Compromise in Moscow:

...On the other hand, the periods between the first two wars and since 1950 have been eras of stabilization of the bourgeois world, of stalemate and the thwarting of revolutions...

...It is through violence and confusion stimulated across frontiers, through civil wars aggravated by conflicting foreign interventions, if not through full-scale international war, that the conditions for Commurism are best promoted...

...It is important for the rest of the world to understand the nature of the compromise that the manifesto represents, and its bearing on practical issues of current international politics...

...The first World War led to the creation of the Soviet Union, the second to the Communist conquest of China...

...They do not, it would seem, have to maintain that war is absolutely unavoidable...

...There was nothing particularly Chinese in calling the United States the "enemy of the peoples of the world...

...war may still come and then it will end in the victory of Socialism and the end of capitalism...

...To win Kennedy's confidence, it might be expected that Khrushchev would now try to minimize his interest in Communism in other parts of the world and would seek to stress the absence of fundamental conflicts between Russian and American interests...

...Certainly in a world at peace there can be domestic conflicts and the emancipation of colonies, but under peaceful and orderly conditions of international concert these factors would not make for new dictatorships of Communist parties...

...In all this the latest Communist manifesto, if it does not altogether correspond to the theses recently maintained by the Chinese Communists, involves a tightening-up of Communist theory, a new militancy and hardening of attitude...

...But it certainly suits the Chinese that it should be said again at this moment emphatically and with all the authority that 81 Communist parties meeting in ecumenical council can give it...

...how could a third fail to complete the process...

...For Peking has undoubtedly been alarmed lest Khrushchev in his quest of a deal with the United States should go too far in compromising basic principles of the Marxist-Leninist creed, not to speak of the sacrifices of specifically Chinese interests which he might be willing to make...

...The manifesto is meant to make this clear, just in case anyone had been getting a little confused by recent events...

...The Chinese have never formally maintained that Communists should seek war...

...On the vital question of peace and war...

...But if the "imperialist maniacs" should after all start a war, "the peoples will sweep capitalism out of existence and bury it...

...and the most recent threats to help the "Congolese people" as represented by the Patrice Lumumba faction against President Joseph Kasavubu, whose delegates have been seated in the United Nations...

...When Liu Shao-chi, Chinese head of state, arrived in Moscow this year he referred in his first public speech to the Socialist camp led by the Soviet Union standing against the imperialist camp led by the United States...

...For all theoretical restatements of doctrine by professed Marxist-Leninists are framed with a view to action on events that are actually going on or may be expected shortly to occur...

...But even before the recent conflict developed, Communist China had been hailing Soviet "leadership of the Socialist camp...

...Khrushchev can count on the faithful support of China as long as it is apparent that he is heading in the right direction...

...The Chinese appear to have conceded that war is not "fatally inevitable," not because of any change in the character of imperialism, but because the Communists and the peace forces may become too strong for it...

...Nearly three weeks of deliberations behind closed doors would hardly have been required for such a statement if the dispute over its terms had not been obstinately fought out, and that such was the case was clear from unyielding restatements of the Russian and Chinese contentions published on each side while the conference was actually going on...

...After all the touring of Soviet statesmen last year in the United States, the birth of the "Camp David spirit," and Nikita Khrushchev's moves to renew with President-elect Kennedy the negotiations which broke down with President Eisenhower, the manifesto states in the most definite way that America is the main enemy...

...The Soviet Communist party obtains in the declaration a fresh tribute to its pre-eminent status...

...But was it wise to stress the hostility of the Communist world to America right after Khrushchev had expressed his hope that, with the election of Kennedy, Soviet-American relations would be again as they were in the time of Franklin Roosevelt...

...If it is argued that he could not help himself, that he could not but have the representatives of world Communism come to Moscow and draw up such a document, then this means at least that he is less of a free agent for a summit conference than is often supposed, and that, however much of an autocrat he may be within certain limits, he cannot go beyond the bounds of the political system on which his power rests...

