A Day That Would Change Korea’s Future: The Birth Of Kim Il Sung

On the 101 anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth, Brandon K. Gauthier looks back to a day that would go on to change the future of the peninsula

BY BRANDON K. GAUTHIER, APRIL 15, 2013

Kim Il Sung, just six-years old, watched as thousands of protestors screamed: “Long live the independence of Korea!” Caught up in the excitement of the March 1, 1919 rally, the young boy ran barefoot after the group, straw sandals in hand—anxious to keep up. As the throngs reached Potong Gate in western Pyongyang, shots rang out.  Japanese forces charged the protestors with unforgiving bloodshed.  Innocents died.

Seventy years later, the North Korean leader remembered that moment vividly: “…the demonstrators resisted the enemy fearlessly, becoming human weapons…This was the first time I saw one man killing another.”

Kim Il Sung was born on April 15, 1912 outside Pyongyang, barely seven years before those momentous events.

Born to a lineage of low social status, Kim was “a ‘dragon from an ordinary well,’” as his preeminent biographer, Dae-Sook Suh, once noted.  His family was originally from Jeonju in the south—a fact that later saved that city from destruction during the Korean War. After his ancestors moved north in the 1800s, his great-grandfather, an impoverished farmer, found work as a grave-keeper in Mangyongdae, a hamlet outside Pyongyang.

There, Kim’s grandparents would work as agricultural laborers—“old country people who knew nothing but farming.” His father, Kim Hyong Jik, later improved upon that marginal social status, working as a schoolteacher and then as a doctor of herbal medicine.

After Kim Il Sung’s birth, his family “eked out a scanty living.” They often survived off uncleaned sorghum gruel—barely edible, as the North Korean leader remembered it.  Meat and fruit were almost nonexistent.  Moreover, the family bristled at their inability to afford such mundane luxuries as a clock.

Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 added insult to the injury of poverty.

The Japanese occupation permeated every element of Korean life. Foreign policemen roamed the streets; the Korean language was forbidden in schools.  Authorities meted out brutal floggings and prison terms to anyone resisting imperial rule.

“Korea in those days was a living hell…the waves of modern history that spelled the ruin of Korea swept mercilessly into our house,” the North Korean leader recalled bitterly.

According to Kim, his father resisted the Japanese occupation through helping organize the “Korea National Association.”  Those efforts, he contends, led Japanese authorities to imprison his father in the fall of 1917.  While little evidence exists to substantiate those claims, Kim’s memory of visiting his father in jail reverberates with emotion:

The visitors’ room was dim, screened from the sunshine.  The air in the room was thick and oppressive…my father was smiling as usual.  He was delighted to see me…The gaunt face of my father who wore prison clothes defied instant recognition…The sound of his voice brought tears to my eyes…His indomitable image that day left a lasting impression on me.

After leaving prison, Kim claims his father traveled to Manchuria, continuing in his efforts against the Japanese occupation. He returned with enchanting tales of Lenin’s new communist government and the Bolsheviks’ struggles in the Russian Civil War.

After watching the March 1st, 1919 movement unfold, Kim’s family moved to the Korean border with China and then into Manchuria. Finding their way to the town of Badaogou, Kim went to school, learning Chinese—a skill that aided him invaluably in the future—while his father worked as a doctor.

In China, the family found solace in Christianity, regularly attending church. The future North Korean leader sang religious hymns and even learned to play the organ in the process. Despite these facts—which Kim admits in his memoirs—he claims his parents were always atheists in disguise.  “Mother, do you go to church because you believe in God?” he once asked.  “What is the use of going to ‘Heaven’ after death?” she responded. “Frankly, I go to church to relax.”  Kim’s father, he also claims, went to church only to encourage resistance against Japan.

In early 1923, Kim’s father announced that his son would return to Korea for secondary school.  Despite earnest protests from his mother, Kim, not yet eleven years old, embarked on that 250-mile journey alone at his father’s wishes.  After enduring onerous struggles and numerous acts of kindness, he arrived at his grandparent’s house in Mangyongdae with instructions from his father that stayed with him: “share the fate of the people in your hometown and experience how miserable they are; then you will see what you should do.”

While the veracity of Kim Il Sung’s autobiography remains much debated, one point is beyond dispute: raw resentment with Japanese colonialism defined his formative years, forever affecting his path in life.

For more information:

• Kim Il Sung. With the Century: Reminiscences, 1. Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1994.
• Lankov, Andrei. From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea, 1945-1960. London: Hurst, 2002.
• Lee, Ki-baik, A New History of Korea. Translated by Edward W. Wagner and Edward J. Shultz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
• Suh, Dae-sook. Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Picture Credit: Foreign Languages Publishing House, Pyongyang

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China overtakes US as world’s largest trading country

AFP Photo / China out

China has passed the US as the world’s biggest trading nation as measured by the sum of exports and imports in 2012. It’s a position the US has held for over six decades.

US exports and imports of goods last year amounted to $3.82 trillion, the US Commerce Department said last week. China’s trade in goods was $3.87 trillion, according to the country’s customs administration report in January. 

While the US recorded a surplus in services of $195.3 billion last year and a goods deficit of more than $700 billion, according to Bureau Economic Analysis, China’s 2012 trade surplus, measured in goods, totalled $231.1 billion.

“The main reason for this growth is the Chinese government policy directed at stimulating domestic demand, which improves imports to growth,” Andrey Shenk, an economic expert at Investcafe, told RT. He said China increased its import volumes 5 fold in the last five years, and that allowed it become the biggest trading nation. 

“For so many countries around the world, China is rapidly becoming the most important bilateral trade partner,” Jim O’Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs’s asset management division and the economist who bound Brazil to Russia, India and China to form the BRIC investing strategy, told Bloomberg. And that can even “disrupt regional trading blocs,” for instance, “Germany may export twice as much to China by the end of the decade as it does to France,” O’Neill added.

The figures indicate the trend that China is already outpacing the US, the world’s biggest economy, in some respects. According to various estimates, China has the world’s biggest new car market, is the biggest energy user, and holds the largest foreign currency reserves. China became the world’s biggest exporter in 2009, and its GDP growth rate has averaged 9.9% a year since the 1970s. In 2011 China’s GDP growth rate stood at 9.20%, compared to 1.80% in the US during the same year.  

In November last year China surpassed the US as the world’s leading trade partner, with 124 countries considering China their largest trading partner and only 76 having that relationship with the US. This was a major shift since 2006, when the US was the larger trading partner for 127 countries, while China dominated among 70. Some historical allies of the US now consider China their top trading partner, including Australia and South Korea. Trade with China was on average 12.4% of GDP for its foreign partners in 2012, compared to only 3% in 2002 – a rate that is higher than trade with the US has been in the past 30 years.

The US dominated as the world’s main trading power since after WWII, but as the recession hit US businesses hard, China’s growth continued, and its pace has already recovered from seven straight quarters of decline, reaching 7.9% in 4Q 2012. 

Still, the US economy is double the size of China’s, according to World Bank data. In 2011, the US GDP reached $15 trillion while China’s totalled $7.3 trillion. In 2012 China’s nominal gross domestic product was $8.3 trillion, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics’ report. However, the US remains the biggest importer, taking in $2.28 trillion in goods last year compared with China’s $1.82 trillion of imports. The US exports innovative products in the automobile industry, aerospace, medicine, computers, finance and pharmaceuticals.  

At the same time, a significant portion of China’s trade involves importing raw materials and parts to be assembled into finished products and re-exported, an activity that provides “only modest value added,” Eswar Prasad, a former International Monetary Fund official, now a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, told Bloomberg.

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The Role of the CIA: Behind the Dalai Lama’s Holy Cloak

Michael Backman
Global Research
March 23, 2008

Global Research Editor’s note

This incisive article by Michael Backman outlines the relationship of the Dalai Lama and his organization to US intelligence.

The Dalai Lama has been on the CIA payroll since the late 1950s. He is an instrument of US intelligence.

An understanding of this longstanding relationship to the CIA is essential, particuarly in the light of recent events. In all likelihood US intelligence was behind the protest movement, organized to occur a few months prior to the Beijing Olympic games.

M. C. 23 March 2008

THE Dalai Lama show is set to roll into Australia again next month and again Australian politicians are getting themselves in a twist as to whether they should meet him.

Rarely do journalists challenge the Dalai Lama.

Partly it is because he is so charming and engaging. Most published accounts of him breeze on as airily as the subject, for whom a good giggle and a quaint parable are substitutes for hard answers. But this is the man who advocates greater autonomy for millions of people who are currently Chinese citizens, presumably with him as head of their government. So, why not hold him accountable as a political figure?

No mere spiritual leader, he was the head of Tibet’s government when he went into exile in 1959. It was a state apparatus run by aristocratic, nepotistic monks that collected taxes, jailed and tortured dissenters and engaged in all the usual political intrigues. (The Dalai Lama’s own father was almost certainly murdered in 1946, the consequence of a coup plot.)

The government set up in exile in India and, at least until the 1970s, received $US1.7 million a year from the CIA.

The money was to pay for guerilla operations against the Chinese, notwithstanding the Dalai Lama’s public stance in support of non-violence, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

The Dalai Lama himself was on the CIA’s payroll from the late 1950s until 1974, reportedly receiving $US15,000 a month ($US180,000 a year).

The funds were paid to him personally, but he used all or most of them for Tibetan government-in-exile activities, principally to fund offices in New York and Geneva, and to lobby internationally.

Details of the government-in-exile’s funding today are far from clear. Structurally, it comprises seven departments and several other special offices. There have also been charitable trusts, a publishing company, hotels in India and Nepal, and a handicrafts distribution company in the US and in Australia, all grouped under the government-in-exile’s Department of Finance.

The government was involved in running 24 businesses in all, but decided in 2003 that it would withdraw from these because such commercial involvement was not appropriate.

Several years ago, I asked the Dalai Lama’s Department of Finance for details of its budget. In response, it claimed then to have annual revenue of about $US22 million, which it spent on various health, education, religious and cultural programs.

The biggest item was for politically related expenditure, at $US7 million. The next biggest was administration, which ran to $US4.5 million. Almost $US2 million was allocated to running the government-in-exile’s overseas offices.

For all that the government-in-exile claims to do, these sums seemed remarkably low.

It is not clear how donations enter its budgeting. These are likely to run to many millions annually, but the Dalai Lama’s Department of Finance provided no explicit acknowledgment of them or of their sources.

Certainly, there are plenty of rumours among expatriate Tibetans of endemic corruption and misuse of monies collected in the name of the Dalai Lama.

Many donations are channelled through the New York-based Tibet Fund, set up in 1981 by Tibetan refugees and US citizens. It has grown into a multimillion-dollar organisation that disburses $US3 million each year to its various programs.

Part of its funding comes from the US State Department’s Bureau for Refugee Programs.

Like many Asian politicians, the Dalai Lama has been remarkably nepotistic, appointing members of his family to many positions of prominence. In recent years, three of the six members of the Kashag, or cabinet, the highest executive branch of the Tibetan government-in-exile, have been close relatives of the Dalai Lama.

An older brother served as chairman of the Kashag and as the minister of security. He also headed the CIA-backed Tibetan contra movement in the 1960s.

A sister-in-law served as head of the government-in-exile’s planning council and its Department of Health.

A younger sister served as health and education minister and her husband served as head of the government-in-exile’s Department of Information and International Relations.

Their daughter was made a member of the Tibetan parliament in exile. A younger brother has served as a senior member of the private office of the Dalai Lama and his wife has served as education minister.

The second wife of a brother-in-law serves as the representative of the Tibetan government-in-exile for northern Europe and head of international relations for the government-in-exile. All these positions give the Dalai Lama’s family access to millions of dollars collected on behalf of the government-in-exile.

The Dalai Lama might now be well-known but few really know much about him. For example, contrary to widespread belief, he is not a vegetarian. He eats meat. He has done so (he claims) on a doctor’s advice following liver complications from hepatitis. I have checked with several doctors but none agrees that meat consumption is necessary or even desirable for a damaged liver.

What has the Dalai Lama actually achieved for Tibetans inside Tibet?

If his goal has been independence for Tibet or, more recently, greater autonomy, then he has been a miserable failure.

He has kept Tibet on the front pages around the world, but to what end? The main achievement seems to have been to become a celebrity. Possibly, had he stayed quiet, fewer Tibetans might have been tortured, killed and generally suppressed by China.

In any event, the current Dalai Lama is 72 years old. His successor — a reincarnation — will be appointed as a child and it will be many years before he plays a meaningful role. As far as China is concerned, that is one problem that will take care of itself, irrespective of whether or not John Howard or Kevin Rudd meet the current Dalai Lama.

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How the CIA helped Dalai Lama to end up in exile

It is widely believed that the Dalai Lama fled Tibet once Chinese troops gained control over the region. Actually, these two events have nine years between them.

Tibet’s self-proclaimed independence in 1913, after the fall of Qing Empire of China, was never recognised legally by any country. So, once China sorted out the Civil War, it saw it only as natural to claim the territories succeeded from the state of Qing.

Once the Chinese People’s Liberation Army forces defeated Tibet’s army on October 7, 1950, Beijing started a campaign of re-integrating Tibet into the People’s Republic of China.

The US became interested in the region as a new ground to counter Communist China. It promised to encourage and support Tibetan resistance to Communist control and provide financial help to Tibetan insurgents, says Peter Harclerode in his book, “Fighting Dirty: The Inside Story of Covert Operations From Ho Chi Minh to Osama Bin Laden”.

For the US State department, the Dalai Lama was of more use in active opposition to Beijing. That is why the CIA actively encouraged the Tibetan leader to go into exile to any nearby state, such as India, Ceylon or Thailand, to become the symbol of Tibet resistance to Communist China.

In 1951 the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, preferred to stay in Lhasa and formally accepted “The 17 Point Plan” peace treaty uniting Tibet and the People’s Republic of China.

Three years later the Dalai Lama was elected vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s National Assembly, thus entering China’s ruling elite.

In 1956 Tibetan tribal alliance “National Army of the defenders of the Faith” tried to urge locals to fight Chinese and asked Dalai Lama to give a “spiritual support and leadership” for the resistance, which he refused.

The alliance nevertheless obtained aid from the CIA without the Dalai Lama’s knowledge. Six Tibetans were handpicked to be trained in using small weapons, demolition, mine-laying and sabotage at the American military base on Saipan Island so they could participate in a secret CIA operation codenamed “Saint Circus”.

In autumn 1957, two of these freshly-trained Tibetans were parachuted in to Tibet to deliver a secret message from the US government to the Dalai-Lama, offering assistance if His Holiness requested any. Again, the Dalai Lama turned it down.

Then, in early 1958, CIA agents in Lhasa delivered a new secret message from the US urging the Dalai Lama to make a formal request for American assistance, which he declined despite the fact it would have been backed by the newly-formed Chushi Gangdrug (Four Rivers, Six Mountains) tribal alliance. The Dalai Lama was consistent in avoiding foreign help to spare his compatriots from a possible war with China – but he did not succeed.

On June 16, 1958, Chushi Gangdrug’s military wing formed a National Volunteer Defence Army which began a full-scale insurgent warfare a whole year before the famous Tibetan uprising started (on March 10, 1959).

Also in 1958, the CIA began a new training programme for future Tibetan guerrillas. Codenamed “The Colorado program” it lasted for seven years at Camp Hale in Colorado and neighboring the Butts Field Air Force Base. No fewer than 200 Tibetans were trained during these years.

At the same time, the CIA made sure the Tibetans were armed by dropping weapons and equipment for their guerrillas.

In total, from July 1959 till May 1960, about 362 tonnes of weapons, ammunition and equipment – as well as 85 trained guerrilla warfare specialists – were dropped into Tibet,

The US State Department closed down the Tibet project fifteen years later when, in 1974, it officially ceased to aid the Tibetan government in exile.

Following the 1959 uprising, the Dalai Lama fled to India where he stays in exile to this day.

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International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO): On the International Situation

The most significant development in the world capitalist economy, since the last meeting of our Conference is undoubtedly the intensification of the symptoms that prove the trend toward a new recession in all fields, after a certain rise in the second quarter of 2009, followed by a period of stagnation. Despite the trend towards a rise in the second quarter, world industrial production shrank 6.6% in 2009 and rose 10% in 2010. The industrial production of June 2010 exceeded its previous level before the crisis of 2008. But starting from the first quarter of 2011, the growth lost momentum and fell to 0.4% in the last quarter of that year. In 2011, world industrial production declined by half (5.4%) compared to the previous year. In the first quarter of 2012, after a weak rise, the growth declined. The growth was 1.8% in the first quarter, 0% in the second and 4% in the last quarter of 20l2. All the data show that, despite fluctuations, a decline persists that began in the first quarter of 2011, which led to zero level in the middle of this year [2012] and is heading for a new period of decline.

Industrial production in the European Union, which is a larger economic power than the U.S.; in Japan, which is third largest world economic power; in India, one of the largest economies in Asia, have had consecutive declines in the third quarter of 2011 and in the first two quarters of 2012 compared to the same period last year. Industrial production in Brazil, the largest economy in Latin America, has also entered into decline in the last two quarters. North African countries like Tunisia and Egypt, and other countries such as Argentina, Colombia and Peru, are in similar situations.

The rate of growth of industrial production in China, in the first and second quarters of 2012, was 11.6% and 9.5%, while it was 14.4% in 2010 and 13.8% in 2011. The downward trend continued in July, 9.2% and in August, 8.9%. China, which grew by 12.9% and 12.3% in the crisis years (2008 and 2009), was, along with India, one of the factors that prevented a further sharpening of the crisis and that allowed the world economy to enter into a new period of growth. The situation in that country has changed considerably. Now it is a country that is accumulating stockpiles in the steel industry, which is facing a slowdown in the construction sector, which has important holes in the financial sector. Those countries that saw lower growth rates despite the stimulus measures to revive the domestic market, are now unable to play the same role as before. The industrial production of Mexico and the Confederation of Independent States (CIS), including Russia, continues to grow. However, while the industrial production in the major countries and the volume of international trade are falling, for these countries also, a decrease is expected.

Unlike simple commodity production, a more rapid growth in the production of the means of production, compared to consumer goods, is a condition for expanded reproduction. But with the capitalist mode of production producing for an unknown market, with the sole purpose of obtaining profits, a consistent development of the two sectors is impossible and this is one of the factors that makes crises inevitable. In the last three years, as well as before, these two sectors have not developed consistently. In the first sector, demand has fallen, the volume of growth has fallen, stockpiles are accumulating and capacity utilization has fallen. In 2010 and 2011 the steel industry, an important component of the production of means of production, grew faster than the consumer goods sector. According to data from the World Steel Union, the growth rate in production was 15% in 2010 compared to the previous year, but in 2011 the figure fell to 6.2%. In January raw steel production saw a sharp drop to 8%, and it has stayed at 0.8% in the period from January to May of 2012. In August of 2012 raw steel production fell 1% in relation to 2011. In the same period, raw steel production rose 3.3% in Japan (a significant increase if one takes into account the major fall due to the tsunami) and 2.6% in India. It has fallen by 1.7% in China, 3.8% in the U.S., 4.4% in the EU, 7.1% in Germany, 15.5% in Italy and 3.8% in the Confederation of Independent States (CIS). The iron stockpiles in Chinese ports reached 98.15 million tons (an increase of 2.9%) belonging to the steel complexes. And stockpiles of Chinese coal are at their highest level in the last three years.

In manufacturing, a very important element of the production of the means of production, production and demand have declined in many countries. This decline has been one of the reasons for the cooling of industrial production in Germany, for example. In the capitalist mode of production, the agricultural sector, by its level of development and its technical basis, is always behind industry. Agricultural production is largely affected by the natural conditions, climate changes, droughts, storms and other natural catastrophes. Agricultural production is increasingly under the control of the monopolies and the speculative maneuvers of finance capital. In 2010 world agricultural production, including the production of cereals, has shrunk due to various factors such as bad weather or the expansion of plots reserved for bio-fuel production. On the other hand, in 2011, agricultural production has progressed thanks to better weather conditions, and also to increased demand and higher prices due to speculation. For example, wheat production increased by about 6%.

In 2009 the volume of world trade has declined 12.7%. According to data from the World Trade Organization (WTO), that volume registered a growth of 13.8% in 2010, and only 5% in 2011 (according to figures from the CPL, the growth was 15.2% in 2010, and 5.8% in 2011). The volume of world trade has grown by 0.5% in the final quarter of last year, and by 0.9% and 0.5% in the first and second quarter of 2012 respectively. During the first two months of the third quarter (June and July), the volume of world trade recorded a negative growth of -1.5% and -0.2% compared to the previous months.

World industrial production reached and surpassed the pre-crisis level of 2008, in June 2010, while the volume of international trade did not surpass this until November 2011. If we compare the data of July 2012 with the level reached before the crisis of 2008 (that is, April 2008), we see an increase of 9.5% in world industrial production and an increase of 5% in the total volume of growth in world trade.

The data on the increase of the volume of world trade is one of the most important that shows an evolutionary trend, although it does not exactly reflect the volume of growth of world trade. These data show that for the last three years, the world capitalist production has increased rapidly and that the capitalist world is once again facing the problem of overproduction, which is the source of all its crises. Decreased production, closing or reduction in work capacity of enterprises, rising unemployment and poverty; needs in abundance and the restriction of markets are the inevitable consequences of overproduction. The sharp slowdown in world industrial production has been shown above. The events in North Africa and the austerity measures taken in countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc., are factors that are aggravating this process and its consequences.

Towards a New Financial Crisis

The crisis of 2008 broke out as a financial crisis, at the same time as the crisis deepened in other sectors, such as industry and trade, it developed with contacts in the finance sector with serious consequences for the following period. The most destructive consequences for the monopolies and the eventual collapse of the financial sector were avoided by transferring of billions of dollars into the coffers of the monopolies by the capitalist States. This rescue operation was only possible by accepting a debt to financial markets with very high interest rates, and the issuance of money into the markets. The end result is an extreme State debt, an increase in the debt and interest burden, a rise in the price of gold and the loss of value (devaluation) of almost all currencies.

Countries at different levels have entered a vicious circle that has elements of new currency and financial crises, in which they can finance their budget deficit, their debts and interests, having to borrow again. The capitalist world began a period of growth starting in the second quarter of 2009, with the weight inherited from the 2008 crisis. However, this period of growth has enabled recipient countries to breathe a little, turn the wheel that was on the verge of suffocating them. The growth of the world economy stopped and even lowered the price of gold for a moment. In some countries, such as China that had a significant growth rate, the ratio of the public debt to GDP decreased. But in other countries, such as Japan and the U.S., a substantial debt has continued, even during the period of growth of the capitalist world economy. The U.S. public debt represents the sum of $16 billion (the debt of Germany, which grew until the second half of this year, is 8 billion). Other capitalist countries are in a similar situation. The increasing debt is almost the condition of financial sustainability and economic growth. And this is the path that is leading directly to a new financial crisis that may profoundly affect all sectors of the economy.

The highly indebted countries have not been able to achieve a period of growth after the financial crisis and the fall in world industrial production that took place between the second quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009; this period has led to a financial crisis that has affected the other sectors of the economy that has led them to bankruptcy. The first example of this process was in Greece, where the weakness was such that the industry, very weak, was largely liquidated when it joined the EU. After the 2008 crisis, in 2009, the economy of this country did not grow, and by the end of the year it was on the verge of bankruptcy. This country, followed by others such as Portugal, Spain, Hungary, etc., has not been able to get out of the crisis and stagnation. However, important differences should be noted in its debt in relation to the GDP.

Austerity measures never seen before, except in times of war or crisis as deep as 1929, have been imposed on the indebted countries. The result of these measures has been to impoverish the people, destroy the economy and reduce the internal market and foreign trade. These austerity plans have been applied (despite the opposition and struggle of the working class and peoples) under the control of the creditor imperialist powers, the international institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and European Union, and above all with the support of the collaborator monopoly bourgeoisie and its representatives, these enemies of the people. They have transferred billions of dollars to foreign banks, completely betraying the national interests. The national pride of the people, their right to sovereignty and independence have been trampled upon. A country like Britain that had a strong financial sector, but since mid-2011 has seen its industrial production and its economy reduced, has been forced to march along with the countries implementing austerity measures.

The significant decrease in the volume of growth of world industrial production, which began in the second quarter of 2011, is developing the elements of a new international financial crisis and is contributing to the degradation of the situation of the highly indebted countries. They failed to enter a period of growth parallel to the process of growth of the world capitalist economy following the crisis of 2008-2009. While the debate over the future of the Euro and the European Union is sharpening, the communiqués on the economic trends of the advanced capitalist countries and the indebted countries have sown confusion in the stock markets, barometers of the capitalist economy. Although world industrial and agricultural production and the volume of international -trade have exceeded the highest level before the crisis of 2008, the indices of the most influential stock markets remain below that level.

Although we are not yet experiencing the outbreak of a financial crisis of major proportions, everything makes it appear that the process is advancing towards such an eventuality. The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank (FED) has announced that it will not raise interest rates and that it will start a process of purchasing bonds for an amount of $2,000 billion dollars, at the rate of $40 billion per month. Japan has announced a similar measure and has begun a program of buying bonds to the tune of $695 billion.

Germany has had to relax its rigid policy towards the indebted countries and the European fund for the intervention in countries facing difficulties has increased. China, along with measures of revival that it has already applied, announced a new investment package to renovate its infrastructure. The price of gold is rising again. In 2008, the intense intervention of the capitalist States began after the outbreak of the crisis. Now, however, the capitalist States have gone into action before the shocks and bankruptcies at the same level as in 2008 start in the major capitalist countries and worldwide. However, these interventions, which can have some influence on the process of development, cannot change the orientation and the inevitable outcome.

The Sharpening of the Inter-Imperialist Contradictions and the Growing Danger of Conflicts

Uneven, unbalanced development is the absolute law of capitalist development. This process after the crisis of 2008 was not balanced, it deepened the antagonistic contradictions in the evolution and development of the relations between sectors, countries, regions, production and markets, etc. The industrial production of the advanced capitalist countries, including the U.S. and Japan, except Germany (ignoring the high level of 2008), did not reach the level of 2005. Germany, which has exceeded the pre-crisis level and has had a growth in industrial production of 11.5% in 2010 and 9% in 2011, has consolidated its position within the European Union and the Euro zone. Without separating itself from the bloc led by the United States, it has penetrated into new markets, new fields of investment, sources of raw materials, basing itself on its economic and financial strength, and above all, on its technical superiority in the industry of machine construction.

As in previous years, China, both because of its industrial production and its economy in general, was the country that had the most significant growth among major economies. It has modernized and increased the technical basis of its industry, and it continues to reduce the difference in its level of development with the other imperialist powers. Russia is going through a similar process. For the United States and its allies, these two countries, one considered as a vast market and production area with a trained and cheap work force, and the other a solid country, appear today as their main rivals to fight against.

The inevitable result of the change in the balance of power is the great demand for a piece of the pie by the emerging forces, using all means to get it and a new redivision of the world according the new balance of power. The recent development of the world economy is another factor that exacerbates the contradictions and the struggles among the major imperialist powers. Last year in the Middle East, in Africa and the whole world, the rivalry and struggle to expand their sphere of influence has accelerated. The production of weapons, the arms race is intensifying. China and Russia have renewed the technical basis of their arms industry. According to a report by the Congress of the United States, arms sales by these countries have tripled in 2011.

China, which increasingly needs more raw materials, energy and fields of investment for its growing economy, and Russia, which is slowly recovering, are intensifying their expansionist desires and their efforts to get their piece of the pie. Therefore, it is a top priority for the U.S. and its allies to prevent China, a young imperialist power in full development, and Russia, from achieving new markets in the field of energy and raw materials. When the Obama administration states that beginning next year the priority strategic objective for the United States will be Asia, and that the deployment of the U.S. military will be renewed according to the new situation, this is merely affirming that reality. The crisis of the archipelagos shows the level of tension between Japan and China; Japan has declared its intention to improve its military capability. The military maneuvers in the region have intensified.

The consequences of the change in the balance of power in the world have been clearly visible since last year. Russia and China were forced to accept Western imperialist intervention in Libya, even though that intervention was contrary to their interests. The intervention ended with the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime, the near collapse of the country, the destruction of its economy, the degradation of working and living conditions, the transfer of the country’s wealth into the hands of the Western imperialist States, etc. Russia and China lost a good part of their positions, including their oil agreements. After the fall of the Gaddafi regime, Mali has been dragged into war and divided. But the main objective is Syria. The attempts by the Western imperialist powers to topple the Syrian regime and put in a puppet government to fully control the country are intensifying. The United States and its allies have mobilized all their forces within Syria and outside of it in Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. They are stirring up the religious contradictions, they use and manipulate the popular discontent towards the regime and they try to prepare the ground for a military intervention as in Libya. Meanwhile Russia is arming Syria, strengthening its military base located in that country and sending more warships to the Mediterranean.

To bring down the Syrian regime, put in place a puppet government, dominate the oil-rich Middle East, control the eastern Mediterranean, block the expansion of China and Russia in the region and expel them as they did in Libya, to encircle Iran, weaken its influence and liquidate its closest allies, are very important objectives. Syria is the only country in the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean where Russia has a military base. This small country has become a place of intense struggle between Russia and China on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other. The Middle East is a powder keg on the verge of religious conflicts.

Contrary to what they did in Libya, Russia and China are opposing a military intervention that would alter the balance in the Middle East and result in the domination of the United States and its allies over Syria. But they have left the door open for a possible compromise that would guarantee their interests and renew the Syrian regime which is having more and more difficulties to survive.

As the case of Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Ivory Coast and Libya show, the imperialist interventions that have had the support of the liberal “defenders” of freedom and democracy, of the pseudo-socialist parties that emerged from the former revisionist parties, have resulted in increased military budgets at the expense of the workers, in the destruction of the productive forces of those countries, in many disasters, the impoverishment and decline in all social aspects. The aspiration of the peoples for the right to sovereignty and national independence, democracy and freedom has never been the concern of the occupiers. Their objective was to further prolong their system maintained by the defeat inflicted on the working class in the middle of the last century, a defeat that guaranteed their super-profits, the expansion of their spheres of influence and the weakening of their rivals. The imperialist powers, which are using all means to achieve this goal, do not lack in demagoguery and low maneuvers to disorient the people’s anger.

