First Published: Revolution, Vol. 3, No. 14, November 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Stuck pigs really do squeal. In the October 30 issue of The Call, the so-called Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) squeals so long and loud that their big brother pigs half way around the world in Peking can hear them.
The CPML has found it necessary to feature a centerfold article in their paper to defend themselves against an interview which appeared in the October Revolution entitled, “Blind Tagging Behind China Demanded–Ex-Member Exposes CPML.” This is quite remarkable, since The Call has declared our Party completely isolated, completely discredited and practically speaking dead a hundred times over. Obviously the interview with an ex-CPML member struck a responsive chord among some CPML members.
In its hysterical rush to cover up what the interview laid bare, The Call seems not to have noticed that its “refutation” confirms the interview’s points one by one, bringing out particularly sharply the method used by the CPML leadership to drag their own members through the rightist mud: maintaining them in ignorance, lying a lot, and gambling everything on the hope that they’ll never figure it all out for themselves.
The two bold-faced subheads used by The Call to highlight their response illustrates this perfectly. The ex-CPML member said in the Revolution interview that there’s little real political and ideological struggle within the CPML, rather mainly struggle “around people’s personal lives as opposed to political lives. It’s a whorehouse for rumors. It’s a whorehouse for attacking people’s personal lives as opposed to dealing with people politically.”
As if on cue, the CPML defends itself by declaring in bold type, “RCP’s new hero was expelled from the October League for woman-chasing and wife-beating.” Another point made by the ex-CPML member is that when all else fails them, the CPML resorts to their standard accusation that the RCP is “racist.” Again on cue, the other boldfaced subhead declares, “If Malcolm X were alive today, RCP would attack him as ’Bundist’.”
Here the CPML has shown its method for all to see. Someone has the nerve to criticize the line of the CPML? Well forget the question of line, just resort to lies and slander. In fact, it’s ridiculous on the face of it, because it’s well known that no one has ever been really expelled from the CPML for woman-chasing, or else their Central Committee would today be minus a number of its more prominent members.
The charge about Malcolm X has about the same relationship to the truth. Rather than defend their rotten rightist line on Martin Luther King (that “Pathbreaker for Black Liberation,” as they recently called him), they lie and slander the position we have repeatedly taken on Malcolm X–before, during and after the sharp struggle against Bundism. Malcolm X, we have stated, was unlike King and stood with the Black masses. He was a revolutionary, although, as we have also pointed out, he was not a communist.
The CPML takes advantage of the fact that King is dead, and therefore not around to embarrass them, to embrace him and the reformism he stood for, while if Malcolm were alive today the CPML would undoubtedly denounce him as an “ultra-leftist” and probably as a Soviet agent as well, as they have done with so many living revolutionaries.
But it is on the question of China that the CPML squeals the loudest, because that’s where they’re really stuck. Here’s where their attempts to reconcile people’s desire for revolution with a reactionary political and ideological line really stick out.
How to account for the fact that today what the CPML supports (and glories in) is a revisionist attack on Mao and his line and everything he stood for? Why simple, just pretend it’s all the same, duck any and all substantial questions, and, again, lie a lot. Once again it’s plain how they gamble everything on the hope that those they influence have no knowledge of Marxism and Mao’s line.
Here, for once, the CPML does depart from the tired old script they usually follow and makes a startling statement. Not true that we just went along with Hua, Teng & Co., they squeal. Why they had “not less than 150 articles” in The Call on the “gang of four” and “have gone into depth” about the changes in China in their theoretical journal, Class Struggle.
Such statements as these are clearly intended for internal consumption–to try to calm some troubles in the CPML. For anyone not drugged by the CPML atmosphere, “education” such as The Call etc. has provided is laughable.
All this “education” was already available in the Peking Review and was shallow distortion and transparent revisionism when it was printed there. It seems that, according to Klonsky, regurgitating something makes it more profound, when in fact it only makes it more disgusting.
A few minutes spent reading the “not less than 150 articles” and the “depths” of Class Struggle since the 1976 revisionist coup raises some interesting questions:
• Since your “response” to the interview brags about the “education” given CPML members, the interview with Chairman Klonsky in the Fall, 1977 issue of Class Struggle, which is, after all, your “theoretical” journal, should give us a fine and relatively thorough example. And of course it does–it’s a perfect example of the CPML’s method of lying instead of facing up to political questions.
Here the interviewer asks, “A year ago Teng Hsiao-Ping was being denounced as an arch-revisionist. Now he is back in leadership. Did his line change or was he framed up from the start?” And Klonsky answers, “Yes, he was framed.” Mao really supported Teng at the time, it was only the “Gang of Four” that opposed him.
The proof? Here’s Klonsky’s entire argument: “In the Central Committee resolution of April 7 [1976], Chairman Mao’s name was not mentioned in the opening section calling the question of Teng an ’antagonistic contradiction.’ Only the Political Bureau is mentioned here. Rather Mao’s name is not mentioned until a later section calling for Teng to remain in the Party. Now looking back, I think this is very significant.”
