The Prospects for Pluralistic Communism

...Before the November plenum of 1962, the Libermann proposals for reducing detailed bureaucratic planning and giving industrial managers freedom and incentive to reduce costs and improve quality in response to market indicators had been eagerly discussed, and an experiment was authorized even then...

...for while nonCommunist movements for political independence have almost universally succeeded, many of the non-Communist revolts against "semicolonial" dependence have failed...

...They did not break relations with the Yugoslav "revisionists" after their second excommunication in 1958...

...A first approach to an answer may emerge if we ask what factors have been decisive for preventing continued allinclusive cooperation among independent Communist states, and for causing their differences to assume the form of a doctrinal schism...

...In 1959, following a series of disappointments over Soviet policies, they had begun to criticize their allies in the forum of the international Communist movement, hoping to bring effective pressure to bear on them...

...organizationally, they began to prepare positions for an impending break rather than for a long-term internal debate and openly strove to discredit the Soviets among the nationalists of the underdeveloped countries...

...with the full authority of the Chinese party, this document took the line that in any split between "Revisionists" and "Marxist-Leninists," regardless of the factual circumstances, the political guilt rests with the revisionists—in other words, that a pro-Chinese minority cannot do wrong when it splits a pro-Soviet Communist party...

...One result of this is to make it doubtful how long an "orthodox" Soviet interpretation of the Communist doctrine will survive at all as an effective influence on Communist thought outside the Soviet Union...

...the Chinese published their "Proposal for the General Line of the Communist Movement," with its all-out attack on the "revisionist" CPSU program, on the eve of the talks, and the Soviets replied one month later with their "Open Letter" which contained among other charges the specific accusation that the Chinese were supporting splitting activities in various Communist parties...

...In fact, the shock of Hungary, following so closely on the shock of destalinization, was probably decisive for Nenni's evolution towards an autonomous, democratic policy, culminating in his joining a government coalition without the Communists...

...It has taken years of successive disillusionments for the Chinese leaders to become aware of the full implications of their sense of mission...

...In practice, however, they behaved exactly as the Soviet leaders had behaved in the formative years of the Comintern...

...Long before the factional struggle began, the Chinese had considered that their main chances of international influence lay in the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America...

...But short of either such a generalized withdrawal from the present fascination with economic development, or a radical change in Chinese economic and social doctrine, it would appear that Communist China's chances of being accepted as a guide for "building socialism" in developing countries are much poorer than its chances of serving as a guide for the revolutionary seizure of power...

...and if forced to make a choice, those who are not in China's physical power sphere may well prefer the protector that demands least ideological conformity and offers most material help...

...108 The Dynamics of "Uninterrupted Revolution...

...In trying to sum up the results of our analysis, the first and most definite conclusion that seems to emerge is the answer to our initial question...

...and even during that critical period the task assigned them by Stalin was not to attempt the revolutionary seizure of power, but to influence national policy and entrench themselves in the state machine by joining in "coalitions of liberation...

...Nor should it be taken for granted that the ambitions of the Communist cadres in these countries are more far-reaching: their training has given them a sense of superior "scientific" insight that is valuable in their present role, but they might find it very difficult to fight the nationalist-socialist myth of the established leaders with a myth of their own...

...The full importance of these different internal needs of the Communist regimes will become clear once we recall that it was primarily for internal reasons that Khrushchev embarked on the difficult and dangerous path of destalinization...

...By contrast, the entire recent development of Communist China has been dominated by Mao's conviction that his rule could only be maintained if ideological militancy was kept up in an atmosphere of the besieged fortress...

...The Chinese will indeed try to form a new International of actively revolutionary parties based on their own model and doctrinal authority, and may have substantial initial success in countries whose internal situation offers chances for new totalitarian revolutions...

...but though the Soviet leader had obviously proclaimed it at least partly in order to make his French and Italian comrades once again eligible for government participation, the PCF made no serious efforts to overcome the barriers maintaining its domestic isolation...

...Yet in the course of 1960, the Chinese Communists found that their ideological attacks were not leading to an increase of Soviet aid, but to its total cessation...

...and some of their leaders probably still feel a basic loyalty to Moscow...

...Conversely, it has been the Chinese who have consistently proclaimed the need for complete ideological unity based on a single doctrinal authority, first seeking to maintain the Soviets in that role and later challenging them to ideological debate...

...First, the revolutionary movements on which the Chinese tend to lean are much more strongly nationalist than those with which Lenin built the Third International: after all, the Comintern arose from a reaction to the "betrayal of internationalism" by the official socialist parties in World War I, whereas the new "Sinintern" is to be largely based on the "betrayal of the national liberation struggle" by the Soviets...

...More important, when the Soviets began to call for a new world conference, the Italians, in open agreement with the Yugoslays and in confidential consultation with the Poles, expressed misgivings about its usefulness and finally agreed to participate only on conditions: there should be no formal excommunication of the Chinese, there should be no attempt to impose a general line on the parties attending but a frank discussion and toleration of differences, and the conference should be devoted to a constructive examination of recent international developments rather than to a factional settling of accounts...

...when they supported Cuba with economic aid and demagogic threats against the United States, they could be em broiled with the Americans...

...When the Soviets advised the Algerian FLN to negotiate with de Gaulle, they could be accused of opportunism...

...If the "world revolution" no longer has a clearly defined meaning from the viewpoint of Soviet interest...

...and he quickly found that the bureaucrats trained by Stalin could not be induced to change their methods unless the legend of Stalin's infallibility was destroyed first...

...The Chinese do not even hesitate to exploit the weakness of some of the new states by promoting purely tribal revolts, as now in the Congo...

...The Soviet leaders' concept of the form that relations among the "loyal" Communist parties should take after the break with the Chinese has been shaped by this new situation, and by the somewhat contradictory needs arising from it, as well as by the growing awareness of their irrecoverable loss of authority and by the difficulty of rallying parties for an International that was no longer all-inclusive...

...A regime seeking to appeal to the self-interest of its subjects in order to achieve a steady growth of productivity wishes to encourage a sense of security among them, and that means security not only from police persecution but also from imminent war...

...The Soviets, sure that in any compromise reached by quiet diplomacy among allies their superior power would normally prevail, were clearly interested in keeping relations on this pragmatic level and avoiding the embarrassment of ideological disputes...

...they willingly endorsed the second excommunication of the Yugoslays...

...The emergence of a plurality of sovereign Communist powers, and the vacancy of international authority created by destalinization, were thus basic for making the disintegration of the organization and doctrine of world Communism possible: given these two conditions, any major differences of national interest and internal ideological needs between the two principal Communist powers might lead to open political and doctrinal conflict between them—for each would now decide its policies independently and seek to justify them in ideological terms...

...If Russia is going capitalist again thanks to the alliance between the re-emerging private businessmen and kulaks, the corrupt bureaucrats and grafters and the "revisionist traitors" at the top who tolerate and protect them...

...In the first type of situation, Communist leadership has hitherto been exceptional: only in the Vietnamese uprising against French rule did the Communists lead from the start...

...Finally, when the conflict with the Chinese developed, they again "followed the baton" and took the Soviet side all the way...

...if its promotion ceases to be an objective that is directly and actively pursued...

...When the Soviets decided after brief hesitation to swallow their pride, stop all polemics with the Rumanians and in fact drop the idea of majority decisions on supra-national planning, this meant that their hope for restoring a more tightly-knit control in Eastern Europe had been abandoned: the Rumanians, by using Khrushchev's need to compete with Mao, had not only won their own battle for economic independence, but had ensured that in any Soviet plans for future international cooperation the "broad and loose" concept would prevail—without exceptions for Eastern Europe...

...conversely, Mao's increasingly complete rejection of those values is incompatible with that obsession with material productivity which the Bolsheviks took over from their Western teacher Karl Marx, and the new nations from their former imperialist rulers...

...but this nuance did not even convince Nenni and his Socialist party...

...This is, of course, a "revisionist" concept of what the links between a Communist power and the international movement ought to be like...

...It would be foolish for the West not to notice, and welcome, the tendency towards such a change...

...The Algerian Communist Party has been banned, but its newspaper, with unchanged editors, continues to appear as an organ of the FLN, and Communists boast of having substantially influenced the FLN's new program when they attended the drafting convention as representatives of affiliated "mass organizations...

...Yet as it would in fact be grouped around the Soviet Union, it would still be a channel through which the latter, thanks to the prestige of its military and economic power, could exert considerable influence on important movements in many countries...

...The logic of this claim to ideological leadership has not only driven them to elaborate their version of the Communist doctrine more and more thoroughly, just as the Leninist version of Marxism was thoroughly elaborated only in the context of the worldwide break with the democratic Socialists...

...The totalitarian regime, once characterized by permanent revolution carried out by mass terrorism and guided by ideological goals, is being eroded into an evolutionary authoritarianism in which the party still wields a monopoly of political power, but is reluctantly yielding sectors of economic and intellectual life to autonomous social activity...

...It was after this that the Rumanian Central Committee, in its resolution of April 1964, while siding with the Soviets on the main issues of the conflict with China, haughtily criticized the conduct of both sides and also took the occasion to erect the rejection of any form of supra-national planning into an "ideological principle...

...These "second wave" opportunities are not identical with the "second phase" of the anticolonial revolution foreseen by Leninist theory: just as in China in the 40s, they arise not from the class struggle of the proletariat against the rule of the "national bourgeoisie," but from mass despair in a climate of general political decay...

...114 The Primacy of the Underdeveloped Regions...

...Yet it is just the Communist parties in the advanced Western countries that find themselves most seriously adrift owing to the decay of Soviet authority and the disintegration of the Leninist faith...

...Further, a number of the nonruling Communist parties, regardless of their allegiance to either side, and often in proportion to their growing independence, continue to play a major political role in their countries, and a few at least must be considered as serious potential contenders for national power...

...yet it is such participation that they must crave if they no longer look for salvation from beyond the frontiers...

...Generally speaking, the "first phase" of the anticolonial revolution—the struggle for political independence—is unlikely to result in Communist regimes of any kind...

...125 Towards a "Letter-Box" International...

...At first, both Soviet and non-Soviet Communists hoped that they would be able to preserve unity of policy without a unique center of power, and respect for Soviet doctrinal authority without subordination to Soviet organizational discipline...

...Within this region, the growth of pluralism and its reluctant acceptance by the Soviet Union will prove compatible with the preservation of unity to the extent that the ruling parties share common interests...

...The need to eliminate pro-Chinese factions in the Soviets' own power sphere has led to demands that all the East European states should follow the Soviet rupture with Albania, to fairly open pressure for the removal of Chervenkov and his followers at the time of the Bulgarian party congress in late 1962, and to more discreet urgings to make destalinization belatedly effective in Czechoslovakia...

...One final question which is perhaps not strictly within the scope of this paper has been touched upon all the time by implication: I mean the future of the conflict between the Soviets and the Western powers...

...The new Chinese doctrine reverses this relationship, treating in fact the working class of the advanced countries as mere auxiliaries of the peoples of the underdeveloped countries, and unreliable auxiliaries at that...