Now a period of sharpening of inter-imperialist contradictions is beginning, which economic-financial and political-military interventions will multiply. It is increasingly important to fight against such intervention, to develop the united fight of the workers and peoples, in both the advanced and backward countries,.

Organize the Resistance of the Workers in the New Stormy Period

The army of unemployed is growing on the world level, especially in countries in total-debt crisis, in the countries in which the economy is declining, stagnating or is in crisis. In Greece and Spain, unemployment has reached 25%. In these countries, unemployment among the youths, including college graduates, reached 50%. In the Euro zone in the second quarter of 2012, the level of unemployment reached 11.2%, according to official figures. In countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, where manufacturing has fallen from 9.6% to 7.5% in the first quarter of this year (2012), the number of unemployed continues to grow. In South Africa, the most developed country on the continent, the unemployment rate exceeds 25%.

In the current period, in almost all fields, from education to health care, drastic measures have been taken, the retirement age has been delayed and pensions have fallen. The gains of the working class worldwide are targeted for cuts or elimination. While direct taxes on the workers are increasing, no measures are taken to disturb the local and international monopolies, when even within the framework of this system one could increase taxes on the banks and the local and foreign monopolies. Wages continue to fall, etc. Many countries are suffering from a process of absolute impoverishment.

In recent years practices have been imposed worldwide such as sub-contracting labor, precarious and part-time work, an increase in the age for retirement, etc. In Germany, for example, one of the most developed countries in the world that has had significant growth rates in industrial production, according to the Federal Administration of Statistics, 15.6% of the population lives below the poverty line, a figure that rises to 26% among the immigrant population.

Last year, on a world scale and in each country, the workers and peoples movement has developed with various demands, in different forms and also at different levels. The struggles carried out in those countries with a “debt crisis” have been outstanding for their broad social base, for their responses and the experiences gained. The miners’ strike in South Africa, the youth movement and the strikes in Chile, the popular movements in Tunisia and Egypt, etc. are powerful examples of the workers and peoples struggles.

Starting with Greece, Spain and Italy, in various countries with a “debt crisis,” strikes, general strikes and huge demonstrations have taken place. In Greece and Spain, hundreds of thousands of people have expressed their anger in front of the parliaments on the days when these were voting for austerity measures. But the workers and peoples movement, despite some more advanced attempts, has remained within the framework of peaceful demonstrations, general strikes of one or two days and limited resistance. The strikes of long duration, the resistance or occupation of factories, have been limited to one enterprise or one sector.

The austerity measures have affected not only the proletariat and semi-proletarian masses of the cities and countryside; they have also affected the petty bourgeoisie and non-monopoly bourgeois strata. Even the less dynamic strata, the traditional base of the bourgeois parties, have been mobilized given the current situation. The social base of the struggle against the bourgeoisie in Power and against imperialism has expanded, to the point where in some dependent countries the mobilization has taken the character of a movement of the whole nation, except for a handful of monopolists. The conditions are maturing for the working class and its revolutionary parties, as representatives and the vanguard of the nation, to decide to organize and advance the movement and the united front of the people.

But despite the great movement, the groups of international finance capital and the local monopoly bourgeoisies have not given in (except in the recent delay of the austerity measures in Portugal). They have decided to implement these measures even at the cost of demeaning the image of the parliaments and weakening their social base. However, the masses are realizing through their own experience the impossibility of repelling the attacks with one or two day strikes or through peaceful demonstrations. Sharper forms of struggle and unlimited general strike are beginning to be considered by the more advanced strata.

It is clear that the bourgeoisie in Power, with their hostile character towards the people, is assuming a position of national betrayal. The traditional parties of the bourgeoisie and parliaments have lost credibility and the mass support for those parties is weakening (especially toward those in government that are implementing austerity measures). The social basis of monopoly capital is weakening. Among the masses who have felt their national pride hurt by the imperialists, the discontent, anger and will to struggle against the major imperialist powers, beginning with the United States and Germany, against institutions like the IMF or the EU, and against the local monopoly bourgeoisie that is collaborating with them, is developing.

The trade union bureaucracy and reformist parties and social trends are following a backward line of “least resistance,” not only in their forms of organization and struggle, but also at the level of political demands and platform. Clearly, this attitude is contributing to weakening their influence among the workers. The attacks and harshness of the social conditions are also affecting the lower strata of the labor bureaucracy and aristocracy and are sharpening the contradictions within their ranks.

The struggles in the countries with “debt crisis” are being developed on a program of protest against the bourgeois governments and parties, against institutions such as the IMF and the EU that are imposing draconian measures and they are demanding their withdrawal. At first this was natural and understandable in the context of a spontaneous movement. But the inability to go beyond those narrow limits is one of the major weaknesses of the movement. This weakness can be overcome with the work of agitation that shows the masses the way out of this difficult situation in which the people and the country find themselves, denouncing the social forces that are an obstacle to that way out. This work of agitation is reinforced by putting forward appropriate demands, slogans and forms of struggle among the masses.

Especially in Greece, certain small groups (that also have weaknesses) have proposed relatively advanced demands and platforms. But the forces capable of influencing the movement are not even concerned with organizing the work necessary to promote the fight on all fronts. The absence or great weakness of a revolutionary class party, has been felt strongly, as it cannot influence the movement.

Linked to the evolution of the world economy, the period that is beginning will be one of further degradation of the living and working conditions for the workers and peoples, a period of intense economic and political attacks, of discontent, anger and militancy among workers, as well as sharpening of inter-imperialist contradictions and conflicts. We must draw lessons and conclusions from the recent developments and the historical experience of the working class and peoples; we must advance, renewing our work and reorganizing our parties.

Tunisia, November 2012

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International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations: Resolution on the West African Region and Mali

Since 2010, the West African region and particularly the sub-Saharan zone has been marked by the armed interference and intervention of the imperialist powers. The objectives of those actions are:

* Political, geostrategic and military, related to the struggle for the redivision of the world and of the African continent.

* Economic (access to the petroleum of the Gulf of Guinea and the Ivory Coast; to the uranium of Niger and the precious metals that abound in the region; to solar energy; cacao, coffee, etc.

* The struggle of the Anglo-Saxon (U.S. and Great Britain) and French imperialists to prevent the penetration into the region by new actors such as China, India, Brazil, etc.

* The will of the imperialist powers to crush any type of protest by the popular masses, who are condemned to misery and lacking in political freedom, as well as the repression that they suffer carried out by the corrupt puppet powers, and their desire to crush any revolutionary insurrectionary movement.

The military-political crisis after the military coup d’état of the National Committee for the Defense and Restoration of the State (CNRDE) of March 22, 2012, as well as the military occupation of the North of Mali, begun January 22, 2012, which covers two thirds of the national territory, an occupation carried out by the National Movement for the Liberation of AZAWAD (MNLA) and the “jihadists” (AQMI, ANSAR, DINE, MUJAO, BOKO, HARAM…) must be put in this context

The military-political crisis in Mali has grave consequences for the neighboring countries, particularly Algeria, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, etc. and the group of the countries of the west African region (destabilization of States, proliferation of arms, massive displacement of populations towards the South of Mali, and thousands of refugees in other neighboring countries).

The military-political crisis in Mali is also a threat to the interests of imperialism, particularly French imperialism, in that country and the whole region. That is why there are preparatory maneuvers for an open military intervention that the troops provided by the members countries of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) can carry out, with the consent and logistical support of the great imperialist powers (France and U.S.A.) and of the UN under the pretext of “making a secure transition,” of “restoring constitutional life” and of “restoring Mali’s territorial integrity.” This is a reactionary plan by the imperialist powers and their allies in the region to maintain and reinforce their domination.

Faced with this serious situation, the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO):

* Denounces and condemns the puppet powers that have opened their territories (particularly in Mali, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Niger, Mauritania and Senegal) to the troops of imperialist aggression.

* Denounces and condemns the proclamation of independence of the State of AZAWAD by the MNLA, instrument of French imperialism.

* Denounces and condemns the crimes perpetrated against the peoples of the North of Mali by terrorist group AQMI and the Islamist groups ANSAR-DINE, MUJAO and the MNLA.

* Supports the brave resistance of the peoples, particularly of the youth, against oppression and medieval and obscurantist practices.

* Denounces and condemns the reactionary plan of the ECOWAS in Mali.

* Calls on the proletariat and peoples of the imperialist countries, particularly France, to support the Malian people in their struggle for a revolutionary solution of the military-political crisis.

* Calls for solidarity and support for the struggle of the peoples of the West African region against imperialist domination and their African lackeys.

Tunisia, November of 2012.

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China & Neocolonialism: Let’s Be Clear About the Facts

Yesterday and today I noticed many people passing around an article from China Daily which attempts to defend China’s relations with Africa and defend it against the accusation of neocolonialism. This is my response.

Let’s be clear about one thing: Africa IS dominated by neocolonialism. All of the so-called “leaders” of Africa in fact preside over neocolonial governments ruling territories whose borders are the direct result of European imperialism. They are representatives of the African petty bourgeoisie and their class interests are directly opposed to those of African workers and poor peasants. And yes, I include such people as Robert Mugabe in this description.

These are the governments with whom China is now making deals. For example, China made deals with the so-called “Congo” – a neocolonial entity. They also have had extensive dealings with the neocolonial government of Sudan – this in fact was on the primary motivations behind American, Israeli and other efforts to detach South Sudan, further fracturing the continent.

Outside of Africa China has various deals with the Zionist State of Israel, an outright white power, settler-colonial entity whose existence is entirely at the expense of the colonially dominated Palestinian and Arab peoples. China even provides arms and funding to the Sinhalese government of Sri Lanka, yet another neocolonial entity, that has long attempted to violently put down the aspirations for national liberation of the Tamil people.

And that’s China today. Let’s not even start on “Maoist” China’s support for Mobuto in “Zaire” and Pinochet in Chile. The latter was a betrayal so great that many Maoists in Chile actually chose to take their own lives rather than face facts and join up with the nascent armed resistance lead by the MIR and FPMR.

Yes, certainly Chairman Mao was a great revolutionary, but Mao did not equal China or the Chinese Communist Party. If you are to believe the historical analysis of modern Maoists’ then by 1971-73 Mao had already lost control of China’s foreign policy to the rightists around Deng Xiaoping with the beginning of the collapse of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Regardless of whether you accept what the modern Maoists have to say or not (and I am by no means sold of their analysis), what this teaches us, or at least should teach us, is that China’s involvement in neocolonialism isn’t even a new phenomena, or even a phenomena of the era marked by the political collapse of the USSR.

In fact, we must be clear that what this all boils down to on the part of leftists outside of China who defend its modern policies is a line that is objectively anti-African (and anti-other colonized peoples) in its orientation and practice. It covers over the lack of self-determination for Africans and other colonized peoples.

So to echo comrade Jesse Alexander Nevel of the African People’s Solidarity Committee and Uhuru Solidarity Movement, how the fuck can anyone defend this?

However, all of this about China being said it must also be added that while we must be clear about the role of China and all foreign powers in Africa at this juncture, we must never lose sight of the fact that the #1 enemy of Africans and other colonized peoples is US imperialism. The destruction of imperialism’s domination over Africa can only be achieved by the complete liberation and unification of Africa and Africans worldwide under an all African socialist government (which is exactly what the African Socialist International is struggling towards).

When African workers and peasants control their own resources and economies then the stage will be set for the possibility of mutual cooperation between sovereign nations. The key thing for the African Revolution is that the African working class is the only social force capable of leading Africa out of the colonially imposed poverty and oppression — not the US, not Europe, not China, not India, etc, but AFRICANS.

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International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations: Resolution on the Situation in Syria

The plenary of the ICMLPO, held for the first time in Africa, reaffirms its support for the right of the Syrian people to live under a democratic regime: a regime that guarantees freedom, equality, social justice and dignity, as well as assures the unity and total independence of the country, including the recovery of the Golan Heights occupied by Zionism since 1967.

The ICMLPO:

1. Denounces the dangerous development of events in Syria. The popular movement of protest has been transformed into a destructive civil war. The bloodthirsty repression is striking the people, and since the beginning, the Assad regime has rejected any democratic reform that would satisfy the aspirations of the Syrian people. This situation is the consequence of the foreign reactionary, imperialist and Zionist intervention, through Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which masked by the so-called “Free Syrian Army” and under the pretext of “saving the Syria people”

2. We reaffirm that this war has nothing to do with the interests of the Syrian people and their aspirations. On the contrary, it serves the reactionary forces of the country, the region and internationally. Syria is at the moment the place of confrontation between, on the one side the U.S., France and Israel and Arab and Turkish reaction that are trying to subject Syria to Western rule and make it break its ties with Iran and Hezbollah. On the other side, Russia and China are supporting the regime to preserve their strategic interests in Syria and the region, after having lost their influence in Libya.

3. We reject all intervention by NATO in Syria under any pretext, given the dangers that this represents for the Syrian people, the peoples of the region and world peace in general. The Conference calls on the Turkish people to oppose Turkey’s intervention in Syria. It sends a call to the workers and peoples of the Western countries, in the first place of the United States, Great Britain and France, whose leaders are threatening military intervention in Syria, to pressure their governments to stop them from carrying out their criminal strategy that caused disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, etc. in the past

4. It is up to the Syrian people, in all cases, to determine their own future. The ICMLPO calls on the Syrian patriotic and democratic forces to unite to save their country from the claws of the Assad regime and the armed gangs and to prevent the foreign powers from mortgaging their future and making use of a part of their minorities to undermine their unity. The ICMLPO calls on those forces to strive to build a new, democratic, secular, independent and united Syria in which the different religions and nationalities live together in freedom and equality.

5. Calls on the patriotic, democratic and progressive forces of the region to urgently mobilize and to undertake the necessary measures of solidarity to support the patriotic and democratic forces of Syria, forces that must act to end the slaughters perpetrated against the Syrian people, to stop the destruction of the country and prevent the foreign intervention, to facilitate dialogue among its inhabitants to achieve their aspirations and break with the tyranny and foreign domination.

Organisation pour la construction d’un parti communiste ouvrier d’Allemagne

Parti Communiste des Ouvriers du Danemark – APK

Parti Communiste d’Espagne (marxiste – léniniste) – PCE(ml)

Plateforme Communiste d’Italie

Parti Communiste des Ouvriers de France – PCOF

Organisation Marxiste Léniniste Révolution de Norvège – Revolusjon !

Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire de Turquie – TDKP

Parti des Travailleurs de Tunisie – PT

Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire de Côte d’Ivoire – PCRCI

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Marxism & Bourgeois Nationalism

As always, a re-posting of articles does not necessarily imply an absolute endorsement of the entirety of its content. However, this well-written article does make a good point about the duality of the bourgeois class, particularly in the Third World and oppressed countries.

– Espresso Stalinist.

Tripoli is burning. Thousands of black Libyans and African immigrants are rounded up by the NATO-backed rebels and thrown into prisons. Supporters of the ousted nationalist government wait with baited breath for the inevitable and bloody purge by the new rebel government. Libyan oil gushes out of Benghazi into the pipelines of Western energy companies. And militia groups, deputized by Interpol and the now-victorious National Transitional Council (NTC) government, hunt for Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and his family across the Libyan desert.

Now that NATO has won this asymmetrical imperialist war, at least in the short term, no one can reasonably say that the Libyan people are better off with the rebel government in power. For all of the flaws of Qaddafi’s government – and other nationalist governments like his – the Libyan people enjoyed the highest standard of living on the African continent, rising from the lowest standard of living in the world as of 1951. (1) The national and tribal governments had an amicable working relationship that allowed for decentralized planning and local decision-making. Moreover, Libya’s natural resources were controlled by a national government at-odds with Western energy corporations, and the wealth they generated was publicly owned and shared. (1) In other words, the Libyan nation exercised its inherent right to self-determination.

Qaddafi’s government wasn’t socialist; it was nationalist. The relations of production in Libya were capitalist in nature, but to deny that Qaddafi’s government was more progressive and objectively anti-imperialist ignores the brutal material reality that millions of Libyans are facing because of the NTC government.

As the West begins to re-calibrate its war machine and set its crosshairs on President Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, Marxist-Leninists need to understand their relationship with nationalist bourgeois states, like Qaddafi’s Libya. History has objectively proven those “leftists” who were cheerleaders for the fall of Qaddafi’s government in Libya or Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq wrong.

At the same time, every bourgeois state operates fundamentally in the interest of some sector of the capitalist ruling class, whether national or international, and in time the proletariat will replace that old machinery with socialism through revolution.

I posit these theses:

Because of their relation to imperialism after the fall of the socialist bloc, the objective historical position of nationalist states in the Third World is progressive.

Marxist-Leninists must uphold the right of nations to self-determination, which in the present is principally characterized by freedom from imperialist subjugation.

Where it arises, Marxist-Leninists must support genuine revolutionary proletarian struggles for socialism against bourgeois nationalist governments.

Josef Stalin, author of Marxism & the National Question

What is nationalism?

To understand when and why Marxist-Leninists should support nationalism, it’s important to examine the material conditions from which nationalism arises.

As a starting point, it’s important to distinguish a nation from other units of social or geographical organization, like a tribe or country. Historically speaking, national identity is a relatively recent development in class society. In his seminal 1913 work, Marxism and the National Question, Josef Stalin outlines the characteristics of a nation as “a historically evolved, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” (2)

Two important characteristics to note about Stalin’s definition. First, while territory and geography is a defining feature of a nation, it is not its sole determining characteristic, meaning that within the existential boundaries of a country–itself a recent social development–many nations may exist. Second, while a common economic life is also a defining characteristic, nations are not formed on the basis of class unity. In other words, there is no proletarian nation or bourgeois nation, but rather these two classes are both part and parcel of their respective nations.

In its inception, nationalism arises as an ideology of the bourgeoisie. From Marxism and the National Question:

The chief problem for the young bourgeoisie is the problem of the market. Its aim is to sell its goods and to emerge victorious from competition with the bourgeoisie of another nationality. Hence its desire to secure its “own,” its “home” market. The market is the first school in which the bourgeoisie learns its nationalism. (2)

Though all classes in a given nation are capable of embracing nationalism, Stalin argues that its historical basis lies in the bourgeoisie and its need for capital accumulation as a class. While other classes can appropriate and have transformed this concept, the demand for national self-determination begins as a bourgeois demand for exclusive access and control of its own national markets and resources.

European and American nationalism, for instance, arose from the break-up of feudal empires and the fledgling bourgeoisie’s struggle to establish itself as a class via primitive accumulation. American merchants, traders, shopkeepers, and speculators, denied full access to the readily available land and resources in North America by British mercantilism, led revolution of 1776 on the basis of American national unity. Though the American revolution of 1776 was waged in the interests of the fledgling bourgeoisie, the working masses rallied to the banner of American nationalism and led a successful struggle against British colonialism. Stalin notes that the “strength of the national movement is determined by the degree to which the wide strata of the nation, the proletariat and peasantry, participate in it.” (2)

Though the role of American nationalism in 1776 was historically progressive, the triumph of the American national movement was fueled by and resulted in the further subjugation of the African masses kidnapped and violently lashed into slave labor, along with the indigenous tribes ruthlessly slaughtered in the expansion of the American empire. Dialectically, American nationalism’s progressive features became the basis for the rise of the most oppressive imperialist power in the history of the world.

Without the subjugation of the African masses as a slave labor force, the Western bourgeoisie could never have established itself as an independent ruling class. Indeed, the same American nationalism that united the colonists against British mercantilism would unite the country in waging genocidal wars for land against indigenous people and Mexicans. After the series of successful European bourgeois revolutions, all ideologically fueled through nationalism, colonialism in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Pacific Islands became central to acquiring the cheap labor and resources necessary to generating extreme national wealth.

Because of the cheap labor and resources acquired through ruthless expansion, American capitalism transformed into imperialism, in which developed countries use force and comparative advantages in trade to violently extract resources and exploit the labor force of other colonies. Central to maintaining the colonial apparatus was the denial of equal rights and the cultivation of racist myths about colonized people, which materially manifested itself in slave labor, apartheid, and denial of access to the liberal democratic institutions established by the colonial bourgeoisie in imperialist countries.

Inevitably, the placement of capital in colonial countries allowed some small fraction of the colonized population to gain access to limited amounts of their own capital, albeit usually dependent on the colonial power. In other words, this small class of propertied yet colonized people constituted a bourgeoisie. Of this bourgeoisie, Stalin writes:

The bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation, repressed on every hand, is naturally stirred into movement. It appeals to its “native folk” and begins to shout about the “fatherland,” claiming that its own cause is the cause of the nation as a whole. It recruits itself an army from among its “countrymen” in the interests of… the “fatherland.” Nor do the “folk” always remain unresponsive to its appeals, they rally around its banner: the repression from above affects them too and provokes their discontent. (2)

The bourgeoisie of oppressed nations has the same basic features as the American and European bourgeoisie, in that both classes sought greater access to their own markets, resources, and labor. However, the conditions around the oppressed national bourgeoisie are qualitatively different than those around the Western bourgeoisie; they cannot seize control of their own national resources because of the fetters of colonialism.

Unquestionably the type of colonial oppression faced by the oppressed national bourgeoisie was different than that felt by the colonized proletariat and peasantry, who faced more brutal repression from the state and worse terms of labor. However, these colonized classes all had something to gain by overthrowing colonial and imperialist rule and achieving self-determination for their nation.

Nationalism becomes vital to the colonized bourgeoisie because it unites themselves and the colonized laboring masses in the struggle for national liberation. At the point where the laboring masses embrace nationalism, “the national movement begins.” (2)

National liberation struggles are not exclusively led by the nationalist bourgeoisie, and historically the bourgeoisie in colonial or semi-colonial nations is often too weak or too connected to the colonizing nation to exert itself independently as a class. Numerous examples of successful revolutionary proletarian national liberation movements exist, including the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). These successful communist movements, like the MPLA, also made use of nationalism to unite the country around the central task of expelling the colonizers. In essence, although nationalism is originally a bourgeois ideology, other revolutionary classes can appropriate it during the national liberation struggle phase.

Saddam Hussein, with an AK-47

Bourgeois nationalist states in the Third World

Because the nationalist bourgeoisie finds itself opposed to imperialism in the Third World, they can function as a tactical ally for the proletariat and peasantry in these same oppressed nations. Marxist-Leninists should never accept this alliance as permanent, however, and must carefully evaluate the place of the national bourgeoisie in relation to imperialism and the vast laboring masses.

Iraq provides one of the most potent examples of the fickle and unreliable nature of the nationalist bourgeoisie. The Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, for instance, was primarily bourgeois in its orientation and leadership, but it also attracted a mass following in the wake of the Iraq’s independence from British colonialism in 1958. (3)

Ba’ath was not committed to socialist revolution in Iraq, but they did preside over an aggressive nationalization program in 1972, which seized oil refineries from British and American companies and allowed them to diversify Iraq’s economy. Though these nationalizations were motivated by the access considerations of the national bourgeoisie, they also allowed the Ba’ath state to redirect revenues into public works projects that lifted nearly half the country out of poverty. In a 2006 profile piece on Saddam, PBS News writes of Ba’ath’s accomplishments:

As vice chairman, he oversaw the nationalization of the oil industry and advocated a national infrastructure campaign that built roads, schools and hospitals. The once illiterate Saddam, ordered a mandatory literacy program. Those who did not participate risked three years in jail, but hundreds of thousands learned to read. Iraq, at this time, created one of the best public-health systems in the Middle East — a feat that earned Saddam an award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (4)

True to form, Saddam and Ba’ath rose to power in direct response to British colonialism. Acting in the interests of the Iraqi national bourgeoisie, they ‘took back’ the resources monopolized by the West’s colonial subjugation and used the revenues to rapidly construct a modern Iraq, which required an educated populace, secular government, a functional road system, and social infrastructure like hospitals. One can question the sincerity of Ba’ath’s actions towards the masses, but one cannot dispute the profoundly positive effect these nationalist policies had on the lives of ordinary Iraqis.

However, the social accomplishments of bourgeois nationalist regimes should never obscure their reactionary character. With both Ba’ath and the Communist Party of Iraq (ICP) vying for supremacy after the 1958 revolution, hostile confrontations between the parties continued until 1963, when Ba’ath launched a coup d’etat against Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qasim. (5) During the coup, communists organized massive militant resistance to Ba’ath, and over the course of the three days in Baghdad, “5,000 Iraqi citizens were apparently killed, including 80 Ba’th Party activists and 340 Iraqi communist activists.” (6)

Following the consolidation of Ba’ath rule in Iraq, the ICP experienced two separate waves of repression: one in 1963 following the coup and the subsequent unrest, and the other in 1977, led by Saddam. (5) Historian Bob Feldman writes in a February 2006 piece on Iraq that “By March 1963, an estimated 10,000 Communist Party of Iraq members had been arrested by the Ba’th regime and many imprisoned Iraqi leftist activists were not treated gently.” (6) Quoting Said Aburish’s book, “A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite”, Feldman continues:

The number of people eliminated remains confused and estimates range from 700 to 30,000. Putting various statements by Iraqi exiles together, in all likelihood the figure was nearer five thousand…. There were many ordinary people who were eliminated because they continued to resist after the coup became an accomplished fact, but there were also senior army officers, lawyers, professors, teachers, doctors and others. (6)

The CPI was correct to resist the 1963 Ba’ath coup and oppose the consolidation of a bourgeois nationalist regime. Iraq’s independence in 1958 had shifted their primary adversary from British colonialism to the Iraqi bourgeoisie, seeing as no colonial entity to struggle against still existed. Saddam’s case reminds Marxist-Leninists that it’s strategic to enter into a popular front with bourgeois nationalists against imperialism, but after the national liberation struggle is complete, they constitute a vicious and dangerous foe.

Palestinian women wave PFLP flags

Nationalist governments support revolutionary people’s struggles in the Third World.

Failure to conform to imperialist foreign policy is the most common wedge issue between bourgeois nationalists and the West. Often driven by pan-national ideological unity, bourgeois nationalist countries objectively support revolutionary people’s struggles and national liberation movements abroad, placing them at odds with imperialism.

Finding common ground with the Shi’a-led Iraqi resistance to US occupation, Iran has provided weapons to Iraqi insurgents, as well as training for assembling their own weapons. (7) While many allegations about Iranian aid to the Iraqi resistance are exaggerated by Western capitalist media to ratchet up tensions, journalist Michael Perry describes Iran’s rationale in a February 2007 article:

But let’s go even further and say, for the sake of argument, that the Iraqi insurgents are receiving officially authorized aid from the Iranian state. It is true that having a neighboring nation in chaos does not generally benefit any country, but the Iranians have been under the gun from the U.S. for a very long time –decades in fact. The recent threats and provocations from the Bush administration make it clear that Iran is an imminent target. I’m quite sure the Iranians realize that the quagmire in Iraq is the primary impediment to an American invasion of Iran. Troubles for U.S. forces in Iraq may buy the Iranians more time. Could the Iranians be so blind to their own self-interests? (8)

At odds with Saddam’s secular Sunni government for decades, the Iranian bourgeoisie would relish the opportunity to have an oil-rich Shi’a-dominated Iraq to its west. More pressing, however, is the collective national fear of having another US-client state in the region. There’s a reason that Tehran, and not Qatar, the UAE, or Saudi Arabia, is actively subverting US occupation by materially supporting the Iraqi resistance. That reason, of course, is because the Iran’s ruling nationalist bourgeoisie has a material class interest in anti-imperialism.

The best evidence for the progressive quality of the Iranian nationalist bourgeoisie, embodied in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is the attempted color revolution in 2009 by the US-backed Mir-Hossein Mousavi. This so-called ‘Green revolution’ was financially supported by both the West and the wealthy neo-liberal bourgeoisie, represented by multi-millionaire former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. (9) In the 2005 Presidential elections, Ahmadinejad defeated Rafsanjani largely on the basis of the latter’s gaudy neo-liberal orientation. A 2005 article in GreenLeft by Doug Lorimer highlights the divergent class interests represented by Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani. While both accept the fundamental tenents of the Iranian capitalist state:

In the same TV interview [Ahmadinejad] claimed the country’s vast oil wealth was controlled by one powerful family — a reference to Rafsanjani, who is alleged to have enriched himself through his son’s management of the country’s nationalised oil industry. The Rafsanjanis also have investments worth US1 billion in pistachio farming, real estate, automobile manufacture and a private airline.

“The whole Iranian economy is set up to benefit the privileged few”, Ray Takeyh, a professor and director of studies at the US National Defense University’s Near East and South Asia Center in Washington, told the Bloomberg news agency last December. “Rafsanjani is the most adept, the most notorious and the most privileged.” (10)

Rafsanjani, and his running dog Mousavi, hoped to rise to power via a US-supported color revolution and open Iran to Western markets; in other words, they represent the comprador Iranian bourgeoisie. Despite the best efforts of the imperialist powers to oust Ahmadinejad–who by every objective measure legitimately won the 2009 election–the Iranian people resisted these attacks on their national sovereignty. (11) Even as he nears the end of his two terms as President, Ahmadinejad remains popular with the Iranian masses because of his consistent anti-imperialism on the world stage, along with the social programs he has championed at home despite Western sanctions.

Pivoting to another nationalist state, Syria has consistently functioned as the most progressive of the multitude of Middle Eastern countries by substantially supporting the major national liberation movements in the region. Trinity University professor of history David Lesch writes in his fantastic book, The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria that:

Syria does not deny claims of support for Hizbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, viewing that such operations constitute legitimate resistance and not terrorism; indeed, Damascus often views Israeli activities vis-a-vis the Palestinians and its actions in Lebanon as terrorism. (12)

Since the Syrian Ba’ath party took power in 1963, the state has always supported the Palestinian and Lebanese liberation struggles and sought to keep Israeli imperialism in-check. (13) Sharing the common trait of secularism, Syria allows the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the largest Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement in Palestine, to operate comfortably out of Damascus and materially supports their struggle with supplies and resources. (14) Because of the Syrian bourgeoisie’s desire for regional secular pan-Arab unity–rooted in the Alawi faith of President Bashar al-Assad and others–and the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, Assad’s government is objectively anti-imperialist.

Similarly, Saddam’s Ba’ath state in Iraq financially supported and championed the cause of Palestinian national liberation, which was played up by the West in the months leading up to the 2003 invasion. On March 13, 2003–just six days before the invasion–the BBC reported, “Saddam Hussein has paid out thousands of dollars to families of Palestinians killed in fighting with Israel. Relatives of at least one suicide attacker as well as other militants and civilians gathered in a hall in Gaza City to receive cheques.” (15) Later, the same article estimates that the Iraqi government had paid out nearly $35 million to Palestinian families since 2000.

