MAO'S GIFT TO THE
OPPORTUNISTS IN THE KREMLIN
By George Novack
On October 1 the Chinese. celebrated the seventeenth year of their liberating revolution. It has brought them such a heap of — benefits that they have no reason to sigh for any blessings of "the good old days" before 1949. Friends of China in the rest of the. world likewise rejoice at the progress made under extreme handicaps since the conquest of power and salute the resolve of its people . to rebuff any assault upon their ' country and its revolutionary . achievements ..
However, Premier Chou En-lai and Defense Minister’ Lin Piao | were not completely credible when they declared in their anniversary speeches that everything was going fine for the regime both at © home ..and abroad. Most of the two million young Red Guards who paraded for four hours before the party hierarchy in Peking may , have believed that this was so. But, even though they could not voice their views on this occasion, the critics of Mao's line jin’ the party, the government and. the army nursed doubts about ‘the © official glowing appraisal. Among them were the. deposed associates — of Peng Chen, the former mayor of Peking and purged Politburo. member, who had been the keynote speaker at National . Day celebrations in recent years. =
There were other absentees. If the marchers scrutinized. the foreign faces at the fete, they could have noticed that this was the first anniversary of the revolution celebrated without the participation of any party or government delegation from Communist countries .in Europe and Asia. Moreover, the Soviet bloc diplomats ostentatiously walked off the reviewing stand. in protest against. Lin Piao's charges that the Kremlin was plotting with Washington _. over Vietnam.
‘The defense chief declared: "Imperialism headed by the United States, and modern revisionism, with the leadership of the Communist party of the Soviet Union at its center, are colluding and actively” plotting peace-talk swindles for the purpose of stamping out the raging flames of the Vietnamese people’ s national revolutionary war against United States aggression.
Even conceding that the Soviet policy-makers may be pressuring Hanoi and cautiously angling behind the scenes for a deal with Washington over Vietnam, one can envisage a leadership trained in . the Leninist school taking an.altogether different tack under present circumstances when U.S. imperialism is on the offensive in. Southeast Asia and its military machine is heading toward China's frontiers.
Lin Piao asserted: "Our national defense has never been so strong." This may be so, although the methods of the rampaging . "proletarian cultural revolution" are unlikely to have cemented
genuine unity in the party or heightened the morale of the masses in face of the war danger.
One thing, however, is sure. Whatever the state of the national defense, the international defense of the People's Republic of China and the’ Vietnamese. revolution has grown weaker.
The responsibility for this disunity falls in no small measure upon the Chinese Communist leaders themselves. By demanding that every other Communist government, regardless of its situation, categorically line up with them against Moscow on penalty of ‘being stigmatized as accomplices of the revisionists, and by insisting they would never sit at the same conference table with the men in the Kremlin, the Maoists have succeeded in alienating one workers state after another over the past two years until they now Stand almost alone in the Communist and colonial world.
Their isolation could be countered if they modified their factional frenzy and made a turnabout in their attitude. Defense Minister Lin Piao could have taken a step in that direction by © declaring in his keynote speech from the high balcony of the Gate of Heavenly Peace that Peking was ready and willing to support the suggestions of the Communist parties from Cuba to Japan for collaboration against American military escalation and would sit down anywhere with the Kremlin leaders to discuss the most effective moves to deter further U.S. aggression, defend Vietnam and ward off the threat of armed attack upon China. Regrettably, there was no sign of any such shift on Peking's part in its conflict with Moscow.
This unreasoning intransigence is harmful to the antiwar movement, the interests of the world working class, the colonial revolution and China itself. But the crowning irony is that these divisive tactics have frustrated rather than facilitated the very purpose set by the Maoists themselves in their feud with the Khrushchevists. They reiterate that they are bent on conducting the fight against the revisionists to the end and defeating them. The fact is that, instead of weakening the influence of the Moscow revisionists, Mao" s line has served to strengthen them far beyond © all expectations while dealing heavy blows to his own international standing. ,
Could this be more dramatically indicated than by the deliberate absence of all official Communist delegations from the participants in the October 1 celebrations this year? Even the north Korean Communist regime, among others, has felt it necessary — to openly move away, and the former partner-in-arms in the Korean © war has gone so far as to castigate ‘the Chinese Communists as "traitors to the revolution.
Mao's conduct has done more to burnish the tarnished reputation of the Khrushchevists than any other single factor. Their credit has been rehabilitated, not through any improvement in ° Moscow's policies, but through the faults and defaults of their’
adversary in Peking.
Just as Stalin's adventurist and opportunist zigzags in foreign affairs and his misdeeds at home poured grist into the mills of the discredited Social Democracy and enabled their parties to refurbish their reputations... at. the expense of the Communists, so-Mao's false policies have been the greatest gift that. could have been handed to Stalin's successors at the head of the Soviet. bureaucracy. Brezhnev, Kosygin and their followers are making the most of Mao's blindness and blunders to retrieve some of their lost prestige.
Here again we have. a living exhibition of how unrestrained sectarianism feeds the worst opportunism. That in itself warrants severe censure of Peking's continuing course in its foreign relations.
KIM IL SUNG