First Published: Guardian April 11, 1979.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Second of two articles
How can we best identify the split in the new communist movement which has resulted in the emergence of what has come to be popularly known as the “antirevisionist, anti-dogmatist” trend?
Last week we explored the reasons why summarizing the line of demarcation as one between Marxism-Leninism and dogmatism is inadequate. Rarely, if ever, do 2-line struggles come to a head in the form of contradictions in the realm of ideology; and dogmatism, as a methodological deviation from dialectical materialism, is clearly an error in the realm of ideology.
But it is not until ideological divergences manifest themselves in politics–that is, in the concrete stand taken on concrete political questions–thai the struggle is joined in decisive fashion. One reason why the break with modern revisionism was not taken up fully by all Marxist-Leninist parties in the world was because the differences never completely manifested themselves in any single clarifying political question.
Thus, on the principal revolutionary question of the decade 1963-1973, the Vietnamese revolution, modern revisionism did not expose itself in such a fashion that the full political consequences of the line on peaceful transition and peaceful coexistence were made clear before the communist movement. That the support the Soviet Union gave Vietnam in the war against U.S. imperialism can be explained more in terms of the state interests of the USSR than proletarian internationalism only underscores the fact that the actual political expression of revisionism around the Vietnamese revolution did not provide a clarifying basis for the split in the world communist movement. In other words, the international movement did not split over the principal political question facing the communist movement during that period.
Nevertheless, we must recognize that modern revisionism as a phenomenon in the communist movement has been consolidated in fact and that it represents a decisive break with Marxism-Leninism, Politically it has expressed itself in three main ways: the emergence of great power chauvinism as the guiding political line of the Soviet state; the abandonment of proletarian revolution by the Moscow-oriented communist parties of the advanced capitalist countries on the basis of the theory of peaceful transition; and the liquidation of revolutionary struggles in a number of semicolonial and neocolonial countries on the basis of the thesis of’’ noncapitalist’’ development which simply provides a “socialist” cover to the petty bourgeoisie in those countries.
But what about the “antidogmatist” line of demarcation? Among those who had consciously identified themselves as the antirevisionist trend in Marxism-Leninism, this demarcation took place around a very concrete political question. In its particularity, that question was Angola. In its generality, it was the international line of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Whatever clarifying was still required after the CPC’s class-collaborationist stand on the Angolan revolution has been supplied by the further political explication of the three worlds theory since that time, particularly by Deng Xiaoping’s (Teng Hsiao-ping) open proclamation calling for a “united front” with U.S. imperialism and China’s invasion of Vietnam.
Marxism-Leninism has a very concentrated way of summarizing class-collaboration: opportunism. Historically, opportunism in the communist movement has most frequently taken the form of abandoning the struggle against capitalism in favor of those immediate concessions that can be won from the bourgeoisie while leaving the fundamental class and property relations unchallenged. The theory of peaceful transition, in other words, is simply a pledge by the supposedly revolutionary vanguard to confine the struggle of the working class to the arena of those reforms which can be achieved through the bourgeoisie’s legal apparatus without smashing the armed power of the capitalist class as represented by its state apparatus. This is correctly called right opportunism.
But there is also left opportunism. This form of opportunism makes its deals with the bourgeoisie under the cover of defending Marxism-Leninism. In the case of the Communist Party of China, its policy of class-collaboration with U.S. imperialism is thus put forward in the name of antirevisionism. Left opportunism does not abandon the thesis of the dictatorship of the proletariat or armed struggle. It does not claim that the quantitative accumulation of reforms under capitalism will lead to the qualitative leap to socialism. Nor does it claim that a policy of peaceful coexistence will lead to the overthrow of imperialism.
Rather, it says that among the masses–and not just within the communist movement–the struggle against imperialism must be subordinated to the struggle against revisionism. In other words, the danger posed by revisionism is so great that it must be smashed even if an explicit alliance with the bourgeoisie must be made to accomplish this goal. In fact, since left opportunism by itself is too weak to smash revisionism–it never can develop a sufficient mass base by itself to do this–the bourgeoisie must be encouraged and even provoked to perform this task for it.
In its earlier stages, this view expresses itself “merely” as ultra-“leftism.” But as this ultra-“leftism” matures into a more all-encompassing system, it expresses itself in open collaboration with the class enemy–left opportunism.