In hindsight, the timing and purpose of this BBC article is obvious, but that Saddam’s support for ‘terrorist groups’ was one of the reasons for the 2003 invasion demonstrates the extreme degree to which his support for the Palestinians offended and scared the West. Startlingly few people remember that Israel invaded Syrian airspace and bombed a peaceful nuclear power plant in September 2007 for many of the same reasons. When a bourgeois state in the Third World becomes nationalist in its orientation, as opposed to comprador bourgeois states, it demands a response from the West.

Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia

Never confuse your primary and secondary contradictions!

Although a multitude of contradictions exist in class societies, at any given time, one of these contradictions is principal in comparison to the others. If a person goes for a walk, decides s/he wants a cigarette, and then gets bitten by a rattlesnake, the order of the day is to call a doctor and receive medical attention immediately for the venom. As much as that person might have wanted–or even needed–a cigarette, only a great fool would tell this person that s/he should prioritize smoking over seeking medical attention.

Primary and secondary contradictions seem like common sense, but a multitude of so-called ‘leftists’ and revolutionaries confuse them when analyzing imperialism. Ultimately, the approach that Marxist-Leninists ought to take to bourgeois nationalist governments is tied up in correctly identifying and acting on primary and secondary contradictions.

Though largely ignored in Marxist-Leninist writings, the experience of the Ethiopian revolution offers valuable insight as to how communists ought to struggle against bourgeois nationalist governments. Having played an instrumental role in repelling the Italian fascist occupation of Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selassie I began as an archetype bourgeois nationalist. He encouraged pan-African unity, promoted decolonization, and began an aggressive process of modernizing Ethiopia.

That said, Selassie’s government became firmly aligned with the West after World War II and opened the country up to an influx of foreign capital. Presiding over and encouraging severely unequal land distribution, Selassie’s government was also responsible for a series of famines and foot shortages, the worst of which claimed an estimated 40,000 to 80,000 victims. (16) Ahmed Khan of the Communist Workers and Peasants Party in Pakistan writes this of Selassie’s government:

During the monarchical period, life expectancy was a mere 38 years and 90% of the people were illiterate. Only a tiny handful of feudal landowners and royal sycophants controlled the entire wealth of the country.

…

Severe drought and famine engulfed Ethiopia which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peasants, and led to widespread hunger and food crises in the urban areas. (16)

Even bourgeois sources regard these famines as the product of Selassie’s destructive policies. A 1997 report by Human Rights Watch called “Rebellion and Famine in the North under Haile Selassie” indicted the nationalist government for its culpability in this famine, saying:

The Wollo famine was popularly blamed on drought, a backward and impoverishedsocial system, and the cover-up attempted by the imperial government. These factors were all-important — though it must be remembered that specific actions by the government, especiallyafter the Ras Gugsa and Weyane revolts, were instrumental in creating the absence of development. (17)

By 1974, Selassie’s bourgeois government lost all legitimacy in the eyes of the masses. Because of the widespread crises brought on by Selassie’s selective industrial development and close trade relations with the West, Ethiopian workers and peasants began to mobilize against the government. Khan writes, “The inability of the monarchy to deal with the crisis and the propensity of the feudalists to bleed the peasantry dry led to increasing hatred for the monarchy on part of the oppressed peasants, workers and a section of the emergent urban middle class.” (16)

Although no Marxist-Leninist vanguard party existed in Ethiopia at this time, a communist council of military officers known as the Derg organized alongside labor leaders in the urban centers and peasant communities in the countryside to produce the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. (18)

The revolutionary experience of the Ethiopian people in overthrowing Selassie’s government and establishing the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia–firmly committed to socialist construction–has tremendous lessons for Marxist-Leninists about their relation to bourgeois nationalists. Objectively, Selassie’s government was essential to the anti-imperialist and anti-fascist struggle waged against fascist Italy in 1935. The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) went so far as to launch a “Hands off Ethiopia” campaign in the same year, which included substantial demonstrations supporting Ethiopia’s right to self-determination (19).

However, classes do not exist in a vacuum. While one class may play a historically progressive role at one time, a change in the material conditions–like increased trade relations with the West following World War II–may render that same class reactionary. For as important as nationalism was to Ethiopia repelling fascist Italy in 1941, the same nationalist government’s reactionary policies reached a boiling point in 1974, resulting in a popular socialist revolution.

The lesson from Ethiopia is clear: Marxist-Leninists in nationalist states must organize with a keen awareness of primary and secondary contradictions. For a moment, let’s assume that an organization like the Derg existed in Ethiopia circa-1935. Said organization would commit a grave error in throwing in with the fascists in hopes of toppling an admittedly reactionary monarchy. First, the organization would undeniably alienate the Ethiopian masses, who despite their poverty and poor military training, flocked to defend their homeland, the only African state never colonized by the West, from fascist occupation. (20) Second, although Selassie’s bourgeois government was at-odds with the interests of Ethiopian workers and peasants, that contradiction receded into the background the moment that fascist Italy began poison gassing entire villages of Ethiopians.

When Mussolini’s forces invaded Ethiopia in 1935, there was only one organized military force capable of mounting a resistance: Selassie’s nationalist government. Unsuccessful at first, Ethiopian patriots of all classes, albeit predominantly workers and peasants, struggled onward to victory and liberation in 1941. That this liberation struggle took place across class lines on a nationalist basis is no small detail. It’s paramount that Marxist-Leninists, in light of Iraq, Libya, and increasing aggression towards Syria, comfortably identify anti-imperialism as the primary contradiction facing the international proletarian revolution today.

Proletarian internationalism is superior in every way to bourgeois nationalism, but so long as neo-colonialism and imperialism exist, communists must unite all who can be united in the anti-imperialist struggle. Simultaneously, though, communists must remember the other side of the dialectic: When bourgeois nationalists become complicit partners in Western imperialism and alienate themselves from the masses, communists must never hesitate to overthrow that state with extreme prejudice and on its ruins erect revolutionary socialism.

The irrelevance and obscurity of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) following the toppling of Saddam’s Ba’ath regime demonstrates the devastating effects of incorrectly identifying primary and secondary contradictions.

Saddam was by no means a consistent anti-imperialist throughout his reign. Though Ba’athist Iraq established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and China, it still retained casual relations with the West; relations that were strengthened following Saddam’s condemnation of Soviet intervention in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, as well as the Iranian Revolution in 1979. (21) Between the overthrow of the US-backed Shah, the establishment of a militant Islamic republic, and the Iranian hostage crisis, Iraq began to work closely with the West to curb Tehran’s influence in the Middle East. Though the Reagan Administration would notoriously fund the Iranians also, the US comfortably placed their initial bets behind Saddam in the devastating Iran-Iraq war of 1983-1988.

Even though the imperialists used Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war to sow chaos in the Middle East, the Ba’ath state remained largely at odds with Western interests because of its nationalist orientation. Refusing to privatize its oil industry and allow Western capital to fully penetrate its national markets, the West increasingly saw Saddam as a danger to imperialist interests in the Middle East. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait over territorial disputes, the subsequent Gulf War, and Saddam’s unabashed support for the Palestinian liberation struggle cemented Iraq’s status as a pariah state in the eyes of the West by the early 1990s.

In an effort to eliminate an unfriendly pro-Palestinian government perched atop massive oil reserves, the US and UK fabricated the now-infamous falsehood that Saddam’s government had weapons of mass destruction. While communists around the world uniformly condemned the imperialist invasion of Iraq, “the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) welcomed Saddam Hussein’s removal and is happy that the ousted president is to be put on trial.” (22) Exhausted and furious from decades of repression by Ba’ath, the ICP’s position is understandable on a purely visceral and emotional level. However, Marxist-Leninists must remain level-headed during periods of crisis and correctly identify primary and secondary contradictions; a task at which the ICP uniformally failed.

In the coming years, the ICP would come to participate in the puppet state erected by the West–most recently in the liberalizing ‘Political Reconciliation’ movement–and integrate themselves into this comprador government imposed from without. (23) Despite comprising the strongest opposition to the Ba’ath government during the 1960s, the ICP has descended into relative obscurity, having lost any credibility with the masses for their blunder. Instead, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and other religious sects comprised the mass base of resistance after Saddam was captured, though their bourgeois and petty-bourgeois class character has led them to also participate in Maliki’s bogus government.

One would think that the international ‘left’ would have learned about correctly handling primary and secondary contradictions after witnessing the failure of the ICP to lead a mass revolutionary resistance to imperialist occupation. Instead, the same ‘leftists’ who witnessed the invasion of Iraq cheerled a racist, imperialist-backed ‘rebel movement’ in Libya, and many made the full leap into supporting NATO’s invasion to oust Qaddafi.

When a nation achieves self-determination, the secondary contradiction between the proletariat and the national bourgeoisie will ascend to the forefront as the new primary contradiction. Before that time, however, the primary contradiction facing the masses in oppressed nations is between imperialism and national liberation. In bourgeois nationalist states, this contradiction can and must draw in all who can be united to strike a blow against imperialism.

Countries want independence.

Nations want liberation.

People want revolution.

—-

(1) Gerald A. Perreira, “Libya Getting it Right: A Revolutionary Pan-African Perspective,” March 4, 2011, Dissent Voice, http://bit.ly/mQT4iz

(2) Josef Stalin, Marxism & the National Question, March-May 1913, http://bit.ly/cwOCSQ

(3) Said K. Aburish, “How Saddam Hussein Came to Power,” 2002, From Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge, Published in The Saddam Hussein Reader, pg. 41-42

(4) Jessica Moore, “Saddam Hussein’s Rise to Power,” 2003, PBS News, http://to.pbs.org/65tro

(5) Turi Munthe (Editor), The Saddam Hussein Reader, 2002, pg. xv-xviii

(6) Bob Feldman, “A People’s History of Iraq: 1950 to November 1963,” February 2, 2006, Toward Freedom, http://bit.ly/qwCar2

(7) CNN, “Iraqi insurgents being trained in Iran, US says,” April 11, 2007, http://bit.ly/nHra0S

(8) Michael Perry, “So what if Iran is Interfering in Iraq?,” February 21, 2007, AntiWar.com, http://bit.ly/ogwqxd

(9) Paul Craig Roberts, “Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated ‘Color Revolution’?,” June 20-21, 2009, CounterPunch, http://bit.ly/pmXj7w

(10) Doug Lorimer, “IRAN: A vote against neoliberalism,” July 6, 2005, Green Left, http://bit.ly/nYcOll

(11) Terror Free America, New America Foundation, “Ahmadinejad Front Runner in Upcoming Elections,” June 12, 2009, http://bit.ly/k8x0w

(12) David W. Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria, 2005, pg. 102

(13) Reuters, “Syrian President Vows to Keep Supporting Hezbollah, Hamas,” August 2, 2007, http://bit.ly/qex219

(14) Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, “PFLP condemns attack on Syria,” November 3, 2008, Fight Back! News, http://bit.ly/qWDlmo

(15) BBC News, “Palestinians get Saddam funds,” March 13, 2008, http://bbc.in/9BWsXr

(16) Ahmed Khan, “Defend Comrade Mengistu! On the struggle of our Ethiopian brothers,” November 19, 2008, Red Diary, http://bit.ly/jbYhks

(17) Human Rights Watch, “3. Rebellion and Famine in the North Under Haile Selassie,” 1997, http://bit.ly/pzy53w

(18) Christopher Clapham, Transformation and Continuity in Revolutionary Ethiopia, 1988, Cambridge University Press.

(19) Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, 1990, pg. 123.

(20) A.J. Barker, The Rape of Ethiopia, 1936, 1971.

(21) Said K. Aburish, “How Saddam Hussein Came to Power,” 2002, From Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge, Published in The Saddam Hussein Reader, pg. 44

(22) Shaheen Chughtai, “Iraqi communists celebrate change,” June 1, 2004, http://aje.me/qp5rVW

(23) Talal Alrubaie, “The Iraqi Communist Party and Hegel’s Owl of Minerva,” February 2, 2010, http://bit.ly/rqF6fr

Source

Peking Review on Environment and Development

Environment and Development
by Chu Ko-ping
Peking Review
May 14, 1976, p. 19

The question of environment and development is of common concern to various countries in the world. The numerous developing countries are speeding up the development of their national economies and, in the course of such development, are protecting and improving the environment so that economic development and environmental protection can be co-ordinated with each other. This is a question of special concern to the developing countries and their people.

The question of environmental pollution and its damages has cropped up in many areas of the world. Pollution has become a scourge of society in some countries with highly developed economies. What is the root cause of environmental pollution and damage? The main social cause of environmental pollution and its damages lies in the fact that, as a result of the development of capitalism into imperialism, the monopoly capitalist groups, in their quest for big profits, are unscrupulously plundering the natural resources and disposing of harmful substances at will, thereby polluting and poisoning the environment. The developing countries also face certain questions concerning the environmental pollution and damage. But their environmental question is different in nature from that in the developed countries. Over a long period in the past, the colonialists and imperialists dominated the Asian, African and Latin American regions by various means, controlling their economic lifelines, carrying out savage plunder and ruthless exploitation, and engaging in indiscriminate development and utilization of natural resources, thereby wreaking serious havoc on their national economies and natural environment. This is the root cause of the poverty and backwardness of the developing countries and of the damage to their environment. In the face of superpower hegemonism, this state of affairs has become even more serious in these regions.

Now some people still regard economic development as the root cause of environmental pollution, while others consider poverty its root cause. All these views represent an attempt to evade the essence of the matter and seek the causes of the problem from superficial phenomenon, thus making it impossible to reach a correct conclusion in conformity with objective reality, and leading to pessimism about the future of the human environment.

Economic development and environmental protection are interrelated and promote each other. The former gives rise to the environmental problem and the latter constitutes an important condition for developing the economy; economic development increases the capability to protect the environment, and environmental improvement in turn promotes economic development. This is the interdependent relationship between the two.

At present, the developing countries have a pressing need to develop their national economies, gradually build up a modern industry and modern agriculture and achieve economic independence so as to consolidate their political independence. This is the urgent task of the developing countries in freeing themselves from imperialist, colonialist, neo-colonialist and big-power hegemonist control and plunder; it is also a basic guarantee for the protection and improvement of the environment. In the absence of political independence and economic development, how can the environment be effectively protected and improved? Economic development will be bring with it the problem of environmental pollution, which, however, can be solved only in the course of development, not by calling a halt to development or slowing down its pace. We hold that in the struggle against nature, man has constantly to sum up experience and go on discovering, inventing, creating and advancing. With social progress and scientific and technological development, the problem of environmental pollution can be prevented and solved in the course of development so long as we proceed from the interests of the people and adopt effective measures to this end.

China is a developing socialist country. We have in the course of advance also come across the problem of economic development causing environmental pollution. The main cause of pollution is the problem left over from the old China. It takes some time to transform the lopsided economy in the old society. So far we are still short of adequate experience and knowledge of environmental protection work, which is a new problem for us. Chairman Mao has taught us that we should proceed in all cases from the interests of the people. Economic development is in the interests of the people and so is environmental protection. The development and protection are in harmony with each other. We are constantly summing up experience and striving to reduce and eliminate pollution while developing the economy so as to create good living and working conditions for the working people.

In developing the economy, we should make an overall planning and arrangement when handling the relations between industry and agriculture, between town and country, between production and livelihood, between economic development and environmental protection, so that they will advance in co-ordination with each other. This is an important measure for preventing industrial pollution.

As to the development and utilization of natural resources, we should also make an all-round planning to ensure multiple benefits, pay attention to immediate and long-term effects, take into consideration the accruing gains and the possible effect on the ecological conditions. Our practice in the building of water conservancy projects over the years has proved that by making an overall planning and striving to ensure multiple benefits in flood-control, power-generation, irrigation, navigation and cultivation of aquatics, we can make the best use of water resources and at the same time reduce and avoid damage to the environment.

Geographical distribution of industries should be put on a rational basis, with greater stress put on small cities and towns. The small cities and towns have characteristics favouring the environmental protection such as the integration of cities with the countryside, of workers with peasants, facilitating production and conveniencing daily life. Meanwhile, the difficulties which often arise in big cities can be averted in small cities and towns: difficulties in housing, communications and transport, supplies of agricultural and sideline products and other public welfare facilities. This is also beneficial to environmental improvement.

To prevent industrial wastes from contaminating the environment, we put anti-pollution measures into practice simultaneously with the designing, construction and commission of the projects in our industrial construction. Such practice has proved effective. In so doing, we can ponder over the ways and means,before the construction work starts, of getting rid of the harmful substances as best we can in the course of production, or adopt purifying measures against any possible damage which might accrue from these harmful substances. This may cost more money when a project is under construction, but the cost will be much smaller than the price which has to be paid for keeping the pollution under control after it has occurred, and the results have proved much better.

Will the environmental protection and improvement affect development and slow down its pace? This depends on what policies are adopted. Our country regards the multiple-purpose use of resources as an important policy for economic development. Thanks to the development of modern industrial technology, the natural resources discovered and used by mankind are increasing daily. Discharge of industrial wastes at will will contaminate the environment. Multiple-purpose utilization of industrial wastes makes it possible to turn many harmful things to good account and make useless things useful. This will help to open up new sources of raw materials for industry, expand social production, increase social wealth and promote the development of production.

Agriculture is the foundation for the development of the national economies of the developing countries. Without the development of agriculture, industrial development cannot go very far. Protection and improvement of the environment is of particular importance to promoting the development of agriculture.

Agriculture production, including food crops, forestry, livestock breeding, side occupations and fishery, depends to a large extent on natural conditions. There is a certain limit to the development of agriculture under certain natural conditions, that is, it will be hampered by natural conditions. However, through its own hard work, mankind can change the existing natural conditions and strive to master the natural law governing the reproduction of living things, and create still greater productive forces. On the question of the natural conditions for agriculture, the naturalist point of view is wrong, and the ideas of pessimism and inertia are both groundless. In the old China, as a result of the long years of oppression and plunder by the imperialists and their lackeys, rural natural environment was seriously damaged, agricultural production was ruined because large tracts of land turned alkaline or became deserts. One-third of the cultivated lands were red soils or alkaline, sand-stony and cold-swampy fields and lands susceptible to drought and waterlogging. Some lands became barren. Since the founding of New China,  our Government has given the first place to agriculture in developing the national economy.

By extensive mobilization of the masses, relying on our own efforts and transforming our country in an indomitable spirit as displayed by the legendary Foolish Old Man who removed the mountains,  it has worked with great will to transform the natural conditions for production. After more than two decades of hard work, we have improved over one half of the alkaline land in north China, reclaimed, utilized and improved over 120 million mu of red soil which is sometimes called “red deserts,” and brought one-fifth of the land subject to erosion under preliminary control. With the planting of shelter belts over large areas and the improvement of water conservancy conditions in the desert regions in northwest and north China, more and more oases have emerged. The improvement of natural conditions for agriculture has enabled China to reap good harvests for 14 years running, with the broad masses of the people enjoying a happy life. Certain people assert that speedy development of agriculture would reduce the fertility of soil and bring about an ecological crisis. The fact that China has improved the  natural conditions for agriculture and reaped good harvests in succession shows that mankind can transform nature and create a more suitable environment. So long as the creative power of the people is brought into full play and necessary measures are taken, the fertility of soil will not be destroyed; instead, poor soil can be turned into fertile soil and produce more food grains.

A View of the Reforms in China

by Vladimir Chechentsev

Review of Zbigniew Wiktor’s book, China on the course of the socialist modernisation.

A major work (546 pages) has been printed by Adam Marszalek Publishing, Poland, by the Professor of Social Sciences of the University of Wroclaw, Zbigniew Wiktor, entitled Chiny na drodze socialistycznej modernizacji (‘China on the Course of the Socialist Modernisation’, Torun, 2008).

It represents the result of Wiktor’s long-term studies of the development of social relations in the People’s Republic of China, its economic and political system, supplied by observations during his stay in China in Autumn 2005, including his scientific work in the University of Wuhan.

China’s enormous size, with 1.3 billion inhabitants, a diversity of lifestyles, its rapid development in the last thirty years, its continuous flow of reforms in politics and economics – all this sets extremely difficult tasks before a social scientist – not only to give an objective reflection of reality, but to determine the tendencies of the motive forces in its future development. While Wiktor has quite successfully accomplished the former task, he has not quite managed the latter; more details will be given below.

As Wiktor notes in the beginning, ‘The problems outlined are really vast. This made me refer to various kinds of sources, to the literature and to apply different research methods, including historical and comparative methods, to apply the political and state-law analysis, and first of all, the method of historical and dialectical materialism, so as to enable the reflection and analysis of the relations between the economics and politics in the People’s Republic of China’ (p. 11).

(The translations from the Polish hereinafter are done by the author of this review.)

Note that Wiktor refers to Marxism as his main research method. The author of this review also advocates these views. However, this does not stop us from assessing the Chinese reality from another viewpoint.

Let us now pass onto the analysis of Wiktor’s book, starting with the conclusion from the book (quoted from the English afterword of the Polish book, with minor stylistic amendments).

‘The essence of the modernisation and reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping and continued by his successor was the new attitude towards the market. The Chinese leader has stated (contrary to his predecessor – Mao Zedong) that the market does not have to be an alien and hostile category and mechanism for the socialist economy but it can lead to a huge increase of production and contribute to dynamism and modernisation in the socialist economy. This modernisation had significant effects not only for practical activities but also influenced theoretical discussion on the basic thesis of Marxist political economy and the theory of scientific socialism. New categories such as socialist market and socialist market economy (which since 1992 has been a constitutional principle of the PRC) were created.

Modernisation and Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were based on the assumption that the dogmatism of Mao Zedong (who had huge successes in leading the socialist revolution in China and creating the basis of socialism but also was not free from numerous mistakes) must be given up. Mao Zedong implemented equalising principles of socialism under the conditions of historical economic backwardness of China – with a quite high pace of development but from a very low initial level, when even extreme poverty was common and its sign was the ‘iron rice bowl’. Poverty and want – said Deng Xiaoping – even shared justly cannot be ideals of socialism like the ‘barracks socialism’ promoted by Maoists also at the international level. The CPC considered that China is still in the initial stage of socialism, when small economy dominates the countryside and plays a significant role in the cities, and that it needs to be steered towards fast development under state and legal control and the socialist state economy. It has also considered that this aim can be achieved through broad international cooperation with foreign capital and trade relations. In this issue the Chinese leadership has used earlier Soviet experience from the 1920s when V. I. Lenin proposed, after huge destruction during the civil war, a new course for the Soviet state – the New Economic Policy (NEP), which put an end to chaos after the revolution, rebuilding of the economy, reviving of international trade and, what is most important, preparing the state for the realisation of the new tasks during later period.’

The text quoted above shows that Wiktor shares the CPC’s official view that socialism is compatible with commodity-money relations, i.e. market relations. We cannot agree with such a position if we are to base ourselves on the model of scientific socialism. The errors in this position will be obvious if we understand by socialism the social system with the comradely mode of production, where wage labour is eliminated. Thus everybody becomes a worker taking part in productive labour, where the exploitation of people by people is liquidated, where the contradiction between the city and countryside and the contradiction between intellectual and physical labour are done away with, where many state functions have withered away. Socialism is the first stage of communism.

It is clear that modern China with its mixed-mode economy, with capitalist and small-production modes, is nowhere near to satisfying these criteria. The free-market socialism in the PRC is the social system of transition between capitalism and socialism.

Actually, Wiktor writes, ‘the CPC foresees that China will complete the transformations inherent to the transition period between socialism and capitalism only by 2050’.

‘This means that it is half way there; in terms of the maturity of socialist relations, it is only in the initial phase of socialist construction.’

Obviously Wiktor has not quite thought this question through, because in the Russian-language summary (p. 531) he states that China is in the initial stage of socialist construction, while in the English-language summary (p. 521) he says it is ‘in the initial stage of socialism’. Everybody would agree that the two things are not the same.

Wiktor states that the practice of economic reforms in China demands the discussion and revision of the fundamental positions of Marxism-Leninism. We are confident that there are no grounds for such statements; defending these fundamental positions, including the versatile development incorporating new aspects, is a vital task for Marxist-Leninists.

The tragic experience of the dismantlement of the USSR and Eastern European countries has shown everybody that in the end, socialism in its early stage was defeated due to the course taken for free market and privatisation. The continuous economic growth during the reforms, the fact that these reforms were carried out in the backward conditions of China’s production shows the impossibility of restricting oneself just to the planned economy.

At the same time, loosening free-market relations, assisting their functioning in all sectors of economy, means blocking the road to socialism.

The book includes four chapters and the author’s Chinese diaries. To understand the complicated processes taking place in the course of economic reforms in China the central portion of the book is Chapter 1, the Contradiction in China.

These contradictions are analysed from the viewpoint of the PRC’s international position and at the internal level. China’s current economic policy is directed at incorporating the country into international relations.

Quite symbolic is the quote in this chapter by the Vice-President of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Li Shenming, ‘China has to be active and remain calm in the processes of economic globalisation. There are no other options. Globalisation carries a risk. All countries and peoples have merits and specifics which have to be honoured. So all countries have to carry out the policy of openness in relation to others. In this century with its rapid development of science and technology, no country can afford to cut itself from the international influence. These countries would remain backward, would be passive and would be subject to attacks’ (p. 12).

This incorporation into the system of international relations is taking place under conditions where world imperialism headed by the USA confronts the peoples’ drive to social and national liberation. In relation to this, Wiktor notes, ‘The United States is willing to take control of the course of globalisation today in different aspects of international relations; this is the USA that since the 1990s has wanted to implement a uni-polar system of international relations. Globalisation in military techniques means the US’ drive to new hegemony, whose expression is the expansion of NATO, the growth of armaments, the appearance of new generations of armaments, and the US-instigated local wars, under the guise of the UN and NATO. Globalisation’s other problems are the expansion of the population in the so-called Third World, the energy crisis, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, international terrorism grown beyond any reasonable limit; to stop it, actions on an international scale are necessary. Globalisation in the area of politics and culture engenders other consequences, whose analysis requires special attention’ (p. 15).

This kind of analysis of the modern world is insufficient, as it does not address the main contradiction of modern times – the contradiction between the social character of production and the private character of appropriation under capitalism, engendering the antagonistic contradiction of labour and capital, leading inevitably to economic crises and social upheavals, preparing the conditions for world wars and social revolution.

A major part of Chapter 1 is devoted to the analysis of changes taking place in the relations of production in China, in the class structure of the society, in the process of class struggle and in the corruption that has affected social life.

Relations between two economic modes are considered. ‘In the last twenty years the social sector has become an important element in the free-market economy’. This is exactly the way it is described in the up-to-date version of the Constitution of the Peoples’ Republic of China. In the years of reforms, the privately-owned enterprises grew; many have turned into big corporations with multi-billion-dollar turnovers, among them the Peking Corporation of Hanjan, the Guandong Meidi, Liaoning Panpan, Zheijang Younger Group (p. 28). The private sector in the cities, which has grown in size, is complemented by the huge small-business sector in the countryside, which constantly engenders capitalist relations.

‘Private property in China has grown to the extent,’ Wiktor affirms, ‘that despite the fact that the State sector in the cities maintains the dominant position, some reviewers and theoreticians doubt the socialist character of public relations in the People’s Republic of China’ (pp. 25-26).

Wiktor notes the positive results established through the reforms in the state sector of the economy. But one of the processes draws one’s attention, the strong dependence of the results of the State sector on the external market.

Given the background of the enormous changes in all aspects of social life, Wiktor has paid much attention to the class contradictions in the modern China. According to the data given, the class structure of China has the following layout:

Workers in the production sector: 160 million people

Unemployed: 14 million people

Workers in other sectors in the economy: 146 million people

Workers in the services, the intelligentsia: 140 million people.

Economically active population (including the unemployed): 760 million (p. 76)

No doubt the relative political weight of the capitalist class is much higher than its numerical proportion of the total population. No matter how actively the representatives of this class swear to socialist principles, the class struggle of the capitalist exploiters against the working class is an undeniable fact.

‘The politics of reform and modernisation of China has led to the growth of private capital, invested in special sectors of the economy; first of all, home capital has been unleashed and is increasing its power many times over. It is now seen by a large part of party members as a major threat to the socialist relations in the future’ (p. 102).

Wiktor believes that the CPC and PRC leadership will be able respond to the new challenges of the class struggle.

Another expression of class struggle in China discussed by Wiktor is corruption. The processes of socialist market economy have made material stimuli more important. The gap between the wealth of the new bourgeoisie and the poverty of the working-class masses, the employees and the peasantry, has greatly increased. Under these conditions, bribery of full-time state and party workers has been a very important aspect in the activity of Chinese business people, especially those who have multi-billion dollar assets. However, the book has no reasonable answers to questions arising from this fact. Wiktor draws much attention to considering the changes in the property relations in the course of economic reform that have led to the differentiation of incomes among the Chinese population.

Of special interest is his detailed investigation of the influence of the Great October Socialist Revolution on the development of the liberation movement in China that led to the foundation of the People’s Republic and its influence on Chinese communists searching for the course of socialist construction appropriate to the national situation.

Part two considers the specific features of the political system in the PRC, its changes in the initial stage of socialist construction in the course of the economic reform. Its other features are analysed, such as the leading role of the CPC, the interaction of the CPC with democratic parties represented in the National People’s Congress, expressing the interests of the existing classes and layers in Chinese society, the implementation of the people’s dictatorship. The stages of development of the political system in the People’s Republic of China starting from 1949 are considered, including the basic statements in the Constitutions of the PRC of 1954, 1975 and 1982 and the five amendments to the current Constitution of 1982. Wiktor considers the principle of the democratic dictatorship of the people proclaimed in the Constitution of the PRC as the expression of the proletarian dictatorship in the specific conditions of the transition period leading from capitalism to socialism. We do not think this is correct. The replacement of the proletarian dictatorship, as a principle, by a people’s dictatorship, is evidence of the tendency to compromise in the political thinking of the CPC leadership. But what do they lead to?

For a long time now, the CPC’s theory and practice has not been based on a class approach when assessing the course of the reforms taken and international events.

‘As a result of action by internal and international facts,” Wiktor states, “the class struggle will exist in a limited form for a long period of time, and it may be aggravated under certain conditions. However, this is not the main contradiction…’ (p. 66).

