First Published: Worker’s Weekly, July 3, 1982.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Sam Richards and Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
The section of British Maoists who support the Soviet social imperialists recently declared that
In his anti-communist jihad (crusade) Reagan couples together as the enemy us Marxist-Leninists in Britain and the Soviet Union. We are proud of the company he puts us in. We are glad to be associated with the first workers’ state in history. (“The Worker” June 17, 1982, Editorial).
In this manner the Maoists of the so-called Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) strive to conceal the differences between the great socialist Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin, and the Soviet Union of Khrushchev and Brezhnev which has restored capitalism at home and competes for world hegemony with the other superpower, the United States.
Following the death of Stalin the modern revisionists seized the leadership of the glorious Communist Party of the Soviet Union and turned it into a revisionist party. Through their control of the Soviet state the revisionists restored capitalism and turned the socialist collective property of the Soviet working people into state monopoly property of the new revisionist bourgeoisie in power. Liquidating the socialist system internally they carried out the savage exploitation of the working people and the persecution of the nationalities, while a barbarous fascist regime was introduced to crush the people’s revolt.
The Soviet modern revisionists liquidated the former proletarian internationalist support of the Soviet Union for the national liberation movement and for proletarian revolution and Marxist-Leninist parties. Instead they strove to reach an accommodation with US imperialism under the pretext of “peaceful coexistence”, and opened the doors of the Soviet Union and the other revisionist countries under their domination to western imperialist finance capital, while at the same time establishing neo-colonial relations with the countries both of Eastern Europe and of Asia, Africa and Latin America. In this way the Soviet Union was turned into a social-imperialist country, which under a spurious banner of “socialism” carries out all the crimes of the old-line imperialists. Today the Soviet Union is a social-imperialist Superpower which is in rivalry with the other superpower, US imperialism; they are two armed marauders whose aim is to divide and re-divide and dominate the entire world between them, backed up by their rival aggressive alliances, the NATO alliance and the Warsaw Treaty. The policy of the Soviet revisionists is a typically aggressive colonialist and neo-colonialist policy which is based on the power of capital and force of arms. Like the US imperialists, the Soviet social imperialists are striving everywhere to put out the flames of the revolution and the liberation struggles of the peoples as in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.
The “C”PB (ML) maoists declare that “It is as though we were being given another chance to do our Marxist duty in the heart of the oldest capitalist country and not again leave the land of the October Revolution to bear on its own the hostility of the capitalist world. That anti-capitalist revolutionary road we must take is also the only road to peace”. Thus the Maoists of the “C”PB (ML) try to equate the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin and the Soviet Union of Brezhnev and Kosygin and strive to line up the workers behind the aims and interests of Soviet social imperialism just as the other section of British maoists support the Chinese revisionist thesis that “the Soviet Union is the main enemy” and thus strive to line up the workers behind US imperialism and the aggressive NATO alliance.
The two superpowers separately and jointly constitute the main enemy of the proletariat and peoples, of socialism and revolution the main threat of war. The working class must oppose both. The thesis of “support one superpower against the other” directly calls on the workers to put their struggles under the wing of one or other superpower and to line up with one or the other side in the imperialist war which the superpowers and their allies are preparing.
The maoists also promote the demagogic claim of the Soviet chieftain Brezhnev that the Soviet Union allegedly will not use nuclear weapons first. An article in “The Worker” June 24, 1982, quotes Brezhnev’s speech at the UN Disarmament Conference to the effect that the Soviet Union “has assumed an obligation not to be the first to use nuclear weapons” and that this “pledge” of Brezhnev’s is “unconditional” and to take effect “immediately”. The British maoists express not one word of doubt as to whether the Soviet social imperialists are to be believed in this and instead put forward that Brezhnev’s offer is a step towards peace. They analyse that all the other imperialist powers, including the US, are against this offer of Brezhnev and that the movement against the war preparations of the superpowers must not make its aim to convince Reagan and the other imperialists to take a similar step to that of Brezhnev. Thus they conclude that ”the peace movement in western Europe and the US will now make it their major responsibility to force Reagan to follow the Soviet Union’s example and renounce any further use of nuclear weapons.”
Thus the workers are instructed to ignore the Soviet social imperialist invasion of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, to ignore its huge war preparations, its troops and military bases in other countries, etc., and see the Soviet Union as a factor for peace. They are called upon too to seek peace through “convincing Reagan”. Both superpowers and their allies make constant demagogic claims, including Reagan’s hypocritical offers to reduce nuclear weapons and troops in order to deceive the people of the world. The “C”PB (ML) maoists strive to bring the growing movement against the imperialist and social-imperialist war preparations under the wing of the Soviet social imperialists in order to assist their drive for world hegemony.
The illusions which the British maoists of the “C”PB (ML) attempt to create about the Soviet Union today, about the nature of Soviet social imperialism, present a greater danger to the people. They cover over the nature of imperialism and its insoluble contradictions and hence disarm the people from taking up the tasks which must be executed in order to put an end to the grave threats to which imperialism and social imperialism are exposing the people.