And it is precisely at the point when ultra-“leftism”–and its ideological counterparts, dogmatism and voluntarism– elevates into all-sided left opportunism that the actual break in the new communist movement occurred in the U.S. It is for this reason that the struggle around Angola is rightly seen as a watershed for our movement. No longer were the ultra-“lefts” simply isolating themselves from the masses by their sectarian antics, their super-revolutionary posturing and their dogmatic distortion of Marxist-Leninist theory. With Angola, they moved over to open and direct class-collaboration.
But this process required a theoretical justification within the construct of Marxism-Leninism, precisely because of its “left” form. Antirevisionism, by itself, is obviously insufficient to this purpose. Lenin’s famous thesis that “the fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism” makes it clear that the struggle against revisionism is waged as part of the struggle against imperialism. No Marxist-Leninist could argue that the struggle against imperialism must be subordinated to the struggle against revisionism or, even worse, that the struggle against imperialism must be abandoned in favor of the struggle against revisionism.
A new theoretical proposition was required–and it was supplied with the thesis of capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union. With this proposition, everything could be justified in terms of Marxism-Leninism. The struggle against imperialism was not being abandoned in favor of the struggle against revisionism. The struggle against imperialism was being abandoned in favor of the struggle against an even more dangerous imperialism, so dangerous in fact, that it has become necessary to line up with one set of imperialists against the other.
This is not to suggest that the thesis of capitalist restoration was consciously invented in order to lead to the political consequences with which we are now all too familiar. The thesis itself was the product of a great complex of circumstances, among them the impending cultural revolution in China, the clear threat posed on a state-to-state level by the degeneration of Soviet foreign policy to all-sided great nation chauvinism, the rise of ultra-“leftism” and anarchism unleashed in the course of the struggle against revisionism and the weakening of Marxist-Leninist ideology through the ascendancy of dogmatism.
The communist movement has barely begun to take up this profound theoretical error. It is still necessary to sort it out from its origins in the legitimate and necessary struggle against revisionism. Complicating the task is the fact that the revisionists themselves have such an enormous stake in refuting the thesis. Nor will it be enough to refute the thesis theoretically. It will also have to be explained as a historical phenomenon in its own right.
At the least, however, we can make the obvious connection between the development of the thesis on capitalist restoration and the consolidation of a policy in the Communist Party of China which subordinated the interests of the international struggle against imperialism to the narrowly perceived state interests of China. Again, given the “left” justification for this policy, we must sum it up as left opportunism.
The new communist movement in the U.S. was inexorably shaped by its political relationship to the Communist Party of China. Its leading forces continuously subordinated the interests of the struggle against the U.S. bourgeoisie to the policy demands of China’s opportunist line. When the acid test came with Angola, and as it has come again and again since that time on similar questions, these same forces continued to uphold the opportunist line and give it concrete expression within the U.S.
For all these reasons, it is necessary to locate the line of demarcation in our movement in political rather than ideological terms. This is what the formulation of seeing the main trend of Marxism-Leninism in the U.S. as an antirevisionist, anti-“left” opportunist trend seeks to essentialize.
Naturally, there were many smaller forms of opportunism bound up with this political opportunism. Thus we have seen the flunkeyism of these forces, the petty careerism, the organizational sectarianism which have all characterized the new communist movement. These are all inevitable extensions of the fundamental political opportunism, since the abdication of a genuinely revolutionary perspective opens the door to securing immediate and sometimes personal advantages from the situation. Clearly, when the defining relationship for a party or organization of communists is not with the masses but with a powerful party based on an opportunist line, the scramble for power, prestige, influence and the like all take precedence over the revolutionary task of forging the kind of communist unity capable of building a genuine vanguard party.
The term left opportunism is not yet an all-sided summation of the failure of the new communist movement. At some point, that summation will be expressed in a particular designation that unites all the deviation in the ideological, political and organizational spheres.
But as a particular question for our movement at this time which is trying to deepen its understanding of its own history, it is clearly of greater consequence to focus on the political expression of this line of demarcation than on questions of methodology. Summing up the split in the new communist movement as a split between Marxism-Leninism and left opportunism helps us fortify our demarcation from the second principal deviation in the international communist movement, a key element in taking on the task of general line rectification.