Fixes Blame on Soviet Leaders, but Says CCP Has Duty to World Movement to See That Struggle Against imperialism Not Be Diverted by Minor issue
The continuation the border conflict between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China can serve no useful, genuinely progressive purpose. If it is not terminated soon, it will divert the struggle against imperialism, confuse large masses of progressive people everywhere, diminish the political consciousness of the working people, and inflict untold damage to the cause of world socialism.
Whatever the military outcome, nothing will compensate for the political and moral blow to the socialist cause and the developing world revolution against imperialism.
One of the principal objectives of imperialism has been to split the socialist countries so as to divert attention from the wars that imperialism is constantly carrying on against the oppressed peoples. Nothing would serve the ruling class better than to see the two great socialist countries consume their energies in a widening border conflict.
The imperialist ruling class gives an impression of neutrality between the two socialist countries. But this is a neutrality in favor of the latters' mutual destruction. The reactionary New York Daily News expressed the true thoughts of imperialism on March 3, when it said in its lead editorial: "Let's you and him fight!" -- and added that the Soviet Union and People's China should destroy each other with nuclear bombs, and the sooner the better.
Meanwhile the predatory monopolists intensify their struggle against the people of Vietnam, Korea, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and against the working class everywhere.
It is of particular interest to note that while the border clash continues, the U.S. launched provocative military maneuvers beginning March 17th. The so called "War Games" carried out on the border of Korea involved 7,000 U.S. troops in one of the longest airborne assault exercises in military history.
The border conflict has the objective effect of transforming China's revolutionary ideological-political struggle against Soviet revisionism into a struggle for purely national aims.
If the struggle continues thus way and particularly if it widens, it will not matter that the Chinese CP leaders are revolutionary and the Soviet leaders revisionist. If both sides manage to galvanize the mass of the people behind them in their respective countries, the ultimate effect will be to substitute national for class aims.
If the border struggle continues, it is bound to divide the Chinese and Soviet people along national lines rather than to solidify them along lines of international class solidarity. It will reinforce Soviet revisionism rather than weaken it.
The fact that the Chinese Communist Party has been the standard bearer for the revolutionary cause and the Soviet leadership the torch bearer of revisionism will in no way lessen the deleterious effects on the world struggle against imperialism By its very nature the border dispute is the type of struggle that cannot but divert attention and consume energies which should go elsewhere.
In fact, it is more likely that it will weaken precisely those revolutionary elements in the Soviet Union which the Chinese CP has been trying to influence in a progressive anti-revisionist direction. Revisionism as a political ideology and social force will be vanquished in the Soviet Union only by the struggle of the masses inside the Soviet Union and the experience of the Soviet masses in political struggle against the neo-bourgeois restorationist leadership which dominates the Soviet Union. Victorious proletarian revolutions elsewhere, which in and of themselves are a refutation of the ideology of revisionism, will aid this struggle.
The continuation of the border conflict gives the Soviet leaders the opportunity to play upon the national fears of the Soviet people. It helps the Soviet leaders galvanize them against an alleged foreign foe and distracts the masses from the maneuvers the Soviet leaders are carrying on with imperialism.
No territorial advantage that can be won, arising from this struggle will solve the problem of the struggle against revisionism.
There are those who assert that China needs a border struggle with the USSR to unify the mass of the Chinese people in order to deal a final, crushing blow, to revisionism at home. We doubt very much that this is so, but even if it were, any gain made along those lines would be far outweighed by the impairment of China as the standard bearer of revolutionary internationalism.
The fundamental cause of the struggle on the border between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union has its origin in the many years that the Soviet leadership has pursued revisionist policies to the detriment of the USSR, China and the world revolution. It is these damaging policies of class collaboration with imperialism which caused the tension between the USSR and China and finally resulted in the recent border clash. Even as the fighting goes on, the Soviet diplomats are scurrying to all the imperialist capitals in an effort to enlist their help.
The border dispute, we must remember, takes place amid an ever more dangerous world condition. The imperialists continue to arm themselves to the teeth. In their desperate effort to regain and widen their world dominion, they have concocted the so-called Four-Power talks aimed at the Arab people. With this scheme, they hope to get the Soviet leaders in au agreement with them to stifle the Arab liberation movement and to utilize the Israeli puppet state as its principal instrument of aggression in that area. World attention should be focused on this struggle as well as others where oppressed people are struggling against imperialism.
Nor has U.S. imperialism in any way let up the struggle in Vietnam. On the contrary, the signs point in the direction of an intensification of the struggle against the Vietnamese people. The new Nixon Administration, while desperately seeking an accommodation with the Soviet revisionists, is nonetheless expanding its aggressive designs, not only in Vietnam, but also in Korea.
The fundamental responsibility for the border clash rests therefore on the Soviet leaders. It is also absolutely incontestable that the People's Republic of China has a valid claim to vast amounts of territory now held by the Soviet Union, which should be rectified.
Nevertheless, the Chinese CP has the duty to the world movement to see to it that the border conflict does not divert the main revolutionary struggle against imperialism.
Measured in terms of the world struggle, the border dispute, however important it may appear to be to China or to the USSR, is nevertheless a minor factor if viewed in the light of the overall objective the world struggle against imperialism.
It follows therefore that the border struggle must be subordinated to the principal struggle -- the struggle against the main enemy, the struggle against international imperialism, of which the U.S. monopolists are the principal leaders. The struggle should be turned against them.
Monopoly capitalism breeds wars of aggression both at home and abroad. It is congenitally incapable of peaceful solution to critical questions of the day and has employed force and violence as its instrument in the struggle for world domination.
Imperialist war is endemic to monopoly capitalism. Periods of peace are merely interludes between Imperialist wars. The only peace the imperialists are interested in is the peace of a slave master imposed on the slaves. The only way to insure a real, enduring peace is the overthrow of the imperialist system.
Peace between the socialist countries, however, has an objective and durable basis. The drive for profit, based on the private ownership of the means of production, characteristic of capitalist society as the driving force for development, does not exist in the Soviet Union or China. There is no objective driving force, arising from the economic system, which should impel them to foreign aggression or extraterritorial needs. There is, however, a very solid objective basis for peaceful socialist construction.
Unquestionably there are difficult and intricate problems regarding borders that have been inherited from pre-revolutionary days. It is in the interest of socialist countries to settle them by peaceful means.
March 12, 1969
New York, N. Y.
CHAPTERS:
Index
Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
MARCY'S WORKS | WW HOME PAGE | WW NEWS SERVICE
Your
feedback is welcome
[email protected]
