We want to applaud all comrades participating in this forum for trying to resolve very serious differences in a genuine communist way. For far more of us will be united, around correct lines, through open debate and struggle, than through each organization simply “teaching” its members and contacts what it thinks Is the correct line, and sheltering that audience from opponents of that line.
But we must reserve our strongest expression of solidarity for those who oppose the Theory of Three Worlds, because we believe that that theory presents a dangerously distorted picture of the world situation and of the tasks of communists. In this statement we discuss how it leads to opposing revolution In the Western imperialist countries.
Wang Shu, China’s Deputy Foreign Minister, recently provided one of the clearest statements yet of a keystone of the main Three Worlds theorists’ foreign policy. He told a U.S. reporter, “A strong China is in the interest of the United States, and a strong U.S. is in the interest of China.”[1] This policy lays a firm basis for full class-collaborationism by U.S. communists. For the Chinese position is not just a matter of state-to-state relations; if the proletariat in power in China correctly believes that the interests of the world revolution require a strong U.S.–even while this country remains imperialist–then the interests of the world revolution must be the same when assessed by the proletariat here.
But what is required for a “strong” imperialist United states, one free to contend with the USSR for strategic dominance and thus (hopefully) able to discourage the social-imperialists from launching world war for awhile? A stable domestic situation, a compliant proletariat. No imperialists are strong and able to meet foreign challenges while confronted by revolutionary challenges at home.
Therefore comrades who continue to follow the chief Three Worlds theorists will eventually find that they must oppose revolution here.
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In Western Europe the proletariat is also being encouraged to prepare for war with Russia, along with the various bourgeoisies, who, after all, do run the NATO governments that are being urged to arm more heavily.[2] Yes, Lenin did recognize that even the workers of advanced capitalist countries might have to fight for liberation from stronger Imperialist powers, before being free to fight their own bourgeoisie. But only nations that are oppressed must pass through the stage of national liberation. In previous proletarian-led national liberation struggles, such as those of China and Albania, the strategy changed the moment the occupiers were defeated. The revolution was continued, to make the transition from peoples’ democracy to socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
For Western Europeans today, the proletariat’s position is, fundamentally, like that of the Chinese after the Japanese invaders were forced out. Foreign occupiers are not the most immediate obstacle to socialism. That obstacle is the bourgeoisie itself. And, as it was with the workers of free China, the task of the Western European proletariat is to prepare for revolution against the bourgeois exploiters. Their interests, therefore, lie in disarming the bourgeoisie they must overthrow, not in urging it to build up its army.
Proletarian leaders must teach their class to fight their present oppression, which comes from “their own” ruling classes; such leaders should not reinforce the bourgeoisie’s attempt to divert the workers’ attention towards a possibility of future Soviet aggression, if that threat materializes before the revolution, then and only then will the proletariat be forced to detour from the path of the internal class struggle to that of the national united front.
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A united front of strong Western imperialists will help neither the people of China nor the peoples of the West. Fueling the arms race to avoid “appeasement” may indeed delay Soviet aggression for a few years. But if it is true that such attacks are nearly inevitable, then the question is whether the proletariat wants them to lead to an inter-imperialist world war, or to wars of national liberation and revolution. They will result in a world war, bringing slaughter and ruin more terrible than we can imagine, if the bourgeoisies and proletariat of the U.S. and the NATO countries all unite to resist the Soviets. Such unity, under conditions of firm bourgeois rule, inevitably means fighting not only to defend Western Europe, but also to embark on the “mutual assured destruction” which Pentagon and foreign strategists have prepared to defend the imperialists’ shares of power in the world. (Surely a proletariat taught to move relentlessly towards world war, by supporting its bourgeois government in an arms race to “deter aggression,” will not suddenly reverse course at the brink of that war, revolt against those rulers who will have stood up to the Russians so well, and give the poised “aggressors” a chance to move into states torn by civil turmoil. And why should it, if its internationalist duty is to help contain the USSR?
