First Published: The Workers’ Advocate, Vol. 9, No. 1, January 3, 1979.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The formation of the warmongering U. S.-China alliance is in complete accordance with and is the very fruit of the anti-Leninist theory of “three worlds”. This so-called “great strategic concept” of the Chinese revisionists is being put into full effect by the Hua Kuo-feng-Teng Hsiao-ping clique. It is the “three worlds” theory which guides their efforts to turn China into a superpower and justifies their alliances with the biggest imperialists and reactionaries against peace, socialism and national liberation.
Chinese revisionism with its “three worlds” theory is but the latest current of modern revisionism. It is a variant of Khrushchovite revisionism, a gross concoction made up of the most outrageous distortions of Marxism-Leninism. Like all the previous revisionisms – that of the American arch-revisionist Browder, Yugoslav Titoite revisionism, Khruschovite Soviet revisionism, and “Eurocommunist” revisionism – the “three worlds” theory is a flagrant renunciation of the revolution and is a line of open collaboration with imperialism, U.S. imperialism in particular.
Leninism teaches us that we still live in the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution, the epoch of the victory of socialism over capitalism. In this era, two contending forces are locked in mortal combat, labor against capital, the forces of socialism and freedom against the forces of capitalism and slavery. Since the Russian Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917, the new socialist system has been in existence without interruption. Despite the restoration of capitalism in the U.S.S.R. at the hands of the Khrushchovite revisionists following the death of J. V. Stalin, and despite the revisionist degeneration in China, genuine socialism continues to flourish in the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania and socialism remains a powerful force. Nowhere on earth does the imperialist-capitalist system exist in peace and quiet, but everywhere it is in deep crisis, confronted by the forces of socialism, by the proletarian revolutionary movement and the anti-imperialist movement of the oppressed nations. Workers’ strikes, demonstration and protests, revolts, armed uprisings and national liberation wars of the oppressed masses are the order of the day. The problem of revolution is being taken up for solution in all countries. The two superpower the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., in the first place, along with the Chinese, Japanese and European imperialist are involved in deep rivalries over the division of the loot plundered from the toilers on all continents. These conflicts are dangerous and lead in the direction of war, but at the same time they tremendously weaken the world imperialist system and provide prospects for the revolution to breach the imperialist front.
However, according to the opportunist ravings of the “three worlders”, Leninism is no longer valid. Socialism, the working class movement and the national liberation movement and the very possibility of a successful revolution have all been written off as unfortunate misconceptions good only for a dim and distant past. The Chinese revisionists allege that the world is now divided in a different way – according to geography: that the so-called “third world” (the capitalist and neo-colonial states of Asia, Africa and Latin America) “now constitutes the motive force pushing world history forward”; and that the so-called “second world” (mainly the imperialist states of Europe and Japan) “can be won over to the third world in the common struggle against the hegemonism of the two superpowers”, the U.S. and U.S.S.R.
Futhermore, the Chinese revisionists look at the world through big power spectacles and consider the re-division of imperialist spheres of influence and not the revolution as the cardinal problem of the time.
The theoreticians of the “three worlds” theory in a warmongering fashion have proclaimed as “inevitable” a war between U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism. They have declared that the proletariat and people cannot prevent such a war and that the revolution has been indefinitely postponed. Hence, the only thing left to do is to support one superpower or the other in the inter-imperialist slaughter they are preparing.
Therefore, regarding the two superpowers themselves, the theory of “three worlds” does not treat them as two imperialisms, equally the most barbaric and savage enemies of the people of the world, but instead makes an absurd distinction between the two. Allegedly, U.S. imperialism is the “declining “super-power” which has been placed “on the defensive” and therefore no longer an enemy but a bulwark of “peace” and “democracy” against the “one main enemy”, the superpower “on the offensive,” the Soviet New Tsars.
Thus, the “great strategic concept” of the Chinese revisionists is as far from the Marxist-Leninist class analysis as it could possibly be. Teng Hsiao-ping and Co. demand that the so-called “third world”, (the U.S. neo-colonial puppets such as the Shah of Iran, Mobutu of the Congo(K) and Pinochet of Chile unite with the imperialist and neo-colonialist states of the so-called “second world”. Of course this “united front” is to be under the direction of the self-styled “leader of the third world”, Chinese social-imperialism, which has its own neo-colonialist designs in this so-called “world”. As well, it is demanded that the “third” and “second” worlds unite under the U.S. nuclear umbrella and be left to the tender mercies of U.S. imperialism. This line could not be more reactionary. There is no better formula for the defense of the status quo and for collaboration with imperialism, U.S. imperialism in particular than the theory of “three worlds”. The formation of the aggressive U. S.-China alliance is the greatest achievement of the “three worlds” theory to date.
The disgusting spectacle of the counter-revolutionary U.S.-China collaboration demonstrates the enormous significance for the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists to fight with all their strength against revisionism and opportunism of all hues. To not fight the Pentagon-socialist “three worlders”, the agents of Chinese revisionism in the U.S., is to take a non-revolutionary attitude towards U. S. monopoly capitalism and its state power. To fail to take an irreconcilable stand against the theory of “three worlds”, to adopt it as one’s own, means betrayal of the working class and going over to the side of world imperialism and reaction. Only by resolutely upholding the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, defending the immortal teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin against the distortions of the revisionists and opportunists of all hues, can the cause of the proletariat and working masses be advanced.