...The diplomatic rupture with Albania and the quiet expulsion of the leaders of the "anti-party-group"—Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich—showed a new realization of the urgent need to deprive Mao's factional allies of any influence in the European-Soviet bloc, though in both cases there were also hesitations and inconsistencies indicating a sense of the political risks involved and perhaps a disagreement about tactics within the Soviet leadership...

...The Soviets receive from time to time fraternal delegations from Ghana, Guinea and Mali, but the Chinese may do the same...

...As the hegemonic power of the Soviet Union in the East European bloc has survived the doctrinaire authority of the Soviet Communists over the former satellite parties, so the institutional power of the Soviet party at home survives the erosion of its ideology...

...Already the question is beginning to be asked not only from outside, but from inside the parties concerned: among the Italian Communists, the avowedly revisionist group around Amendola and Alicata has advocated the principle of "majority and minority platforms" ever since the 22nd congress of the CPSU—and to advocate such a principle for more than two years without being silenced by organizational measures goes quite a distance towards achieving it in practice...

...The surprise of the Soviets was not unnatural...

...But while the Chinese Communists can and do renounce any claim to disciplinary subordination in their new International, they cannot renounce the claim to ideological leadership: they have always believed that no united international movement is possible without a recognized ideological authority, and as we have seen, the schism means to them that they have now to play this role...

...Such an arrangement would therefore be in harmony with an internal situation in which the Soviet leaders, while trying to legitimate their rule increasingly by their domestic economic achievement, still feel the need for an international legitimation as well...

...The long-term trend of Russian internal development seems clearly to go in the direction from the former to the latter, and the breakup of world Communism has certainly strengthened that trend...

...The shock of "destalinization" was the direct cause of the East European crisis of October, 1956...

...Both the early struggle for national liberation in countries where the Communist parties were weak or non-existent as in Africa, and the later Communist-led struggle against the continuing influence of the "imperialists" in formally independent countries thus seemed to offer the scene of irreconcilable, violent conflict that was required by the Chinese vision— and with it corresponding chances for Chinese leadership...

...yet by damaging the traditional prestige of the Soviet Communist party beyond repair, it created the precondition for Peking's challenge to Moscow's worldwide leadership which was to turn that conflict into a schism...

...First, there are the few African populations still struggling against direct colonial rule or formal white supremacy...

...As most of the Communist rulers used their autonomy to make life more tolerable for their sub jects, while the Hungarian experience caused a general loss of hope for an overthrow of Communist rule, the growing resignation of the peoples led to a loss of fear and a growing self-assurance among the Communist leaders that reduced their sense of dependence on Soviet protection...

...Clearly, it is not possible to evaluate the prospects for the various Moscow-oriented, Peking-oriented, or independent forms of Communism without reference to the prospects for the further internal transformation of each of them...

...If nevertheless they decided to continue the struggle even after the compromise of the Moscow declaration, this cannot be explained by pure considerations of power politics...

...Now regardless of Castro's cautious maneuvering in the Sino-Soviet conflict, the close affinities between the "Fidelist" guerrilla strategy as taught by Guevara and Mao's type of partisan warfare are notorious, and throughout Latin America today the influence of the Fidelist and the Chinese model tend to merge...

...and after Stalin's death the Bandung conference had greatly increased China's prestige among Afro-Asian governments, and the formation of the "Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee" had given her access to a useful machinery for influencing the most militant revolutionary elements of both continents...

...They were ahead of the Soviets in recognizing the success of the West European Common Market, which their trade union leaders experienced in its favorable effect on Italian wages, and in calling for a realistic, i.e., reformist, adjustment to it...

...Economic dependence on the bloc is a formidable tie for Bulgaria, while Rumania's resources give her possibilities for extra-bloc trade that combine with the total absence of threats from the West to encourage her independence...

...Hence there has been considerable differentiation both in the handling of state relations with Albania and in the form and timing of public polemics with China by the East European Communists, and considerable reluctance to endorse the Soviet call for another world conference without an assurance of Chinese participation: the East Euro pean Communist leaders realized that Sino-Soviet rivalry within a factionally divided movement gave them increased freedom to maneuver in relation to the Soviets, and they were unwilling to sanction a formal and final split so long as there was danger that this might lead to a revival of Soviet claims for doctrinal authority—at least for their own area...

...But they benefit from the fact that important sections in both nations, including the majority of their industrial working class, are traditionally disaffected—not in the sense of being ready for revolutionary action, but of refusing to feel themselves as part of the democratic state...

...and only after the Chinese had, in the summer of 1963, come out with their root and branch condemnation of Soviet domestic policy and of the CPSU program, and had at the same time weakened their own propagandist appeal by opposing the ban on nuclear tests, did the Soviets conclude that it was now in their interest to complete the formal and final split, and therefore to call a world conference...

...During the municipal elections of the spring of 1963, the Italian Communists openly criticized the then current Soviet campaign to restore ideological discipline among writers and artists...

...and experience soon showed that the two were in conflict—that every local advance in structural change promptly resulted in losses in agricultural output...

...Their influence may be dominant in helping the left wing of the Indian and, of course, the Nepalese Communists to organize their separate parties, and traditionally strong with the Communist party of Japan...

...and the growing preoccupation of the Soviet leaders with the need to improve the performance of the Soviet and East European economies—including their performance in the satisfaction of consumers' wants...

...To the French leaders, any weakening of Soviet authority is a net loss, because their vested interest in the Soviet myth is overwhelming...

...and that same determination must have been an important contributing factor in causing them to engage in various national conflicts with their Asian neighbors in the following years...

...They did so by adopting, in early 1963, the formula that the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America now constitute "the main focus of global contradictions" and "the storm center of the world revolution," and that the struggle of their peoples would be "decisive" also for the ultimate victory of the proletariat of the advanced industrial countries...

...indeed, the overthrow of Khrushchev and the subsequent cancellation of the 1962 reorganization of the party can best be understood as an attempt to ensure its survival...

...But if the history of "World Communism" is at an end, the history of Communism in the world is not...

...On the other hand, the centralistic form of organization was originally justified by the need to forge an instrument for the revolutionary conquest of power, and to ensure disciplined obedience to the world headquarters in Moscow: if the political reasons are really gone, why not the organizational corollary...

...Today, comparable failures are offering opportunities for a variety of promising strategies to Chinese-oriented Communist parties in several South East Asian countries...

...In short, pluralistic Communism means not only the decay of the old International and the extremely difficult efforts to form two rival new Internationals of very different types...

...Internally, too, the renunciation of mass terrorism and the new emphasis on encouraging a steady growth of productivity were bound to lead to further changes in the dynamics of Soviet development...

...and while they no doubt deplore the split, they became the first major party unconditionally to support the Soviet proposal for a new world conference...

...In the new party program, structural change was no longer demanded as a precondition for the transition to Communism, merely anticipated as a by-product of the long-term rise in productivity...

...The one way to maintain a measure of unity despite this new pluralistic constellation would have been a common effort to tolerate the inevitable political and doctrinal differences—to develop a looser form of international cooperation based on pragmatic compromise and ideological nonaggression...

...Thus when, at a meeting held in Moscow in July 1962, he called for the creation of a new Executive Committee of the Council for Mutual Economic Aid consisting of party leaders as well as for the forming of a number of supranational economic organs, he was not simply looking for the best institutional forms of blocwide rationalization, but was seeking to enlist the loyalty of the party leaders in the struggle to overcome the vested interests of the national planning bureaucracies...

...Yet the open question is precisely whether parties with the distinctive characteristics once transferred to Western Europe by the Bolsheviks will be able, in a nonrevolutionary situation and in the long run, to survive the fading of the belief in the unique salvational mission of the Soviet Union...

...Of course, this recent elaboration of increasingly complete rival interpretations of the "Marxist-Leninist" doctrine has been largely a result of the factional struggle for control of the world Communist movement...

...By the time of the 22nd congress in 1961, economic rationality had won...

...and when this front appeared to be threatened with disintegration because its former commanders had left their post, the Chinese were willing to assume their role...

...While the prospects of any form of Communism in the West appear increasingly doubtful, both Moscow and Peking regard the underdeveloped world as the chief arena of their competition, and both compete for influence on revolutionary nationalist as well as on Communist movements there...

...and ideologically, it had a distinctly revisionist flavor, tending as it did to turn the party's main attention away from the needs of ideological struggle at home and abroad...

...But the Communists of Vietnam and Laos were fighting a civil war under Chinese guidance...

...132 Will Communism Survive in the West...

...In Hungary, the shock of 1956 has made the leaders probably more inclined to make concessions to their people but less inclined to quarrel with the Soviets than any of their neighbors...

...Yet while Stalin had envisaged an abolition of all monetary exchanges between the collective farms and the state, and their replacement by barter contracts as the crucial step in this transformation, Khrushchev's reforms had tended for years to raise agricultural productivity by making all costs and prices comparable in monetary terms...

...The trend is not toward a simple split into two clearcut and stable Internationals...

...In the 40 years since Lenin died, the workers of the advanced industrial countries have become less and less revolutionary, with the result that in no such country have the Communists been able to lead a victorious revolutionary movement...

...But just because this kind of pseudorevolutionary mass disaffection is a historical hangover rather than a reflection of present conditions in the Western world, both parties have largely depended on the Soviet myth for maintaining it...

...With all due allowances for the differences in scale and power, it may thus be predicted that a Soviet Union whose international ties have been loosened by the schism and the growth of pluralistic Communism, and whose ruling party is increasingly thrown back on the need for justifying its rule by achievements of value to its own people, will evolve in the same revisionist direction in which the Yugoslav Communists evolved when Stalin had cut them off from the world Communist movement and when their survival depended on broadening their domestic support...

...This evolution still takes place under the imperative of the self-preservation of the party regime...

...At a plenary session of the Central Committee in November 1962, Khrushchev took a recently rediscovered draft of Lenin's, dealing with the primacy of economic tasks after the seizure of power, as his text, or rather his pretext, in order to justify a sudden and radical reorganization of the entire party machine into parallel industrial and agricultural sectors: henceforth, the primary duty of the heads of party organizations on all levels was to consist in raising output in their area of responsibility...

...Finally, the greater the toleration for differences of opinion in such an alliance, the broader support the Soviets may hope to rally for it in the face of Chinese obstruction...

...The Communists in Cuba who merged their organization with that of the victorious Castro were regarded as poor revolutionaries, but they quickly gained influence by having a rather more precise program than their new companions...

...An awareness of these dangers seems indeed to have been the basis for the compromise reached by the Soviet and Chinese leaders in early 1959, at the time of the 21st congress of the CPSU, when they temporarily agreed to keep their different views about the "People's Corn munes" without further polemics...

...The trend is clearly in the direction of a "Titoist" type of market economy in a planned framework—though the changeover must be infinitely more difficult in Russia after decades of detailed bureaucratic planning on a gigantic scale...

...and it would enable the Soviet leaders to tell their own people that though Moscow has ceased to be the headquarters of an embattled army of the world revolution, their country is still the beloved and admired stronghold of the great majority of the world's progressive forces...

...139 Some Conclusions...

...The Prospects for a "Maoist" International...

...At the same time, the Soviets had begun to work for a more differentiated division of labor not only for economic reasons, but also as a means to strengthen the ties of self-interest that would bind each member state to the bloc...

...but the present experiment takes place after the victory of the national revolution, and its purpose may be different...

