SUSLOV POINTS TO THE DANGER OF “"TROTSKYISM"
By Pierre Frank
What will come from the conversations now being held in Moscow? If figures like Gomulka are in agreement with Khrushchev's general policy (peaceful coexistence, peaceful and parliamentary roads,.etc.), they are not necessarily in agreement with him on the early convoca~. tion of an international conference of Communist parties. Such a conference, under present conditions, could only seal the division, Khrushchev needs to consolidate the ranks of his partisans, to check the gains of the Chinese, and that is why, having largely lost hope of reaching a compromise with the Chinese, he needs a conference of this kind, But Gomulka, Togliatti., . .. each for his own reasons doesn't want a conference that would consummate the split. In Mos~ cow, Gomulka publicly came out for a new conference of Communist parties if it would "contribute to attenuating the sharpness of the ideological and political differences which separate us today from the Chinese Communist party."
Will Khrushchev be able to win Gomulka to his point of view, or will he agree to a compromise? This is one of the most important things to follow in the present phase of the conflict.
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If it is rather obvious that these discussions in the Khrushchevist camp are not taking place in the public square, something else in the Sino-Soviet conflict is presented at top voice for everyone to hear, This is the denunciation of "Trotskyism," the acousations which the two sides keep throwing at each other on this topic, an element in the conflict that is assuming greater and greater im~ portance, The charge is hurled not because "Trotskyism," as superficial commentators imagine, is the gravest, the worst possible epithet among Communist parties, Certainly in this debate there are epithets and slanders, but the accusation of “Trotskyism" is raised on the political level, for reasons that are not .at all mysterious, although they are not ‘the’ same and not even of the same intensity on the two sides,
The argumentation in the latest article of the Chinese [Hsinhua March 31] does not take up more than about twenty-five lines and can be reduced to a syllogism: Trotskyism belongs to the same family of revisionism as the Second International, which rejected revolution, Khrushchev is also a revisionist who.rejects revolution, Therefore, Khrushchev should keep the label of "Trotskyism" for himself,
The Chinese documents are not:.edited by second-string bureaucrats but by the top leaders of the Chinese Communist party. They. are not ignoramuses, at least in the big questions. Even if we have no direct way of ascertaining the truth, the texts themselves bear witness that they follow Trotskyist publications, They know very
well that Trotsky organized the Red Army, that he fought Stalin in the twenties and the following years because the usurper of power held to a policy of "peaceful coexistence" which Khrushchev has done no more than continue, etc. In other words, the Chinese leaders themselves, even if there are certain gaps in their knowledge, deliberately distort the truth concerning Trotsky's and Stalin's roles, One senses that they feel a certain amount of fear about their present positions and that they hope their references to Stalin will provide protective coloration.
On the Soviet side, Khrushchev is not exactly one to inspire hope for a profound political explanation, The vulgarity of his thought is as clear in form as in content, Either you are for Hungarian goulash with a side dish of rice, eaten in a pair of pants free of holes; or you want a belt that can be tightened and another war, The choice is obvious: Who wouldn't take a_good goulash, especially one liberally seasoned with paprika? ["This cook will prepare a peppery dish," Lenin once said of Stalin.]
- But Suslovts report is a serious piece in which things are. said as frankly as a Stalinist bureaucrat can say them,
It is of course loaded with deliberate distortions of the Trot-. skyist and Chinese positions, For example, that they demand the _ revolution be commenced at once and everywhere, without taking into account the concrete relationship of forces; that the Chinese position on the question of war and peace is a pure and simple repetition of the "Trotskyist" slogan, "neither war nor peace"; that the Chinese renounce peaceful economic construction in favor of the tactic of | "revolutionary war,” etc,
But on a whole series of questions, Suslov stands on more solid ground.