Such an approach inevitably strengthens the positions of the national bourgeoisie, which is aligning with the bureaucrats in the administrative, economic and party apparatuses.

The tendency to abandon the class approach in the assessment of social events has been further developed in Jiang Zemin’s Three Representatives concept. It is aimed at merging the economic elite (the bourgeoisie) brought up in the reforms since 1978 into the CPC. Thus, instead of admitting and theoretically outlining the continuous antagonistic class struggle in China, there is an attempt to reconcile their economic interests and to call for their collaboration in the name of prosperity in China.

Unless we are driven by the illusion of capitalism being rooted in socialism, the political power of the working class (the proletarian dictatorship) is aimed at steadily rooting out capitalist relations of production and at establishing new ones, and would not be stopped by the prospect of applying justified violence against the exploiters. ‘Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another’ (K. Marx, F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party).

The report on the activity of the CPC CC Disciplinary Commission at the 16th Congress of the CPC stated unequivocally, ‘getting rid of corruption is an important political struggle, whose course is a matter of life and death for the Party and for the State’ (p. 88). No coincidence that CPC veterans, functionaries, military service people and scientists classify the current party course as openly revisionist in a letter to CPC CC General Secretary Hu Jintao (October 2004).

In part three, ‘The development and the world,’ Wiktor presented his view of the principal stages in the history of China from the foundation of the Republic of China in 1911 up to the present time. The analysis of the economic and political development of the People’s Republic of China throughout nearly sixty years is summarised in the following statement: ‘The essence of the theoretical discovery by Deng Xiaoping is that socialist economy has to be a market-based economy, regulated accordingly by a popular state in the interests of society. It is therefore necessary to regard this in the broad historical context as the utmost of all realistic chances today for the victory of socialism world-wide’ (p. 282).

To sum up the study of distinct questions investigated by Wiktor’s book, we see his undivided support for the socio-political and economic reforms carried out since 1978 by the CPC and PRC leadership headed by Deng Xiaoping and his followers.

Economic reform in the PRC carried out in the transition period between socialism and capitalism, the reform that has lead to a significant strengthening of capitalist lifestyle, is presented as the implementation of market-based socialism. The political reform whose essence is the departure from the principles of proletarian dictatorship is regarded as the overcoming of dogmatism and the enlargement of the camp of socialism’s supporters. These views are incompatible with the development of scientific socialism; they are a revision thereof.

‘Market-based socialism,’ unless it is specifically seen as a social system in transition, and unless an emphasis is made on its transitional character, is a false concept designed to cover for capitalist restoration. Socialist economy is not a modification of market economy, not a version of it, but its historic alternative, central to which is not profit but human needs and the work to base them on a scientific plan. Politically the substitution of a class-based, proletarian approach with the notorious concept of a state of all the people led to the collapse of socialism in the USSR. The PRC is open to the same kind of threat. In essence this is all about the great difficulties of the transition period, and the rubbish and confusion related to it, and about the recognition and application of the transition and hence the contradictory forms appropriate for the epoch.

Throughout his book, Professor Wiktor stands for defending the cause of socialism in China. We also see the cause of socialism in the PRC as our own. We are therefore critical in following the questionable course of the CPC’s and PRC’s current leadership that could threaten the socialist achievements of the Chinese proletariat and the entire Chinese people.

A confirmation of how far this leadership has departed from following the principles of scientific socialism has been the support for Resolution 1874 in the UN Security Council. This resolution, adopted unanimously by the Security Council, condemns the nuclear tests carried out on the 25th of May 2009 by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and thus provides for sanctions against this socialist country.

We would like to express the hope that Wiktor’s book, which contains rich factual material on the PRC’s economics and politics valuable for continuing discussion on the methods of socialist construction, will come out in Russian.

Source

The Night Zhou was Drunk Under the Table

By Ian Williams

As we approached the 60th anniversary on Thursday of Mao Zedong’s declaration that the “Chinese people have stood up,” I trawled through the memories of my time in China straddling 1970 and 1971, and found, with all the accuracy of retrospective prophesy, that there were more auguries of the current China than one might suspect.

Although my putative memoirs would be called “I was a Teenage Maoist”, by the time I landed in Beijing I was a callow 21-year-old, a month older than the People’s Republic. In fact, Zhou Enlai, the first premier, from 1949 until his death in 1976, repeated to us his dictum that it was too early to tell whether or not the French Revolution had been a success, let alone China’s. Forty years later, I wonder what Zhou, one of the more sophisticated and cosmopolitan of the Chinese leaders, but nonetheless a devoted communist, would have made of present-day China.

I was part of a delegation from an obscure British party that enjoyed unprecedented access to the Chinese leadership, including a drinking competition with Zhou – and a very risky argument about literature with Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who had, after all, instituted the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) by demonizing all but a tiny group of writers and artists. It was so long ago that even the Chinese used the old Wade-Giles Romanization system for the Mandarin language. We were in Peking (Beijing), and read the Peking Review every week. In fact, our visit featured in it.

Our sessions with the Chinese cadres were often like negotiations, conducted over innumerable cigarettes and a constant flow of tea. The idea was that whoever called for a bathroom break was conceding the field of battle. Sadly for Chinese pride, our side had been brought up on a diet of gallons of tea and bitter beer and had formidable resistance to such diuretics.

Even at the time, I had a sense of bewilderment at the relative isolation from the world outside, of the top leadership. They provided us with a daily English press summary of world affairs and the difficulties of a binary view of the world became apparent. For example, Pakistan was an ally of China, therefore it was socialist and progressive – which the Pakistanis themselves would hardly claim, while social-democratic governments, like the British Labour Party, were reactionary and capitalist to the core.

As for our visit: I suspect that Zhou had hoped that it would provide information and encouragement for his planned opening to the West. We were there before British premier Edward Heath, or former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and president Richard Nixon from the United States. Indeed, as almost the only gweilos (foreigners) in town, we could attract crowds just by peering in a shop window. In those far-off days, my hair was red, which was almost like having eyes on green stalks for some people. However, enlisting us as a resource for global realpolitik confirms the naivety of their approach.

We were a sectarian groupuscule with fewer members nationally than the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee. Our contact with the working political system in Britain was minimal and our knowledge of other countries tended to be based on contacts with equally out-of-touch groups. It would be nice to think that we changed the course of history, but there is absolutely no basis for thinking so. Our input probably pointed in the opposite direction to what they did. When we asked why they did not walk in and take Hong Kong, which was then ruled by Britain, Zhou suggested it was better to lessen the economic disparities between the two sides first.

Despite their own sectarian squabbles, despite the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese were at least dealing with some aspects of the real world. For example, they had built a state-of-the-art metro system in Beijing. Even though it was as yet unopened, Zhou took us for a ride on it, which tangentially introduced yet another paradox.

They told us, with almost schoolboyish glee at their boldness, that they were calling the metro station for Tiananmen Square “Zhuxi [Chairman] Station.” It was a paradox even then, that in the midst of history’s biggest-ever personality cult, no physical location was named after Mao, let alone any of the other revolutionary personalities. I can only presume that it was intended as a gesture of superiority to the Soviet proclivity for churning out city names in honor of top people.

This saved a lot of sign-painting during the various rectification campaigns, the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Not many of the leadership stayed in power throughout.

Apart from Zhou, we met the full Gang of Four – Jiang Qing and her close associates, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen – but we noticed the omissions. Lin Biao, the powerful military commander who rose to political prominence in the Cultural Revolution and whose picture and introduction was at the front of hundreds of millions of Little Red Books, was absent in name and person. In a seamen’s club in Shanghai, I noticed a book on sale by Chen Boda, Mao’s personal secretary. Our minders immediately took it out the case and said it was too old and faded to sell.

Our party chairman, Reg Birch, an old communist trade unionist, asked to meet his old chum, Kang Sheng. They brought along his wife instead, explaining that the head of the security and intelligence apparatus was indisposed. In fact, along with Chen Boda, it now seems as if he, and indeed Lin Biao, were at that time in the process of being purged.

Lin shortly afterwards died in a plane crash. Kang resurfaced long enough to ensure that the People’s Republic put its weight behind Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In retrospect, I am glad I never had to shake his hand. Kang was posthumously accused of sharing responsibility (with the Gang of Four) for the Cultural Revolution. The Gang of Four had effectively controlled the power organs of the Communist Party through the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution.

In contrast with all the mass campaigns and circus antics of the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in widespread social and political upheaval and and economic disarray, these purges were being conducted in secrecy with no word of them leaking out from the leadership.

A case in point was a bizarre Christmas feast with an elderly American couple, old-style communists who had moved to China and taken up citizenship and party membership. They were brought out because they knew several of the delegation, who had asked about them.

The turkey dinner was odd in several ways. The couple were Jewish for a start, and although our Chinese hosts were trying to be hospitable with the seasonal bird, they obviously found something alien about the idea of cooking an intact animal: it came as a sort of turkey construction kit, disassembled, cooked and then reassembled. As for the couple, it was only many years later that I heard that their goose had been well and truly cooked. They were languishing in prison, brought out and dusted off for us, and then returned afterwards. But nothing they said gave any of us any grounds for suspicion.

The full Gang of Four came along to join Zhou for talks and a banquet on New Year’s Eve. Jiang Qing stood out in a sea of nondescript cotton Mao suits. The still striking woman, who had reduced the repertoire of a huge nation to a handful of revolutionary Beijing operas, one ballet, the Red Detachment of Women, and pretty much one classical sonata, flounced in, every inch the imperial consort. The former actress’ cotton greatcoat was draped around her shoulders like a cape, and she carried herself like an imperial consort.

When she discovered that I had been studying English literature, she immediately pronounced that Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’ Hard Times were the only two English proletarian novels. Even as I blurted out a negative, I was thinking hard. I saw the rest of the senior leadership of the party withdraw a little in expectation of the thunderbolt to come. Jane Eyre was clearly a bit too close to home. A governess who marries the boss had too much resonance with the career of a Shanghai starlet who married the chairman. I concentrated on Hard Times, pointing out that its hero was in fact a strikebreaker – a traitor to his class in Marxist terms.

Through narrowed eyes, Jiang delivered her ultimate riposte, “You have long hair. It makes you look like a girl.” There was a barely concealed sigh of relief around the table. At least it was not “Off with his head!” or “Counter-revolutionary scum”.

The evening, after a banquet fit for an emperor, ended with drinks for us and Zhou and his entourage. The Gang of Four did not, as I remember, hang around. It became a drinking match, with shots of mao tai, the ferocious-smelling sorghum-based overproof liquor that had become the official drink of the party.

As the youngest there, but already with a reputation as a determined drinker, I was moved forward as the champion on going glass-for-glass with Zhou, a man with an iron constitution. But I saw how he stayed ahead. He only drank half his, while I was drinking the lot. Even so, he gave up first, as I remember – allowing for the fact that after large amounts of the stuff, memories can be unreliable.

Despite the Moscow-style purges going on behind the wainscoting, economically, China’s development was more balanced than that of the Soviets. We could go on a pub crawl through the streets of Beijing, pijui – beer, being one of the early accessions to our Mandarin vocabulary and although, for example, cotton was rationed, consumer goods seemed in adequate supply. In the covered market, locals looked superior as Aeroflot pilots came rushing through stocking up on things from soap to razor blades to tomatoes that the Soviets’ heavy industrial base couldn’t provide.

The variety of cigarettes, from coffin nails to the crush-proof packs of the most expensive brands, has always made me wonder about the role of tobacco in industrialization – selling the peasants highly profitable cigarettes was a financially painless way of raising state funds compared with expropriation. The other aspect was the amount of collective entrepreneurial activity that was taking place, even after years of disruption from the Cultural Revolution, which had not officially finished by then.

For example, in the countryside, communes were making cement boats for sale, while in Shanghai we visited a back-street factory that was etching silicon chips – almost state-of-the-art at the time. Even then, I remember wondering about the flue that vented the hydrofluoric acid fumes from the process onto the street. In a microchip, it encapsulated the future environmental problems of reckless development, even as it demonstrated the entrepreneurial urges that Deng Xiaoping was later to unleash.

I returned to Britain puzzled. The Cultural Revolution had not visibly destroyed the economy, as was sometimes claimed. But it was difficult to know what it was all about. It was bad enough when party leaders were denounced for esoteric sins of culture and ideology during the Cultural Revolution, but these silent purges and behind-the-scenes disappearances reduced the struggles to personalities and power-plays. Mao himself seems to have been playing off the leaders against each other.

So perhaps that was the twin legacy of the first 20 years. It developed the ground for the upsurge of economic activity in which China seems not only to have stood up but appears to be racing ahead. But it also has left the Communist Party totally committed to clinging onto power, without much in the way of ideology, while its leadership changes behind closed doors, with only the faintest pretence of consulting the masses. And by all accounts, party leaders at every level are still fond of banquets and mao tai.

Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush’s War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

“Mao Tsetung Has Died” by Enver Hoxha

(A diary entry from Enver Hoxha’s “Reflections on China Vol. 2″ written the day of Mao Tse-Tung’s death. In it, Hoxha interprets Mao’s legacy as that of a “revolutionary democrat” who brought progress to China, but whose thought was marred by eclecticism and liberalism that impeded the development of socialism in China. Hoxha wrote this entry during the early stages of the the rightist coup d’etat in China, a former ally of Albania which had recently cut off aid to the country.)

THURSDAY
SEPTEMBER 9, 1976

Today the death of Comrade Mao Tsetung was reported. His death saddens and worries us, especially in this disturbed situation. It is a great loss for China.

In my opinion, Mao Tsetung was a revolutionary, a personality of importance, not only for China but on an international level.

Mao Tsetung led the Communist Party and the great Chinese people to the major victory of the liberation of China from enslavement by occupiers and from the reactionary clique of the Kuomintang. This was an achievement of great historic importance, both for the Chinese people and for the socialist camp and the peoples who fought and are fighting for liberation.

Under the leadership of Mao, the construction of socialism began in China. (At least, this was our belief up till recently, when we are seeing that this «construction» has gone with zigzags.) In our opinion, matters have already reached the point when the question must be asked: Which will triumph in China, socialism or capitalism? Therefore the death of Comrade Mao Tsetung gives rise to great concern amongst us about the future of the Chinese people and the course China will follow after his death. Of course, we can make no pronouncements on this at present, time will make this clear to us. May we be proven wrong, but the result of this line, which the Chinese revisionists call «Mao Tsetung thought» and which has nothing in common with Marxism-Leninism, will spell nothing good for China.

Mao Tsetung, as a thinker and philosopher, as a revolutionary democrat leader of the Chinese people, is an historical personality, but history and Marxist-Leninist analysis of the situation in China will explain that while he was a philosopher with a broad culture, he was not a Marxist-Leninist. He was profoundly influenced by the old Chinese philosophy of Confucius, etc., and as the eclectic he was, he brought Marxism-Leninism into his work only in the form of mutilated principles and ideas.

It was precisely his philosophical eclecticism which made Mao what one may call a moderator for the different currents which have existed continuously in China, which he permitted, encouraged and put in allegedly dialectical «collision». However, the activity of a moderator might influence for good or for evil, but in any case such a thing could operate only so long as Mao himself was alive. Now he is dead. Will China remain red, and this red be turned into a true, fiery, revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist red?

This is what we desire and hope for with all our heart and soul, with all our communist sincerity, because this is for the good of China, the revolution, socialism and communism. We Albanian communists will remember Mao Tsetung with respect for his good aspects, for those positive ideas and his long revolutionary activity, but in regard to those political, ideological and organizational views and stands which we consider to have been mistaken and non-Marxist, we have not sat and will not sit idle without pointing them out and criticizing them. Leninism teaches us that we must always be correct and objective and not subjective or sentimental.

Regardless of our disagreement with many of his judgements, the death of Comrade Mao Tsetung saddens us also, because he always showed himself to be a friend and admirer of our socialist country and the Party of Labour of Albania and, as the communists and internationalists we are, we must not ignore this. We can say that Mao Tsetung was the main and decisive person in the Chinese leadership who assisted the People’s Republic of Albania with economic and military credits and he accorded this aid in an internationalist spirit. In the same spirit, our Party assisted China, stood beside it and defended Mao in both good and difficult times, especially against the attacks of the Khrushchevite revisionists, as well as during the Great Cultural Revolution.

Immediately we heard about his death, we decided to send a Party and Government delegation with Comrade Mehmet at the head, but in the statement which the Chinese leadership released we read that foreign delegations would not be welcome to take part in the ceremonies organized on this occasion.

Naturally, we took measures to send messages of condolence and see that wreaths were laid in Peking, to organize visits and send messages of condolence to the Chinese embassy in Tirana from the leadership of the Party, the state, the mass organizations, the educational, cultural and scientific institutions, as well as delegations from the working collectives of Tirana and a number of industrial enterprises and agricultural cooperatives of other districts.

Source

Ho Chi Minh shown as sympathetic to the Albanian-Chinese line in Khrushchev’s Memoirs

“I remember when the conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties in Moscow was being held in [November] 1960 [...] The Chinese spoke out against us. Enver Hoxha conducted himself especially rabidly as an agent of Mao.

[....]

Ho came over to me then and said: “Comrade Khrushchev, you ought to concede the point to them.”
I said: “How can we concede? Why, it’s a matter of principle!”
Ho said: “Comrade Khrushchev, China is a huge country, they have a huge Communist Party. The concession should be made to them. A split cannot be permitted. It’s necessary that the Chinese sign the document together with everyone else. This document will have great international significance.”

[....]

I felt very bitter later when the Chinese decided to make an open break with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the other fraternal parties. China has powerful influence in Vietnam. A large stratum of the population there is Chinese. Pro-Chinese people even hold key positions in the leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party. They have carried on their work against the Soviet Union and against our policies [...] The pro-Chinese elements in Vietnam had done everything they could to start a quarrel, to turn Vietnam away from the Soviet Union, and set our two parties fighting against each other.

After Beijing broke off all political and business relations with us, de facto, and did everything in its power against us, it began trying to impose its views on Vietnam. Unfortunately the Vietnamese Workers Party took the Chinese bait. This is very bitter for us [...] Later on, Vietnam did everything to favor China against us, against its own interests.

[....]

Our relations [with the Vietnamese] were good, and if they grew worse later, the blame for that lies not with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In my opinion, it was the result of Mao’s influence.

[....]

If ho’s alleged testament [read at his funeral] is analyzed [...] I think the document was drawn up in a pro-Chinese spirit.”

- Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev: Statesman, 1953-1964, p. 501-506

Confessions of a fake Marxist

Pieter Boevé, a.k.a. Comrade "Chris Petersen"

As leader of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, Pieter Boevé was fêted by the world’s communist dictators for 40 years. What they didn’t know was that he was an undercover agent. Finally unmasked, he tells all to Stephen Castle There was one catch: the leader of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands wasn’t really a communist at all. Stephen Castle reports

Enver Hoxha, gesturing, meets Pieter Boeve, right, in Tirana, Albania.

Once Pieter Boevé called the masses to the barricades. Today, he waggles his walking stick at his local train station in the Netherlands. As the founder of a political party for the elderly, he is calling for an escalator to be installed. There’s no stopping some people. For Mr Boevé spent much of the Cold War preaching the word of Mao and Marx in the West. He was fêted in Beijing, toasted in Moscow and met the leaders of the Communist world.

Once Pieter Boevé called the masses to the barricades. Today, he waggles his walking stick at his local train station in the Netherlands. As the founder of a political party for the elderly, he is calling for an escalator to be installed. There’s no stopping some people. For Mr Boevé spent much of the Cold War preaching the word of Mao and Marx in the West. He was fêted in Beijing, toasted in Moscow and met the leaders of the Communist world.

Yet now, Mr Boevé peruses a menu at a café in the Dutch seaside town of Zandvoort. He muses over a Chinese option – “Chicken Beijing Lunch” – and rejects it. And then he confirms a secret that fooled the Communist world for generations. He was no lover of the red flag. He was, in fact, a spy all along.

Through the years of the Cultural Revolution and Nixon’s visit to China, he made regular trips behind the bamboo curtain. The then Mr Petersen skilfully navigated his way through the ideological lurches of his Communist hosts and visited places off limits to almost everyone else in the West as the leader

of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands (MLPN). Mr Boevé’s incredible story has made him something of a celebrity in this town of 17,000, where he is greeted in the supermarket as the “James Bond of Zandvoort”.

Over 35 years Mr Boevé met Nikita Kruschev in Moscow, Enver Hoxha in Tirana, and shook hands with Chairman Mao. But the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands he led was a sham, staffed mainly by Dutch agents.

The revelation of his extraordinary life has left left-wing activists across Europe wondering whether their comrades through the 1970s and 1980s were all they seemed to be. As a 25-year-old student and part time mathematics teacher, Mr Boevé was always an unlikely recruit to the cause of Communism. True, he was a political campaigner but his allegiance was to the Dutch liberal party, the forerunner of today’s centre-right VVD, which was instinctively capitalist in outlook.

As an increasingly confident Soviet Union sought to project its image in the West, the authorities in Moscow began preparations for a youth festival to be held in the country’s capital in 1955. Bizarrely, a request for candidates to go to Moscow for the token price of 150 guilders was sent to the Dutch liberals among other political parties. A friend in the party who worked for the Dutch secret service (BVD) approached Mr Boevé and asked if he would be willing to go to Moscow and report back to the service. Yes, said Mr Boevé, not knowing that he was embarking on a 35-year adventure of deceit and double-dealing that would give him access to some of the most senior figures of Communist Cold-War politics.

Even now, 50 years on, sipping a cola next to the fire in the Café Neuf in Zandvoort, Mr Boevé seems a little vague about why he opted for such a life. He was, he insists, never paid by the BVD though it later provided a car big enough to transport reams of Communist propaganda, and stepped in to make up his salary when he took time off between jobs to attend a lengthy indoctrination course in Beijing.

He says he retained a strong aversion to the Communist system and believes he helped, in some small way, to win the Cold War. But Mr Boevé’s main motivation may have been the intoxicating excitement of leading such an exotic double life. At one point in our conversation he turns to me and says: “Wouldn’t you have liked the chance to do something like that?” Multilingual and, by his own admission a good actor, Mr Boevé managed to blag his way into becoming the leader of the Dutch organising committee for the Moscow youth festival, vetting those who applied to go to Moscow. His BVD controllers could not believe their luck as a list of Communist sympathisers fell in their lap.

While the rest of the 700 Dutch delegation took the train to Moscow, Mr Boevé was flown there, met Mr Kruschev (“a nice man”) and made a broadcast in Dutch on Radio Moscow. In 1958, China organised its own youth festival and Mr Boevé was invited. Initial Chinese suspicious of the young Dutch liberal were overcome and he embarked on a five-day journey from Amsterdam to Beijing.

That was followed by regular visits to the Chinese embassy in the Netherlands which led to an invitation to shed his “bourgeois ideas” and join the Dutch Communist Party. As a teacher, membership of the CP was impossible, so Mr Boevé’s new political allegiance was a secret to everyone except the BVD. Then came the Sino-Soviet split which also divided Communist sympathisers. Dutch intelligence saw a chance to split the far left and prompted Mr Boevé to help set up the MLNP to follow Beijing’s line. Its propaganda may have been funded by the Chinese embassy in the Netherlands, but the organisation was controlled by seven or eight BVD agents including Mr Boevé, who adopted the pseudonym Chris Petersen.

By 1963 he was back in Beijing, this time for a formal Communist education. He was put up at the best hotel and treated as a VIP but the hospitality came with a price tag: lengthy study of the thought of Mao. “I learnt how to think in the Chinese way. It even became possible for me to make a speech in a Mao style,” he recalls. Meanwhile, Mr Boevé held down a job as director of a technical school in Schoonhoven near Rotterdam.

With financial backing from the Chinese, what became known as Operation Mongol did not even cost any money. “In fact it made a profit”, says Mr Boevé. “The Chinese always paid in dollars.” By virtue of his party position and links with the Chinese, Mr Petersen was introduced to Communists in a host of countries, travelling extensively around Europe and beyond. The Albanian embassy in Paris fixed up a visit to Tirana where Mr Boevé met Mr Hoxha (who “seemed a nice man though we know he was not” and who spoke “excellent French”).

More trips to Bejing followed with audiences with Deng Xiaoping, Chou En-lai (a “clever, educated man who spoke German and French”), and even Mao himself. Though this was only a handshake, it afforded much celebration at the BVD, which had never had any agent so close to the Chinese leader.

Back at home, Chinese diplomats in the Netherlands were told the MLPN had a membership of about 500 but the party was really made of “about 25 agents and about 15 people stupid enough to join us”, says Mr Boevé.

The Chinese were not the only ones to be fooled: one Dutch academic even donated 20 per cent of his salary to the party, money he now wants refunded by the BVD. Meanwhile, Dutch secret service agents became experts in Maoist ideology, denouncing the evils of their capitalist government. Although the Chinese knew Mr Petersen’s real name, they did not bother to monitor his movements or, if they did, failed to spot regular meetings with a BVD controller. Other clues were overlooked, including one occasion when Mr Boevé spoke publicly about how to manage the tax system in order to pay less – not usually a Maoist preoccupation.

Mr Boevé told his wife (from whom is he now separated) and two sons about his double life and seems phlegmatic about the risks. He says: “I was told, ‘if you make a mistake. If you are put in prison and you admit that you are an agent, we cannot help you. You will be on your own, and you know what that means in those countries.’ But I was never afraid, I was so sure that everything was so well organised here.”

Didn’t all the lying and deceit get him down? On the contrary, he says: “I am a little proud of what I have done. I have led a good life and I have added something to humanity.” Mr Boevé only revealed his role after being exposed in a book written by a former BVD agent, Frits Hoekstra. The revelation has placed the spotlight on his new political party for the elderly. But he still faces a struggle to make a group of three local councillors into a real political force.

But all that time in Beijing has left him prepared for the battle to come. He might just get his escalator. As Chairman Mao once put it: “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”

Source

Dutch math teacher admits fake communist party scam that fooled Mao Zedong

The Guardian
December 4, 2004
Jon Henley

A 76-year-old retired Dutch math teacher described yesterday how for more than 25 years he was feted by communist leaders around the world as the inspired head of a radical Marxist-Leninist party that never, in fact, existed.

As Chris Petersen, head of the supposedly 600-member Marxist-Leninist party of the Netherlands, Pieter Boevé travelled to Beijing more than two dozen times and met Mao Zedong. He was also welcomed with open arms in Albania by Enver Hoxha, and in the eastern bloc capitals of Europe.

“In fact we had at most a dozen members, none of whom had the faintest idea of the truth,” Boevé said on Friday from his home in the seaside resort of Zandvoort. “The whole thing was a hoax, set up by the secret services to learn all they could about what was going on in Marxist Peking.”

The Mao regime was so impressed by the revolutionary zeal of Petersen/Boevé and his MLPN that it gave him regular briefings on the chairman’s latest thinking at the Chinese mission in The Hague. Beijing even funded the non-existent party’s newspaper, De Kommunist, which was written entirely by Dutch secret service (BVD) agents.

“We took everybody in,” Boevé said proudly on Friday. “As far as I know, the MLPN was the only wholly fake radical party to have existed, and certainly the only one to have really worked. We passed inside information on every Maoist policy nuance to all the western intelligence forces. It was a wonderful adventure.”

Boevé was first recruited by the BVD in 1955 when he visited a World Student Congress in Moscow. Soon after, he was invited to China, then still the Soviet Union’s ally, for a similar communist youth junket. After the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s, the Chinese began courting western communists and, egged on by the BVD, Boevé played along.

“I was invited to Peking for a month-long course on the wisdom of Chairman Mao,” he said. “It was quite a baptism of fire. I hadn’t read a great deal of Marx or Lenin at that stage, let alone Mao. But I soon got very proficient. I could spout for hours.”

The foundation of the MLPN was announced by De Kommunist in 1969. Its main role was to undermine the official Dutch Communist party, the KPN, by denouncing its deviant beliefs and unreliable conduct, and to garner information on – and gain access to – the Maoist elite in Beijing.

In the latter task, it was successful beyond the BVD’s wildest dreams. “They adored us,” Boevé said. “I was invited to all the big events – Army Days, Anniversaries of the Republic, everything. There were feasts in the Great Hall of the People and long articles in the People’s Daily. And they gave us lots of money.”

Most European Maoist groups, unable to keep up with an endless string of purges and policy about-turns, had lost faith by the mid-1980s, and the MLPN gradually began winding down its activities. But as late as 1989, after the Tiananmen student uprising, Boevé was invited to Beijing to praise the regime’s crackdown.

The existence of Project Mongol, as it was dubbed by the BVD, was successfully kept secret until this September, when another former agent, Frits Hoekstra, published a book about the service’s glory days. It caused something of an uproar in the Netherlands, a country where a fair few genuine former radicals now occupy leading positions in public life.

Boevé, who was never a salaried spy and who, despite his extra-curricular activities, rose to become headteacher of a top Dutch grammar school, said he was at first unwilling to have his name revealed. “My family knew, but no one else,” he said. “As far as my friends and former colleagues were concerned, all my travel was to do with educational exchanges.”

Since the revelations about his former life as one of the west’s most productive spooks, Boevé said reactions have varied from shock and disbelief – “How can we ever trust you again?” – to mild amusement. “My fellow members of the Zandvoort town council call me 007,” he said. “I don’t mind. I’m satisfied with what I’ve done with my life. I’ve travelled the world at someone else’s expense, and I feel did my bit. And it was certainly fun.”

Source

Comrade ‘Chris Petersen’ Was Big in China and Albania; ‘Project Mongol’ Tell-All

The Wall Street Journal
December 3, 2004

In From the Cold: He Was a Communist for Dutch Intelligence

By ANDREW HIGGINS
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
December 3, 2004; Page A1

ZANDVOORT, Netherlands – As secretary-general of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, Chris Petersen traveled the globe during the Cold War, wowing Communist leaders with his revolutionary zeal and anti-capitalist diatribes.

“I could make speeches for hours and you would think that Mao Tse-tung himself had been my teacher,” recalls the now-retired party chief.

The Chinese Communist Party was so impressed, it regularly gave the ranting Dutchman the full red-carpet treatment in Beijing: banquets in the Great Hall of the People, an audience with Mao, envelopes stuffed with cash and tributes in the People’s Daily. Albania’s Communists were also big fans.