...By contrast, it is in the underdeveloped countries that huge masses of people, living in extreme insecurity on the edge of starvation, can be said to have "nothing to lose but their chains," and their despair has offered opportunities for a number of victorious revolutions, including Communist revolutions...

...In short, Khrushchev was seeking to combine the dynamics of ever new structural change, required by Communist doctrine, with the dynamics of economic rationality, imposed by competition with the non-Communist world at the stage of development reached by Soviet society...

...it exerts its regional hegemony over a number of East European countries (as well as over Outer Mongolia) partly by its ties to the Communist parties ruling them...

...Whether these objections will retain their force depends on many unforeseeable factors—on China's economic successes or failures and the degree of her involvement in warlike conflicts in the first case, on Western development aid and the degree of its detachment from private vested interests in the second...

...and by their posthumous publication of Togliatti's last memo randum to Khrushchev, they have served notice that they intend to remain an important factor in filling this revisionist form with equally revisionist content...

...Hence there will also be less and less of an unambiguous meaning to the concept of a "Communist" party or regime...

...This contrast between the willingness of the Soviet leaders to adjust their policy, even though inconsistently and with many hesitations, to the new pluralism of Communist power, and the Chinese insistence on restoring complete doctrinal unity under single-centered leadership, has been crucial for the growth of the schism and may be expected largely to determine its future course...

...Yet it is doubtful whether even the fulfillment of these two conditions will suffice to assure an effective role for Communist parties in the West—so long as by "Communist parties" we mean parties with centralistic, undemocratic internal structure originally imposed by the Comintern on all its sections...

...By its very nature, such a broad fraternal alliance would exclude any return to a formal claim for Soviet leadership based on doctrinal authority, let alone organizational discipline: in some ways, it would be little more than what Lenin contemptuously called the Second International— a "letter-box...

...But nearly all of them felt that if they decided to reject the Chinese views, this was their own free decision made in the light of their own experience and interests, not the result of an automatic loyalty to Soviet authority, and that it was also their own affair when and how they wished to give expression to this decision...

...on the contrary, in their polemics against the Soviet leaders they kept stressing the independence and equality of all Communist parties, denying the right of even the most powerful outside party to interfere in any party's internal affairs and asserting that there could be no return to the times of the Comintern with its single command center...

...Internationally, it will use the slogans of anti-imperialist solidarity but also those of peace and disarmament...

...Accordingly, the unity of the Communist World Party, such as we knew it for more than three decades, was built around the existence of a unique center of both political power and doctrinal authority— the Soviet Union...

...Under the whip of hunger, the attempt to achieve a massive increase in heavy industrial production, without corresponding capital investment, by means of countrybuilt furnaces was abandoned, and agriculture given priority...

...They serve not only to denounce the "Khrushchev clique" and to explain to the Chinese Communists that they must in the future stand alone without counting on the Soviet alliance, but also to "prove" to the Communists and revolutionary nationalists of the underdeveloped regions whom China wants to lead that there is no alternative...

...in some cases, such relations may be very effective without being exclusive or even formalized...

...The internal Chinese meaning of the argument becomes transparent in the concluding section of this "testament of Mao," which urges the Chinese party to train in time loyal successors to the first generation of revolutionaries—lest revisionist careerists should gain power and, by relaxing the struggle against the neo-capitalist elements, turn the country away from the true socialist path...

...Under the pressure of their conflict with the Soviets, the Chinese leaders, whose links to European Marxism and to the industrial proletariat have always been tenuous, have at last made a choice: their new International will be wholly revolutionary, but only marginally proletarian...

...Yet there are indications that the "classical" chances for Chineseinspired Communist revolutions arise in the third type of crisis: the one that occurs where the leaders of a newly independent country fail, for whatever reason, to create a viable state and, a fort oriari, to solve the problems of economic development—particularly if those leaders, after successfully conducting the original struggle for independence, have meanwhile been accepted by the West...

...The pace of the process and the mixture of its ingredients have, of course, differed from country to country, according to the history of each regime, its assets for trade relations outside the bloc, and the degree of its continuing sense of danger from the West...

...Once more, we are reminded of the Kuomintang in the early twenties, when Soviet aid and advice was combined with the "bloc within" tactics of the Chinese Communists...

...Mao's insistence on branding "revisionism" as the main danger in the international Communist movement during the Moscow conference of November 1957 must be largely seen in this domestic Chinese context...

...122 The Repercussions on China...

...Technically, the plan was an improvisation of doubtful value...

...and while hoping for stronger Communist influence among the underground movements in South Africa and the Portuguese colonies, they will similarly support them in any case...

...This suggests that the Soviets may seriously hope to get some of these ruling left-wing nationalist parties—parties that have never accepted a commitment to "Marxism-Leninism" but feel that they share their anti-imperialist and "socialist" outlook with the Communists—to join a reconstructed International, particularly if the entry of Yugoslavia proved this could be done without joining a Soviet-commanded military bloc at the same time...

...but they probably still thought that a split could be avoided...

...it thus adopts a position that was explicitly criticized by Lenin and Stalin in the early years of the Comintern, when similar views had been expressed by Sultan Galiev and for a time also by the Indian Communist M. N. Roy...

...The calculation that what would be lost in ideological conformity would thus be more than regained in breadth of influence may also help to explain the comparative readiness of the Soviets, in the discussions and correspondence with other Communist parties concerning the preparation of a new world conference, to accept the demand for pledges that this should not be a conference of "excommunication," and that no attempt should be made to establish a supra-national discipline or to impose a new dogma that would interfere with the autonomy and equality of the attending parties...

...But they also found, much to their surprise, that the decay of their authority had gone so far that they could no longer enforce it even on a recalcitrant "satellite" by any means short of physical power—and this they were now unwilling to use...

...Even today, it is no longer possible to define them by Leninist doctrine, for Leninist orthodoxy, polemically claimed by either side, has in fact been abandoned by both of them: neither the Chinese attempt to transfer the revolutionary mission of the industrial proletariat to what Toynbee has called the "external proletariat" of Western civilization, nor the Soviet thesis that socialism will ultimately defeat imperialism by economic competition can in truth be described as Leninist...

...In that competition, the Chinese are likely to have more attraction for totalitarian revolutionary movements still fighting for power, but the Soviets may have an advantage with ruling revolutionary parties, as they can offer them more and demand less risks...

...114 The Will to Lead...

...while elements of the Communist ideology exert a substantial influence on the political and intellectual elites of underdeveloped countries even where no effective Communist organization exists at all...

...But it would be equally foolish, and far more dangerous, to regard the change as accomplished before there are direct and unmistakable proofs of it...

...They rejected Togliatti's suggestion of a "polycentric" future for Communism and insisted on Soviet leadership...

...Similarly, they accepted Khrushchev's 1956 doctrine of the "peaceful" or "parliamentary" road to power...

...yet it would be superficial to see these competing systems as mere ideological superstructures erected to justify a personal or national rivalry for world leadership...

...111 II...

...it also followed up the resolution with a campaign of information meetings for party cadres with strong anti-Soviet and anti-Khrushchev undertones, and with the demonstrative sending of high-level delegations to Washington and Paris...

...But Stalin did not make the successful example of the Prague coup d'etat of February 1948 the basis of a general formula about the possibility of a peaceful conquest of power, as Khrushchev did in his report to the 20th congress of the CPSU—and Mao fears that such a formula might make the task ahead appear easier and the struggle less bitter to Communists in underdeveloped countries with revo lutionary possibilities and to those in the Communist countries themselves...

...After the Cuban crisis, a decisive advance of the "world revolution" appears far more distant than Khrushchev believed in the preceding years...

...But they start with the support of the overwhelming majority of the Communists in the advanced countries of the West...

...In part, it is obviously to be explained by the disproportion of material power between China and the Soviet Union—the dependence of the former on the economic, military, and diplomatic aid of the latter, and her inevitable dissatisfaction with the extent of that aid...

...In what direction, then, may we expect that influence to be exercised...

...if Russia's new spirit of less visible controls and increased emphasis on material incentives and comforts is a capitalist spirit, as Mao's latest document maintains, then the schism is not merely about questions of strategy and tactics, not even merely about orthodoxy versus heresy: it is a conflict between a socialist and a capitalist power...

...whether it will eventually return to such conflict will neither depend on the memories of its heroic period nor on Chinese advice, but on the obstacles it encounters in trying to develop its country and on the ability of its leaders to cope with them...

...Internally, it will favor the "noncapitalist road"—the expropriation of foreign firms, the building up of the nationalized sector, radical land reforms...

...What, then, are the chances that further revolutions of the underprivileged peoples will in fact lead to the victory of totalitarian parties committed to permanent, irreconcilable struggle against the "imperialists," and that the Chinese Communists will be able to guide the development of these new totalitarian regimes for any length of time...

...In any totalitarian Communist regime, the rulers must justify their rule in doctrinal terms, while for the subjects loyalty to the faith and obedience to the state coincide...

...It is different, of course, with the Communist mass parties of France and Italy...

...and when the Soviets responded to the Chinese ideological attacks throughout 1960 not only by rebutting them, but by declaring their willingness to renounce their worldwide "leading role," they were probably groping for a return to such a solution...

...henceforth, to struggle for socialism means to accept China's leadership...

...By the time the factional struggle with the Soviets opened in 1959/60, colonial "wars of national liberation" had become, in Peking's concept, a vital means for diverting the strength of the imperialists —above all the main enemy, the United States—and wearing them down...

...and it seeks to retain, and in part revive, its guiding influence on the majority of other Communist parties, including the ruling party of Cuba...

...A regime seeking to impose bitter sacrifices in a climate of internal tension tends to project the cause of this tension into the outside world and to justify its domestic harshness by a sense of imminent external danger...

...indeed, one is tempted to wonder whether it does not really express a half-conscious tendency of the Chinese leaders to give up the near-hopeless struggle for industrializing China without major foreign aid and to seek instead to conserve their political order on the present low economic level by glorifying its social justice and collective discipline...

...Finally, the Soviet thesis that world war is not "fatalistically inevitable" and may even be "eliminated from the life of mankind" before the end of imperialism, and the increased verbal stress on "peaceful coexistence" even during highly critical phases in East-West relations, have, apart from their truth content and their role in foreign policy, also a function in this domestic context...

...It is indeed remarkable that the same insistence on extreme egalitarianism and uninterrupted revolution which in 1958 was justified by the promise of a rapid transition to full communism has now come to be based on the opposite argument—i.e., that the danger of a new privileged class attempting a "capitalist restoration" will persist during the entire long transition period of "five to ten generations" or "one or several centuries," and can only be held at bay if the regime continues the most vigilant class struggle throughout that time...

...Clearly, the Chinese felt that any such appearance might interfere with their determination to maintain the atmosphere of the besieged fortress at home...

...It also means that though the Indonesian Communists may be expected to become one of the most important founder members of such an International, a Communist-governed Indonesia would hardly submit to China's ideological authority for long...

...Next to their dependence on a foreign center and to their refusal to be bound by constitutional rules, this totalitarian form of organization has always been a basic objection to the acceptance of the Communists as possible partners by other political forces, and hence an obstacle to their full participation in the democratic political game...

