As the factional battle between Moscow and Peking continued to intensify, and as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution brought increasing political strife within China, a shift occurred in Progressive Labor’s attitude toward the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front. Around the beginning of 1967, PL’s publications began to strongly criticize the Vietnamese.
The criticism focused on the military and economic assistance to the Vietnamese from the Soviet Union, the “Trojan Horse” aid as PL labeled it. Secondly, the Vietnamese came under increasing fire for refusing to line up with China in the factional attacks on the leadership of the Soviet Union. In PL’s view, by remaining publicly non-committed, the Vietnamese had placed themselves on the side of imperialism, had joined the antirevolutionary camp. (PL, May 1969).
Thirdly, as the war progressed and the Vietnamese and U.S. governments decided to open negotiations, PL came to the conclusion that the Vietnamese had definitively adopted a “revisionist” political line.
One of PL’s clearest statements on accepting Soviet aid appeared in the March-April 1968 issue of PL.
We believe that revolutionaries must agree on this crucial point: under no circumstances should aid be taken from revisionism. We believe that anyone who takes ’aid’ from the revisionists will eventually lose their struggle, no matter how heroic the forces involved. We believe this to be a life and death question for the international revolutionary movement.
PL is so wrong on so many points in such a short paragraph that it is hard to know where to even begin! It is absolutely true that Soviet aid is not given for the purpose of promoting revolution, or sustaining revolutionary activity around the globe. On the contrary, the Soviet bureaucracy has one central concern–to maintain itself in power–and that central concern has not changed for more than 40 years.
Yet the Maoists make one of the most fundamental errors possible for a tendency that presents itself as Marxist. They are wrong on the class nature of the Soviet Union, and despite Mao’s supposedly brilliant contributions to Marxist philosophy, they are totally oblivious to the contradictory aspects of the policies of the Soviet bureaucracy.
The Soviet Union was established on the basis of a successful socialist revolution which abolished private ownership of the means of production, instituted a planned economy, established a monopoly over foreign trade, and carried out a whole series of other basic reforms which transformed the class nature of Russia. From a capitalist country, with even a few remnants of feudalism, the Soviet Union was transformed into a workers state –a dictatorship of the proletariat in transition between capitalism and socialism.
Despite the bureaucratic degeneration, this basic class character of the Soviet Union has never been reversed. And the bureaucratic caste that controls the economic, political, cultural and social life of the Soviet Union must defend those basic conquests of the Russian working class if it is to retain its privileged position. If capitalism were restored in the Soviet Union, either by invasion, civil war or some combination of reactionary forces, the current ruling bureaucracy would be among the first to go. Thus, when forced to do so, the bureaucratic caste will defend the revolution as they did when Russia was invaded by Hitler’s armies and as they did during the post-World War II period, when the Soviet Union was threatened by the victorious capitalist “allies.” The Soviet-oriented Communist parties, supported by the Red Army, even took power and abolished capitalism in Eastern Europe, establishing a whole new series of workers states.
In other words, Soviet policies reflect the antagonistic class forces underlying the world revolutionary process. The Soviet bureaucracy must preserve the foundations of the workers state, and no matter how reluctantly, even extend the revolution when those foundations are threatened. But the basic interest of the bureaucracy is to maintain the status quo both nationally and internationally. Because such peaceful coexistence with imperialism is historically impossible, given the inherent needs of the capitalist system to expand, the world revolutionary process cannot be suppressed, and the Kremlin bureaucrats are sometimes forced to aid that process.
Why is this important? Any political tendency that fails to understand these contradictory aspects of the policies of the Soviet Union will make fundamental errors in political judgment, as does PL, when it claims that the Soviet Union is now a capitalist, imperialist country. Somehow, overnight, without any struggle, the economic foundations of the Soviet Union were overthrown. As Paul Sweezy and the late Leo Huberman once observed, the Maoists correctly score as un-Marxist the Khrushchevist notion of a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism. Yet at the same time they speak of peaceful evolution back to capitalism in the USSR. Such a position has nothing in common with Marxism.
To take a position that it is unprincipled for the Vietnamese to accept aid from the “capitalist” Soviet Union only hurts the world revolution. The Vietnamese are fighting the mightiest military colossus the world has ever seen and they need every bit of help they can get. Rather, the Soviet Union – and China – must be condemned for giving so little aid! Even together they give less than a quarter of the aid the U.S. supplies to the dictatorship of Saigon. If someday that limited but far from insignificant aid is withdrawn and the Vietnamese have to struggle without it, it is tendencies like PL which will bear much of the blame. The failure of the Maoists to follow policies designed to force the Soviet bureaucrats into extending unconditional and maximum aid to the Vietnamese is a historic crime of the first magnitude.