All that is necessary in answer to this is to quote this entire resolution, both its first sentence (the “opening section”) and its second and last sentence (“a later section”): “Having discussed the counter-revolutionary incident which took place at Tien An Men Square and Teng Hsiao-ping’s latest behavior, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China holds that the nature of the Teng Hsiao-ping problem has turned into an antagonistic contradiction. On the proposal of our great leader Chairman Mao, the Political Bureau unanimously agrees to dismiss Teng Hsiao-ping from all posts both inside and outside the Party while allowing him to keep his Party membership so as to see how he will behave in the future.”
• The Call’s “response” blasts the ex-CPML member for saying that ”Teng Hsiao-ping is ’unable to distinguish the difference between Marxism and imperialism.’” Come now, CPML. Don’t you remember it was Mao Tsetung who said that about Teng? Furthermore, Mao said that Teng “represents the bourgeoisie.” Who do you support, CPML, Mao or Teng?
• The “response” also blasts the ex-CPML member for accusing them of “not mentioning the revisions in the Constitution of China at the 11th Congress or about the revolutionary committees being abolished.” Well, what about the revolutionary committees, which until recently you denied were being abolished. Did you speak too soon, before you’d seen Peking Review No. 42, 1978, which explains why from now on it will be “factory directors, production brigade leaders, school principals, college presidents, and managers taking charge”? Or is it that you knew all along that the revolutionary committees were being abolished, since it was first made public last February, but were afraid to admit that this was the case until some “theoretical” justification came out that you could use to defend this reactionary return to Soviet-style one-man management?
• What about your statements on culture and education in China today? In several issues, including, for example, the September 4 Call, you’ve blasted the “gang of four” for putting forward the famous “two estimates”–that until the Cultural Revolution began in 1966 both culture and education in China were dominated by a revisionist line. Do you think that no one knows that the “two estimates” were made by Mao Tsetung? “For 17 years after the liberation the cultural and education circles have been dominated by revisionism.” Are you waiting for some “theoretical” justification to come out in Peking Review before you can admit what everyone already knows–that it’s Mao and his line that’s being attacked.
• What about the question of international line? Fond as you are of par-.roting the current revisionist slander that the “three worlds theory” was “Chairman Mao’s brilliant strategic conception,” why don’t you explain why no one ever dared say such a thing while Mao was still alive, and why both the Central Committee statement and even Hua’s speech made on the occasion of Mao’s death fail to mention even once this three worlds strategy among the list of Mao’s achievements? And maybe you could “go into depth” in your theoretical journal trying to show that Hua’s hugging Tito and calling him a “Marxist-Leninist” is anything but a deliberate slap in the face of Mao, who long ago denounced Tito as a revisionist? Maybe you could reprint some of the pamphlet Is Yugoslavia a Socialist Country, written under Mao’s direct leadership as a polemic against Khrushchev’s embrace of Tito, and then do a little “education” to show people how Hua is carrying out Mao’s line? While you’re in the “depths,” since you love the “three worlds” strategy so, why don’t you explain how it was Mao’s line to rush to hug reactionary butchers like the Shah of Iran even as the entire Iranian people were rising in rebellion, and to do as Peking Review No. 42, 1978, does and condemn the mass upsurge of the people for causing an “unstable political situation” which might somehow benefit the USSR? Or are you afraid people will throw up?
• As a matter of fact, you could devote an article or even a whole special issue educating people as to how the current China rulers are really carrying out Mao Tsetung’s political behests. You could quote the Statement of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on Mao’s death. Maybe you’d explain how Hua, Teng and the rest are carrying out Mao’s behest to “deepen the criticism of Teng Hsiao-ping, continue the struggle to repulse the Right deviationist attempt at reversing correct verdicts, consolidate and develop the victories of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, enthusiastically support the socialist new things, restrict bourgeois right and further consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat in our country.” You could explain how by criticizing Teng, the Central Committee really meant support Teng, how by the Right they really meant the “Gang of Four,” how by consolidating and developing the victories of the Cultural Revolution they meant declaring it over and wiping out its achievements,how by socialist new things they meant returning to elitist entrance examinations for the universities, experts and managers in command, bringing back feudal, bourgeois and imperialist culture, relying on the Western imperialists for technology and arms, etc., etc. You get the idea. Maybe you could tell us how restricting bourgeois right really means widening the gap between the wages of the working people and the intellectuals, experts and bureaucrats, etc. Maybe you could explain how by consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat they really meant bringing back every renegade to the Chinese revolution and the proletariat while suppressing and murdering revolutionaries?
Maybe you could explain how “proletarian internationalism,” strengthening “the unity between the people of our country and the people of all other countries” really means subordinating everything to alliances with reactionary rulers, and how carrying “the struggle against imperialism, social-imperialism and modern revisionism through to the end” means restoring most of the particulars and certainly the essence of Khrushchevite revisionism, capitulating to U.S. imperialism and attempting to force modern revisionism down the throats of revolutionaries all over the world?
Surely anyone who is out to “educate” people about the changes in China and the arrest of the Four couldn’t just pretend that the Central Committee never made this statement. In fact this statement is a good starting place for what Mao’s legacy really was.
Hua and Teng’s application of this legacy is truly at the same depths as your valuable “education.”