...now they also became a useful lever for disrupting the Soviet diplomacy of "peaceful coexistence," i.e., for interfering with any plans for a Soviet-American dialogue...

...120 The Limits of Chinese Control...

...Toward the end of his life, Stalin had proclaimed that the achievement of true communism would require, apart from quantitative advances in productivity and corresponding increases of real income and reductions of working time, one more major structural change—the transformation of collective farm property into all-national property, ending the distinction between collective peasants and state workers...

...and the fact that the Chinese publicly supported their stand for the economic sovereignty of any "socialist" state made it impossible for the Soviets to use physical pressure against them as this might have driven many wavering parties to the Chinese side...

...The greatest regional power in Asia, the Chinese People's Republic, is governed by its own form of Communism, controls the Communist regimes of North Korea and North Vietnam and is actively engaged in laying the doctrinal and organizational foundations of a new revolutionary International with its center of gravity in the underdeveloped continents...

...If they renounced that, they would turn into some kind of militant democratic-socialist parties, and might well find that their only remaining reasons for separate existence are of a historical, not to say sentimental kind...

...If this is true, it limits severely the prospects of maintaining Chinese authority in a new International...

...and they have since stuck to this formula in the face of all Soviet charges of "racialism" and of all warnings against weakening the colonial liberation struggle by "isolating" it from the cause of the advanced "socialist" countries and from the movement of the Western industrial proletariat...

...Yet the Hungarian uprising proved once again to all the East European Communist regimes that their very survival would be in danger without Soviet protection...

...The Rumanian objections to these plans, being due to Rumania's special economic interests as an industrially underdeveloped country whose chances for independent industrialization were favored by highly saleable raw material resources, were not shared by the other East European states...

...The emergence of a plurality of sovereign Communist states, with different national interests and internal problems resulting in differences of ideological outlook, was bound to put an end to the centralism of the Communist secular church, as was first proved when Communist Yugoslavia established its sovereignty in conflict with Stalin...

...The Soviets' loss of their former uncontested authority, skillfully exploited by the Rumanians in their "objective" presentation of both the Soviet and Chinese points of view and their attempts at "mediation," thus hampered Khrushchev even in using the weight of Russian economic and military power against a rebellious ex-satellite...

...Both the Sino-Soviet conflict and the growing Soviet emphasis on economic performance have contributed to this countertrend...

...After the Sino-Soviet talks had failed and the Soviets had signed the nuclear test ban agreement with the United States and Britain in late July, the Chinese were ready for it: they called the agreement a betrayal, they began to disclose parts of the secret prehistory of the conflict, and they built up the case for splitting Communist parties that had fallen into the hands of "revisionist traitors...

...But whenever the constellation of interests should change—for instance by the growth of new chances of extra-bloc trade following internal economic reforms in some of those states, or by the disappearance of some of the fears underlying the alliance—such a structure would have little reserves against further centrifugal tendencies...

...Now Russia has lost her uniqueness—but that does not mean that China has automatically gained it, even in the eyes of those Communist parties and governments that incline to her side of the schism...

...They may in fact exert close organizational control over the pro-Chinese splinter groups in the West that depend on them for funds and publicity, and over such traditionally dependent Communist underground parties as those of Malaya and Thailand, most of whose members are Chinese...

...It seems at least doubtful whether Moscow looks on the Communists in these countries as future leaders of an independent mass movement and aspirants to power in their own name, or whether it does not simply regard the exertion of influence on the ruling groups by this channel as a preferable alternative to the development of rival parties in conflict with them...

...and the Chinese missed no chance for pointing out the difference to the Communists and sympathizers from the countries concerned...

...for such claims, being no longer based on unique power or unquestioned tradition, could now be made with equal justification by either side, and could only lead to mutual accusations of heresy...

...For Karl Marx, it was axiomatic that the victory of socialism would be brought about by the industrial proletariat of the most advanced countries on the basis of the highest level of economic development that capitalism could achieve...

...Much more than their French colleagues, they had seen their early government participation as a possible road to the "legal" conquest of power...

...But if the class struggle is ended at home and domestic social revolution is beginning to give way to peaceful economic evolution, the domestic effort can no longer be presented as merely a sector of a single worldwide struggle, and the link to the international Communist movement is loosened—even ideologically...

...and though the Chinese Communists then rendered active help in restoring the Soviet leadership—in the hope of decisively influencing its future use—they never forgot that it rested henceforth on borrowed authority...

...but never had it been given the dignity of a serious doctrinal statement before the leading organ of the party...

...Moreover, the lack of a universally recognized model will leave the impulse for further internal revolutionary transformation— the characteristic dynamism of totalitarian regimes—seriously weakened in all of them, and will strengthen the receptivity for "revisionist" economic reforms aimed at improved performance in most of them—particularly if such reforms should first be adopted by the Soviet Union...

...Yet the FLN in power has shown no desire to continue militant conflict with the West for conflict's sake...

...The Soviet Union is not merely an unreliable ally—it is ruled by traitors who have joined the enemy camp...

...It has been suggested above that the increasing preoccupation of the Soviet leaders with economic improvement rather than permanent revolution at home has made it easier for them to accept the facts of Communist pluralism abroad and to seek a looser form of association with the international revolutionary struggle...

...Another result is that a number of Communist parties, like the Cuban and perhaps even the Rumanian party, may stay outside both "camps" at least for a time, or may choose a form of association with the Soviets that carries no obligations whatever, and that a number of bilateral criss-cross contacts between parties inside either or outside both camps may continue for a considerable time...

...Yet in the long run, it is not very plausible that the monopolistic power of an ideological party should be required for so unideological a purpose as the promotion of peaceful economic progress...

...and its able leaders were both too ambitious and too conscious of the contribution made to the rise of Fascism by the purely negative opposition of the "maximalist" Socialists to feel happy in a similar policy...

...The new formula thus expressed the conviction of the Soviet leaders (both before and after the fall of Khrushchev, whose successors have promptly reaffirmed their loyalty to the party program and the decisions of the 20th and 22nd congresses) that, at the present stage of development, their rule could better be justified by disguising than by emphasizing its dictatorial character—that henceforth the stability of their regime and the growth of its material power would be better served by a somewhat relaxed form of autocratic rule than by the extreme of totalitarian tension...

...Communism in Eastern Europe is thus likely to survive the schism with a structure that is no longer based on either totalitarian doctrinal unity or one-way imperial control, but on an alliance of differentiated and independent but broadly "like-minded" states accepting a limited measure of leadership from the hegemonic power...

...For decades, these parties have stubbornly clung to a totalitarian revolutionary doctrine and corresponding forms of organization in a situation offering no revolutionary chances, keeping their faith alive by hitching it to a foreign model...

...Whenever possible, they will continue to accept support from both Russia and China, as Cuba is doing and Vietnam would have wished to do...

...At the same time, the Soviets' growing concentration on economic results—and results of a kind that are to benefit the consumer—creates a materialist spirit that is bound to weaken the pressure for tight ideological control of all spheres of life, and to strengthen the argument for reforms that are in conflict with received dogma but in accord with practical experience...

...In fact, the first indications that the Soviets were moving towards that sort of concept were furnished by their demonstrative rapprochement with Tito's regime since 1962 and by their defense of it against Chinese attacks— on the grounds that fraternal solidarity was possible without complete ideological agreement...

...The histories of Mossadegh's rule in Persia and of Kassem's Iraqi revolution as well as of Nasser's Egypt, and of Peron's Argentina as well as of the Bolivian and Venezuelan revolutions, offer examples of the political explosions that may result if independent national development has to be achieved against the joint resistance of native oligarchies and foreign capitalist interests...

...Third, Russia was the unique model for all Communists until at least 1949...

...In other words, will the terms "Communist party" and "Communist regime" continue to have a clearly definable basic meaning despite the inevitable national variations of detail, or will they eventually become as ambiguous as the term "socialism" has become following the break between Communists and Social Democrats after the First World War...

...it has also compelled them to find a doctrinal justification for their own claim to uniqueness —as the only great power actually engaged in building socialism and eventually Communism...

...117 The Chances of "Chinese-type" Revolutions...

...and they clearly wish to maintain alliances with the largest possible number of already ruling revolutionary parties in the underdeveloped countries—whether these be nominally Communist as in Cuba or nominally non-Communist as in Algeria...

...Similarly, Stalin did in fact experiment with the "peaceful road" to power in the first postwar years, both in authorizing the use of "parliamentary" forms for the consolidation of Communist rule in the "People's Democracies," and in encouraging the West European Communist leaders to see how far they could imitate the example without the presence of the Russian army...

...The "secret speech" was certainly not the original cause of the Sino-Soviet conflict, as the Chinese have later claimed...

...Second, there is the much larger number of politically sovereign, "semicolonial" countries whose problems of economic and social development, difficult enough in themselves, are complicated by the existence of foreign capitalist combines holding key positions in the national economy—combines that often have no positive interest in the overall development of the country concerned and sometimes are directly opposed to it...

...Lenin broke with this concept by seizing power in backward Russia on the ground that Russia constituted "the weakest link" in the imperialist chain, and by proclaiming the alliance between the revolutionary proletariat of the industrial West and the nationalist revolution of the colonial East...

...It may indeed be said that while the Soviets have never abandoned the claim to be in the orthodox Leninist tradition, they have in recent years been more interested in remaining immune from outside ideological criticism than in enforcing worldwide ideological conformity: provided they were left a free hand in developing their domestic, imperial, and worldwide policies, they have been increasingly willing to tolerate a measure of political and even doctrinal variety among their allies and comrades...

...It seems likely that it was only the 22nd congress of the CPSUthe clash with the Soviet leaders over the Albanian issue and the memory of Stalin, and the adoption of the Soviet party's new programme —that finally convinced Mao and his team that the Soviet leaders were incurable "revisionists," and that it was the Leninist duty of the Chinese party to prepare for a split and the creation of a new, truly revolutionary International...

...Meeting unexpectedly stubborn resistance, they had by late 1960 come to think in terms of a protracted factional struggle which, after repeated compromises, would eventually enable them to become the recognized leaders of the world movement...

...Second, for many of the movements in question, China is not the only available, nor even a sufficient, source of support: Castro may well regard China as more reliable than Russia—but he has to rely on Russia nevertheless, because the Soviets can offer him so much more of what he needs...

...They used their diplomatic missions and publishing offices in various countries to make contact with dissident revolutionary groups, to subsidize their activists by employing them, and to finance their publications...

...What all this amounts to is that a different concept of the domestic tasks and nature of a Communist regime entails a different concept of the "world revolution" and of its own role in it...

...By the beginning of September 1963, the Chinese Communist press began to publish approving reports about the formation of anti-revisionist splinter groups in various countries...

...Suslov put forward that discovery in his report on the conflict with the Chinese Communist leaders—as part of his rebuttal of their attempts to declare the underdeveloped continents as the new "storm center of the world revolution" and to deny to the conflict between the advanced countries in the "Socialist camp," above all the Soviet Union, and the imperialists its role as the main contradiction of the present epoch...

...They objected behind the scenes to the concessions made to the Chinese at the Moscow world conference of 1960...

...and their views were given solemn official sanction when Ben Bella was hailed as the head of a socialist government during his visit to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1964...