One final word on the aid question. Even if the Soviet Union were capitalist, the Vietnamese would be totally justified in accepting whatever aid they needed. It might not be a wise tactical decision, if there were some alternate source of needed supplies, but it would certainly not be counterrevolutionary. It was Lenin himself who stated he would accept the aid of the devil if necessary to further the revolution.
The Maoists’ policy of refusing to help build a united-front defense of the Vietnamese revolution here in the U. S. has been repeated on a world scale with even more serious consequences.
The Maoists state categorically, “there can be no unity in action with revisionists.” But what the Vietnamese need more than anything else is precisely this unity in action by the world working class against every form of overt or covert support of U.S. aggression in Vietnam. The Maoists’ line, far from exposing the inaction of the Communist parties around the world, simply lets them off the hook, giving them one further excuse to do nothing.
If the Maoists’ policy were a revolutionary one, it would begin from the need for unity of action, and develop a strategy to force the Moscow-orientated Communist parties into joint activities. But the Maoists’ policy does not reflect a revolutionary line. It is based on the needs of the Peking bureaucracy in its factional struggle with Moscow. This, more than anything else, underlies PL’s unbridled attacks on the Vietnamese for remaining publicly non-committed in the Sino-Soviet dispute. As was the case with PL’s attitude toward Cuba, PL is far more concerned with this interbureaucratic battle than with the objective needs of the world revolution.
PL’s position on negotiations between the United States and the Vietnamese is summed up in the statement, “Though People’s War has beaten the U. S. military machine in Vietnam, the negotiations process is turning this victory into a defeat for the revolutionary forces in Vietnam and in the world.” (PL, June 1968). More succinctly, this was spelled out in the statement that negotiations is a “revisionist political line.” (PL, May 1969).
First of all, to state that the Vietnamese have already militarily defeated the U.S. is rather unreal. They have dealt almost unbelievably stunning blows to the imperialist colossus, but the continuing presence of half-a-million U. S. troops testifies to the reality that the struggle continues.
If power resided solely in the barrel of a gun, as the Maoists are fond of suggesting, the Vietnamese would have been defeated already by the unequalled U.S. arsenal, including its atomic arsenal. The very significance of the revolutionary gains in Vietnam is the political fact that it has been able to strike such blows despite the enemy’s military superiority, proving once again the Marxist thesis that social forces are more powerful than any weapon.
It has been the power of the Vietnamese social revolution, coupled with the power of the U. S. antiwar movement and buttressed by world revolution, that has proved mightier than the most powerful military force history has ever known.
This reality is not only a matter of inspiration–itself important for the many independence movements, which have seen that a small people can resist imperialism; it is decisive in developing a political strategy that can effectively aid the Vietnamese revolution.
Secondly, are negotiations with an imperialist enemy in and of themselves “counterrevolutionary,” as PL implies? If so, the logical conclusion would be that the Bolsheviks were also counterrevolutionary when they negotiated the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Is it inconceivable that revolutionaries sometimes have to compromise, even retreat? Only a fool would say so.
If you admit that it is permissible in principle to negotiate, is it true that the Vietnamese will turn a victory into defeat by negotiating? It is not out of the question that they may give away more than necessary. But PL does not offer one shred of evidence to back up this contention. PL is inevitably reduced to the simplistic and false categorical statement that negotiations can only aid the imperialists, therefore negotiations equal betrayal.
The Vietnamese have decided, for whatever reasons, to negotiate. What the outcome of those negotiations will be is as yet undetermined. But that in no way changes the responsibilities of revolutionaries within the United States to continue the fight for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U. S. troops from Vietnam, the responsibility to continue to build the broadest and largest mass actions possible to fight, not for negotiations, not for a coalition government, or anything else the Vietnamese may propose in the course of negotiations, but for the withdrawal of troops.
Far from building the April 5-6 mass demonstrations for withdrawal of troops, PL refused to even participate on the day of the demonstration itself. Their refusal to act in defense of the Vietnamese revolution makes very clear that despite some revolutionary sounding verbiage, PL stands guilty of sabotaging the defense of the Vietnamese revolution.