...War is not, however, "fatally inevitable,' since "the time has come when the attempts of the imperialist aggressors to start a world war can be curbed" because the Socialist camp and the peace-loving forces of the world are continually growing stronger...

...Is such talk, officially sponsored by the Party which Khrushchev heads, a good preliminary for talks genuinely designed to bring about a detente with the United States...

...America and Yugoslavia are the twin monsters of Chinese Communist demonology, the one as the chief imperialist power and the other as the incarnation of revisionism...

...Roosevelt fell in with the aims of Soviet policy in those days because he fondly supposed that with the dissolution of the Comintern Russia had given up international Communist aims, and that the United States as Russia's ally could not possibly be viewed from Moscow as imperialist...

...The United States," it declares, "is the mainstay of colonialism today...

...This, however, is not certain...

...It has been well illustrated in practice by Soviet policy with regard to the Congo: the campaign against Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold of the United Nations...

...it is a modest Chinese way of pushing the Russians on from behind...

...On this historical experience, it sounds somewhat unconvincing to assert that "in conditions of peaceful coexistence favorable opportunities are provided for the development of the class struggle in the capitalist countries and the national-liberation movement of the peoples of the colonial and dependent countries...

...This qualification meets the Chinese case in so far as it regards world war as an alternative way in which the world-wide victory of Communism might come about, and leaves no room for fears that an allout nuclear struggle might be as ruinous for Communist as for nonCommunist states...

...Some observers may therefore conclude that it has vanquished Chinese opposition and secured its supremacy over the whole international Communist movement, as in the days of Stalin...

...it has been a theme of Soviet propaganda for the last decade and a half...

...By G. F. Hudson Compromise in Moscow An analysis of the manifesto issued after the recent Communist summit meeting in Russia London The most impressive fact about the manifesto of the 81 Communist parties issued last month in Moscow was the time it took to arrive at it...

...G. F. Hudson is currently Director of Far Eastern Studies at Oxford...

...No doubt it is better that the Soviet Government, having so far failed to establish an anti-Western and near-Communist fanatic in power in the Congo, should try to keep up a savage civil war there rather than make a direct attack on a member state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—but this still falls short of what most people in the West understand by peaceful coexistence...

...The Chinese have always been prepared to follow the Soviet Union if the latter will only lead...

...The declaration was very severe on the Yugoslav Communists, accusing them of carrying on "subversion work" against the whole international movement...

...Nor, indeed, is it any accident that the manifesto pulls no more punches in condemning Yugoslavia than it does in denouncing the United States...

...It may be said that there is nothing new in this, that everyone knows how wicked America is in Marxist-Leninist eyes, and that saying it once more will make no difference to the two leading statesmen of the superpowers if they should find they have any sound basis on which to conclude a practical deal...

...This section of the declaration clearly shows the effect of the compromise between the Russian and Chinese arguments...

...It can, after all, point to the repeated failures of his attempts to be reconciled with Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito—a policy which has involved the Soviet Union in humiliation and obscured the line between right and wrong for many faithful Communists...

...Expansion of this kind, despite all the talk of peaceful coexistence, is plainly indicated by the language of the manifesto on colonial and newly independent territories, and the "moral and material support" that is to be given to their peoples...

...it is sufficient for their thesis that it can come about and that it can be won...

...The Communist and Workers' parties," we are told, "unanimously declare that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has been, and remains, the universally recognized vanguard of the world Communist movement...

...The imperialists, headed by the United States, make desperate efforts to preserve colonial exploitation of the peoples of the former colonies by new methods and in new forms...

...Once it is admitted that war can be the means of carrying through the great world-historical transformation in which Marxist-Leninists believe, then at least one ought not to shrink from taking great risks in policy without regard to the consequences...

...about which the public ideological controversy centered, the manifesto tells us that "the peoples of all countries know that the danger of a new world war still persists" with American imperialism as the main force of aggression...

...Instead he endorses a document, with all the Communist parties of the world as co-signatories, declaring the United States to be the "enemy of the peoples of the whole world...