...but the Soviets may be cautious about recommending either agricultural collectivization or their own type of detailed administrative planning...

...They reluctantly accepted destalinization because they would not oppose the incumbent Soviet leaders, but they dwelt as little as possible on the critique of the past...

...and by the time of the Central Committee meeting of February 1964, it was Suslov, the party's leading doctrinaire, who declared that the international duty of the Communists of the "socialist countries" consisted in building up the new society at home so that it should become an attractive example for the masses elsewhere...

...and on the morrow of final victory in the civil war, Liu Shao-chi had proclaimed the Chinese revolution as a model for all those countries at the Peking conference of Asian and Australasian trade unionists...

...With that, it became indeed a commitment to a new international "economism" that is as far removed from Lenin's concept of the "world revolution" as is the Chinese vision of a revolutionary front centered on the underdeveloped nations...

...But the unforeseen consequences of destalinization did not remain confined to the damage to Russia's international authority...

...This would have required that neither Moscow nor Peking should henceforth claim a position of world leadership based on a monopoly of orthodoxy for its own interpretation of the doctrine...

...the Chinese, frustrated in their more discreet efforts to influence Soviet policies, were increasingly tempted to try and put pressure on their powerful ally by ideological attacks—by questioning the orthodoxy of Soviet behavior in the forum of the international Communist movement...

...Without actually quarrelling with the Soviets, they thus went consistently ahead of them in promoting "revisionist" ideas inside the fold, and were rewarded in becoming the main target of open Chinese attacks after the Yugoslav "outsiders" and before the Soviets were attacked by name...

...The course of contemporary history has thus made it impossible for the Communist leaders to be faithful to Lenin's Marxist belief in the industrial working class and to Lenin's passion for revolutionary struggle at the same time, though they have tried hard not to admit the fact to themselves...

...it corresponds closely to what the Yugoslays, with growing support from the Italian Communists, have advocated in recent years...

...for it depends on a rigidly egalitarian and military concept of the road to socialism that rejects all privileges for scarce technical, economic, and administrative cadres and deprecates any belief in material incentives in favor of a cult of collective enthusiasm and heroic poverty...

...Yet formal participation in international conferences, or even in a new kind of international association, is not the only form in which influence may be exercised by means of "inter-party relations...

...by 1961, Mao must have come to be convinced that Khrushchev's outlook had become incurably "revisionist"—that they differed not only about particular policies, but about the basic tasks of a Communist party regime in the building of "socialism" at home and in fostering the advance of the world revolution...

...Yet it seems in retrospect that ever since then, the leaders of the PCI have been waiting for their chance to become really independent...

...hence its preservation may become more difficult in each new crisis of succession...

...if even its importance as a legitimation of the party dictatorship becomes secondary...

...It will have to accept the disappearance of Soviet doctrinaire authority, and to convince both its followers and its opponents that its support of Soviet policies is not unconditional—that its traditional Soviet sympathies no longer imply subordination...

...Kemal Ataturk's Republican People's Party never dreamt of affiliating with the Comintern, and the episode of the Kuomintang's admission to it as a "sympathizing party" came near the end of its real cooperation with the Communists...

...On the whole, both the collapse of Khrushchev's worldwide offensive and the bitterness of the conflict with Peking seem to have inclined the Soviet leaders to make their links with other Communist parties less rigid than at any time since 1920—to seek a loose and broad fraternal alliance rather than unity on a strict and narrow doctrinal basis...

...but they could not afford to interfere in the least with the autonomy of the powerful Communist party of Indonesia, which made a point of taking its time and listening to both sides before it officially joined the "Chinese camp...

...Faced with this threat to their ideological foundations, many of the smaller Communist parties in the West have at first reacted by trying to ignore the schism, pretending as long as possible that there was still a single Communist world movement under Soviet leadership —and then by pleading with the protagonists to restore unity at any price and not to force them to make a choice...

...After all, Mao's original conquest of China was the victory of such a "second wave" revolution, due to the failure of the once revolutionary Kuomintang to cope with the immense difficulties of Chinese unification and modernization after decades of war and civil war...

...Finally, the Soviet leaders' resolve to make no further concessions for the sake of compromise became visible in the open voting down of a Chinese-sponsored resolution at the Stockholm session of the World Peace Council, in December 1961, and in the refusal to entertain the Chinese-supported "neutral" proposals of the following spring for an early Communist world conference unless all participants would pledge themselves to abide by majority decisions...

...On October 26, the deputy head of the Chinese party's propaganda department, Chou Yang, declared in a speech in Peking the splitting of revisionist-led parties by Marxist-Leninists to be an "inexorable law"—for the surprising dialectical reason that the Communist movement, like everything else, "tends to divide in two...

...how are they to survive the admission that neither the doctrine nor the model have universal validity...

...With the issuing of a number of documents and reports on the dispute by the French, Italian, and Belgian Communists in early 1962, a more active campaign was also set in motion among pro-Soviet Communist parties outside the bloc...

...In the framework of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, renunciation of dictatorship can be justified only by the ending of the class struggle following the final disappearance of "antagonistic classes...

...It is thus hardly surprising that the winter of 1962/3 seems to have brought more resistance to Khrushchev's new "line" in high places than had been noticeable at any time since his 1957 victory over the "anti-party group"—resistance carried on in the name of the primacy of politics over economics and of the importance of tightening the party's control on the ideological front...

...But when the double crisis of the autumn of 1962—over the Soviet missiles in Cuba and the Sino-Indian frontier war—showed that the alliance between the two main Communist powers had been eroded to vanishing point, the course of five European Communist party congresses in the following months made it clear that the Soviets, too, now regarded a split as inevitable and would hasten it if they could...

...in fact, the plans in question were largely based on Polish proposals...

...of a Communist party...

...124 III...

...The Soviets are aware that their only chance to rally broad international support is to form a loose alliance without a very precise doctrinal platform and possibly even without clearly defined membership...

...The central domestic task facing Stalin's Russian heirs, and more particularly Khrushchev as the exponent of the efforts to restore the primacy of the party over all other power machines, was to adapt the rule of the CPSU to the needs of a growing industrial society...

...105 The Dynamics of "Destalinization...

...Correspondingly, the Soviet state was no longer described as a "dictatorship of the proletariat" exercised by its vanguard, the Communist party, but as a "state of the whole people" led by that party...

...A totalitarian ideological dictatorship needs that conflict...

...This means that Castro's Cuba, despite its interest in guerrilla revolutions, is unlikely to join a Chinese-led International...

...A fourth tentative conclusion is that, contrary to a widespread impression, the schism does not tend to a clearcut division of spheres of influence, with the Soviets guiding the Communists of the West and the Chinese those of the underdeveloped world...

...Since the end of serious attempts at a Sino-Soviet compromise, the Italian Communists clearly consider that the hour of real independence has come—and this, to them, means the hour when the Soviets can frankly be treated as a respected but no longer infallible ally...

...The second type of prerevolutionary situation is widespread both in Latin America and in the Middle East, and examples occur in all underdeveloped regions...

...The first major step in that direction was taken within a few weeks of the Cuban missile crisis that ended Khrushchev's hopes of a speedy overturn of the world balance of power, and while Chinese taunts about a "Munich" were still reverberating in his ears...

...This mass attitude, which has its roots in past history rather than in present economic and social conditions, was revived when the Communists, and in Italy also the Nenni Socialists, were pushed back into opposition in 1947...

...In the era of pluralistic Communism, the prospects for Soviet influence on the postrevolutionary regimes of underdeveloped countries may thus be improved precisely to the extent that the Soviets may be less committed to replace them ultimately by Communist party regimes —that they come to adopt the attitude of the Yugoslav revisionists towards these countries...

...The belief that by means of those communes full communism could be reached in less than a generation was dropped and the fact stressed that the way ahead was long and arduous...

...International Communism has no longer a single worldwide organization, a single center of authority, or a single "orthodox" doctrine...

...The Polish Communists' change of leadership amounted to a first step of emancipation from satellite status...

...Now, as before the schism, a nuclear world power, the Soviet Union, is ruled by a Communist party...

...In the Chinese April documents of 1960, which constituted their first coherent factional platform, the need to support anti-imperialist uprisings without regard to the risk of escalation or to the consequences for overall diplomatic relations with the enemy became one of the central theses...

...This difference of background made it inevitable that the two parties should react very differently to the series of shocks beginning with destalinization and leading up to the present disintegration of world Communism...

...The significant revision here was not the admission that state and party had ceased to be "proletarian"—that had been clearly implied already in the Stalin constitution of 1936 and the party statute of 1939—but the claim that the party regime had ceased to be a dictatorship: it was intended to emphasize the change of political climate brought about by the end of mass terrorism, and to assure the Soviet people that while one-party rule would continue indefinitely, the era of violent social upheavals staged in the name of the party's goals was over for good...

...Castro will certainly maintain party relationships with both Moscow and Peking as long as possible...

...Yet it would appear in retrospect that it was just this period of quiet consolidation that prepared the ground for the "de-satellitization" of Eastern Europe...

...While thus looking towards a split, the Chinese leaders were still trying to avoid the onus of the initiative and also to delay the date: the longer they could work with a separate factional platform and organization inside a formally united movement, as the Bolsheviks had worked inside the Russian Social Democracy until 1913, the better, they felt, would be their chances to extend their influence—provided they did not make any more ideological concessions for unity's sake...

...and he showed himself anxious to accomplish the new structural changes without a setback in productivity, hence without violent upheaval...

...It is particularly significant that even after the catastrophic eco nomic results of the "Great Leap Forward" and the "People's Communes" forced the Chinese Communist leaders to revise their expectations and correct their immediate policies, they refused to change the general climate of their internal development...

...yet for a time, an important formative influence was exercised by the Bolshevik model in both cases...

...In trying to answer the first part of the question, it may be useful to group the bewildering variety of pre-revolutionary crisis situations in these countries into a few main types...

...Is it conceivable that Communism should have ceased to be truly international, i.e., world-wide and single-centered, without otherwise changing its nature...

...it does both reflect and promote divergent trends of development in the Soviet Union and China, leading to essential changes of policy and doctrine on both sides...

...The Indonesian Communists are seeking to profit from the administrative and economic ineffectiveness of Sukarno's "guided democracy" by first collaborating with him, involving him in conflict with the West, infiltrating his machinery of government and finally inheriting his power...

...Thus under the pressure of the need to systematize the doctrinal justifications for the divergent development of the two powers, the disintegration of Leninism proceeds in both directions: to China's final rejection of its Marxist elements—the link between the revolution and the industrial working class of the advanced countries—corresponds a Soviet emphasis on the importance of economic superiority for the victory of socialism that often sounds like an echo of the Marxist arguments once used against Lenin by his Menshevik critics...

...and that means that they must now favor a form of international association founded on broadly defined common objectives and mutual ideological non-aggression rather than on the search for precise doctrinal unity...

...Yet the inner atmosphere of both parties and the view taken by their leaders of their own role has been as different as their history...

...This uniqueness was ended and the foundations of world-wide Communist unity undermined by two events: the rise of a second Communist Great Power in China, and the blow inflicted on Soviet authority by Khruschev's "secret speech...

...The Italians have thus been an important factor in pushing the Soviets towards the "letter-box" type of International...