If, however, a revolutionary movement in the U.S. cripples “our” imperialists’ ability to resist the USSR, there will probably still be wars of aggression and national resistance, but no all-out showdown between the superpowers, because one would have had to withdraw from the contest. It takes an imperialist bent on major new conquests to start an Inter-imperialist war, but for such a war to be fought at all it also takes imperialist competitors who can fight to retain their current share of the spoils of imperialist exploitation of the world. End their ability to fight, and there can be no inter-imperialist world war.
Moreover, if the U.S. proletariat undermined “our” bourgeoisie’s capacity to wage war, the effect on the Russian proletariat would be enormous. Seeing the stand of their class brothers and sisters In the U.S., Russian workers would understand who their real enemies were far more quickly than if the social-imperialists could pose as liberators of peoples in the clutches of U.S. imperialism.
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Comrades, communists can lead the proletariat according to the policy of Lenin and Mao, the policy of striking Imperialism at its weakest link, of defeating it in a series of revolutions wherever It is in crisis, as the proletarian and national liberation forces gather strength and the great Imperialist power centers become weaker and more isolated. Or we can follow the new Chinese policy of propping up the weaker imperialisms, like the NATO countries, against the stronger, in the hope of living for awhile in an imperialist world without imperialist war. In the eyes of the CPC leadership, the ideal situation would be “anti-appeasement” (i.e., war preparations) in the West, and powerful opposition to war preparations by the peoples of the Soviet bloc. But what would this lead to? The U.S. would become the “main danger” again, and “a strong USSR” would be needed in “the broadest possible united front” against the new “most dangerous superpower”!
This could go on for decades.
If it Is true–and we have our doubts–that war can be deterred for long by the various imperialists maintaining a strategic balance, then this series of shifting alliances would indeed bring the Chinese the prolonged peace which their leaders say they need for modernization. But they would be getting their peace in a capitalist world; the penalty for the Chinese proletariat’s losing its internationalist perspective would be decades of Imperialist encirclement. This means being pressured into dependent trade relations instead of benefitting from socialist cooperation, being subverted as the C.I.A.s and K.G.B.s of the world continue to build up the capitalist-roaders inside China, facing the degeneracy produced by the constant ideological pressure of propaganda and culture from the capitalist and revisionist world, and still always facing the danger of military attack. Prolonging this situation by trying to strengthen whatever imperialists look weak enough to “invite aggression” in any given period does not serve socialism.
It would be wrong to proclaim that a socialist state and the international proletariat should never establish a tactical alliance with some imperialists and against others. If a socialist country were in imminent danger of destruction and could not save itself through peoples’ war, the material support sent by workers elsewhere, and those workers’ campaigns to get “their” bourgeoisies to break all ties that benefitted the attacker, then we can imagine the proletariat, here and elsewhere, joining the bourgeoisie In making war on the imperialists who are destroying socialism. But such a desperate situation surely does not exist today.
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The Communist Manifesto’s statement of our foremost Internationalist duty remains true today: “The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie,” the only one which It can overthrow, the one that no one else can overthrow. We will inevitably be urged to abandon this principle by those who, frightened by a strong USSR, claim that proletarian internationalism means a “strong United States.” For the harder the U.S. proletariat fights to “settle matters” with “its” bourgeoisie, i.e., the more all classes become absorbed in civil strife, the weaker this country will be as a contender in the inter-imperialist power struggles. But let us remember what the revisionist Chinese leaders would have us forget: the weakening and collapse of each imperialist country, in its turn, will both Improve conditions for socialist countries’ development and hasten the end to all imperialist war.
[1] Interview with Fred Coleman, Newsweek, 9/25/78, p. 60. See also report of R. Novak’s Interview with Teng Hsiao-ping, Washington Post, 12/4/78, p. A23; article supporting U.S. deployment of neutron bomb, [2] See Chairman Mao’s Theory of the Differentiation of the Three Worlds is a Major Contribution to Marxism-Leninism, pp. 64-72; P.R. #40, pp. 13-14 (1978) (Huang Hua’s U.N. speech).