"Does anyone think perhaps that the Chinese theory making the regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America the 'principal zone of the storms of the world revolution! represents something original? No, This is the repetition almost word for word of one of the principal theses of ourrent Trotskyism, One can read in the decisions of the so~called Fourth International (Trotskyist): ‘As a result of the successive failure of the two major revolutionary waves of 1919235 and of 1943-48 -- and of the minor one of 1934-37 -- the main center of world revolution shifted for a time to the colonial world,!(1)
(Tithe quotation is taken from one of the key documents of the Reunification Congress of the Fourth International held last June. The document, together with other texts, is available in the October- . December 1963 issue of the magazine Fourth International (No. 17) and in the Fall 1963 issue of the American Trotskyist publication, International Socialist Review. A copy of the latter publication can be
Here is where the source of the political wisdom of the Chinese leadership must be sought!"
Suslov denounces the Trotskyist theory of the "permanent revo-~ lution." The struggle on this question had, he says, “a historic importance," and now "the Chinese leaders in fact impose on us a discussion on the same question," The Chinese theses on the danger of "bourgeois degeneration" repeat what the Trotskyists said about Thermidor, (2)
For Suslov, things are clear:
"In essence the theoretical and political opinions of the’ leaders of the Chinese CP on many points repeat the Trotskyism long ago rejected by the international revolutionary movement,” .
That on a certain number of important points, the Chinese oame, under pressure of circumstances, to adopt a kind of ersatz of Trotskyist positions is evident to Suslov; he thinks it is equally evident to the Chinese, And he expresses himself in revealing terms:
"The Chinese leaders make out that they have not noticed all this, They probably reason in the following way: 'Present-day Trotskyism is a little-known current and. one can profit from their ideas by giving them a “Chinese” aspect.’ But in the end the truth always comes out! The Chinese leadership wanted very much to hide the sources from which they drew their ideas; they cannot succeed in dissimulating the coincidence between their views and those of the Trotskyists of yesterday and today."
These words indicate the fear that Trotskyism arouses among the masters of the Kremlin, who, in the arena of world politics, are so powerful, Moscow fears Trotskyism more than Peking does. This is partly because they understand better what it is, but above all because, despite all the concessions made since the death of Stalin, the Soviet leaders feel the growing threat of a society thirsting for freedom and proletarian democracy,
Suslov addresses the Chinese, telling them in substance: You poor fools! What do you think you're doing? You want to combat us
‘obtained by writing to 116 University Place, New York 3, For a copy of Fourth International write the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, 47, Drie-~ bergts Avenue, Colombo 10, Ceylon, or WIR Publications, Grays Inn _ Road 374, London, W.C.1. . . oe (2)The Trotskyists speak of bureaucratic degeneration, not bourgeois degeneration as the Chinese leaders do, The lie, in the ciroumstances, explains a good deal.
with ideas that you have taken from the Trotskyists, You can!t be unaware of it, You think you'are clever enough to get away with it because the Trotskyism of today is a weak current and that it's’ enough to use Chinese lacquer to cover up everything. You even think it's a slick ruse to credit Stalin with these ideas, -But no one will be fooled in the end because the truth will come out, You will not succeed in reviving Stalin, but you will play into the hands of the "Trotskyists of yesterday and today." Against the still living Trotskyism, bvreaucrats of all countries, unite!
The bureaucrat Suslov explains the resurgence of Trotskyism as due primarily to a clumsy maneuver of the Chinese. Then, following up with the ideological job assigned to him, he explains‘the "Trotskyism" of the Chinese by the peasant character of their country, Stalinist logic has its mysteries -- the peasantry engenders a cur-~ rent of ideas underestimating the peasantry. . . The bureaucrats are rent by a conflict in which they reveal their incapacity to understand why they are deaf to each other and why Trotskyism has returned. to trouble their nights and their days.
The conflict will continue to worsen, engendered and stimulated as it is by the revolutionary rise in the world, this revolutionary rise which is renewing revolutionary Marxism in our epoch; that is, Trotskyism,