...We must thus reckon with the prospect that further totalitarian revolutions of a more or less "Chinese" type may be victorious in various parts of the underdeveloped world, and we can be sure that Mao's China will give them any aid and encouragement of which it is capable...

...During the same period, finally, the Soviet and Chinese parties had also changed roles with regard to the project of another Communist world conference: in 1962 the Chinese had urged and the Soviets evaded it, but from October 1963 it was the Soviets who sought a showdown conference to achieve a clear majority vote against the Chinese views, and the Chinese who worked to prevent it while they were building up their own new International...

...yet on the whole it is remarkable to what extent the Soviet leaders have in recent years tried to reassure their people that peace can and will be preserved...

...Soviet specialists on these countries now state in their theoretical articles that a non-Communist one-party regime need not be reactionary— provided its internal structure permits the "conscious proletarian elements" to exert a growing influence on its policy...

...it will also mean a profusion of bilateral and multilateral criss-cross contacts, not all of them visible to the naked eye...

...The Italian CP, whose old cadres had been shielded from some of Stalin's excesses by their underground existence and by Togliatti's tactical skill, and whose younger elements have been newly recruited since liberation, had never become equally fossilized...

...they praised Soviet intervention against the Hungarian "counterrevolution...

...Khrushchev had understood at an early stage that Soviet society could not develop further without a drastic change in the methods of governing it—a renunciation of mass terrorism involving a major reduction in the role of police coercion in daily life and a major increase in the role of material incentives for the ordinary worker and peasant...

...Communism of the Chinese type would then become not a model for development, but a model for accepting its failure and reacting by a final extrusion of the influence of Western civilization...

...Yet for the first two years of this period of preparation, the described tendency of the Soviet leaders to put their international party relations on a looser but broader basis had to contend with the simultaneous Soviet desire to tighten the ties of control in the region where interparty relations matter most—the area of the Soviet bloc proper in Eastern Europe...

...Any enquiry into the nature of the schism must begin by recalling the "Caesaropapist" character of modern totalitarianism with its inseparable unity of state power and ideology...

...But the Rumanians raised the question of principle whether a sovereign Communist government could be forced to submit to supra-national planning against its will...

...When after Stalin's death Khrushchev had introduced a number of reforms in this empire, ending its brutal exploitation, reducing detailed Soviet supervision and even granting the local Communist leaders some representation in collective organs of military and economic coordination, he had meant to modernize the form, but not to abandon the substance of Soviet control...

...Yet by 1964 the counterattack had petered out, and the Libermann discussion was resumed with increased boldness and evident official support...

...Only after the public Chinese attacks on their own conduct of the Cuban missile crisis in the autumn of that year did the Soviets encourage explicit criticism of the Chinese at the congresses of European Communist parties and join in it...

...and they welcomed it all the more eagerly because they hoped that visible proof of their independence would remove the principal obstacle to winning a share of power along the "peaceful road...

...Stalin, after all, was also concerned to limit his foreign policy risks and to avoid world war—and there is no evidence whatever that the Chinese are seriously bent on provoking a nuclear holocaust...

...and when Khrushchev tried to achieve a change of leadership in the Rumanian party during a "private" visit, he failed utterly...

...As soon as one of these leaders, the Rumanian Gheorghiu-Dej, refused to cooperate in sacrificing his country's heavy industrial projects to a Soviet-sponsored supra-national plan, the Soviets thus found that in this region at least, they were still in need of their traditional "leading role...

...The Transformation of the Soviet Camp...

...We may assume that the Soviet decision to take measures against the Chinese faction even at the risk of an open break dates from the clash at the 22nd congress—just like the Chinese decision to prepare actively for the split...

...Moreover, the Bolshevik party in Lenin's time, though in fact independent of working class interests thanks to its centralist organization, was at least based on a predominantly proletarian membership and allied with important sections of the West European proletariat, whereas in the case of Mao's party today the claim to represent the industrial proletariat has become wholly fictitious: it rests neither on its history, its composition nor its international influence, only on the vestigial notion that whoever conducts a militant revolutionary struggle against imperialist monopoly capitalism expresses ipso facto the true class consciousness of the proletariat...

...They also indicated their willingness to combine fission with fusion: just as Lenin, in his effort to rally all militant revolutionaries, had appealed to revolutionary syndicalists even if they had no Marxist traditions and had rebuked the "intellectual arrogance" of those oldline Marxists who wished to reject them on those grounds, so the Chinese were now saying that the Algerian FLN had proved itself a more revolutionary force than the Algerian Communist party, and Castro a better revolutionary leader than the old Cuban Communists...

...To China, as the only great power still following the true path of socialism, has fallen the task to carry the banner...

...It is in that context that Mao's latest charges about the "restoration of capitalism" not only in Yugoslavia, but also in Russia itself, acquire their true international significance...

...if Soviet internal development seems to require a climate of security rather than of permanent tension—what becomes of the need for maintaining a state of permanent conflict with the non-Communist world as such, over and above the pursuit of Russian national interests...

...But nowhere has the simple satellite relationship to the Soviets survived—with the one exception of Eastern Germany: there, the magnetism of a free and prosperous state comprising three quarters of the German people makes impossible any national identification of the forcibly separated fourth quarter with its Soviet-imposed rulers...

...while the Japanese Communists were expelling a "revisionist" group at the very moment of the 22nd congress of the CPSU...

...From that moment, he seems never to have looked back...

...The history of World Communism, conceived as a united movement with a common doctrine and strategy formulated from a single center, is at an end...

...This change has made it easier for the Soviets to accept the facts of Communist pluralism and renounce their traditional "leading role...

...This interpretation had, of course, been used often before in propagandist speeches and interviews addressed to Western audiences...

...In any violent colonial conflict, Chinese interest was clearly on the side of militancy, while Soviet interest was divided between the wish to inflict defeat on the imperialists and the need to control the risk...

...Nor can these differences of outlook be understood as merely reflecting differences of national interest in the field of foreign policy: they are as much an expression of different internal needs resulting from the different roads travelled and the different stages reached by the two leading Communist regimes in their "construction of socialism...

...The Sino-Soviet schism is not a mere phenomenon of power conflicts within a basically unchanged Communist world...

...In the international as in the domestic field, Mao's central charge against the "revisionists" is that their slogans lead to the ideological disarmament of the Communist ranks...

...It is true that some of the revolutionary movements which thus received Chinese support were by no means Communist-controlled and could be described as corresponding to the "Chinese model" only in that they were anti-imperialist, peasant-based, and above all violent...

...Again, North Korea may have become some kind of a Chinese satellite, but the Communist rulers of Albania have joined the Chinese cause by their free decision and have made an independent contribution to the dispute, and North Vietnam, for all her dependence on Chinese backing in her military struggle in the South, could not simply be ordered to take the Chinese position but had to be slowly won over...

...The Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe thus had already moved a considerable distance away from the old type of subordination to Soviet leadership in the direction of a classical alliance, centered around the military and economic preponderance of a leading power but limited by various national interests, when the open Chinese challenge to Soviet authority and the threat of a split accelerated the change and forced it into the consciousness of the participants...

...The French CP had emerged from Stalin's continuous purges with a thoroughly Stalinist and thoroughly mediocre leadership, apt to maintain the members' hatred of the "bourgeois state" and their loyalty to the Soviet Union with unswerving conviction and to combine the comfortable role of an entrenched permanent opposition with the smug certainty that they were thereby rendering an important service to the "socialist fatherland...

...Finally, since the late months of 1963 Soviet writers have begun to underpin the tactical efforts for closer relations with some of the ruling parties of ex-colonial countries by admitting the possibility—also first put forward by the Yugoslav revisionists— that some of these countries, having embarked on the "noncapitalist road of development" thanks to the sincere anti-imperialist and prosocialist orientation of their ruling parties, might actually advance towards "socialism" without the leadership (or even the legal existence...

...They developed the doctrine of the "parliamentary road" to the point of specifically promising that not only "other parties," but "opposition parties" could continue to function after a hypothetical Communist victory...

...during the months of the counterattack of the doctrinaires, nothing more was heard of the matter...

...They do not work in conditions of a pre-revolutionary crisis either, at any rate not since the end of the post-war upheavals...

...Yet at the same time, and despite the demands for a more farreaching reversal of the line raised by a "right-wing" minority in the leadership in 1959, Mao and his supporters have continued to insist on such basic features of their "general line" as the need to develop China by its own strength, the rejection of any attempt to reward scarce technical cadres by increased income differentiation during the main period of industrial construction, the preservation of the Communes as a "germ" for higher Communist forms, and the preference for militarization of labor over any consistent policy of material incentives...

...at the same time, the first clearly Peking-financed organs of Communist dissidence made their appearance outside China, after French and Spanish editions of the Peking Review had prepared the way several months before...

...Yet Khrushchev rode out that storm, and after the Chinese attack on the party program was able to go ahead with his policy...

...In 1956/7, they had begun to feel ideologically superior to Stalin's heirs, but had still wished to keep them in the "leading role" and to guide them quietly behind the scenes...

...Generally, it will try step by step to replace Western political, economic and cultural influence in these countries, while respecting their military neutrality and ideological independence...

...The Soviet decisions first to risk, then to promote, and finally to hasten the split thus took place in interaction with two other major developments in Soviet policy: the climax and final failure of Khrushchev's attempt at a world political breakthrough, followed by the turn to a new effort at Russo-American detente...

...But as the bulk of the Communist parties of the advanced industrial countries took sides against China in the factional struggle, it became increasingly obvious to Peking that all the chances for revolutions, be it under Communist or non-Communist leadership, were concentrated in the colonial, ex-colonial or semicolonial countries, while in the advanced countries, however large their Communist parties, there seemed to exist no immediate potential for revolutionary struggle at all...

...It would be an oversimplification to attribute this conviction directly to the comparative "youth" of the Chinese revolution, or to the lower level of China's economic development...

...For the new International in its initial stage, what mattered most was clearly to attract the most militant revolutionary elements of any country, regardless whether they came from inside or outside its established Communist party...

...It is equally true that the irretrievable loss of the Soviet Communists' "leading role" in a single, worldwide movement, and the fading of the grandiose visions of a speedy, worldwide revolutionary advance under Soviet leadership, have favored the tendency to shift the ruling party's primary legitimation to its role as the architect of domestic economic progress...

...it was, after all, the obvious fact that these regimes depended on Soviet external protection for maintaining their domestic rule that had earned them the Western label of "satellites...

...and the Communist parties have been skillful in exploiting it, satisfying at the same time the ideological needs of those disaffected masses by their revolu tionary phraseology, and their practical needs, particularly in Italy, by a militant reformist policy in the trade unions, cooperatives and municipalities (in a manner recalling the similar dual role of the "revolutionary" Social Democrats of Germany until 1914, of Italy until the victory of Fascism and of Austria until the Dollfuss coup of 1934...

...But Stalin did not talk so much about "reasonable" imperialists understanding the need for peace, and just this talk of Khrushchev's appears particularly objectionable to Mao because of its effect on the ideological climate within the Soviet Union and the bloc...

...The Chinese may well be right in wondering how long a theocracy can hold on to power after the disintegration of its faith...

...The internal organization of the "People's Communes" was greatly loosened, turning them into units of administration rather than of actual production...

