly, such a policy is very desirable from the point of view of a socialist country since it serves to hamper imperialism’s counterrevolutionary impulse to throttle the new society at birth. Historically speaking, peaceful coexistence has never been agreed to as a matter of course by the imperialist countries, but in every case has been imposed uPon them by the strength of socialism and the inability of the capitalists to do otherwise.
As a guide to the relations between capitalist and socialist countries, particularly in the period when the former are militarily more powerful, peaceful co-existence is correct and sensible as a tactic. But the basic feature of communists’ international line must always be class struggle and proletarian internationalism. In the final analysis, the only genuine long-term security for any socialist country is the triumph of world revolution.
The Khrushchev thesis on peaceful coexistence was revisionist because it put forward peaceful coexistence as the cornerstone–the basic strategy–for the international communist movement. It denied that the national liberation struggles already characterizing the colonial and neo-colonial world had become the foremost expression of class struggle and proletarian revolution internationally. It fetishized peaceful coexistence as the magic elixir of change that would defeat imperialism, bring about the liberation of peoples and secure socialism by providing the context for the USSR’s growth. In a word, instead of the masses relying on revolution to defeat imperialism, they were to rely mainly on the neutralization of imperialism through the triumph of the more “reasonable” sector of monopoly capital, who would likewise see that there was no future for themselves in world war.
In 1963, barely a year before the massive US escalation in Vietnam, Khrushchev responded to the CPC’s critique of his line: “These comrades declare that it is impossible to preserve peace because of the specific properties of imperialism… But, comrades, after all, the policy of the imperialist countries is also determined by people. And these people also have a head on their shoulders, and brains. . . . The imperialists, discounting the madmen from whom anything can be expected, are forced to take reality, the changed correlation of world forces and the growth of the forces standing for peace and socialism into account.”
The obvious implication of such views was that revolutionary forces should do nothing to provoke the imperialists unduly since their power was on the wane and socialism was growing strong in the USSR. This historical pattern then would be the way in which imperialism would depart the stage of history.
3. The new balance of forces in the world now made it possible/or the working class, particularly in advanced capitalist countries, to effect a peaceful, “democratic”, parliamentary transition from capitalism to socialism.
Any Marxist will immediately recognize this proposition as the ideological linchpin which has always characterized revisionism, from Bernstein to Browder. Nevertheless, citing historical precedent and the commentaries of all earlier Marxists does not by itself refute this proposition. It must still be judged on its own merits.
Since Marxists do not deal in absolutes and since negative propositions are always difficult to prove, the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism cannot be definitively ruled out. Nor is that the point. Marxists do not favor a violent or extra-legal path to socialism as a matter of principle. Rather, they recognize the overwhelming likelihood that such a path will of necessity have to be pursued.
The political point, then, is whether or not the revolutionary party will base its own ideological outlook, program and organizational structure on a strategy that is geared to a legal and/or peaceful transition or on one recognizing that the path of illegality and violence will be the path that the working class and its party will have to pursue. In short, will the party train and educate the working class to be ready for such a course of struggle or will it sow illusions in the working class as to the feasibility of the peaceful path?
The question is hardly academic. The grave setbacks imposed on the revolutionary struggle in Indonesia and Chile flowed directly out of illusions about peaceful transition. In June 1973, three months before the coup in Chile, the newspaper of the CPUSA editorialized that the Chilean Communists “press for a peaceful transition to socialism. That outlook is founded not on wishful thinking or pacifism but on the historic change that has taken place since World War II.” The violent overthrow of the Popular Unity offers its own grim commentary on the consequences of such illusions.
Nevertheless, all the communist parties of the major capitalist countries–Italy, France, England, Spain, Germany, Japan and the US–have formally adopted and incorporated into their general lines the thesis of the peaceful transition to socialism. Whether phrased as the “historic compromise” or the “anti-monopoly coalition”, the essence remains the same.
At first glance the phenomenon seems bizarre. It is hard to imagine mature political leaders of any persuasion who could imagine that the bourgeoisie in the capitalist countries would simply permit themselves to be voted and legislated out of power and possession. Wasn’t it Henry Kissinger who declared that the US could not permit the people of Chile to be so irresponsible as to elect a “communist” government? Is it conceivable that the US bourgeoisie will feel any less concerned with a possible socialist triumph in western Europe or Japan or in the US itself?
How, then, can we account for this strange phenomenon? It can only be grasped as a theoretical formulation in relation to the other two theses. From the Soviet revisionist point of view, the theory of peaceful transition is an ideological and political offering to imperialism to induce it to adopt the policy of peaceful coexistence or its more recent expression, detente. The CPSU leadership is telling US imperialism, in effect, that it will use its not insignificant influence with the communist parties in the capitalist countries to guarantee that they do not push the class struggle to the point where it could threaten the rule of the bourgeoisie in their own lands. This can be seen as a statement of “good faith” on behalf of the revisionists in return for imperialist agreement to peaceful coexistence.
On the most sophisticated level, the leadership of the CPSU has, in effect, made an estimate that proletarian revolution is not on the agenda in the advanced capitalist countries anyway. Therefore, the theory of “peaceful transition” does not give the imperialists anything they don’t already have and if it can serve to induce them into detente with the Soviet Union, then much more is gained than lost. (Ironically enough, the CPC makes a similar estimate of the prospects for revolution in the developed capitalist countries, which is one reason why they do not hesitate to bargain with those they consider the real wielders of power in the capitalist world.)
We will not argue that any of the major capitalist countries is today on the verge of a revolutionary period. But given the inherent instability of the capitalist economy, the economic and political crises in England and Italy, the recent history of mass workers’ unrest in France and Italy and the political agonies of the US bourgeoisie, we believe that both the CPSU and the CPC gravely overestimate the strength of imperialism in its own backyard.
In any event, the CPSU’s line increasingly takes on the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the transformation of the mass communist parties of western Europe and Japan into parties of reform can only weaken the ability of the working class to make revolution.
As to the revisionist parties themselves, the theory of peaceful, parliamentary transition was seen as the indispensable means for acquiring respectability and legitimacy in the bourgeois political process and thereby carving out for themselves an appropriate niche as the representatives of the working class within the capitalist system.
Taken as a whole, these three propositions laid the political and ideological foundation for the all-sided degeneration of many Marxist parties. The adoption of class-collaborationist political policies surrendered the revolutionary struggle before it began and eliminated the need for a Leninist party. With the CPSU, these propositions stemmed from and reinforced a tendency toward chauvinism and hegemonism in relation to other socialist countries and communist parties.
In the period from 1956 on, it was the responsibility of every Marxist-Leninist party to challenge the general revisionist line adopted by the CPSU. As this line was consolidated and its class collaborationist essence was more clearly revealed, it became necessary for Marxist-Leninists to draw a line of demarcation with modern revisionism.
The implications of such a demarcation are:
• Ideologically, a resolute struggle to reaffirm the revolutionary principles of Marxism-Leninism and combat the mechanistic materialist outlook and nationalist deviations of modern revisionism.
• Politically, a struggle to expose the major political thesis of the revisionist line and to oppose every attempt to implement that line in practice.
• Organizationally, the establishment of a Marxist-Leninist headquarters in every country and, where necessary, the reestablishment of a genuine party outside the existing parties.