Now, with communism all but dead, the Dutchman has decided to come clean: Both he and his party were a sham.

He says he was never a Maoist but an opera-loving math teacher moonlighting for Dutch intelligence. His name, his politics and his party, he says, all were concocted in a plot to penetrate militant Marxist subculture.

“Nothing was real,” says the ex-Mr. Petersen, who now lives under his real name, Pieter Boevé, here in Zandvoort, a seaside resort town west of Amsterdam. The only genuine part of a revolutionary career that lasted decades, he says, was a fondness for Chinese food: The Chinese Communist Party, Mr. Boevé recalls, had excellent cooks.

The Central Intelligence Agency, which got regular updates on the mock Maoist movement, dubbed it “Operation Red Herring,” according to Dutch intelligence. (The CIA won’t comment.) The Dutch called it “Project Mongol.”

The unmasking comes at an uncomfortable time for Dutch security services, now under fire for post-Communist bungling. Having infiltrated Maoist groups with gusto, they lost track of an Islamic radical blamed for the murder last month of filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

Mr. Boevé, who appeared on television in a recent documentary about the Dutch secret service while wearing a fake beard and Groucho Marx plastic nose and glasses, says his past exploits provide tips that could help con Islamist extremists, but he doesn’t envy anyone who might try: “It’s very dangerous,” he says.

In a country where erstwhile Maoists and other radicals have become pillars of the establishment, the exposure of the phony Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, or MLPN, has caused dismay and embarrassment. Frits Hoekstra, a former high-ranking security official, shocked former colleagues in September by publishing a book that described Project Mongol and other escapades. The interior minister ordered an investigation into whether state secrets were divulged. Former Maoists are aghast.

“I totally wasted 12 years of my life,” says Paul Wartena, an ex-MLPN member who was so dedicated to the cause he used to donate 20% of his salary to the fake party. He says he “had some doubts now and then” about the MLPN but stayed loyal because “I was very naive and Mr. Boevé was such a good actor.” Now a researcher at a university in Utrecht, Mr. Wartena wants Dutch intelligence to pay him back for all his donations.

Mr. Boevé, now 74, scoffs at his acolyte: “He was an idiot.”

Mr. Boevé says he, too, is upset that his caper leaked but that Mr. Hoekstra’s book forced him in from the cold.

Conning so many people, says Mr. Boevé, was “not the most beautiful thing,” but it was a great adventure. He visited China about 25 times, made frequent trips to Albania and duped radical leaders in the West. After each journey, he went to a safe house in Amsterdam to pass on tidbits of information.

Set up and run by spooks in 1969, his party, the MLPN, had its own newspaper, De Kommunist, written and edited by the secret service. As well as Mr. Boevé playing Chris Petersen, the secretary-general, it had a chairman (another fraud) and a Central Committee stacked with secret agents. To add authenticity, the party let Mr. Wartena and a handful of other true believers join its otherwise nonexistent ranks, telling them that they were part of a network of underground cells.

Mr. Boevé first started working as an informant for the Dutch secret service, then known as the BVD, in the late 1950s and started using a fake name. Invited to Moscow for a youth festival in 1957, he attended a reception hosted by Nikita Khrushchev and briefed Dutch intelligence.

Mr. Hoekstra, a former head of counterintelligence against Soviet-bloc countries and author of the recent book, says Mr. Boevé’s recruitment wasn’t at first seen as a big deal, but, rather, as part of routine tracking of local Communists.

Shortly after the Moscow festival, however, Mr. Boevé got an invitation to China, then still aligned with the Soviet Union. While in China, he kept hearing Chinese officials curse Moscow, which had just cut funding to Beijing. The move marked the start of the Sino-Soviet split – and of Mr. Boevé’s role as an unlikely prize agent.

Desperate for allies against Moscow, China searched out Communists in Europe and elsewhere. Mr. Boevé, encouraged by the BVD, offered his services. He visited China in the early 1960s for a six-week course on Mao Tse-tung Thought. He says he got good at mimicking Chinese propaganda. The main difficulty, he says, was keeping up with the wild zigzags of Chinese politics: his hosts kept getting purged.

Chinese diplomats in Holland invited the man they knew as Chris Petersen to their mission in The Hague and gave money to help finance a Maoist newspaper secretly edited by the BVD. The result was De Kommunist. Mr. Hoekstra, the former spy and now a business consultant, says he once wrote a screed against the Dutch government. “As a civil servant, it was very satisfying,” he says.

After a year, De Kommunist announced with fanfare in 1969 the foundation of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands. “In order to limit as far as possible the danger of penetration by enemy elements,” it explained, “the MLPN organization shall be based largely on the cell system, obliging all members to the greatest possible secrecy.”

For the next decade, the fake party helped the Dutch secret police divide Holland’s legitimate Communist movement, keep tabs on Maoist groups and gain access to China’s elite. “Petersen” issued regular communiques – all drafted by the BVD – denouncing real Communists as sellouts and urging voters to reject them.

Mr. Hoekstra, the former intelligence officer, said the facade of Maoist fervor did sometimes wobble. On one occasion, he says, “Petersen” started talking in public about how to take advantage of tax deductions, not something a Maoist is supposed to worry about. He says there was concern the Chinese might smell a rat, but that faded. The Dutch, he says, had the Chinese embassy bugged and heard diplomats singing “Petersen’s” praises. “We could hear everything,” says Mr. Hoekstra.

By the 1980s, purges and ideological U-turns had exhausted most Maoists in Europe, and the BVD began to lose interest in the ruse. China was no longer an enemy but a big trading partner. De Kommunist shut down. The MLPN fizzled.

Mr. Boevé, though, kept going. In 1989, when troops shot dead hundreds of protesters around Tiananmen Square, he issued a statement praising the resolve of the Communist Party in restoring order. Shortly afterward, he was back in Beijing, hailing the party and its leaders.

In a small apartment crowded with an electric organ and piles of books, Mr. Boevé rustles through plastic shopping bags full of yellowing MLPN tracts and other mementos. One is a copy of a photograph of himself meeting Enver Hoxha, Albania’s Communist dictator from 1944 until his death in 1985.

Advancing age has finally slowed Mr. Boevé down. He walks with a cane and can’t climb stairs. His involvement with China is limited to visits to a local Chinese restaurant. He draws giggles by humming the “East is Red,” a Maoist anthem. “It’s a very nice tune,” he says.

His political horizons have shrunk to Zandvoort. He sits on the local council and lobbies for better housing for the elderly. He has even set up yet another party: It represents old people. It doesn’t have many members, but, says Mr. Boevé, “This time they are all real.”

Source

U.S. Citizens Used by F.B.I. Abroad

The New York Times
February 16, 1975

Bureau Confirms Practice—Authorities Say It Does Not Violate the Law

By JOHN M. CREWDSON
Special to The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Feb. 15—The Federal Bureau of Investigation periodically dispatches American citizens on intelligence-gathering missions outside the United States, according to a 42-Year-old Florida man who says he and others have been used for that purpose.

The man, Joseph A. Burton, who for more than two years, beginning in May, 1972, posed as a Marxist in order to infiltrate revolutionary groups here and abroad, told The New York Times that he had made “about 10″ sorties into Canada at the F.B.I.’s direction.

James Murphy, a spokesman: at F.B.I. headquarters here, confirmed in a telephone interview that the bureau has in the past sent American citizens abroad for intelligence purposes, but he declined to discuss specific cases.

The F.B.I., according to a former high official there, has “no right to run [intelligence] operations in a foreign country—that’s the C.I.A.’s jurisdiction.”

But neither he, nor legal authorities in and out of’ the Government who were asked about the practice, could point to any statute prohibiting the bureau from gathering intelligence overseas.

Another undercover operative, a woman with whom Mr. Burton occasionally worked, confirmed in a separate interview that she had made a month-long visit to China nearly four years ago in connection: with her work for the bureau.

Mr. Burton, an auctioneer and antiques dealer who lives in Tampa, Fla., told The Times that he ended his relationship with the F.B.I. last summer after becoming concerned about the legality of some of the; tasks he had undertaken, including the Canadian ventures.

He said that, last month, his doubts led him to write to: Clarence M., Kelley, director of the bureau, seeking assurances that his work outside the United States was “legal and proper.”

He has received no reply to that letter or to an earlier one. F.B.I. officials will not say whether a reply is forthcoming.

Apart from his concern that he may have violated the law, Mr. Burton’s account of his activities and that of his fellow operative provide an insight into a little-known aspect of the F.B.I.’s operations at a time when the agency is coming under increasingly stringent scrutiny.

Last month, the Senate set up a select committee to examine intelligence-gathering by Federal agencies, including the F.B.I. and the Central Intelligence Agency, whose occasionally overlapping jurisdictions have created some difficulties in the past.

Talk of Albania

Although his forays outside the United States were confined to Canada, Mr. Burton said, “There was some talk of my going to Europe and also going to Albania. The bureau would have let me go to Albania. They wanted me to go.”

He was in the process of securing an invitation to visit the tiny Communist country, he said, when be decided to break off his relationship with the bureau.

Mr. Burton said he was once asked by an F.B.I. superior whether he would “like to go to Mexico, walk into the Chinese embassy and say that you’ve got this organization in Tampa and that you want to work with the Chinese.”

Mr. Burton then headed a, sham “revolutionary” group in Tampa, called the “Red Star Cadre,” that, he said, had been set up as a front for his F.B.I. work. He said he told the inquiring agent that he would not “insult the Chinese by trying to pull something that stupid on them.”

During the Canadian trips, he recalled, his instructions were: to develop contacts with members of the Canadian Communist party’s pro-Chinese wing, and to report to the F.B.I. on their activities, including any signs that the organization was passing funds from China to Maoist groups in the United States.

Accompanied by Woman

On two of the trips, he said, he was accompanied by an American woman who had adopted a similar radical pose in the New Orleans area, and who told him that she had visited China to gather political intelligence for the bureau.

The woman, a 36-year-old housewife and mother, confirmed in an interview in the Southwestern city where she now lives that she spent four weeks in China in 1971 with one of the first groups of Americans allowed into that country after President Nixon’s announcement that he would visit there.

When first asked about that trip, the woman said, “It’s better not to discuss any F.B.I. operations outside the count try.”

But after being assured anonymity, she conceded that she had entered China “before Nixon” as part of a “delegation made up of American radicals,” and had made “four or five” trips into Canada as well.

The woman asked that she not be identified for fear of reprisals from the left against her or her husband, with whom she had worked in penetrating leftist political organizations in Louisiana and elsewhere.

‘A Detail Specialist’

The reports she submitted to the F.B.I upon her return, she said, were filled not only with information about her traveling companions, but also with her observations of Canton, Shanghai and Peking, the Chinese capital, where, she said she had been introduced to Premier Chou En-lai.

“I was concerned about everything,” she replied when asked what sort of information she supplied to the bureau. “I was a detail specialist.”

Asked whether she now entertained any misgivings about her work, her voice trembled as she said, “I spent a month in China, wondering if I was ever going to go home again: wondering if they were ever going to find out what I was doing.

“I feel like I’ve put my life on the line for a good cause, and I don’t feel like that all ought to go down the drain because someone wants to make a sensational story.”

The former F.B.I. intelligence official said he had read the woman’s reports on China, but could not recall whether any of the information had been shared with the C.I.A.

Hoover’s Strategy for ‘Glory’

On more than one occasion when the F.B.I. sent a covert operative abroad, the official said, J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the bureau, would “instruct us not to advise” the C.I.A. of the Intelligence that was produced.

“He wanted to outscoop the C.I.A.,” the man said. “He wanted the F.B.I. to come back with valuable information which he would give to the President over his signature, so he would get the glory.”

Added the official: “He was wrong.”

When first asked about Mr. Burton’s activities, officials of, the bureau here said that all queries should be addressed to Nick F. Stames, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Tampa field office, under whom Mr. Burton had worked.

Mr. Stames, who last week was notified that he was being transferred to the bureau’s Washington field office, said repeatedly in a recent interview that he would not respond in any way to Mr. Burton’s disclosures or charges beyond the following statement:

Services ‘Discontinued’

“Joseph A. Burton volunteered his services to the Tampa F.B.I. office in May. 1972, and was able to establish contact with several Marxist-Leninist groups.

“He was paid for his service in providing information and expenses incurred in connection with its acquisition.

“During his periods of assistance to the F.B.I. Burton was instructed not to engage in any illegal activities and we have no information indicating he did engage in illegal activities.

“Burton’s services were discontinued in July, 1974, at his own request, as he indicated he desired to provide security for his family and because he was no longer willing to be associated with the Communist revolutionary movement.”

The former F.B.I. official said that the bureau maintains agents in a number of foreign capitals who serve as “legal attaches” and who have their offices inside American embassies. But he said that their role was officially limited to performing a “liaison” function with foreign policy agencies and that they were barred from “positive,” or active gathering of intelligence.

Not Special Agents

Mr. Murphy, the spokesman for the bureau here, said that the F.B.I. was “not operational outside the country” and, without confirming that either Mr. Burton or the woman had ever traveled abroad, he pointed out that neither was a special agent of the F.B.I.

Asked how he would describe the pair, Mr. Murphy replied that they were considered “paid informants.”

A spokesman for the C.I.A., which is charged by law with the gathering of intelligence outside the United States, said his agency would have no comment on any reports concerning the F.B.I.’s external intelligence operations.

Told of the bureau’s description of him as an “informant,” Mr. Burton bristled.

“What information did I sell them?” he demanded. “When they called me and told me to go to Canada, was I selling them information? When they asked me to set up ‘Red Star,’ was I selling them information?

“If the bureau asked me to go to Canada or Pennsylvania or anywhere,” he went on, “at first they would say, ‘Do you want to go?’ After a while they just said, ‘You’re going to Canada.’”

Full-Time Help

Both Mr. Burton and the couple from New Orleans pointed out repeatedly that they had worked virtually full time for the F.B.I.

Mr. Burton produced a letter from Mr. Stames showing that, in addition to travel and other expenses; he was paid $2,923 for his work for the bureau during the first seven months of last year.

The New Orleans couple said that during their service as undercover intelligence operatives they received an average of “about $16,000″ a year from the bureau.

Told of Mr. Murphy’s explanation that, because he had not graduated from the F.B.I. Academy as a special agent he was officially considered an “informant,” Mr. Burton laughed and replied:

“The only thing I didn’t learn [by not attending the academy] is how to pick up a phone and say, ‘This is not your F.B.I. We didn’t do it, no, We don’t know them, thank you for not calling us’

“That and the karate course, I think, are the only two things I missed.”

Dismissing an informant as “somebody who asks, ‘How much will you give me for some information,’” Mr. Burton emphasized that he received instructions from and made reports to his F.B.I. superiors on a daily basis, and that he was directed both here and abroad to act “in other than a passive role.”

As his first Canadian assignment, he recalled, he was instructed to attend a conference of the Canadian Communist party’s pro-Chinese wing, an organization of which he said he eventually became a voting member and to which he periodically donated funds supplied by the F.B.I.

Without seeming to do so, Mr. Burton said, he had been able to cause a “rift” among some of the leftist organizations represented at the conference. Upon his return to Tampa, he said, the bureau “congratulated” him on his success.

Displaying anger at what he deemed attempts by bureau officials to play down the importance of his activities, Mr. Burton asserted that last July, just before he broke with the bureau, he was told by an agent:

“If you want to do a book on your association with the bureau someday after this has all settled down, we would be more than happy to help you, and we will supply you with a publisher.”

Mr. Burton said he declined the offer, saying that, “By the time you cut out everything I want to put in, there wouldn’t be any book.”

Source

William Ash’s “Pickaxe and Rifle: The Story of the Albanian People” on Khrushchev’s Secret Speech

“At the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February, 1956, after three years of preparation, Khrushchev presented in the report of the Central Committee a number of ‘new’ theses described as ‘a creative development of Marxist-Leninist theory’ which were in fact a complete departure from Marxism-Leninism. Collaboration with imperialism which he labelled ‘peaceful co-existence’ was exalted as the general line of the foreign policy of all socialist countries… Khrushchev made it clear that he was prepared to give up international class struggle, renouncing on behalf of the colonial peoples any right to liberate themselves from oppression and reassuring capitalist governments by emphasising ‘peaceful transition to socialism’ or the Parliamentary road as the only correct line for communist parties everywhere. If only the United States imperialists were given to understand that their economic and military positions all over the world were not to be challenged then they would give up their aggressive designs against the socialist block.

What this really amounted to was an attempt to freeze the world situation just as it was, with all its injustices and inequalities, for the sake of a ‘peace’ which the two major world powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, would guarantee with their nuclear might. The ‘creative development of Marxism-Leninism’ which Khrushchev was advancing was simply the division of the world into Soviet and American spheres of influence… ‘Then’, Khrushchev was to say, ‘if any mad man wanted war, we, the two strongest countries in the world, would have but to shake our fingers to warn him off’ – and included among the ‘mad men’, of course, were any popular leaders wishing to take their countries out of imperialist bondage. Instead of challenging the policy of nuclear blackmail which the United States government had used ever since the war to keep the world safe for the operations of monopoly capitalism, Khrushchev was going to use the Soviet Union’s nuclear capacity to get in on the act. That this was the case was demonstrated later on when Albania’s opposition to the Khrushchev line prompted the threat from Kozlov, a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Party, that ‘either the Albanians will accept peaceful co-existence or an atom bomb from the imperialists will turn Albania into a heap of ashes and leave no Albanian alive’….

The basic political question on which Khrushchev’s attempt to diverse the whole line of the Soviet Communist Party depended was whether or not class conflict had ceased to exist in the Soviet Union. Lenin always took an absolutely unequivocal stand on this issue, holding that during the entire historical period separating capitalism from the classless society of communism, that is the period designated as socialism, class conflict did continue and therefore the dictatorship of the proletariat remained a political necessity for the development of a socialist society. Indeed, after the assumption of state power by the working class, bourgeois elements would struggle even harder to re-establish themselves…

Furthermore, if class conflict had ceased to exist, the Party and state instead of being the political and governmental expressions of the dictatorship of the proletariat could be designed by Khrushchev as the Party and State of the ‘whole people’. But in this formation he departed altogether from anything remotely resembling Marxism. The Marxist view developed by Lenin in such works as ‘State and Revolution’ … was that the state always represented the interests of a particular class in a society in which there was still class conflict. Neither the state nor the communist party was above class struggle and they would cease to exist when classes ceased to exist, in ‘the withering away of the state’ which Marx had only predicated of the classless society of full communism. Therefore a party or a state of the ‘whole people’ was nonsense from a Marxist point of view; Stalin, in his last theoretical work, ‘Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR’, which attacked revisionist ideas in precisely the same terms the Chinese and Albanians were to use in the polemics following the 20th Congress, specifically criticised the ‘state of the whole people’ concept as an anti-Marxist attempt to undermine the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In fact, the denial of any further need for the leadership of the working class in a situation where other classes still existed merely prepared the way for those anti-working class elements to recapture political power and begin diverting the Soviet Union from a socialist course. That this was the intention of Khrushchev and the revisionist clique around him became apparent in the economic changes which accompanied these political manoeuvres The decentralisation of the economy was not a loosening of control from the centre but a change from control by organs responsible to the working people like the state and Party to control by experts, managers and bureaucrats. With this change went a shift in motivation from the socialist incentives of putting collective above personal interests to material incentives no different from those characteristic of capitalist society. The so-called economic liberalisation was simply a move from socialism to state capitalism and, as such, was naturally hailed as a break-through by bourgeois economists everywhere… But it was never intended that such a restoration would threaten the position of the revisionist party hacks and state officials who had brought it about – hence the continuing conflict between bourgeois writers and artists in the Soviet Union demanding the freedom of expression they might have expected in a bourgeois democratic society and the Soviet state apparatus with the same bourgeois values who were prepared to welcome works attacking Stalin and the dictatorship of the proletariat but were not prepared to countenance those criticizing themselves and the bureaucratic dictatorship they had imposed.”

 – William Ash. Pickaxe and Rifle: The Story of the Albanian People. London: Howard Baker Press Ltd. 1974. pp. 183-187.

Maria Antonietta Macciocchi on Stalin and Mao

“There is a radical difference between Stalin and Mao… When Communists make mistakes, the Chinese Communist Party attempts to save them, based on the directive that ’95 percent of the cadres are healthy’ This is the exact opposite of the Stalinist work of destruction…Many Chinese cadres whose positions were very different from Mao remained in the party, and even on the Central Committee. Thus after the line they were supporting was rejected, Li Li-san and later Wang Ming remained members of the Central Committee. They were removed at the Ninth Congress, but they are apparently still members of the party…In Peking we were told that Chen Yi, who still held the title of Minister of Foreign Affairs but was no longer exercising the functions of that office, is supposed to have told Mao that he did not have the courage to attend the Ninth Congress because of what he feared was going to happen. ‘No, on the contrary,’ Mao replied, ‘you must go, you’ll represent the opposition’…Liu Shao-chi’s work, How to Be a Good Communist, became, as we have seen, one of the bases of every debate about the party. The basic texts of Khrushchev have been disseminated throughout China. The Chinese even say that Peking is the only city where you can find the complete works of Khrushchev-they are not available in Moscow…”

- Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, “Daily Life in Revolutionary China”

Enver Hoxha on Class Struggle Under Socialism

“[The Party of Labor of Albania] has waged and is waging the class struggle in the correct Marxist-Leninist way, inside and outside the Party, and this is the motive force during the whole period of the transition from capitalism to socialism.”

– Enver Hoxha, 1968 Selected Works Vol. IV p. 427,  “The Working Class in the Revisionist Countries Must Take the Field and Re-Establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”

“The ideological and cultural revolution is a part of the general class struggle to carry the socialist revolution through to the end in all fields. Contrary to the views of the modern revisionists, who have declared the class struggle in socialism outdated and a thing of the past, our Party holds that class struggle remains one of the main motive forces of society, even after the exploiting classes have been eliminated. This struggle includes all fields of life. It has its ebbs and flows and zigzags, sometimes it surges up, sometimes it falls back, sometimes becomes fierce, at other times more «mild», but it never ceases and dies right away.”

– Enver Hoxha, Selected Works Vol. IV, p. 165, “Report to the 5th Congress”

“Acceptance or non-acceptance of the class struggle in socialism is a question of principle, it is a line of demarcation between Marxist-Leninists and revisionists, between revolutionaries and betrayers of the revolution. Any deviation from the class struggle has fatal consequences for the future of socialism.”

– Ibid.

“The revolution overturns a whole world, let alone a single tradition. Since the class struggle goes on during the whole period of the construction of socialist society and the transition to communism, and since political parties express the interests of specific classes, the presence of other non-Marxist-Leninist parties in the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat would be absurd and opportunist, especially after the economic base of socialism has been built.”

– Enver Hoxha, 1967, Selected Works Vol. IV, p. 307 “On the Role and Tasks of the Democratic Front in the Struggle for the Complete Triumph of Socialism in Albania”

“In practice we often come across a narrow concept on the class struggle and class enemy, which regards only the kulaks and other elements of the former exploiting classes, or the imperialists and Titoite and Khrushchevite revisionists abroad as class enemies, and only the struggle against their anti-socialist activities as class struggle. The struggle against these enemies remains, as always, a primary task for our Party, our state and our working people. But we should take a broader view of the class struggle. It is a many-sided struggle which is, first and foremost, an ideological struggle today, a struggle for the minds and hearts of people, a struggle against bourgeois and revisionist degeneration, against all alien remnants and phenomena which still exist and manifest themselves in various degrees among all our people — it is a struggle for the triumph of our communist ideology and morality.”

–  Enver Hoxha, Selected Works Vol. IV p. 166, “Report to the 5th Congress”

“The issues we are raising at this Plenum are closely linked with a major cardinal problem, that of the understanding and development of the class struggle in the proper way. The Party has long made it clear that the class struggle is one of the main motive forces of our socialist society, that it is a very broad struggle which is waged in all fields, both against internal and external enemies and within the ranks of the people and the Party, and that in the existing conditions the class struggle on the ideological front assumes special importance.”

– Enver Hoxha, 1973, Selected Works Vol. IV,  848, “Intensify the ideological Struggle Against Alien Manifestations and iberal Attitudes Towards Them”

“The struggle for the communist education of the working people against the remnants and manifestations of alien ideologies, old and new, constitutes the broadest and most complex front of the class struggle which is going on in our country. This struggle becomes especially important and acute in the present conditions when our country is forging ahead in the construction of socialism, relying entirely on its own forces, when the struggle between socialism and capitalism, Marxism-Leninism and revisionism in the international arena has become extremely severe and when the imperialist-revisionist encirclement and its pressure on our country have become more ferocious.”

– Enver Hoxha, Selected Works Vol. VI, pp. 372-373.

“The modern revisionists with the Soviet ones at their head claim that all class struggle ends with the elimination of the exploiting classes. This is a hoax which serves to disarm the working class and lull it into sleep and this way pave the path for the restoration of capitalism. This has been most clearly shown in the Soviet Union and in other former socialist countries where the new capitalist bourgeoisie seized power.

The experience of our country refuted these false and capitulationist theories of the disappearance of class struggle under socialism. The whole history of the construction of socialism in Albania is a story of uncompromising struggle between revolution and counter-revolution, between the two paths of development, against the internal and external enemies both within the people and the Party. This struggle has been waged continuously and always vehemently. Only its forms and methods have changed according to the circumstances and stages of development. Even after elimination of the exploiting classes as classes the inner and outer enemies have not for a single moment laid down their arms or halted their fight against socialism. Therefore our party and our people have waged the class struggle with strict consistency and in a correct Marxist-Leninist way in all areas as a crucial condition for the final victory of the socialist way over the capitalist.”

– Enver Hoxha, “Proletarian Democracy is Genuine Democracy”

“Which of them will triumph? Marx and Lenin, Marxist-Leninist science, the theory and practice of the revolution, provide us with convincing proof that, in the final analysis, the proletariat will triumph by destroying, overthrowing the power of the bourgeoisie, imperialism and all, exploiters, and will build a new society, socialist society. They teach us also that even in this new society, classes, that is, the working class and working peasantry, which are closely allied to each other, will exist for a very long time, but there will also be remnants of the overthrown and expropriated classes. During this entire period, these remnants, as well as elements which degenerate and oppose the construction of socialism, will try to regain their lost power. Hence, under socialism, too, stern class struggle will exist.”

– Enver Hoxha, Imperialism and the Revolution

“Thus he (Mao) does not see the socialist revolution as a qualitative change in society in which antagonistic classes and the oppression and exploitation of man by man is abolished, but conceives it as a simple change of places between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.”

- Enver Hoxha, Imperialism and Revolution

“The class struggle continues and will continue in the period of the construction of socialist society, but we have the impression that in China this struggle is not carried out consistently, is weak and not based on sound and lasting principles. When there are vacillations in line there will certainly be wavering stands towards enemies.”

– Enver Hoxha, Reflections on China Vol. II, p. 147

“Only once, Chou [en-Lai], this liberal and opportunist element, when he came to our country made a criticism of us, allegedly that our Party was not waging the class struggle. When we faced him with the facts, telling him that during its whole existence our Party had waged a stern class struggle inside and outside our country, as well as within the ranks of the Party itself, he was obliged to beg our pardon, saying, «I do not know the history of your Party as well as I should».”

– Enver Hoxha, Reflections on China Vol. II, p. 241

“But Mao also put forward other theses and views with which we have never been in agreement. He wrote a good deal about the class struggle, about contradictions, etc., but the class struggle in China, in practice especially, has not been waged sternly and consistently.”

– Enver Hoxha, Reflections on China Vol. II, 283

“Liu Shao-chi, this revisionist, had delivered a whole report to the comrades of one of our delegations about the alleged rightist mistakes of Stalin, alleging that Stalin had said that the class struggle was over, etc. What irony! And who was saying this? The person who, at the 8th Congress of the Communist Party of China, advocated coexistence with the capitalists! L iu Shao-chi emerged as the Chinese Khrushchev!”

– Enver Hoxha, Reflections on China Vol. 1 , p. 328

“Even within the party a class struggle must be waged, indeed a stern struggle, to totally liquidate the anti-party, anti-Marxist faction as quickly as possible.”

– Enver Hoxha, Reflections on China Vol. 1 , p. 358

“He proves with scientific argument why the class struggle will continue until the construction of communism and why the fate of socialism depends on the correct understanding of this struggle which is waged in a coordinated manner on the internal and external plane, why socialism is threatened not only from abroad, by a military aggression, but also from within the country, by degeneration and peaceful counter-revolutionary evolution.”

 – Enver Hoxha, Selected Works Vol. IV, Forward, p. VIII

“The exploiting classes could not be eliminated immediately, either in our country or in the other socialist countries. A fierce political and ideological fight, a violent war with arms, a stern and continuous class struggle under the unwavering leadership of the Marxist-Leninist party is needed for the proletariat to wrest political power by violence from the hands of the exploiting capitalist class and establish the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to eliminate the economic base of the exploiting class and private property in general, to eliminate the capitalist relations of production and establish socialist social ownership and the socialist relations of production, to turn the existing socialist property into the property of the entire people; and simultaneously, to build a new socialist superstructure, by radically purging every remnant of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois policy and ideology from the consciousness of the people.”

– Enver Hoxha, Selected Works Vol. IV, p. 51-2, “Our Party Will Continue the Class Struggle”

“Hence, our Party believes that, notwithstanding that the exploiting classes have been liquidated, the danger of bourgeois and revisionist restoration always exists if you rest on your laurels and do not advance at a great revolutionary tempo, if you are not guided in everything by Marxism-Leninism, if you cease the class struggle instead of waging it consistently and uninterruptedly, if you weaken the dictatorship of the proletariat instead of further strengthening it, if you divorce yourself from the people instead of linking yourself with them as closely as possible, if you prove cowardly instead of being valiant and courageous and in continuous, dauntless, unrelenting struggle against imperialism, revisionists of all hues and all lackeys of the bourgeoisie and capital.”

-  Enver Hoxha, Selected Works Vol. IV, p. 66, “Our Party Will Continue the Class Struggle”

“As you know, we have had a controversy over principles with the Chinese comrades, not mainly over the class struggle, but about “the existence of the feudo-bourgeois class as a class, as an entity which fights us, even from positions of state power, at a time when state power in our countries is the dictatorship of the proletariat.” We know what our thesis is and this we base on our struggle, on facts and on Marxist-Leninist analysis. The Chinese comrades have claimed the contrary. As you know, we have told them that it may be so in their country, but not in ours, because the class struggle in our country has been waged and continued consistently from the time of the National Liberation War and since the war right to this day, and it will go on against the remnants of the feudo-bourgeois class, etc., etc. There is no bourgeoisie in power in our country.”