...It is, of course, conceivable that the Chinese reversal of the order of priorities will appeal to some political elites in Asia and Africa, particularly in countries where the problems of economic development appear increasingly insoluble...

...The Chinese were not, in fact, explicitly speaking of the need for a new international organization...

...But it also constitutes the germ of a new doctrine that is incompatible with the teachings of either Marx or Lenin...

...But once such accusations were publicly raised in the forum of the international Communist movement, not only the international influence of the Soviet and Chinese leaders, but even the legitimacy of their rule in their own empires would be at stake in the factional struggle thus opened—and this would make retreat and compromise impossible and organizational and doctrinal schism inevitable...

...The very fact that Khrushchev wanted to accomplish the change in the name of an ideological party forced him to justify it by an ideological break...

...A third conclusion is that in this world of uncertainty and flux, the comparatively most stable inter-Communist relations will be those within the immediate power sphere of each of the protagonists—in other words, hegemonic relations of military and economic cooperation in Eastern Europe, and of military, economic and subversive cooperation in East and Southeast Asia...

...Expulsions and counterexpulsions had in fact begun in a number of countries, and the time had come to justify the organizational schism on grounds of principle...

...claimed the principle that true Marxist-Leninists, if expelled by a revisionist party leadership, were entitled to form a new Communist party, and that such "circles, magazines and new parties," if found to be truly Marxist-Leninist, deserved the support and solidarity of established parties under Marxist-Leninist leadership...

...And it will have to adapt its program and policy to the political, economic, and social situation in the advanced Western democracies, and to convince its potential partners that its program is meant to be carried out in the institutional framework of Western democracy under the rule of law...

...Are we simply confronted with a new plurality of Communist states and parties of a familiar type, each pursuing its own separate interests in power politics but each retaining the same structural characteristics and ideological goals...

...There are, in fact, at least three major obstacles to this...

...much more, too, they chafed under the domestic isolation to which the Cold War and Italy's NATO membership condemned an avowedly pro-Soviet party...

...The Italian Communists, on the other hand, while sensitive to the blow inflicted by destalinization on the Soviet myth, have from the start also grasped the chance of greater "polycentric" autonomy implied in the weakening of Soviet authority...

...politically, it hurt many vested interests...

...and by the end of the summer, the total transformation of rural life by driving the entire peasantry into Communes within a few months, in conditions where long hours and poor rewards were enforced by militarization of labor and egalitarian propaganda, was proclaimed as the next step of an "uninterrupted revolution" that was to lead to full Communism within a short time...

...This settlement worked well enough at first: during the next five years, nothing dramatic happened in Eastern Europe, if we leave the Albanian issue on one side...

...The Cuban Communists had, however reluctantly, joined Fidel Castro's revolution, and the Venezuelan and various other Latin American Communists were trying to imitate its partisan strategy...

...Indeed, the weakening of Soviet authority will be a far less serious handicap for such backroom advisers than for would-be political leaders: the latter could no longer point to Russia as the unique model of true socialism—but the former may still point to it as an impressive model of economic development...

...and he had still stuck to this concept when he restored the unity of the bloc after the October events of 1956...

...but the chances of such success were critically impaired when Khrushchev, setting out to destroy the myth of Stalin's infallibility, destroyed forever the belief in the infallibility of the Soviet Communist party and thus precluded himself from inheriting Stalin's worldwide prestige...

...But by the same token, the Chinese Communists' continuing commitment to unceasing revolutionary struggle at home maintains their need for seeing themselves as part of a worldwide revolutionary front...

...In Poland, fear of German "revanchism" has contributed both to close cooperation with the Soviets and to a renewed "hardening" of the regime...

...On the basis of these experiences, the 1957 reconstruction of the bloc granted the satellites greater domestic autonomy than Khrushchev had originally intended, but at the price of strict subordination to Soviet foreign policy and ideological authority...

...In fact, these different concepts concerning the central issues of Communist doctrine and strategy have been made more and more explicit in the programmatic documents published by both sides since the 22nd congress of the CPSU...

...Third, there are the newly independent countries whose regimes, quite apart from any influence of foreign capital, are proving for various reasons unable to create a functioning administration and a sense of national loyalty, yet are continuing to enjoy Western "imperialist" support simply because they are in power and often appear as the only available alternatives to Communist victory...

...Yet just in its conflict with both Marxism and Leninism, Mao's new doctrine is based on some of the decisive historical facts of our time...

...Now that experience has shown that the Soviet Union may not be able to control the policy of other revolutionary powers, the Soviet leaders must be increasingly concerned that other powers should not attempt to control their own by forcing on them ideological arguments in an international framework...

...There is indeed no need here to recount in detail the frustrations Peking suffered in 1958/9—the disappointment of Chinese hopes in Soviet capital aid, the lack of Soviet regard for Chinese prestige in the Lebanon crisis, the limitation of Soviet military support for the attack on Quemoy, the Soviet refusal to help China become an atomic power, the critical neutrality towards China's frontier conflict with India, the Soviet efforts to establish a basis for a dialogue with the United States—and to retrace their translation into ideological terms...

...In the circumstances, the Soviet leaders themselves cannot expect to compete successfully with the Chinese for the allegiance of totalitarian revolutionary parties involved in a serious bid for power in the underdeveloped areas of the world...

...Yet this argument for the uniqueness of China contains both dangers to her own development and weaknesses from the viewpoint of her international attraction...

...The fact that the Chinese delegation at this conference, when it sought not yet a quarrel but the closest possible cooperation with the Soviet leaders, expressed serious doctrinaire qualms behind the scenes about Khrushchev's 1956 formula of the "peaceful" or "parliamentary" road to socialism, indicates the Chinese fear of any theory which might even remotely appear to blur the picture of an irreconcilable worldwide struggle...

...As early as the end of 1939, Mao had first expressed the view that the revolution in all colonial and semicolonial countries would follow the same "laws" as in China...

...Nor can the Leninist orthodoxy of the new Chinese position be rescued by the fiction that the leading role of the proletariat in the new International will be assured by the leadership of the Chinese Communists: though Lenin himself evolved a similar fiction to justify the possibility of Soviet regimes in Asian territories without an industrial working class, he never regarded such territories as the central part of the international revolutionary front...

...The classical justification of totalitarian Communist rule is the need for permanent social revolution at home and permanent irreconcilable conflict with the nonCommunist world, both of which are interpreted as aspects of the class struggle: because the stakes in that struggle are survival or death, it is bound to assume violent forms at crucial moments and can only be conducted effectively by a ruthless dictatorship acting as its international High Command...

...Strong factional opposition to the "peaceful road" strategy had developed—originally, it seems, independent of any Chinese stimulation—among the Brazilian Communists since 1957 and among the Indian Communists since 1958...

...This was most clearly shown in the one directly international organ that was created, also in September 1963, on the Chinese line and with Chinese money—the monthly Revolution, published in several languages from Paris as a magazine for Africa, Latin America and Asia: for it based its appeal on no narrower doctrine than that of violent anticolonialism...

...Of course, we must expect resistance against organizational change to be tougher than on any other issue: here, not only the vested interests of the party machines are at stake, but ultimately the distinctive character of the Communist parties itself—their "being" as distinct from their "consciousness...

...This contrast between the dramatic breakup of the Communist "monolith" and the continued importance, and in part vitality, of the pieces raises a fundamental question concerning the significance of the whole event...

...The changes in the international outlook of the Soviet leaders we have described could be summed up in the thesis that Khrushchev's attempt at a revival of the Leninist faith in "world revolution" has collapsed under the impact of his dual failure to achieve a breakthrough in world politics or to maintain the unity of world commu nism, and that the Soviet Union is now returning to a concentration on "Communism in one bloc" recalling Stalin's "Socialism in one country...

...At any rate, both the ideological output and the organizational tactics of the Chinese changed after this event: ideologically, they broadened the area of the dispute to defend Stalin's memory and attack Khrushchev's domestic policies...

...Nevertheless, the Soviets, throughout most of 1962, were not attacking their principal opponents by name in their own press: like the Chinese, they were maneuvering to avoid responsibility for the break even while accepting its inevitability...

...Our second conclusion concerns the new international alignment resulting from the schism...

...For years, the Yugoslays have maintained informal party relations both with the Russians and with some of the new ruling parties in Africa, above all the Algerian FLN...

...For the first time, the effort to build Communism was now defined purely in terms of quantitative economic improvement, no longer in terms of the deliberate use of state power as an agent of social transformation...

...In the circumstances, the bilateral talks held in Moscow in June/July 1963 were viewed by both sides not as a last chance for reconciliation, but as a final confrontation before the break...

...it will aim at winning diplomatic support of these countries, in the United Nations and elsewhere, but be cautious about pushing them into armed conflicts with the West which they could not sustain alone and in which the Soviets would not wish to be involved...

...Outside Albania, none of the East European regimes showed any inclination to side with China on the issues in dispute, the wistful hankerings of some bureaucratic cliques for the Stalinist past notwithstanding...

...Since then, the Soviets have further developed this argument by insisting that Yugoslavia, despite some "errors," was still a "socialist" country, and that the same applied to Albania on the opposite pole—thus making clear their own willingness to remain in a common international association with both "revisionist" and "dogmatist" parties and governments, provided only that all would refrain from hostile polemics against the Soviet Union...

...They had accepted the fact that they could not control sovereign Communist states that had arisen from independent revolutions...

...Yet in order to defend his thesis of the central role of this conflict despite the inglorious end of Khrushchev's offensive, and despite the evident absence of revolutionary chances in the advanced Western countries, Suslov had to reinterpret the conflict as being fought out mainly in terms of economic competition...

...But they had never regarded the East European Communist regimes that owed their existence to Soviet military domination of that region as sovereign states...

...They used their authority to redefine the principles of revolutionary doctrine and strategy, and to decide which party or splinter group was "truly" revolutionary in accordance with those principles...

...practical measures in this direction have even been speeded up since Khrushchev's fall...

...The speech was published two months later and, more important, its principal arguments recurred in early February 1964 in the seventh of the Chinese party's official commentaries on the Soviet "Open Letter," entitled "The Leaders of the CPSU are the Greatest Splitters of All Time...

...They might have succeeded for a time because of the historical role of the Soviet Union and the Bolshevik party as the original model for Communists everywhere...

...It is hardly surprising that both at the 1960 Moscow conference of 81 Communist parties and at the meetings of the World Federation of Trade Unions and the World Peace Movement, the Chinese line found a sympathetic echo chiefly among some of the delegates from the underdeveloped continents, and that support for it proved much stronger in the Afro-Asian Solidarity Organization than in any other international "front...

...For it means that while revolutionary movements in the underdeveloped world will gladly accept Chinese ideological guidance along with other forms of support, successful revolutionary governments will, unless physically dependent on China, tend to keep their own counsel and refuse to recognize Peking's "leading role...

...In this effort, it already enjoys the support of some of the leading Communist parties of Asia as well as of considerable sections in Latin America...

...Of course, this requirement may at times conflict with the need to justify special efforts and sacrifices for the armament race...

...In the ninth and latest Chinese official commentary on the Open Letter of the Central Committee of the CPSU of July 14, 1963, which reads like a political testament of Mao Tse-tung, this argument is used to attack the "revisionist" outlook of the 1961 CPSU program, and above all the thesis that after the destruction of the former exploiting classes, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" can be replaced by a "state of all the people...

...In short, it will have to be independent, and it will have to be thoroughly revisionist: in the second half of the 60's, to be unconditionally pro-Soviet and to wait for Moscow's doctrinal pronouncements is no longer enough for a great party—not even in France...

...In fact, the Chinese leaders are convinced that this must also be the main basis of the appeal of the new International as a whole...

...they can be reduced only if the Western powers, and particularly the United States, go out of their way to dissociate themselves from the vested interests of Western private corporations in those countries...

...What of the prospects for Soviet influence on the Communist or leftwing-nationalist one-party regimes of ex-colonial countries, and for their further political evolution under that influence...

...Conversely, the defense of permanent dictatorship requires proof that the class struggle must still continue, and the Chinese provide it by claiming that new capitalist elements will rise again and again pending the final achievement of Communism, and that the struggle against them may enter particularly acute phases at any time during that long period...

...after the schism, the relevance to Soviet greatness of further Communist revolutions, even where they are possible, appears far more doubtful than before...

...The Chinese effort to build up a new International may have an important stimulating effect on Communist and semi-Communist revolutionary movements in the underdeveloped world, but the new body itself will be unstable, and may decay much more rapidly than its parent...

...The Italian example seems to illustrate two of the conditions which any Communist party will have to fulfill if it is to survive as an important force in the West...

...At the moment, it seems improbable that the ruling parties of either Cuba or Algeria, Mali, Guinea, etc., would be ready to join a Soviet-sponsored International: they all wish to be formally neutral as between the Soviets and the Chinese, and some of them also between the Soviets and the West...

...On the whole, the prospects that further revolutions against "semicolonial" dependence may turn Communist are serious, because here the link between nationalism and anti-capitalism is inherent in the situation...

...The issue was brought to a test by the Rumanian resistance to Soviet plans for blocwide economic integration...

...But just as Stalin's skepticism concerning the progress of world revolution did not prevent him from using the foreign Communist parties as instruments of his policy, so the present and future Soviet leaders will wish to use the largest possible number of international party links as channels for Soviet influence—so long as the Soviet Union itself is governed by a party regime...

...but to Mao and his team, they have the merit of preserving the atmosphere of intransigent ideological struggle against all dangers of embourgeoisement...

...Indeed, while in a Soviet context that thesis serves the rulers' need to give their subjects an increased sense of security from further violent upheavals, the implied promise of such security must appear to the Chinese rulers in their context as dangerous encouragement for opposition to their own harsh regime...

...but such an International is likely to be unstable owing to the strength of nationalist motives in each participating movement and to the limited attraction of the Chinese model of economic development...

...In fact, of course, those events had shown the first serious weakening of Soviet control in this area, caused by the crisis of Soviet authority that followed destalinization...

...But it does not follow that the regimes emerging from such totalitarian movements, or even the movements themselves before the seizure of power, will be willing to submit to Chinese leadership in the way in which all Communists submitted to Soviet leadership for several decades...

...and when the Soviets formally abandoned the "leading role" during the Moscow conference of 81 Communist parties in order to end the debate, the Chinese regarded this new compromise as a mere stage in a continuing ideological struggle to impose their own views on the world Communist movement, including the Soviet Union...

...They did indeed adopt the Yugoslav version, defending the final intervention without claiming that the uprising had been "counterrevolutionary" from the start...

...Unless this dogma is radically revised (which might conceivably occur after Mao's death), it will add to the many objective difficulties of China's economic development a self-made obstacle that may well prove insurmountable...

...For while the rival systems are new in their present form, they have been built around differences of outlook that existed before the schism and indeed were largely responsible for causing it by leading Moscow and Peking to hold different ideas about the possible forms of international unity...

...In Western Europe and North America, the Communist parties had welcomed Khrushchev's "revisionist" thesis of the "peaceful road" to power except for insignificant minorities...

...Even though the East European Communist regimes, except for East Germany, can no longer be described as Soviet satellites and have acquired a measure of real independence, the ties of interest underlying the regional alliance continue to be more real than any other ties among Communist parties are likely to remain...

...At the same time, the Soviet leaders reacted to the—for them—surprising success of the West European Common Market by pressing for speedier progress toward a rational "socialist division of labor" within the Comecon: by 1962, Khrushchev had come to realize that the complete independence of the national planning machineries of the member states was in fact favoring autarchic nationalist tendencies to the detriment of the bloc...

...It was this Chinese determination to replace the discredited authority of the "revisionists" in Moscow not by toleration of differences, but by assuming themselves the role of sole fountainhead of Leninist orthodoxy, that led to the collapse of the compromise during the 22nd congress of the CPSU in 1961 and, foiling all later attempts at an ideological truce, made it impossible to preserve a looser form of worldwide Communist unity on a pluralistic basis...

...During the years that followed, China's authority among the Asian Communists had grown, apparently with toleration from Stalin...

...The Chinese Communists themselves are sufficiently aware of these limitations to disclaim any thought of returning to a "world party" with the rigid, single-centered discipline of the Comintern...

...But as China's own case has shown, the chances of the "second wave" revolution are none the less real for not fitting into the traditional Leninist schema...

...Students of Communist China seem to agree that it was the shock at the flood of domestic opposition which those experiments brought to light, even more than the shock of the Hungarian revolution, that caused Mao to turn, from June 1957 onward, to a policy of deliberately keeping up a climate of internal tension and irreconcilable ideological struggle...

...With the rise of Communist China, the unique position of the Soviet Union as a command center for all Communist parties became definitely a thing of the past, and this was recognized implicitly in Stalin's dealings with China and explicitly by his heirs...

...Once the Chinese had determined on preparing for a new, truly revolutionary International, it was natural that they should recognize this geographical shift in the main theatre of the world revolution...

...Conversely, as some of those leaders got bolder in standing up to the Soviets on behalf of national interests, they came to be accepted by growing sections of their own people, with however many reservations, as national spokesmen, and their need to hold down their subjects by force was correspondingly lessened...

...when they got involved in the Congo troubles, both lines could be pursued by Peking in turn...

...The Chinese Communists themselves emphatically recognize that such a contingency, however desirable, should not be a condition for their support of an anti-imperialist revolt: for years they have gone out of their way to extol the Algerian FLN, despite its non-Communist ideology and leadership, as a model for other oppressed nations...

...The second session of the eighth party congress of the CPC in the spring of 1958 brought the "great leap forward"—the attempt to achieve fantastic simultaneous increases in agricultural and industrial production mainly by mobilizing "mass initiative," and the preparations for the "People's Communes...

...So far, Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution has been the only one of this type that has actually issued in Communist rule, yet it seems to have greater potentialities as a model than that of Ho Chi Minh among the first type...

...If they did not succeed, it was not due to lack of domestic flexibility—only to the fact that they proved not to be independent enough to disavow the Soviet intervention in Hungary...

...Or must the schism be viewed as both an effect and an additional cause of di vergent trends of development in different parts of the Communist world, so that we are dealing with increasingly different types of Communist regime and increasingly different versions of the Communist doctrine, exerting their attraction in correspondingly different social and cultural conditions...

...128 The Growth of Soviet "Revisionism...

...To the outsider, such policies seem unlikely to solve China's tremendous economic problems...

...126 "De-Satellitization" in Eastern Europe...

...One hundred years after the foundation of the First International and fifty years after Lenin proclaimed the need to form the Third in order to replace the Second, the doctrinal and organizational unity of the "world party" created by him have been finally broken by the rival claims to leadership of the two Communist Great Powers, and the resulting schism has opened up new possibilities of independent development to many nonruling and even some ruling Communist parties...

...To most of the countries concerned, this policy of a "Cold War with muffled drums" may prove more attractive than the more militant policy of the Chinese...

...Once again, it is this internal need for unrelenting struggle that gives Chinese opposition to Khrushchev's propaganda of "peaceful coexistence" and of the "peaceful road" to Communist power its peculiar dogmatic character...

...the Vietnamese Communists have profited from the different, but equally marked ineffectiveness of the bureaucratic-military regime in South Vietnam to expand their guerrilla warfare in the teeth of all American support for their opponents...

...But these are short-term evasions, likely to be followed by a further sectarian splintering of the Communist splinter parties and by their progressive disappearance from the arena of effective political activity...

...This gets Mao Tse-tung close to Stalin's notorious thesis—developed in his 1937 speech to the Central Committee as a justification for his blood purge, and specifically denounced in Khrushchev's secret speech 19 years later—that the class struggle must become more acute with the progress of socialist construction...

...Under Stalin, the creation of the material skeleton of an industrial society had been accompanied by periodic violent transformations of the social structure, "revolutions from above" intended in theory to get nearer to the goal of a classless society and serving in practice to prevent any consolidation of the body social that might weaken the power of the totalitarian state...

...But such a "socialism" of "highminded but hungry people sitting around an empty table in complete equality," as Khrushchev once expressed it, would lack one of the main attractions hitherto exerted by the Communist bloc on the intelligentsia of the underdeveloped countries— the attraction of a model for quick modernization...

...As late as the 21st party congress in 1959, Khrushchev, in outlining his own program for the building of Communism, accepted the disappearance of the distinction between collective farms and state farms as a precondition for reaching the goal, and announced a catalogue of measures aimed at bringing about this structural change...

...Indeed, the passion to catch up with Western productivity and power implies at least a partial acceptance of Western values...

...a thoroughly de-ideologized, authoritarian regime would no longer need it...

...In fact, just in the case of the new ruling parties of ex-colonial countries, we have to bear one more type of relationship in mind— what may be called "licensed infiltration" or "the party within the party...

...134 Soviet Communism and the Third World...

...Even the French Communists have lately had to tolerate, for the first time in many years, a kind of opposition from their students' organization, whose leaders are frankly looking to the "revisionists" in Rome...

...that had been proved not only by the conflict with China, but by Yugoslavia's defiance of Stalin and Albania's challenge to Khrushchev...

...141 This essay is from Marxism in the Modern World, edited by Milorad Drachkovitch, and published this spring for the Hoover Institution by Stanford University Press, copyright © 1965 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University...

...This thesis is basic for the possibility of a new, Sino-centric International in that it denies to the conflict between the Soviet-centered "socialist world system" and the imperialist powers its role as the main axis of the international class struggle...

...for it should not be forgotten that China had been an active and successful pioneer of the coexistence campaign in Asia for several years beginning in 1954, and that in 1956 and early 1957 Mao had experimented with permitting intellectual criticism of his regime in the "Hundred Flowers" campaign and even tolerating the expression of popular grievances as a safety valve for "nonantagonistic contradictions" in Chinese society...

...But self-preservation now requires that this regime should change both in its justification and in its methods...

...but he never left any doubt that he regarded the class struggle of the proletariat as the decisive force, compared with which the nationalist movements of the colonial and semicolonial countries would be mere auxiliaries...

...Later that month, the Indonesian party leader D. N. Aidit, reporting on a two months' journey through the leading Communist capitals, on his return pro * As the underlying factors have not been changed by the fall of Khrushchev, it is the writer's view that any new bilateral meeting following this event would have a similar, purely tactical character...