–  Enver Hoxha, Selected Works Vol. IV, p. 98, “Some Preliminary Ideas about the Chinese Proletarian Cultural Revolution”

Lenin on the Revolutionary Potential of the Colonies & Neo-Colonies

“I should also like to emphasize here the importance of the movement in the colonies. In this respect we witness in all the old parties of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals the survivals of old sentimental conceptions–there is much sympathy for the oppressed peoples of the colonies and semi-colonies. The movement in the colonies is still regarded as an insignificant national and completely peaceful movement. However, that is not the case. For great changes have taken place in this respect since the beginning of the twentieth century, namely, millions and hundreds of millions — actually the overwhelming majority of the world’s population — are now coming out as an independent and active revolutionary factor. And it should be perfectly clear that in the coming decisive battles of the world revolution, this movement of the majority of the world’s population, originally aimed at national liberation, will turn against capitalism and imperialism and will, perhaps, play a much more revolutionary role than we have been led to expect.”

–Lenin, “Tactics of the Russian Communist Party, Report to the Third Congress of the Communist International” (July 5 1921)

“In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe.”

–Lenin, “Better Fewer, But Better,” March 2, 1923

Lenin on Colonialism

“For example, if tomorrow Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be ‘just,’ ‘defensive’ wars, irrespective of who attacked first, and every socialist would sympathize with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slave-owning, predatory ‘great’ powers.”

 – Lenin, Socialism and War

“Socialists must not only demand the unconditional and immediate liberation of the colonies without compensation—and this demand in its political expression signifies nothing else than the recognition of the right to self-determination; they must also render determined support to the more revolutionary elements in the bourgeois-democratic movements for national liberation in these countries and assist their uprising—or revolutionary war, in the event of one—against the imperialist powers that oppress them.”

  — Lenin, The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination

“We welcome the close alliance of Moslem and non-Moslem elements. We sincerely want to see this alliance extended to all the toilers of the East. Only when the Indian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Persian, and Turkish workers and peasants join hands and march together in the common cause of liberation—only then will decisive victory over the exploiters be ensured.”

 – Lenin, To the Indian Revolutionary Association

“From these fundamental premises it follows that the Communist International’s entire policy on the national and colonial questions should rest primarily on a closer union of the proletarians and the working masses of all nations and countries for a joint revolutionary struggle to overthrow the landowners and the bourgeoisie. This union alone will guarantee victory over capitalism, without which the abolition of national oppression and inequality is impossible.”

 – Lenin, Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions

“[...] the Communist International should advance and theoretically substantiate the proposition that with the aid of the proletariat of the advanced countries, the backward countries can pass over to the Soviet system and, through definite stages of development, to communism, without going through the capitalist stage.”

 – Lenin, Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial Questions

Liberal Holocaust: Imperialism and the Democratic Party

This is a good article from a website that is now down. I disagree with several parts, particularly the labeling of North Korea as a “Stalinist dictatorship,” referring to the Soviet Union as an “empire,” saying that Titoite Yugoslavia was a “Leninist revolution” and denying the genocidal actions of the Milošević government. Regardless, this article makes a very important point about the Democratic Party, and exposes their true imperialist warmongering nature.

 – Espresso Stalinist 

Many people involved in US anti-war movement(s) have this naive belief that Democrats are not imperialists, that US imperialist policies, such as those pursued by the Bush administration, are just a recent deviation or limited to Republican administrations. In fact, the Democratic Party has a long and bloody history of imperialism. Democrats are imperialists and mass murderers. Nor is this limited to the more conservative democrats; left-liberals have done the same. Liberal governments have slaughtered millions.

Starting shortly before the end of World War Two, Democrats began recruiting many Nazi war criminals and using them to help expand the American Empire. Hitler’s intelligence chief in East Europe Reinhard Gehlen was used by the US, after the war, to build an intelligence network against the Soviets in East Europe. They also dropped supplies to remnants of Hitler’s armies operating in Eastern Europe, to harass the Soviet bloc. Other Nazi war criminals employed by the US included Klaus Barbie, Otto von Bolschwing and Otto Skorzeny. Some of these Nazis later made their way to Latin America, where they advised and assisted US-backed dictatorships in the area.

Harry Truman kicked up anti-communist hysteria, which lead to McCarthyism (which occurred during his administration) and helped start the Cold War. He supported numerous dictatorships, including Saudi Arabia. US involvement in Vietnam started under Truman with the US providing support for the French invaders and the CIA carrying out covert actions. In 1950 his administration issued the ultra-hawkish NSC 68. The subversion of Italian democracy was done by his administration – fearing electoral victory in 1948 by the Italian Communist party, the CIA funded various leftover Mussolinite Brownshirt thugs and other former Nazi collaborators, successfully manipulating the results to ensure pro-US candidates won. A secret paramilitary army was formed to overthrow the government just in case the Communists managed to win anyway.

In the years after World War Two a rebellion against the British puppet government in Greece broke out. This client state was largely staffed by former Nazi collaborators who the British had put back in power. The UK was unable to defeat the left-wing insurgency (which had previously fought an insurgency against the Nazi occupation during World War Two) and asked the US for help. In 1947 Truman invaded Greece and proceeded to crush the revolutionaries, keeping the former Nazi collaborators in power. Truman attempted to justify this by portraying the guerillas as mere pawns of Moscow and therefore a form of covert aggression, but he had no real proof of this. The claim is also based on a double standard: when the USSR (allegedly) covertly supports revolutionaries in another country it constitutes “aggression” and is wrong, but when the US (or UK) send actual military forces to another country in order to prop up unpopular dictatorships this is somehow perfectly just.

At the end of World War Two Japan withdrew its forces from Korea, resulting in a brief period of self-rule. A provisional government was set up in Seoul, but it had little power. Across Korea, workers took over their factories and peasants took over their land. Self-managed collectives were organized. This did not last long, as the US and USSR quickly partitioned the country into a North and a South, under the occupation of each power. In the south Truman installed a brutal military dictatorship, run mainly by former Japanese collaborators, complete with death squads, torture chambers and suppression of all opposition. The United States and its client state suppressed an insurgency, leveled whole villages and massacred thousands of innocent Koreans. The Soviets followed a similar policy in the north, where a Stalinist dictatorship was imposed. Forces from each empire repeatedly clashed until war broke out in 1950. Truman & his propagandists tried to portray the war as an attempt to defend South Korea from Soviet/Northern aggression, but the very existence of South & North Korea was the result of aggression by the US & USSR. The Korean War was an inter-imperialist war between rival empires fighting for territory, rather like a turf war between rival mafia dons, in which lots of ordinary people (who had no real stake in the war) were sent to die for their elite.

These policies of mass murder continued in both the subsequent Eisenhower administration and the next democratic administration, Kennedy. Like every other president since World War Two (and many prior to that) he supported numerous puppet dictatorships that slaughtered thousands – Mobutu, the Shah, etc. Kennedy backed a coup against the democratically elected government in the Dominican Republic because it was too independent. And lets not forget the Bay of Pigs and the many terrorist campaigns against Cuba.

Kennedy also escalated US involvement in Vietnam. During Eisenhower’s term the Vietnamese defeated US-backed French invaders and the war with France was brought to an end. The country was partitioned in two, with the Vietnamese nationalists/Communists taking over the north and the French puppet government temporarily ruling the south. Elections were to be held to reunite the two, but the US intervened to prevent this (because the Communists would have won free elections) and put in power a right-wing dictatorship headed by Ngo Dinh Diem which relied on a reign of terror in order to stay in power. In the late ’50s popular rebellions erupted against this dictatorship. By the time Kennedy came to power the survival of Diem’s dictatorship was increasingly precarious and so Kennedy escalated the situation from state terror to outright aggression. The US military, mainly the air force, was sent to crush the resistance. This failed to defeat the resistance, so Johnson fabricated a bogus attack on US destroyers by North Vietnamese forces and used this as an excuse to escalate the war, launching a full-fledged ground invasion of the south and began bombing the north. US forces set up concentration camps (called “strategic hamlets”) and committed numerous atrocities during the war. Even John Kerry testified:

“Several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. … They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. … We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. … We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals. … We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater.”

Kerry has since claimed that Vietnam was an exception to the norm, but the evidence presented in this article shows otherwise. This testimony is corroborated by numerous other primary sources, including many Vietnam veterans. Colin Powell admitted these atrocities occurred and defended them, writing in his memoirs (My American Journey):

“If a helo [helicopter] spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM [military-aged male], the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him. Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had served at Gelnhausen, Lt. Col. Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong.”

In addition, Powell defends the torching of civilians’ huts in his memoirs. There are also many Vietnam veterans who strongly deny that the United States committed any kind of atrocities or wrongdoing in Vietnam at all, but they are not the first murderers to strongly deny murdering anyone. These are the kinds of atrocities the Democrat’s foreign policy leads to.

Democrats (and Republicans) tried to portray the war as a result of Chinese (or even Soviet) aggression that had to be stopped or else it would cause a “domino effect” leading to “Communist” conquest of the globe. This is shear fantasy.

Vietnam became independent in 1945 and for a brief period of time the whole country was united under the rule of Ho Chi Min and his fellow nationalists and Marxists. Then France invaded, with US support, leading to the creation of “South Vietnam,” which was a foreign puppet from day one. Attacks on it by Vietnamese were no more “aggression” than attacks on the Vichy government by the French resistance. Communists in China didn’t come to power until 1948, whereas Vietnam declared independence in 1945, so portraying the war as “Chinese aggression” is particularly absurd. Eventually, China did provide weapons, money and advisors to Vietnam (as did the USSR), but merely giving supplies to people fighting for independence hardly constitutes “aggression.” If China giving some weapons and supplies to a Vietnamese movement with substantial popular support constitutes “aggression” then what are we to make of the US, which went well beyond sending weapons and sent over 100,000 troops to keep in power a deeply unpopular puppet government? By this kind of logic, the American war for independence constituted French aggression because France gave the rebels support, just as China & Russia gave the Vietnamese support, except France went even further and sent warships to fight the British and help the US win the war. The Vietnam War was a brutal colonial war, started mainly by democrats, against a people struggling for national liberation.

Even if we ignore Vietnam, Johnson was still a murderous warmonger. In 1965 Johnson launched a secret war on Laos, which would eventually drop more bombs on it then were dropped during World War Two, in order to defeat the leftist Pathet Lao. When a popular rebellion erupted against the US-backed dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, LBJ invaded and defeated it, keeping a US puppet government in power. In Brazil LBJ supported and encouraged a fascist coup against the mildly reformist Goulart administration. Johnson also backed a right-wing coup in Indonesia. The previous ruler, Sukarno, committed the crime of trying to stay neutral in the cold war and desiring to build a strong Indonesia independent of foreign powers. So he was removed and general Suharto seized power. The US helped Suharto liquidate dissent and gave him lists of “subversives” to kill. Between 500,000 and a million people were massacred by Suharto in the period following the coup, with the covert help of the Johnson administration. When the Greek ambassador objected to the President’s plan for a resolving a dispute over Cyprus LBJ told him:

“Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant’s trunk, whacked good. … We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not last very long.”

In 1965 the Greek king, aided by the CIA, removed Prime Minister George Papandreou (who’s foreign policy was too independent for Washington) from power. In 1967 the Greek government was forced to finally hold elections again, but when it looked like George Papandreou was going to win again a military coup prevented him from coming to power. George Papadopoulos, leader of the coup and head of the new military dictatorship, had been on the CIA payroll for 15 years and was a Nazi collaborator during World War Two.

Carter, the so-called “human rights” president, was also an imperialist warmonger. He continued US support for brutal tyrants in Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc. Carter supported Pol Pot’s forces after they were thrown out of power due to a war with Vietnam. Under Ford Indonesia invaded East Timor and proceeded to slaughter 200,000 people. Although this invasion occurred under Ford, the worst atrocities happened under Carter’s reign. As atrocities increased, he increased the flow of weapons to the Indonesian government, insuring they wouldn’t run out and could continue massacring Timorese. Carter also backed the massacre in Kwangju by the South Korean military dictatorship. Many of the things which liberals like to blame Reagan for were actually started under Carter. Deregulation began under Carter, as did US support for the Contras in Nicaragua. Six months before the Soviets invaded he also initiated US support for the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists/”freedom fighters” in Afghanistan which would later include Bin Laden.

Bill Clinton was a mass murderer and war criminal, too. He backed numerous dictatorships, continued the proxy war against Marxist guerillas in Columbia and bombed more countries than any other peacetime president, including Iraq, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan.

Clinton laid siege to Iraq with sanctions, “no fly zones” and bombings, killing 1.5 to 3 million people. UN-approved sanctions on Iraq were originally imposed at the start of the Gulf War in response to the invasion of Kuwait, but continued after the end of the war at US (and UK) insistence. The United States used sanctions as a weapon against Iraq. One military intelligence document titled Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities noted:

“Iraq depends on importing-specialized equipment-and some chemicals to purify its water supply … With no domestic sources of both water treatment replacement parts and some essential chemicals, Iraq will continue attempts to circumvent United Nations sanctions to import these vital commodities. … Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease and to certain pure-water-dependent industries becoming incapacitated, including petrochemicals, fertilizers, petroleum refining, electronics, pharmaceuticals, food processing, textiles, concrete construction, and thermal power plants. Iraq’s overall water treatment capability will suffer a slow decline, rather than a precipitous halt … Unless water treatment supplies are exempted from the UN sanctions for humanitarian reasons, no adequate solution exists for Iraq’s water purification dilemma, since no suitable alternatives … sufficiently meet Iraqi needs. … Unless the water is purified with chlorine epidemics of such diseases as Cholera, Hepatitis, and Typhoid could occur … Iraq could try convincing the United Nations or individual countries to exempt water treatment supplies from sanctions for humanitarian reasons. It probably also is attempting to purchase supplies by using some sympathetic countries as fronts. If such attempts fail, Iraqi alternatives are not adequate for their national requirements. … Some affluent Iraqis could obtain their own minimally adequate supply of good quality water from northern Iraqi sources. If boiled, the water could be safely consumed. Poorer Iraqis and industries requiring large quantities of pure water would not be able to meet their needs. … Alternatives are not adequate for their national requirements.”

This and other documents show that the United States intentionally used sanctions to destroy Iraq’s water supply with full knowledge of the consequences. In addition to water problems, the sanctions also interfered with the importation of basic necessities like food and medicine. The UN itself, the organization that implemented the sanctions (due to US/UK insistence), reported that they resulted in mass death. UNICEF found that on average 5,000 children died every month as a result of sanctions. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported in 1995 that 567,000 children in Iraq had died as a result of the sanctions. Those sanctions continued until the invasion in 2003, killing even more. This began under the first Bush administration, but most of it occurred under Clinton’s administration.

In 1996, faced with mounting humanitarian concerns that threatened to end the sanctions, an “oil for food” program was implemented. Officially, this was supposed to allow Iraq to import a limited amount of food and supplies in exchange for limited amounts of oil but in practice it did little to alleviate the suffering of Iraqis caused by the sanctions. Everything imported by Iraq had to be approved by a UN sanctions committee that, due to US/UK influence, frequently stopped or delayed importation of needed supplies. All money Iraq made from the sale of oil was kept by the UN in an escrow account with the bank of Paris and was not at the discretion of the Iraqi government. Some of this was used to pay for administrative costs related to the sanctions and about a third were used to pay reparations to Kuwait, the remainder was inadequate for Iraq’s needs. In 1998 Dennis Halliday, the first head of the UN’s “oil for food” program resigned because the sanctions continued to result in a humanitarian catastrophe. In 2000 Hans Von Sponeck, the new head of the “oil for food” program, resigned for the same reason. On the May 12, 1996 edition of “60 minutes” journalist Lesly Stahl asked Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state,

“We have heard that a half million children have died [from sanctions on Iraq]. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright’s response was, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”

Clinton attacked and dismembered Yugoslavia, using a “divide and conquer” strategy to install US/NATO puppet governments ruling over its corpse. During and after World War Two Yugoslavia underwent its own Leninist revolution, independent of Soviet tanks, and eventually evolved a market socialist economy based on a limited form of worker self-management. Most of the economy was run by enterprises that were officially worker owned, with elected managers, and sold their products on the market. Yugoslavia was a federation of different nationalities in southeastern Europe, with six different republics united under a federal government.

As the Soviet empire declined and fell western financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank began pressuring Yugoslavia to implement neoliberal capitalist reforms such as privatization, austerity measures and so on.

Yugoslavia implemented these on a limited basis. These programs lead to a declining economy that opened the door for opportunistic politicians to whip up nationalism for their own benefit, scapegoating other nationalities for economic problems. They also stressed relations between the federal government and the republics because money that would have gone to the republics instead went to servicing Yugoslavia’s debt. The United States and Western Europe took advantage of this to encourage the breakup of Yugoslavia into NATO protectorates.

In 1990 separatists won elections in Slovenia, Bosnia and Croatia. The new Croatian government began to persecute the Serb minority living in Croatia, even bringing back the flag and other symbols from when it had been a World War Two Axis puppet government (run by a fascist organization called the Ustase) that attempted to exterminate the Serbs (who were regarded as “subhuman”). Croatian President Franjo Trudjman refused to condemn the Ustase and claimed, “the establishment of Hitler’s new European order can be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews.” Croatia and Slovenia declared independence in 1991. West Europe and then the US recognized Slovenia and Croatia as independent states despite warnings from the UN that this would encourage Bosnia to declare independence and bring about a civil war, which it did.

The Yugoslav federal government fought a small ten-day war with Slovenia, after which Slovenia was allowed to leave Yugoslavia. Croatia and Bosnia fought bloody civil wars with the Yugoslav government. In Bosnia the main forces fighting against the federal government were Croat fascists, supported by Croatia, and Islamic fundamentalists, led by Alija Izetbegovic, who aimed to turn Bosnia into a theocracy similar to Iran or the Taliban. Most of Bosnia’s Serb minority sided with the Yugoslav federal government. The US covertly backed the Islamists and fascists by secretly supplying them with weapons and even flying in Muslim ‘holy warriors’ from Afghanistan so they could join the Jihad. Initially the Islamists and fascists in Bosnia worked together against the Serbs and Yugoslav government. Later they started fighting each other, but US & West European pressure eventually put a stop to that. When the Yugoslav government started winning the war NATO sent in the air force to bomb them and support the separatists. Many atrocities were committed on both sides of the war, but Western governments and media emphasized and exaggerated Yugoslav and Serb atrocities while downplaying or ignoring atrocities committed by the separatists.

In 1995 the war came to an end, in a defeat for Yugoslavia. Under a UN fig leaf, NATO “peacekeeper” troops occupied much of the former Yugoslavia while Bosnia was made into a de-facto NATO colony, occupied by NATO troops and with a “high representative” responsible to foreign powers in charge of the country. Yugoslavia was dramatically shrunk, with only two out of six Republics, Serbia and Montenegro, remaining in the union (Macedonia had been allowed to peacefully leave the union in the early ’90s but at this time was still largely outside the Western sphere of influence).

The next phase of Clinton’s conquest of Yugoslavia began in the late ’90s when the CIA began covertly supporting the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a terrorist organization that has been linked to Osama Bin Laden. The KLA launched a guerilla war in the Kosovo province of Serbia, advocating independence for Kosovo. In 1999, under the guise of “peace negotiations,” the US/NATO issued an ultimatum demanding Yugoslavia allow NATO troops to occupy the entire country. Yugoslavia obviously refused this unreasonable demand and Clinton used this refusal as an excuse to begin a major bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. After several months of bombing pulverized the country a peace deal was reached allowing NATO “peacekeeper” troops to occupy Kosovo (but not the rest of Yugoslavia), effectively turning the province into a NATO protectorate. A year later a revolt led by US-funded groups and politicians overthrew the Yugoslav government, putting pro-US/NATO leaders in charge. The new government abolished Yugoslavia and became a Western puppet. This conquest was completed shortly after Clinton left office, when KLA forces attacked Macedonia. Macedonia saw the writing on the wall and allowed NATO troops to occupy it. Clinton succeeded in not only ripping Yugoslavia apart, but in achieving US/NATO domination over the Balkans and in forcing an economic system favorable to Western investors on the region. A wave of privatization has swept over the former Yugoslavia, transforming it into a corporate capitalist economy colonized by Western capital.

The standard excuse Clinton used to justify the military interventions in Yugoslavia was that it was supposed to stop “ethnic cleansing”/”genocide” allegedly being perpetrated by the Serbs/Yugoslav government. This is obviously bogus because the US helped instigate the conflicts that lead to the various massacres in the war and also because Clinton largely turned a blind eye towards atrocities committed by separatist forces (like the massacres in Gospic and Krajina). It is also not credible because Clinton ignored other genocides (such as Rwanda) and even funded Turkey’s genocide against the Kurds, which occurred at roughly the same time and resulted in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Kurds.

The death toll of the democrats is quite large:

Greek Civil War: 160,000 (Truman)
Korean War: 3 million (Truman)
Assault on Indochina: 5 million (started under Truman, accelerated under Kennedy & LBJ)
Coup in Indonesia: 1 million (LBJ)
East Timor: 100,000 (Carter)
Kwangju Massacre: 2000 (Carter)
Argentine Dirty War: 30,000 (mostly Carter)
Iraq sanctions: 1.5 million (mostly Clinton)
Turkish Kurdistan: 40,000 (mostly Clinton)

That’s at least 10,8022,000 killed by democrats, 9,292,000 if one only counts the liberal governments (Clinton wasn’t really a liberal). For comparison, the Nazi holocaust killed roughly 6,000,000 Jews. And this is just the tip of the iceberg; these are only the most famous incidents over the last couple of decades. If you add up the total from periods preceding this and the less famous incidents the number get much, much higher. If you add in starvation (a direct result of capitalism) it gets even higher.

Democrats could have stopped the congressional authorization for the Iraq war (via filibustering) but instead lots of them defected to the warmongers’ side. They could have stopped many of the nasty things the Republicans are doing by filibuster but choose not to. Many democrats actively supported the war. Most of those who did oppose it offered little opposition, chickening out when the shooting started and either abstained or voted in favor of the pro-war “support our troops” resolution in March. Even Dennis Kucinich, leader of the “anti-war” opposition in the house, abstained from the vote instead of voting against it. It was only after Bush’s war started going sour that vocal criticism began to come from democrats, which is completely opportunistic. Bush’s lies and fabrications about the Niger Uranium had already been exposed prior to the war, but it wasn’t until after the invasion was completed and the democrats needed an issue to attack Bush with that they started whining about it.

The Democratic Party, the party of slavery, has a long history of mass murder and empire building. They are not an alternative to the American Empire. Especially on foreign policy, there is remarkable consistency between republican and democratic administrations. If the Nuremberg standards were applied every President since World War Two, both democrat and republican, would have to be hung. Both parties have the same basic goals; they just disagree on minor details. It would have been much harder for Bush to conquer Iraq (perhaps politically impossible) if Clinton hadn’t been waging war against it for his entire term. The policies implemented by the US government have more to do with the specific circumstances of the time period then with which particular individual happens to occupy the white house. If a democrat is elected he will inherit this Pax Americana and it is unlikely that he would dismantle it (or even be capable of dismantling it). A vote for the democrats is a vote for imperialism and war (as is a vote for the Republicans).

Retrospect: A Nervous China Invades Vietnam

By TERRY MCCARTHY
Monday, Sept. 27, 1999

Early in the morning of Feb. 17, 1979, Chinese artillery batteries and multiple rocket launchers opened fire all along the Vietnamese border with protracted barrages that shook the earth for miles around. Then 85,000 troops surged across the frontier in human-wave attacks like those China had used in Korea nearly three decades before. They were decimated: the well-dug-in Vietnamese cut down the Chinese troops with machine guns, while mines and booby traps did the rest.

Horrified by their losses, the Chinese quickly replaced the general in charge of the invasion that was meant, in Beijing’s words, to teach Vietnam a lesson, and concentrated their attack on neighboring provincial capitals. Using tanks and artillery, they quickly overran most of the desired towns: by March 5, after fierce house-to-house fighting, they captured the last one, Lang Son, across the border from Pingxiang. Then they began their withdrawal, proclaiming victory over the Cubans of the Orient, as Chinese propaganda had dubbed them.

By China’s own estimate, some 20,000 soldiers and civilians from both sides died in the 17-day war. Who learned the bigger lesson?

The invasion demonstrated a contradiction that has forever bedeviled China’s military and political leaders: good strategy, bad tactics. The decision to send what amounted to nearly 250,000 troops into Vietnam had been taken seven months before and was well-telegraphed to those who cared to listen.

When Deng Xiaoping went to Washington in January 1979 to cement the normalization of China’s relations with the United States, he told President Jimmy Carter in a private meeting what China was about to do–and why. Not only did Beijing feel Vietnam was acting ungratefully after all the assistance it had received during its war against the U.S., but in 1978 Hanoi had begun expelling Vietnamese of Chinese descent. Worst of all–it was cozying up to Moscow. In November 1978 Vietnam signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union. A month later the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, a Chinese ally. Although Hanoi said it was forced to do so to stop Pol Pot’s genocide and to put an end to his cross-border attacks against Vietnam, Deng saw it as a calculated move by Moscow to use its allies to encircle China from the south.

Soviet adventurism in Southeast Asia had to be stopped, Deng said, and he was calculating (correctly, it turned out) that Moscow would not intervene in a limited border war between China and Vietnam. Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said Deng’s explanation to Carter of his invasion plans, with its calculated defiance of the Soviets, was the single most impressive demonstration of raw power politics that he had ever seen.

At the time Deng was consolidating his position as unchallenged leader of China. Having successfully negotiated normalization of relations with Washington, he wanted to send a strong signal to Moscow against further advances in Asia. He also thought the Carter Administration was being too soft on the Soviets, although he did not say as much to his American hosts. Hanoi, for its part, was unfazed by Deng’s demonstration of raw power. The Vietnamese fought the Chinese with local militia, not bothering to send in any of the regular army divisions that were then taken up with the occupation of Cambodia. Indeed, Hanoi showed no sign of withdrawing those troops, despite Chinese demands that they do so: the subsequent guerrilla war in Cambodia would bog down Vietnam’s soldiers and bedevil its foreign relations for more than a decade.

The towns captured by the Chinese were all just across the border; it is not clear whether China could have pushed much farther south. Having lost so many soldiers in taking the towns, the Chinese methodically blew up every building they could before withdrawing. Journalist Nayan Chanda, who visited the area shortly after the war, saw schools, hospitals, government buildings and houses all reduced to rubble. The war also showed China just how outdated its battlefield tactics and weaponry were, prompting a major internal review of the capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army. The thrust for military modernization continues to this day, even as the focus of China’s generals has shifted from Vietnam back to Taiwan–a pesky little irritant that could cause Beijing even bigger problems if it decides to administer another lesson.

Source

The Neo-Nazis of Mongolia: Swastikas Against China

By Mitch Moxley
Monday, July 27, 2009

In the Mongolian capital Ulan Bator, “Shoot the Chinese” is spray-painted on a brick wall near a movie theater. A pair of swastikas and the words “Killer Boys …! Danger!” can be read on a fence in an outlying neighborhood of yurt dwellings. Graffiti like this, which can be found all over the city, is the work of Mongolia’s neo-Nazis, an admittedly implausible but often intimidating, and occasionally violent, movement.

Ulan Bator is home to three ultra-nationalist groups claiming a combined membership of several thousand — a not insignificant number in a country of just 3 million people. They have adopted Nazi paraphernalia and dogma, and are vehemently anti-Chinese. One group, Blue Mongolia, has admitted to shaving the heads of local women found sleeping with Chinese men. Its leader was convicted last year of murdering his daughter’s Mongolian boyfriend, who had merely studied in China.

The neo-Nazis may be on society’s fringe, but they represent the extreme of a very real current of nationalism. Sandwiched between Russia and China, with foreign powers clamoring for a slice of the country’s vast mineral riches, many Mongolians fear economic and ethnic colonization. This has prompted displays of hostility toward outsiders and slowed crucial foreign-investment negotiations.

Fifty-year-old Zagas Erdenebileg is the leader of Dayar Mongol (All Mongolia), the most prominent of the neo-Nazi groups. “If our blood mixes with foreigners’, we’ll be destroyed immediately,” says Erdenebileg, who has run unsuccessfully for parliament four times. He loathes the Chinese — whom he accuses of involvement in prostitution and drug-trafficking — and reveres Genghis Khan, who he says influenced Adolf Hitler. I ask him if he considers his adoption of the beliefs of a regime that singled out and executed people with Mongol features from among Soviet prisoners of war to be in any way ironic. “It doesn’t matter,” he shrugs. “We share the same policies.”

If Erdenebileg is the elder statesman of Mongolia’s neo-Nazis, Shari Mungun-Erdene, the 23-year-old leader of the roughly 200-strong Mongolian National Union (MNU), is the new kid on the block and sports a swastika tattoo on his chest. The MNU takes vigilante action against law-breaking outsiders, Mungun-Erdene says, mainly Chinese. When I ask what kind of action, he replies, “Whatever it takes so that they don’t live here.” At other times, though, he comes across as an overzealous adolescent. He opens his laptop to show photos of his neo-Nazi buddies. But beside the folders entitled “Guns” and “Skinheads” are others with names like “My Car” and “Mom in Japan.”

Dagva Enkhtsetseg, program manager for the Open Society Forum, an Ulan Bator – based organization that promotes public participation in civic life, points out that the neo-Nazis don’t enjoy broad support. A graduate in Mongolian nationalism, she argues that hard-line nationalism’s allure is subsiding as more young Mongolians are exposed to globalization or study abroad. That was evident during the presidential election in May, when bogus accusations that Democratic Party leader and eventual winner Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj was part Chinese fell on deaf ears. “In the past that would have worked,” Enkhtsetseg says.

The neo-Nazis still pose some threats, however. In May, a newsletter of the international development charity Voluntary Service Overseas reported allegations that two Peace Corps volunteers were “severely beaten” outside a pub after a confrontation with Dayar Mongol members. (Erdenebileg denies his group’s involvement.) One 25-year-old American living in Ulan Bator, who didn’t wish to be named, said he was accosted by neo-Nazis at a nightclub for cavorting with a Mongolian woman. “After they showed a swastika, my initial thought was, This isn’t going to be a normal fight,” he says. “They wanted to send a message.” That message, delivered by spray paint or fists, translates to “get out.”

Source

“New Albania: A Small Nation, A Great Contribution!” Part IV: International Relations and the Foreign Policy of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania

Albania is the only socialist country in the world today, and as such its foreign policy is different from the foreign policy of any other country. It follows an open, independent policy, guided by the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. This means that Albania constantly guards and maintains its independence and defends the interests of the socialist homeland. This also means that Albania supports the revolutionary struggles of the working class and people throughout the world, for national liberation and socialism working always to assist these struggles and to increase the fighting unity of the people against their common enemies.

In taking this stand, Albania opposes the threats and interference of the two imperialist blocs, headed by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In contrast to the two superpowers, who dictate and dominate over the world’s people and whose rivalry for power is threatening all humanity with a new world war, Albania maintains a policy of peaceful coexistence with countries of different social systems. It develops foreign trade, cultural and scientific exchanges based on equality and mutual interest, and respect for freedom and national independence. It has always worked to strengthen sincere relations of friendship and collaboration with all the freedom-loving and peace-loving peoples, with all those who fight against the aggressive and hegemonic policy of imperialism.

Self-Reliance Paves the Way For Foreign Trade

On the basis of forty years of socialist construction, Albania has been able to build a strong and diversified economy. As a result it has increased its foreign trade, adding new products to its exports and achieving a balance of imports and exports. At present Albania has trade relations with over 50 countries and hundreds of firms. Its exports include fuels, electric power, chromium, ferrochrome, basic nickel carbonate, tobacco, fresh and canned vegetables, agricultural and artisans’ goods and other products. Machinery and some kinds of raw and primary materials for the expansion of production make up the overwhelming portion of imports. During this Five-Year Plan (the seventh), Albania is working to keep the growth of exports higher than imports. It gives priority to exports so as to ensure that the export-import balance results in the increase of their reserves for foreign currency.

In addition to foreign trade, Albania has cultural and scientific exchanges with many countries. It has always highly valued the friendship of peoples throughout the world, and their contributions to culture, science and the progress of humanity. lt has worked to extend its friendly relations on every continent. The reports of trips to and from Albania in the magazine, “New Albania”, give a vivid picture of the growing ties and friendship of Albania with the people of the world. Diplomatic relations have grown from year to year and in 1981 numbered 95 stetes and commercial and cultural relations exist with many more. These include countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America as well as in Europe.

How Does Albania Conduct Trade Relations While Remaining Free From The Domination and Dictate of the Superpowers?

One of the problems which confront the developing countries of the world is interference and control over their economies by one or the other superpower. The newspapers have been filled with the serious difficulties faced by the Latin American countries as they suffer under tremendous debt to the U.S. and particularly the U.S.-controlled International Monetary Fund. Using these debts as a club, the U.S. is demanding even greater sacrifice by the peoples of these countries and further increasing its control over these countries.

How is it that a small country like Albania is free from such domination? The answer lies in the socialist policies of Albania, beginning with the victory of the people’s revolution and continuing today. Albania has never accepted any inequality, discrimination, exploitation and political or economic submission it rejects all imperialist attempts to gain a foothold in Albania under the guise of trade.

Speaking at the Paris Peace Conference, 1946

Albania has been able to do this by implementing from the beginning the Marxist-Leninist principle of establishing state monopoly on foreign trade. This means that the state, which is controlled by the working class, concentrates in its hands all foreign trade activity. Albania’s economy is protected from indiscriminate flow of foreign goods and from the economic crisis of the capitalist countries. Thus, imports and exports are included in the economic plan. Albania trades its surplus of mineral products and energy in order to obtain products and technology it needs to sustain its industrial growth and meet the material needs of the people.

Visiting China

Since liberation, Albania has never allowed the resources of the country to be given away to foreign companies. As its Constitution states, “…In the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, the granting of concessions to, and the creation of foreign economic and financial companies and other institutions or ones formed jointly with bourgeois and revisionist capitalist monopolies and states, as well as obtaining credits from them, are prohibited.” Albania is completely free of foreign debt and the entanglement and domination by the superpowers and other capitalist states which these debts create.

Thus Albania is living proof that even a small country and one which started out very backward economically can achieve socialist construction and maintain complete independence from the big imperialist powers, by relying on its own resources and uniting all its people in a valiant struggle.

Albania and the Struggle Against Revisionism

During World War II and after, Albania allied with the Soviet Union, then a socialist country. Under the leadership of Stalin, the Soviet Union provided assistance and fraternal aid to Albania. Based on a united struggle for building socialism and supporting the revolutionary struggles around the world, Albania and the Soviet Union had Lies of mutual benefit and cooperation.

But with the death of Stalin and rise of revisionism in the Soviet Union, a struggle broke out — not only between these two countries but between all the true fighters for socialism in the world and the traitors of the Soviet Union, who destroyed socialism and re-established capitalism. This was a just and vital struggle in the interests of the people, and the Albanians, led by their Marxist-Leninist Party, the Party of Labor of Albania, played a leading role in exposing the Soviet revisionists. They put forward for all to see that the path the Soviets had taken was against the interests of the people and would cause the Soviet Union to become an aggressive, imperialist power. Reality today proves the Albanians right.

E. Hoxha being welcomed at Moscow airport by Soviet Minister V. Molotov, 1947

After World War II, the Albanians also had relations with Yugoslavia and China. In both of these cases, a similar struggle unfolded. The Yugoslav government and party tried to make Albania an appendage of the Yugoslav economy and to hamper the socialist industrialization of Albania. They tried to isolate Albania and exploit the country through unequal exchanges and hostile interference. And here too, an ideological struggle developed, with the Albanians once again exposing that the policies and stands of the Yugoslavs reflected not socialist ideals, not Marxism-Leninism, but capitalism and service to the rich.

Albania and Yugoslavia were allies in the anti-fascist war before the Titoite deviation into the capitalist camp.

The situation with China developed at a later date. Again there was a fierce ideological struggle, with the Albanian people fighting to defend the interests of the working class and people, and the Chinese taking a stand in support of U.S. imperialism. The Chinese, like the Yugoslavs and Soviets, promoted revisionist lines and policies which harmed the struggles of the people and caused great confusion.

Stamp made to celebrate the warm relations between E. Hoxha's Albania and Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnam

In each case, the revisionists attempted to sabotage the economy of Albania, unilaterally canceling contracts and agreements. They tried to fool the Albanians into accepting their dictate and when this didn’t work they resorted to other means of attack leaving projects unfinished, providing false reports on mineral deposits and so on. In the face of this, the great strength and determination Albania has shown to oppose all forms of revisionist and imperialist attack and to continue on the socialist road is a great inspiration to all people interested in freedom and progress.

With General Secretary of the CP-Peru (M-L) Saturino Paredes Macedo

The struggle waged by the Albanians under the leadership of the PLA, has been discussed and analysed in recent works by Enver Hoxha, First Secretary of the PLA. In these books – The Khrushchevites, The Titoites, Reflections on China (on the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and China respectively), and Imperialism and the Revolution, Hoxha provides great detail and insight, while making important contributions to the understanding and analyses of imperialism and revisionism on a world scale. These books, as well as  the consistent and open policy which Albania pursues today readily show why the imperialists slander Albania. They attack Albania because it refuses to accept revisionism and the path of betrayal of the people, and because it remains independent of the dictate and domination of the imperialists. In fact, it is a great danger to the imperialists and social-imperialists and thus they do everything to silence its voice and confuse people about Albania. But day after day, Albania shows the world that it is the imperialist powers who are becoming more and more isolated, as the peoples increase their struggle against the superpowers and all their local tools of reaction.

The Foreign Policy of Albania: Based on a Marxist-Leninist Analysis of the World

In order to have a consistent internationalist stand which both safeguards the revolution in Albania and supports the struggles of the world’s peoples, the Albanians make a careful objective analysis of the international situation. They explain that imperialism is the source of all aggression and predatory wars, the source of the suffering of the world’s people. U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism are competing and maneuvering to carry out various aggressions and occupy other countries. These two superpowers, along with other imperialist and capitalist powers (European countries, Japan, China, etc.), are trying to outdo each other in gaining economic, political and military superiority and in capturing new strategic positions. This is what leads to dangerous tensions and threatens the peoples with a new world war. The superpowers make secret deals and interfere in and attack various countries and nations in order to gain markets, raw materials and other advantages.

With Gensek of CP France, W.M. Thorez, 1959

The Albanians show that imperialist war, oppression and exploitation have run into great resistance from the working class and peoples of the world. They bring out that the struggles of workers and other oppressed peoples is a cause for great optimism.

While analysing that the imperialist superpowers and their NATO and Warsaw Pact allies are powerful and ferocious, the Albanians also expose that they are in decay, suffering from all round crisis. They explain that for the world’s people to escape once and for all from the suffering they experience under capitalism, under the neo-colonialist yoke of foreign imperialists and domination by local reactionary rulers, there is only one path. This is the path of socialist revolution, to overthrow imperialism and all reactionaries. This struggle is an objective historical process that no force can stop.

Albania Supports The International Working Class and Oppressed Peoples

Albania strengthens its support for the working class world-wide while safeguarding and defending socialism at home. In every available international forum, Albania presents a Marxist-Leninist analysis of the world, which recognizes that the working class in every country is the leading force of the revolution. And as their own experience confirms, the victory of the revolution depends on the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist party of the working class on the ability of this party to unite the people in struggle against their enemies and to organize the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. For this reason, the PLA pays great attention to strengthening and increasing its unity with Marxist- Leninist parties worldwide, and on developing the unity and strength of the international communist movement. Its consistent struggle against revisionism has been a very valuable contribution to the growth and development of the revolutionary movement world-wide. The great accomplishments of Albania in socialist construction and its firm stand against imperialism and revisionism has made it the leading ideological and political force in the international Marxist-Leninist movement.

Speaking at a rally of the people, 1967.

Consistent with assisting the unity and struggle of the working class world-wide is Albania’s support for the struggle of all people for democracy, independence and socialism. The Albanians support each step in the struggles for freedom, independence and social progress won by other peoples, such as those of the Iranians in overthrowing the U.S.-backed Shah and the Nicaraguans in overthrowing the U.S.-backed Somoza. These triumphs help them and the other peoples of the world by weakening the common enemy.

With Gensec of Romanian Worker's Party, G.Georgiu Dej, 1956.

In the international arena, the Albanians work to expose the superpowers and their allies and to put forward an internationalist stand in support of the just struggles of the people for national and social liberation. For example, the consistent exposure of the phony character of the disarmament talks by the superpowers is one effort the Albanians have made to prevent the world’s people from being fooled.

E. Hoxha meeting with Kim Il-sung

The fact that Albania vigorously opposes, ideologically and politically, the stands of other countries does not prevent them from having friendly relations. Yugoslavia, for example, has taken hostile actions toward Albania and has attempted to destroy its socialist homeland. Despite the ideological differences with the Yugoslav revisionists, and their continuing plots against Albania, the Albanians aim to carry on normal diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia . At the same time, they have repeatedly warned the Yugoslav government against continuing its brutal, chauvinist policy toward the almost two million Albanians in Kosova and other parts of Yugoslavia. These people were separated from Albania during the imperialist dismemberment of the country before World War II. The Kosovars have demanded their own republic within the Yugoslav Federation, the right to develop their own national art and culture, to become acquainted with their own history and so on. The Kosovars have refused to reconcile themselves to an inferior status among the peoples of Yugoslavia, where their political, economic and national rights have been denied. Albania has never interfered in the internal affairs of Yugoslavia, but it has defended and will continue to defend the rights of the Kosovars in Yugoslavia.

With Stalin, 1947

Albania works not only for good relations with Yugoslavia, but with all the Balkan countries (Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania) and with European states in general. It aims to create a friendly atmosphere and to relax tensions. It seeks to resolve disputes by protracted negotiations rather than by threats and violence. It has called on these countries (as well as those in the rest of the world) not to ally themselves with the superpowers, saying that there is no safety under their aggressive “nuclear umbrellas”. It has also called on its neighbors to refuse to allow superpower military bases on their soil or to permit the superpowers to use their ports for refueling or rest stops.

Albania has formal diplomatic relations with China, but since 1978 when the Chinese social-imperialists lined up against the PLA and the Albanian people, there have been no other contacts. In 1978 the Chinese violated official agreements between the two countries, revealed information harmful to Albania’s security and sabotaged projects underway.

At a meeting of working in a Leningrad factory.

As for the two superpowers, U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism, the Albanians consider them the most savage enemies of the freedom and independence of the peoples and of peace and security in the world. They do not and will not have relations with these enemies of the people and will resolutely continue their exposure of these powers’ aggressive and hegemony-seeking policy and activity. Albania also refuses to have diplomatic relations with South Africa and Israel.

The foreign policy of Albania is an open, correct and principled policy, which defends the victories of socialism and supports the progressive struggles of people in the world. Providing a clear example of what is possible when a people rely on their own efforts, and unite under the leadership of a true Marxist-Leninist party, the Albanian people and state have won the respect and sympathy of millions of people all over the world.

Conclusion

In spite of the conspiracy of silence in all the U.S. bourgeois media the achievements of socialist Albania cannot and should not be hidden from democratic and progressive Americans. This pamphlet has been produced to help break this silence and to tell the inspiring story of this small country and its forty years of brilliant achievements since liberation and the triumph of the people’s revolution.

Alternating with the capitalist media’s usual silence have been lies and falsifications about Albania. But progressive organizations world-wide and many eyewitnesses to Albania’s socialist construction insist an spreading the true facts about the new socialist life being developed.

Facts show the Albanians are blazing a historic trail. Socialist Albania, the first country in the world to abolish taxes, the only country without such capitalist evils as inflation and unemployment, is a country that anyone eager to learn how these “miracles” have been accomplished should investigate. Starting as the country which was the most backward in Europe before World War II, Albania has become completely self-sufficient in feeding its people and constantly provides a better material and cultural life for its people.

Albania has accomplished all of this despite constant attacks and pressures by the imperialist powers. In particular, the United States government has been responsible for ongoing attacks against Albania, in collaboration with Britain, Yugoslavia and other European countries. These provocations continue today.

Albania deserves the support of all democratic and progressive people. It provides a shining example of how the working class and people can completely change their lives for the better. Using the experience of centuries of struggle against foreign occupation, the Albanian people rose and developed their Communist Party, the strong leadership capable of meeting the historic challenge before them. This Party, now the Party of Labor of Albania, led the people in defending their rights and waging a war of national and social liberation. Today after forty years of triumphant socialist construction the people, firmly united around the Party, are actively participating in the running and organizing of the state and economy, defending their homeland and joining with the people of the world to fight for peace, democracy and social progress.

Socialist Albania shows the reality that can be achieved when the working class and people take history into their hands and determine their own destiny.

Enver Hoxha: The Theory and Practice of Revolution

I.

In his brilliant works about imperialism V. I. Lenin arrived at the conclusion that imperialism is a perishing and dying capitalism, the last stadium of capitalism and the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat. In the analysis of the specific characteristics of imperialism he wrote:

“… all this makes the state of development of capitalism which has been reached up to now into the era of the proletarian socialist revolution, … This era has begun” and “Part of this agenda of the present epoch is the multilateral immediate preparation of the proletariat for the conquest of political power in order to effect those economic and political measures which form the core of the socialist revolution.” (Lenin, Collected Works, volume 24, p. 420, German edition)

In defining the present epoch Lenin based himself on class criteria. He emphasised that it is important to consider

which class stands in the centre of this or that epoch and defines its essential content, the main direction of its development, the most important characteristics of the historic situation in the specific epoch, etc.” (Lenin, Collected Works, volume 21, p. 134, German edition)

Defining the fundamental content of the new historic epoch as the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolutions, Lenin remained consistently loyal to the teachings of Marx about the historic mission of the proletariat as the new social force which will carry out the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist society of oppression and exploitation and build the new society, the classless communist society.

“The Communist Manifesto” by Marx and Engels and their appeal: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” was published in order to announce that the basic contradiction of human society was now the basic contradiction between labour and capital and that the proletariat was chosen to solve this contradiction through revolution. By his analysis of imperialism Lenin showed that the contradictions of the capitalist society had sharpened to the utmost and that the world had entered the epoch of the proletarian revolution and the triumph of socialism.

The Great Socialist October Revolution confirmed this brilliant conclusion by Marx and Lenin in practice. Even after Lenin’s death the communist world movement resolutely adhered to his teachings about the present epoch, it adhered to his revolutionary strategy. The triumph of the socialist revolution in several further countries proved that the Leninist thesis of the present epoch as epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism mirrors the basic laws of the development of today’s human society. The downfall of the colonial system, the achievement of political independence by the overwhelming majority of the countries of Asia, Africa and more are a further affirmation of the Leninist theory of the our epoch and the revolution. The fact that the teachings of Marxism-Leninism and the revolution were betrayed in the Soviet Union and a number of former socialist countries does not alter the Leninist thesis on the character of the present epoch in the least, because this is nothing but a turn and twist on the way to the inevitable victory of socialism over capitalism on the global scale.

The Albanian Party of Labour has always consistently upheld these Marxist-Leninist conclusions. Comrade Enver Hoxha said:

“On a daily base the main features of our epoch are sharpened and appear more and more clearly as the epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism, the struggle of two opposed social systems, as the epoch of the proletarian and national liberation revolutions, the downfall of imperialism and the liquidation of the colonial system, as the epoch of the triumph of socialism and communism on a global scale.” (Enver Hoxha, Report to the 5th Party Congress of the PLA)

The Marxist-Leninists always based the definition of the present epoch and the revolutionary strategy on the analysis of the great social contradictions which characterise this epoch. Which contradictions are these?

After the triumph of the socialist revolution in Russia, Lenin and Stalin were speaking about four contradictions:

- the contradiction between the two opposed systems — the socialist and the capitalist system

- the contradiction between capital and labour in the capitalist countries

- the contradiction between the oppressed peoples and nations on the one hand and imperialism on the other hand

- the contradiction between the imperialist powers

Exactly these contradictions build the objective foundation of the development of today’s revolutionary movement, which in their collectivity form the great process of the world revolution in our epoch. The complete current situation world wide proves that since Lenin’s times the contradictions have neither been moderated nor disappeared but on the contrary, haven been further sharpened and have come to the surface like never before. Therefore the knowledge and acknowledgement of these contradictions is the basis for defining a correct revolutionary strategy. The denial of these contradictions, concealing them, ignoring one or another of these contradictions, distorting their true meaning — like the revisionists and the various opportunists do — leads to confusion and disorder within the revolutionary movement and serves as foundation to construct and preach a distorted, pseudo-revolutionary strategy and tactic.

II.

Today there is much talk about the division of the world into the so-called “First”, “Second” and “Third World”, about a “non-aligned” world, about a world of “developing countires”, “of the South and the North” etc. Each advocate of these divisions portrays his “theory” as the most correct strategy which allegedly match the real circumstances and the current international situation. But it is like Comrade Enver Hoxha emphasised at the 7th Party Congress:

“… all of these terms which refer to the different political powers working in the world today conceal — and don’t reveal — the class character of these political powers, the basic contradictions of our epoch, the predominant key problem on the national and international scale today, the grim struggle which is waged between the bourgeois-revisionist world on the one hand and socialism, the world proletariat and its natural allies on the other hand.” (E. Hoxha, Report to the 7th Party Congress of the PLA)

If Marxist-Leninists speak about the world and the different countries and name them, they judge based on the principle of dialectical and historical materialism. They judge above all according to the existing socio-economic order in the different countries, according to the proletarian class criterion.

Exactly from this point of view V. I. Lenin wrote in the year 1921, so when only one socialist country, Soviet Russia, was existing in the world:

“Today (there are) two worlds in the world: the old — capitalism which has come to a dead end and will never back down and the new growing world which is yet very weak but which will become strong and big because it is invincible.”(Lenin, Collected Works, volume 33, p. 132, German edition)

J. V. Stalin also stressed in his famous scripture “Two Camps” already in 1919:

“The world has definitely and irrevocably split into two camps: the camp of imperialism and the camp of socialism… The struggle between these two camps constitutes the hub of present-day affairs, determines the whole substance of the present home and foreign policies of the leaders of the old and the new worlds.” (Stalin, Collected Works, volume 4, p. 205, German edition)

Our Party holds the opinion that we must talk about the socialist world today, too, like Lenin and Stalin did, that the Leninist criterion is always true, like Leninism itself is alive and true. The argument of the theoreticians of the “Three Worlds”, the “non-aligned world” etc., who eliminated the existence of socialism in their schemata by referring to the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and in some other former socialist countries, to the dissolution of the socialist camp, is completely unfounded. This stands in absolute contrast to the Leninist teachings and the class criterion.

The revisionist betrayal, the return of the Soviet Union and a number of former socialist countries to capitalism, the spreading of modern revisionism widely in the international communist and workers’ movement and the splitting of this movement were a heavy blow to the cause of revolution and socialism. But this by no means implies that socialism was liquidated as a system and that the criterion of the division of the world into two opposing systems must be changed, that the contradiction between capitalism and socialism no longer exists today. Socialism exists and proceeds in the genuine socialist countries which are loyal to Marxism-Leninism, like the Socialist People’s Republic of Albania is. The socialist system which opposes itself to the capitalist system, exists objectively just like the contradiction and the struggle for life and death between it and capitalism exists.

By ignoring socialism as a social system, the so-called “Theory of Three Worlds” ignores the greatest historic victory of the international proletariat, ignores the fundamental contradiction of the time, the contradiction between socialism and capitalism. It is clear that such a theory, which ignores socialism, is anti-Leninist, it leads to the weakening of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the countries where socialism is being built, while calling on the world proletariat not to fight, not to rise in socialist revolution. And this is not surprising: the renunciation of the proletarian class criteria in the evaluation of the situation leads to conclusions which are contrary to the interests of the revolution and the proletariat.

As the great and consistent Marxist he was, Lenin frequently analysed the capitalist world and the balance of power within it in his works. He did this, however, in the service of the revolution, in order to determine the tasks which lay ahead of the proletariat, the tasks of the communist parties, the tasks of the first socialist state the proletarian towards the world revolution and in order to show who were the really allies of the revolution and who were its enemies.

Lenin gives us an excellent example in this regard in his theses and reports at the II Congress of the Communist International in the year 1920:

“Now we have to ‘prove’ by the practice of the revolutionary parties”, emphasises Lenin, “that they have enough consciousness, organisation, contact with the exploited masses, determination and the ability to exploit this crisis for a successful, for a victorious revolution. We came together at this congress of the Communist International mainly in order to prepare such evidence.”(Lenin, Collected Works, volume 31, p. 215, German edition)

The so-called “Theory of the Three World”, however, does not pose a single task for the revolution; on the contrary, it “forgets” to do so. In the schemata of the “Three Worlds” the basic contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie does not exist. What is also striking about this division of the world is the non-class view of what it calls “Third World”, the disregarding of classes and class struggle, the global treatment of countries which this theory counts to this world, the regimes which rule there and the different political powers which exist there. This way the contradiction between the oppressed peoples and the reactionary and pro-imperialist powers in their countries.

It is common knowledge that a fierce struggle of the freedom-loving peoples for freedom, independence and national sovereignty is led against the old and new colonialism in the countries exploited by imperialism, the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This is a just revolutionary and liberation struggle which enjoys the unreserved support of the Marxist-Leninists, the genuine socialist countries, the world proletariat and all progressive forces.

This struggle is and inevitably has to be directed against multiple enemies:

 - against the imperialist exploiters, first and foremost against the two superpowers as the greatest exploiters and world police, the most dangerous enemies of all peoples of the world

- against the national reactionary bourgeoisie which is connected by thousands of strings with the foreign imperialism, with this or that superpower, with the international monopolies and which is the enemy of freedom and national independence

- against the strong remains of feudalism upon which the foreign imperialists base themselves on and which allies itself with the reactionary bourgeoisie against the people’s revolution

- against the reactionary and fascist regimes, the agents and defenders of the rule of these three enemies

Therefore it is absurd to claim one only had to struggle against external enemies without at the same time fighting and challenging the inner enemies, the allies and accomplices of imperialism, all those factors which hinder this struggle. Until now there was never a liberation struggle, there was never a national-democratic and anti-imperialist revolution which did not have inner enemies, reactionaries and traitors, bought and anti-national elements. One cannot — like the so-called theory of the “Three Worlds” does — equal all strata of the bourgeoisie without any exception, including the comprador bourgeoisie, with anti-imperialist forces, with the foundation and the factors which further the struggle against imperialism.

To follow this theory means to distract the revolutionary movement from the right way, to desert the revolution halfway, to separate it from the proletarian revolutions in the other countries, to the drive the struggle of the peoples and the proletariat of these countries into an anti-Marxist and revisionist way.

Marxism-Leninism teaches that the national question always has to be examined subject to the question of the revolution. From this point of view the Marxist-Leninists support each movement which is actually aimed against imperialism and serves the common cause of the proletarian world revolution.

“We as communists”, emphasises Lenin, “(have to and will) only support the bourgeois liberation movements in the colonial countries when these movements are really revolutionary, when their representatives do not prevent us from educating and organising the peasantry and the broad masses of the exploited in the revolutionary spirit. But if these conditions are not given then the communists in these countries have to fight the reformist bourgeoisie to which the heroes of the Second International belong. (Lenin, Collected Works, volume 31, p. 230, German edition)

The preachers of the thesis of the “Third World” label even more as liberation movement, as the “main force in the struggle against imperialism”, even the horse-trade of the King of Saudi-Arabia or of the Shah of Iran with the petroleum monopolies of the USA, their weapon transactions in the amount of billions and billions of dollars with the Pentagon. According to this logic the oil sheiks, who let the money from their oil flow into Wall Street and the banks of the USA, are fighters against imperialism and advocates of the people’s struggle against the imperialist rule. So this means that the US-imperialists, who sell their weapons to the reactionary and oppressive regimes of these sheiks, give these weapons the “patriotic” forces who struggle to drive the imperialists away from the “golden sands” of Arabia and Persia.

The facts prove that today, too, the anti-imperialist and democratic liberating revolution can only be consistent and brought to an end if it is lead by the proletariat with its party at the spearhead in alliance with the broad masses and the peasantry and the other anti-imperialist and patriotic forces.

Already in 1905 Lenin demonstrated in his book “Two Tactics” in detail that under the conditions of imperialism the characteristic of the bourgeois-democratic revolution consist in the fact that the force which is most interested in furthering the revolution is not the bourgeoisie, which is inconsistent and tends to ally itself with the feudal reactionary forces against the revolutionary impetus of the masses, but the proletariat which views the bourgeois-democratic revolution as an interim stage of the transition to the socialist revolution. The same applies for the current national liberation movements. J. V. Stalin emphasised that after the October Revolution

“The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony, has begun.” (Stalin, Collected Works, volume 10, p. 212, German edition)

These Leninist teachings achieve a special value and a special meaning under the current given conditions. Today the two tendencies which Lenin pointed out have deepened and operate with great force in the world:

- one the one hand the tendency of the capitalist monopolies which break the national borders and internationalise the economic and political life

- on the other hand the tendency of the different countries to the intensify the struggle for national independence

This way, in regard to the first tendency, the connections of the national bourgeoisie with the foreign imperialist capital are not only maintained in many countries liberated from the yoke of colonialism but further increased and extended by a multitude of neo-colonialist forms like the multinational companies, the different economic and financial integrations, etc., etc. This bourgeoisie, which holds the key position in the economic and political life of the country and grows steadily, is a pro-imperialist power and an enemy of the revolutionary and liberation movement. With regard to the other tendency, namely the increase of the national independence towards imperialism in the former colonial countries, it is above all connected to the growth of the proletariat in these countries. This means that more favourable conditions arise for the extensive and consistent realisation of the anti-imperialist and democratic revolution, for its leadership by the the proletariat and thus its transition to a higher phase, to the struggle for socialism.

The Marxist-Leninists do not confuse the burning efforts and wishes of the peoples and the proletariat of the countries of the so-called “Third World” for liberation, revolution and socialism with the aims and the policies of the comprador and oppressive bourgeoisie of these countries. They know that there are sound progressive currents in the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, within the peoples, who will further their revolutionary struggle determined until victory. But speaking about the so-called “Third World” as main force against imperialism and as main force of the revolution – like the followers of the theory of the “Three Worlds” do without making any difference between the genuine anti-imperialist and revolutionary forces and the ruling pro-imperialist, reactionary and fascist forces in a number of developing countries — means to openly abandon the teachings of Marxism-Leninism and to preach typical opportunistic views which cause confusion and disorder among the revolutionary forces. Basically the peoples of these countries, according to the “Theory of the Three Worlds”, are not allowed to fight, let’s say, the bloodthirsty fascist dictatorships of Geisel in Brazil and Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, the Shah of Iran and the King of Jordania, etc., because they all belong to the “revolutionary driving force, which turns the wheel of world history”. On the contrary, according to this theory the peoples and revolutionaries had to ally with the reactionary forces and regimes in the “Third World” and support them, in other words, abandon the revolution.

US-imperialism, the other capitalist states and Soviet social-imperialism have bound the ruling classes of the countries of the so-called “Third World” to themselves with thousands of strings. Of course these classes, which are dependant on the foreign monopolies and want to prolong their reign over the broad mass of their people, try to create the impression that they have formed a democratic block of independent states with the aim to put pressure upon US-imperialism and the Soviet social-imperialists and thus allegedly prevent interference in the interior affairs of their states.

Lenin pointed out towards the communist parties the necessity “to constantly expose and denounce every fraud the imperialist powers systematically commit by allegedly creating politically independent states, which are in fact dependent on them economical, financially and in questions of military to the broadest mass of working people of all countries, but especially of the backward countries.” (Lenin, Collected Works, volume 31, p. 138, German edition) . The Party of Labour of Albania loyally adheres to these immortal teachings of Lenin. “In the evaluation of the policies of the different governments and states” Comrade Enver Hoxha emphasised at the 7th Party Congress of the PLA, “the Marxists also base themselves on the standpoint of class, on the attitude which these governments and these countries display towards imperialism and socialism, towards their own people and the reaction.

Based on these teachings the revolutionary movement and the proletariat build their strategy and tactic, find their true allies in the struggle against imperialism, the bourgeoisie and the reaction and unite with them. The term “Third World”, “non-aligned world” or “developing countries” create the illusion among the broad masses who fight for national and social liberation that a hideout was discovered which protects us from the threat of the superpowers. They conceal the reactionary state of most of these countries which are in this or that way politically, ideologically or economical identical, bound to the superpowers as well as to their former colonial metropolises and are dependant on both.” (E. Hoxha, Report to the 7th Party Congress of the PLA)

The modern theories about the so-called “Third World”, the so-called “non-aligned world”, etc. aim at damming the revolution and defending capitalism which is not to be hindered while exercising its hegemony but is to practice a few more acceptable forms of ruling the peoples. The so-called “Third World” and the “non-aligned world” are as like as two peas in a pot, irrespective of their different names; they let themselves be guided by the same policy and ideology, one group entwines itself with the other so that it is difficult to spot which countries belong to the “Third World” and what differs them from the “non-aligned” and which states belong to the “non-aligned” and what differs them from the states of the “Third World”. There are efforts to create yet another group, namely of the so-called “developing countries”, where the countries of the “Third World” as well as the “non-aligned” are lumped together. The authors of this theory conceal the class contradictions as well, preach the given status quo in order not to hurt imperialism, social-imperialism and the other imperialist powers by any means, provided they hand out alms for the construction of the economy of the “developing countries”. According to them the superpowers have to make some “sacrifices”, to cough up something for the hungry so that they can somehow manage to live and don’t get rebellious. That way, they claim, a compromise will be found, a “new international order” will be created in which everyone, rich or poor, exploiter or exploited will live “without war”, “without armament”, “in harmony”, “in class peace”, in coexistence á la Khrushchev. Exactly because these three “inventions” have the same content and the same aims we can notice that there is full harmony among the “leaderships” [English in the original text] of the “non-aligned countries”, the “Third World” and the “World of the developing countries”. Together they deceive the masses, the proletariat and the peoples by their theories and sermons in order to lead them away from revolutionary struggle.

The theory of the “Three Worlds” does not only disregard the contradiction between the two opposite social systems — socialism and capitalism — as well as the great contradiction between wage labour and capital but also does not analyse the other great contradiction, namely the contradiction between the oppressed peoples and world imperialism which they reduce solely to the contradiction to the two superpowers, indeed even mainly to one of them. This “theory” totally ignores the contradiction between the oppressed peoples and nations on the one hand and the other imperialist powers. And not only this, the followers of the theory of the “Three Worlds” call for an alliance of the “Third World” with these imperialist countries and with US-imperialism against Soviet social-imperialism.

One of the arguments which is given in order to justify the division of the world into three worlds consists of the claim that today the imperialist camp, which existed after World War II and in which American imperialism ruled, has allegedly collapsed and as a result of the uneven development of the different imperialisms ceased to exist. The supporters of this theory claim that today one could no more speak of a single imperialist world, because first of all the Western imperialist powers allegedly rose against the American ruler and secondly an always increasing fierce rivalry between the two imperialist superpowers, USA and Soviet Union, exists.

Since the stage of imperialism the inter-imperialist contradictions exist as a result of the uneven development of the different capitalist countries, they exist, deepen continuously and depending on the circumstances and conditions inter-imperialist alliances, blocks and groups form and dissolve again — this is the ABC of Marxism-Leninism. Lenin proved in detail that this typical characteristic of imperialism, which gives testimony of imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, approaching decay more and more every day, is an objective law. But does this mean that the imperialist world as social system has ceased to exist as result of these contradictions and is divided into several worlds, that the socio-economic nature of this or that imperialism has changed? By no means. The current factors do not give evidence about a collapse of the imperialist world but about one single imperialist world system which is characterised by the existence of the two great imperialist blocks today: one the one hand the Western imperialist block with US-imperialism at its head with its inter-imperialist instruments like organisms as NATO, EEC, etc., and on the other hand the block of the East under the leadership of Soviet social-imperialism with the Warsaw Pact and Comecon as its instruments of expansionist, hegemonic and war policies.

In the schema of the “Three World” imperialist, capitalist and revisionist countries belong to the so-called “Second World”, countries which do not feature significant differences in regard to the social order of the two superpowers and are also not different to various countries classified as belonging to the “Third World”. Indeed, the countries of this “world” show certain contradictions to both superpowers but these are contradictions of inter-imperialist character like the contradictions between the two superpowers are, too. In the first instance they are contradictions between such imperialisms like the West German, Japanese, British, French, Canadian, etc. and one or the other superpower as well as between themselves in regard to markets, spheres of influence, regions for capital export and the exploitation of the wealth of others.

Of course these contradictions weaken the imperialist world system and are in the interest of the struggle of the proletariat and the peoples. But it is anti-Marxist to equal the contradictions between the different imperialist powers and both superpowers with the struggle of the working masses and the peoples against imperialism and for its destruction.

It can happen by no means that the countries of the so-called “Second World”, in other words, the ruling monopolist bourgeoisie there, become allies of the oppressed peoples and nations in the struggle against the two superpowers and world imperialism. History after World War II shows clearly that these countries supported and still support the aggressive policies and actions of US-imperialism like in Korea and in Vietnam, in the Middle East and in Africa, etc. They are ardent defenders of neo-colonialism and the old order of inequality in international economic relations. The allies of Soviet social-imperialism in the “Second World” participated together with it in the occupation of Czechoslovakia and are eager advocates of its expansionist policy in the different regions of the earth. The countries of the so-called “Second World” are the economic and military main support of the aggressive and expansionist alliances of the two superpowers.

The supporters of the theory of the three worlds claim that it gives great possibilities for exploitation of inter-imperialist contradictions. The contradictions in the rows of the enemy have to be exploited, but in which way and to what aim? Generally they always have to be exploited for the sake of the revolution, the sake of the peoples and their freedom, for the sake of socialism. Generally the exploitation of the contradictions between the enemies have to lead to the growth and the intensification of the revolutionary and liberation movement and not to its weakening and its downturn, they have to lead to an always more and more active mobilisation of the revolutionary powers in the struggle against the enemies, especially against their main enemies without letting even a single illusion about their character emerge among the peoples.

To make the inter-imperialist contradictions absolute, to underestimate the basic contradiction, namely the contradiction between the revolution and the counter-revolution, to make only the exploitation of contradictions within the camp of the enemy the centre of the strategy while forgetting the most important point — the strengthening of the revolutionary spirit and the development of the revolutionary movement of the working class and the peoples -, to leave the preparation for the revolution aside, all this is in absolute contrasts to the teachings of Marxism-Leninism. It is anti-Marxist to preach unity with the allegedly weaker imperialism for the struggle against the stronger one under the pretext of exploiting contradictions, to side with the national bourgeoisie in order to resist the bourgeoisie of another country. Lenin stressed that the tactic of the exploiting of contradictions between the enemies should be used to raise and not to reduce the general level of proletarian class consciousness, the revolutionary spirit, the confidence of the masses in struggle and victory.

The Party of Labour of Albania has consistently adhered to these immortal teachings and always consistently adheres to them.

“In these moments of the great crisis of imperialism and modern revisionism”, Comrade Enver Hoxha said, “we have to exploit the great contradiction between the enemies correctly for our sake, for the sake of the socialist states and the peoples rising for the revolution, have to unmask the enemies constantly and must not be content with the so-called concessions and cooperations the imperialists and revisionists make perforce until they have left the danger behind them to take revenge afterwards. Therefore we have to keep the iron steadily in the fire and forge it constantly.” (E. Hoxha, Report to the 7th Party Congress of the PLA)

By portraying the so-called “Second World”, to which most capitalist and neo-colonialist countries belong and which presents the main pillar of the two superpowers, as ally of the “Third World” in the alleged struggle against US-imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism the anti-revolutionary and pseudo-imperialist character of the theory of the “Three Worlds” becomes evident.

It is an anti-revolutionary “theory” because class truce is preached to the European, Japanese, Canadian and other proletariat which has to struggle against the ruling monopoly of the bourgeoisie and exploitative order in the countries of the “Second World”, and also the collaboration with the bourgeoisie, meaning an abandonment of the revolution because allegedly this is in the interests of the defence of national independence and of the struggle especially against Soviet social-imperialism.

Furthermore it is a pseudo-anti-imperialist theory because it justifies and supports the neo-colonialist and exploitative policies of the imperialist powers of the “Second World” and calls upon the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America not to resist this policy, allegedly for the sake of the struggle against the superpowers. This way, the anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the so-called “Third World” as well as of the so-called “Second World” is actually weakened and sabotaged.

III.

A revolutionary strategy is one which puts central emphasis on the revolution.

“The strategy and tactics of Leninism”, Stalin wrote, “constitute the science of leading the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat.” (Stalin, Foundations of Leninism)

The Leninist strategy sees the proletarian world revolution as one single process, consisting of several great revolutionary currents of our epoch where the international proletariat is centred.

This revolutionary process takes place continuously in countries which are treading the way of genuine socialism as irreconcilable and fierce struggle between the two ways — the socialist and the capitalist way — for the achievement of the complete and final victory of the first over the second, in order to avert the danger of retrogression by counter-revolutionary violence and imperialist aggression or by the bourgeois-revisionist peaceful degeneration once and for all. The revolutionaries and peoples of the whole world follow the this struggle with lively interest and view it as a vital issue for the sake of the revolution and of socialism on a global scale. They give the socialist countries their whole support and backing against every assault of imperialism at these countries because in the socialist countries they see a strong basis and a mighty centre of the revolution, they see the practical realisation of the ideals for which they fight themselves. Lenin’s ideas about the necessity and primary importance of help and support from the part of the international proletariat for the country in which the socialist revolution was victorious are immortal. However, this requires at all times that it is a truly socialist country which applies the revolutionary teachings of Marxism-Leninism with utmost strictness and which consistently holds on to proletarian internationalism. In the case that it transforms into a capitalist country and only keep a fake “socialist” mask it must not be supported.

The revolutionaries and peoples know that the success and the struggle of the socialist countries hit and weaken imperialism, the bourgeoisie and the international reaction, that they are an immediate help and aid for the revolutionary liberation struggle of the working class and the peoples.

Lenin and Stalin always saw it as a revolutionary duty of the proletariat of a socialist country not only to make every possible effort to develop socialism in their own country but to wholeheartedly support the revolutionary liberation movement in other countries.

“Lenin”, J. V. Stalin wrote, “never regarded the Republic of Soviets as an end in itself. He always looked on it as an essential link for strengthening the revolutionary movement in the countries of the West and the East, an essential link for facilitating the victory of the working people of the whole world over capitalism. Lenin knew that this was the only right conception, both from the international standpoint and from the standpoint of preserving the Republic of Soviets itself.” (Stalin, On the Death of Lenin)

Exactly because of this a genuine socialist country cannot integrate itself into such groupings as the so-called “Third World” or the so-called “non-aligned countries” where all class boundaries are blurred and which solely serve the goal of diverting the peoples from the path of struggle against imperialism and from the revolution.

True and reliable allies of the socialist countries can only be the revolutionary, freedom-loving and progressive forces, the revolutionary movement of the working class and the anti-imperialist movement of oppressed peoples and nations. To preach the division into “Three Worlds”, to ignore the fundamental contradictions of our epoch, to call for an alliance of the proletariat with the monopoly bourgeoisie and of the oppressed peoples with the imperialist powers of the so-called “Second World” is neither for the betterment of the international proletariat nor of the peoples or the socialist countries, it is anti-Leninist. J. V. Stalin stressed:

“I cannot imagine that there will ever be a case when the interests of our Soviet Republic demand deviations to the right from our brother parties… I cannot imagine that the interests of our republic, which is the basis of the revolutionary proletarian movement of the whole world, would ever demand not a maximum of revolutionary verve and political activity of the Western workers but a decrease of this activity, hindering the revolutionary impetus.” (Stalin, Collected Works, volume 8, p. 97, German edition)

In the metropolises of capitalism the process of the proletarian world revolution gets more and more concrete today in the always increasing class struggles of the proletariat and the other working and progressive strata against bourgeois exploitation and oppression, against the attempts of the bourgeoisie to shift the burden of the current crisis of the capitalist world system on to the shoulders of the working class, against the revival of fascism in this or that form, etc. Among the working class, with the proletariat at its head, the conviction becomes accepted and will become more accepted each day that the only way out off the crises and other evils of capitalism, the bourgeois exploitation, the fascist violence and the imperialist wars is the socialist revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Live and the facts prove that neither the bourgeoisie nor their declared or disguised lackeys, from the social democrats to the modern revisionists, are able to hold up the surging wave of the revolutionary struggle of the masses.

“The present struggle of the world proletariat”, Comrade Enver Hoxha stressed at the 7th Party Congress of the PLA, “proves again the basic thesis of Marxism-Leninism that working class and its revolutionary struggle in the bourgeois and revisionist world can suppressed neither by violence nor by demagogy.”

The objective conditions for the revolution in the developed capitalist nations become more positive with every day. Today in these countries the proletarian revolution is a problem whose solution has to be faced. The Marxist-Leninist parties, which have taken up the banner of the revolution that the revisionists have betrayed and dropped, have rightfully readied themselves for the task and started seriously on the work of preparing the proletariat and its allies for the future revolutionary battles aimed at the downfall of bourgeois order. This revolutionary struggle which attacks the capitalist and imperialist world order in its strongholds has the full support of the true socialist countries as well as the revolutionary and peace-loving peoples on the whole world and must necessarily have them. Today, however, the modern revisionists, the advocates of the theory of the “Three Worlds” and the theoreticians of “non-alignment”, are making an effort by keeping silent about the revolution and its preparations and by upholding the status quo of the capitalist social order.

By trying to divert the attention of the proletariat from the revolution, the authors of the theory of the “Three Worlds” preach that nowadays the question of the defence of national independence opposing the danger of aggression from the part of the superpowers, especially from Soviet social-imperialism which they consider to be as arch-enemy, has taken precedence. The question of defining who — at a given time — is considered to be the arch-enemy on an international scale is of great importance for the revolutionary movement. Our party which takes into consideration the course of events and class analysis of the current situation, underlines that US-imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism, both them superpowers, are today “the biggest and the main enemies of the peoples” and as such “present the same kind of danger” (E. Hoxha, Report to the 7th Party Congress of the PLA).

Soviet social-imperialism is a brutal, aggressive and expansionist imperialism which practices an exceedingly colonialist and neo-colonialist policy which is based on the power of capital and weapons. This new imperialism is struggling as a rival of US-imperialism in order to conquer strategic positions and to extend its clutches to all regions and continents. It excels as a fire extinguisher of the revolution and oppressor of the liberation struggle of the peoples. This does not mean in the least that the other enemy of the peoples of the whole world, namely US-imperialism, is less dangerous, although the supporters of the theory of the “Three Worlds” say so. By disfiguring the truth and betraying the peoples they claim that American imperialism is no longer a warmonger, that it is allegedly weakened, that it is in decline and that it has turned into a frightened mouse — or in other words that US-imperialism is gradually becoming more peaceful. This goes so far that they justify even the American military presence in different countries like Germany, Belgium, Italy or Japan and label it as a factor of military defence. Such views are extremely dangerous to the freedom of the peoples and for the fates of the revolution. Such theses fuel illusions about the aggressive, hegemonistic and expansionist nature of US-imperialism as well as Soviet imperialism.

The proletariat and the proletarian revolution face the task of overthrowing each single imperialism and especially both imperialist superpowers. Because of its nature each imperialism is always a furious enemy of the proletarian revolution and therefore the classification of imperialisms in more or less dangerous kinds is false from the strategic viewpoint of world revolution. Practice has confirmed that both superpowers are to the same degree and at the same level the arch-enemy of socialism, the liberty and independence of the nations, it is the main force for the defence of the oppressive and exploitative systems, the immediate danger which threatens to pitch humanity into a third world war. The denial of the great truth, the underestimation of the danger of one or another superpower, or worse, the appeal to ally with one superpower against the other bears disastrous consequences and great dangers for the future of the revolution and the freedom of the peoples.

Of course it happens and can happen that one or another country is oppressed and threatened by one of the superpowers directly but this never ever means that the other superpower poses no danger for just this country and even less that the other superpower has become an enemy of this country. The principle “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” cannot be applied if it is a matter of the two imperialist superpowers: the USA and the Soviet Union. These two superpowers are fighting with all means against the revolution and against socialism, they undertake all possible efforts to sabotage the revolution and socialism and suffocate both in blood. The two superpowers are fighting in order to expand their rule and exploitation to different peoples and countries. Experience shows that they attack brutally first in the one region and next in another in order to reach for the peoples with their bloodstained claws and that they furiously form up for attack so that they can oust each other. As soon as the people of one country succeeds at shaking off the rule of the one superpower, the other immediately approaches. The Middle East and Africa fully confirm this.

The other great current of the world revolution in our epoch is the national liberation struggle of the peoples which is directed against imperialism, neo-colonialism and the colonial remains. The Marxist-Leninists and the world proletariat are solidly united with the national liberation struggles of the oppressed peoples and lend it all their support because they consider these struggles to be a very important and irreplaceable factor in the development of the revolutionary world process. The Party of Labour of Albania was and always is on the side of the peoples who struggle for freedom and national independence:

“We are in favour of the unity of the world proletariat and all upright anti-imperialist and progressive forces which thwart the aggressive plans of the imperialist and social-imperialist warmongers.”

The Party of Labour of Albania and the Albanian people who consistently adhere to this line… will… also in the future not spare any effort and will fight together with the other anti-imperialist and anti-social-imperialist peoples, together with all Marxist-Leninist parties, all revolutionaries and the world proletariat, with all progressive humans for the failure of the plans and manoeuvres of the enemies and for the triumph of the case of freedom and safety of the peoples.

Our country will always be on the side of all the peoples whose freedom and independence are threatened and whose rights are injured.” (E. Hoxha, Report to the 7th Party Congress of the PLA)

 Comrade Enver Hoxha expressed this unshakable conviction in the name of the party and the Albanian state in the speech at the people’s assembly for the enactment of our new constitution:

“Most peoples of the earth”, he explained, “are making great efforts and they insistently resist the colonial laws and the neo-colonial reign, the old and new rules, practices, conventions and one-sided treaties which have been put up by the bourgeoisie in order to keep up the exploitation of the peoples, the detested differences and discriminations in the international relations… the progressive peoples and the democratic states which cannot accept this state and struggle to achieve national sovereignty over their resources, which struggle to strengthen the political and economic independence and to achieve equality in the international relations have the full solidarity and support of the Albanian people and the Albanian state.”

Since the time of Lenin, the Marxist-Leninists have always considered the national liberation struggle of the peoples and nations oppressed by imperialism as a strong ally and great reserve of the world revolution of the proletariat.

In the countries which have achieved political independence completely or partially, the revolution is in different stages of development and it does not face the same tasks. Among them are countries which are directly facing the proletarian revolution while in many others the tasks of the anti-imperialist, national-democratic Revolution are in order. But the revolution is in any case an ally and a reserve of the proletarian world revolution as long as it is also directed against the international bourgeoisie and imperialism.

But does this means that such country has to stop at the national-democratic phase and that the revolutionaries must not speak about the socialist revolution, must not prepare it out of fear of skipping stages and leaving them out and because somebody might call them “Blanquists”?! Lenin already spoke about the necessity of the transformation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution into the socialist revolution at a time when the bourgeois-democratic revolution was still only budding in these countries. Marx and Engels, while criticising Blanquism, have called neither the revolution in 1848 nor the Paris Commune premature. Marxism-Leninism in no way mistakes the petty bourgeois impatience which leads to skipping stages with the necessity to perpetuate the revolution consistently.

Lenin stresses that the revolution in the dependent and colonial countries has to be promoted. Since the time of Lenin great changes have taken place in these countries which haven been foreseen by him in a brilliant way and in which the Leninist thesis of the revolutionary world process finds its answer. The realisation of the proletarian revolution is an universal law and the main trend of our epoch. Both must and will necessarily permeate all countries without exception, among them Indonesia and Chile, Brazil and Zaire, etc., regardless of the question by which stages the proletarian revolution will be accomplished. Disregarding this aim, preaching the preservation of the status quo and theorising about the “necessity not to skip any stages”, forgetting the fight against Suharto and Pinochet, Geisel and Mobutu means being neither for the national liberation struggle nor for the national-democratic revolution.

The proletarian revolution must and will permeate Europe, too. Whoever forgets this perspective, whoever doesn’t prepare for this aim but preaches instead that the revolution has shifted to Africa or Asia and that the European proletariat has to ally itself with its “reasonable and well-meaning” bourgeoisie under the pretext of defending national independence, is someone who takes an anti-Leninist stance and who is not in favour of the defence of the mother country and for the nation’s freedom. Whoever “forgets” that both the Warsaw Treaty and the NATO have to be fought, and that both the Comecon and the EEC have to be rejected, is someone who allies himself with them and becomes their slave.

In the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” Marx and Engels wrote: “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre.”

This statement by Marx and Engels is topical today, too. Both the temporary defeat which the revolution suffered because of the revisionist betrayal and the economic potential and the military oppressive power which imperialism and social-imperialism use to oppose the revolutionary movement and the ideas of communism have not been able and will never be able either to change the course of history and thus to bring the great power of Marxism-Leninism to its knees.

Marxism-Leninism is the revolutionary ideology which has penetrated deeply into the consciousness of the proletariat and which has an ever increasing influence on the broad masses of the peoples seeking liberation. The influence of this theory is so strong that even the bourgeois ideologists have always been forced to reckon with it, and they have never ceased trying to find ways and means to disfigure Marxism-Leninism and to undermine the revolution.

The current anti-Leninist theories of the “Three Worlds”, the “non-alignment”, etc., also aim at undermining the revolution, to fight back the struggle against imperialism, especially the American one, to divide the Marxist-Leninist movement and the unity of the proletariat propagated by Marx and Lenin, to create a number of groups of anti-Marxist elements so that fight against the true Marxist-Leninist parties which are loyally stick to Marxism-Leninism and to the revolution.

All efforts to analyse the situation in an allegedly new manner which is different from that of Lenin and Stalin and to change the revolutionary strategy which has always been upheld by the Marxist-Leninist movement lead astray, making one take the anti-Marxist path and turning one’s back on the struggle against imperialism and revisionism. The loyalty towards Marxism-Leninism, towards the revolutionary strategy of the Marxist-Leninist communist movement, and the fight against all opportunist deviations which the modern revisionists of different colour propagate as well as the revolutionary mobilisation of the working class and the peoples against the bourgeoisie and imperialism as well as the serious preparation for the revolution are the only true way, indeed the only way towards victory.

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English abstract of Enver Hoxha’s “The Theory and Practice of Revolution”

A lengthy editorial was published on July 7, 1977, in “Zëri i Popullit” (The Voice of the People), the official organ of the ruling Albanian Party of Labour. Entitled The Theory and Practice of Revolution, it was written by Enver Hoxha in third person but not signed.

Significant passages in the article read as follows:

Defining the fundamental content of the new historic epoch as the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolutions, [Lenin] remained consistently loyal to the teachings of Marx about the historic mission of the proletariat as the new social force which will carry out the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist society of oppression and exploitation and build the new society, the classless communist society. [...] The fact that the teachings of Marxism-Leninism and the revolution were betrayed in the Soviet Union and a number of former socialist countries does not alter the Leninist thesis on the character of the present epoch in the least. [...] The Albanian Party of Labour has always consistently upheld these Marxist-Leninist conclusions. [...]

The revisionist betrayal, the return of the Soviet Union and a number of former socialist countries to capitalism, the spreading of modern revisionism widely in the international communist and workers’ movement and the splitting of this movement were a heavy blow to the cause of revolution and socialism. But this by no means implies that socialism was liquidated as a system and that the criterion of the division of the world into two opposing systems must be changed, that the contradiction between capitalism and socialism no longer exists today. [...]

By ignoring socialism as a social system, the so-called theory of three worlds ignores the greatest historic victory of the international proletariat, ignores the fundamental contradiction of the time – that between socialism and capitalism. It is clear that such a theory, which ignores socialism, is anti-Leninist. It leads to the weakening of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the countries where socialism is being built, while calling on the world proletariat not to fight, not to rise in socialist revolution. [...]

The supporters of the theory of the three worlds claim that it gives great possibilities for exploitation of inter-imperialist contradictions. [...] [But] it is anti-Marxist to preach unity with the allegedly weaker imperialism to oppose the stronger, to side with the bourgeoisie of one country to oppose that of another country, under the pretext of exploiting contradictions. Lenin stressed that the tactic of the exploitation of contradictions in the ranks of the enemies should be used to raise and not to reduce the general level of proletarian consciousness, the revolutionary spirit, the capacity of the masses to fight and win. [...]

A truly socialist country cannot include itself in such groupings as the so-called Third World of non-aligned countries in which any kind of class boundaries have been erased and which serve only to divert the peoples from the road of the struggle against imperialism and for the revolution. [...] To preach the division into three worlds, to ignore the fundamental contradictions of our times, to call for an alliance of the proletariat with the monopoly bourgeoisie and of the oppressed peoples with the imperialist powers of the so-called second world is not to the advantage of the international proletariat, the peoples, or the socialist countries. [...]

In trying to divert the attention of the proletariat from the revolution, the authors of the theory of the three worlds preach that, at the present time, the question of the preservation of national independence from the danger of aggression by the super-powers, especially by Soviet social-imperialism, which they consider to be the main enemy, is the primary issue. [...] Bearing in mind the course of events, the class analysis of the present situation, our party stresses that US imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism, these two super-powers, are “the main and biggest enemies of the peoples” today, and as such “they constitute the same danger” [in the words of Enver Hoxha]. [...] Distorting the truth and deceiving the peoples they [i.e. the advocates of the three worlds theory] claim that US imperialism is allegedly no longer war-mongering. [...] Matters have reached the point where even the US military presence in various countries such as Germany, Belgium or Italy, in Japan and other countries is being justified and described as a factor for defence. Such views are extremely dangerous to the freedom of the peoples and the fate of the revolution. [...]

It happens and may happen that this or that country is oppressed or directly threatened by one of the super-powers, but this in no way and in no case means that the other super-power has become a friend of that country. The principle “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” cannot be applied when it is a matter of the two imperialist super-powers [...] [which] are fighting to extend their domination and exploitation of various peoples and countries. [...]

The carrying out of the proletarian revolution is a universal law and the main trend of our epoch. All countries without exception, even including Indonesia and Chile, Brazil and Zaïre, and so on, must and will go through it regardless of what stages will have to be traversed to get there. If you lose sight of this objective, if you preach the preservation of the status quo and theorize about “avoiding missing out stages”, if you forget to fight against Suharto and Pinochet [and] Geisel and [President] Mobutu, this means that you are for neither the national liberation struggle nor tlie national democratic revolution. [...]

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PCMLE: Albania’s struggle against the Maoists

From En Marcha, the newspaper of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador (PCMLE).

The activity displayed by the Chinese was vacillating and contradictory, absent of Marxist-Leninist principles and characterized by opportunism…

The Party of Labor of Albania after facing and fighting the Khrushchev had to expose and fight against a new facet of revisionism, but this time came from the Asian continent and under the hand and the leadership of Mao Tse-Tung.

From 1956, the year in which it is presented the report of the XX Congress of the CPSU, the PTA strengthened its relations with the Chinese. This relationship is girded increasingly deployed by the Albanian struggle against Khrushchev revisionism, but the action led by Mao and his followers degenerated into a pragmatic policy that sought to turn China into an imperialist superpower.

The unfurled the Chinese activity was hesitant and contradictory, which were absent Marxist-Leninist principles and characterized by opportunism, according to Enver Hoxha “… many positions, not only generals, but also personal for Chinese leaders on a series of major political, ideological, military and organizational sometimes ranged to the right and others left. On some occasions were keen, in other swing, from time to time also held positions correct, but in most cases were obvious opportunistic attitudes. China’s policy in general, throughout the entire period that Mao lived, has been faltering, was a joint policy, lacked the spine Marxist-Leninist. One day he spoke in a way about an important political issue, and the next day to another. In China’s policy could not find a stable and consistent thread “to the point that even Mao Tse-Tung stated that his thought can be used by everyone, both the left and right.

While Albania deepened the struggle against revisionism and imperialism, the Chinese action was hesitant becoming more and more, on one hand with the attitude of the Chinese leadership for Khrushchev and his band, the other glaring submission to U.S. imperialism . On several occasions the Chinese tried to seek reconciliation and union with the Russian revisionists under the pretext of forming a common front against imperialism, and immediately afterwards invited Nixon (21 to February 28, 1972) and Ford (December 3 , 1975) to proclaim China’s policy approach and join the imperialists.

Enver Hoxha in the paper entitled “Reflections on China,” said that “the Chinese masquerading as revisionist, but collaborate and expand cooperation with all revisionist trend that has apparent contradictions with the Soviet revisionists. Therefore, in practice together (and are also united ideologically) with the revisionists to fight the Soviet revisionists. The Chinese anti-imperialist posing, pretending to fight the imperialist superpowers (U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism), but now develop contacts and cooperation with the United States of America against the Soviets. Supposedly exploit contradictions. Not expressly say that the Soviets are the number one enemy of mankind, but suggests that the United States of America are not the enemy number one. “Adding to these criticisms the c. Hoxha maintained their rebuttals saying that China “… to pursue a policy of unprincipled and explode, supposedly, contradictions and joints, can not establish itself as a powerful socialist country, nor the Communist Party of China as a Marxist-Leninist strongly defend the principles. “

The thought of Mao Tse-Tung was presented as a grade higher than Marxism-Leninism, was preached as the Chinese way of dealing with problems “… full of life and freshness, pleasant to the ear and the eyes of Chinese people,” noting that the Maoists wanted to remove the universal scientific basis of the theory of the proletariat, while looking at fusing elements of Marxist-Leninist theory with theories of ancient thinkers revolutionaries, the jurists and feudal as Lao Tse, Tse Kung, Confucius, and so on.

The main elements that are contrary to the philosophical principles of Marxism-Leninism are about materialist dialectics which mainly refers to the unity of opposites-the revolution (from countryside to city, the devaluation of the working class) and transition from capitalism to socialism (capitalist and socialist line in the party).

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