[GegenStandpunkt Index] [Contents] [Introduction] Part 1 [1] [2] [3] [4] Part 2 [1] [2] [3] [Part 3] [1] [2] [3] [Part 4] [1] [2] [3]

From 1917 to Perestroika
The Victory of Morality over Socialism

Karl Held and Audrey Hill

Part 2
Instead of world revolution: Peace-promoting interference in the business of imperialism

Chapter 3
Supporting world communism to death

The CPSU does not have to worry about class struggle elsewhere. It could simply adopt the attitude that it has its hands full building up a flourishing communist society, and class struggle in other places has to be won by the communists and workers there anyway. Who would blame it? But once the CPSU decides it must worry about social conditions all over the world, it should at least do so without making life even more difficult for communists there!

Instead, communists in all states of the imperialist world system encounter world-traveling CPSU cadres at their enemies’ side, arm in arm with rulers and capitalists. And this is no coincidence, but absolutely according to plan. There is no Western statesman who cannot point out to communist critics how well he gets along with the head of the CPSU, how similarly they both see important world problems, and with what esprit de corps they both intend to overcome them!

This fatal outcome characterizes a success which the CPSU strives for and which it has achieved. Its aim is to gain respectability in the imperialist world for the anticapitalist overthrow it brought about in Russia and fought out against great imperialist hostility. This contradiction has become reality —logically enough, at the expense of rejecting the bourgeois system the overthrow was somehow directed against and whose state powers so detest communism. The CPSU itself does everything it can to diminish, or even deny, the revolutionary character of its rule. It acts as if it had not taken any step out of the bourgeois “family of nations” by establishing its new social order, but only fulfilled in an exemplary and trailblazing way a particularly progressive interest of this same world of states — found the optimal “answer to the questions of our time,” as these communists’ phraseology has it today. The CPSU acts as if the other states — unlike old Russia — no longer needed any revolution at all to follow the Russian example of conducting a modern state.

And it thus perverts — along with everything else — its relations with fellow communists who fight capitalism elsewhere and are quite aware that the abolition of private property is a social revolution and therefore requires an overthrow of the state. Instead of helping this opposition, the CPSU redefines their goals for them: communists are supposed to try to induce the political heads of every nation, especially the leading nations, to adopt the CPSU’s view of “world problems” and its “proposals for solutions.”

This assignment is anticommunist. Secondly, it is paradoxical because, even if the socialists ingratiate themselves to the nth degree, their definition of problems proves to be separated from the bourgeois state’s catalogue of tasks by nothing less than a social revolution. If the CPSU’s supporters around the world are not willing to admit this themselves, their own states confront them with this truth. And, thirdly, this assignment has a gigantic hitch. The communists are supposed to address a consciousness which fundamentally views politics as problem solving in the interests of national progress — i.e., the political standpoint for which the success of the nation is the greatest conceivable interest. This standpoint is then supposed to let itself be impressed, instructed, and guided by the national success achieved by another state, the Soviet Union. The interest in a glorious future of national society is supposed to be the common denominator between the “communist” references to the Soviet model and the political needs addressed — and this cannot work out. The national standpoint inevitably involves a disassociation from “the others,” a mistrust of foreign examples, and the spirit of competition. As everyone knows, there is only one national reason for really “learning from other countries” without reservation, and that is the competitive struggle for national survival.

This contradiction of wanting to arouse a nationalist’s enthusiasm for the more successful nationalism of another country hits first and foremost the parties following the CPSU line: they are accused of being “in Moscow’s thrall” and “traitors to their country.” And this forces them to make a decision. They must sooner or later choose between “Moscow’s point of view” and their “national colors.” Political crimes which the Soviet power may be accused of are never the reason for this dilemma; they only make it acute, if anything. And there is no question that every party that can afford to do so will divorce itself from the CPSU and completely adopt the standpoint of national progress, without anyone else “leading it by the nose.” There is nothing else the “Eurocommunists” ever learned from the CPSU! Conversely, the alternative of remaining true to Moscow’s example is equivalent to perpetual shipwreck on the rock of nationalism which one never criticizes, for which the mere suspicion that someone is “a slave to the Russians” suffices as a reason for dead certain anticommunism.

The CPSU’s real interest is not even to have pieces of its socialism introduced in other countries — how could that happen? Its propaganda for the Soviet example is intended above all to encourage other states to adopt the attitude that one can get along well with the Soviet Union and there is no reason for hostility. And this makes the agitation task assigned to the allied CP’s even more absurd. They are supposed to act as parties of the Soviet will for peace; and that is an extremely tough job in the world of democratic states. Even if pro-Soviet communists do not see it this way, “politics for peace” necessarily refers to “dangers” which are unthinkable without Soviet war readiness. Every national mind therefore knows that standing up for the Soviet love of peace means, strictly speaking, standing up for its reasons for war. Communist propaganda for peace is therefore not merely the continuation of Soviet foreign policy by means of a “fifth column” in the form of a party. It will also inevitably be taken as such and rejected for this very reason by every nationally-minded person — whom the communist message does not want to change! What lethal self-betrayal the CPSU demands from its sister parties!

And they cannot even be sure of their big sister’s gratitude. For the logic of this politics for peace entails readily sacrificing the efforts of like-minded allies if this provides better chances of inducing a pro-Soviet will for peace on the part of the government in charge. For peace, which it quite aptly translates into good diplomatic relations with other governments, the CPSU knows no bounds in its cynicism toward opposition movements that basically sympathies with it, and were maybe even built up by it. It of course regards the peace to be preserved as an overriding justification for every rotten thing it does. And it thereby reveals once again its irremediable mistake of wanting to gain recognition from other states for its different system. It does not prevent imperialism from taking this as a cause for war. Rather, it lets itself in for it.

With its general line of peaceful policy, the CPSU has killed what used to be a “communist world movement.” But this does not bother it. In its view of the world, it has a substitute. Nationalists who are concerned for any reason at all about peace and/or some “social question” without having ever thought about class struggle are nowadays almost as welcome to the CPSU as communist parties which canvass for it directly, and in any case much more welcome than just plain communists. The CPSU regards such unappointed “supporters” as all the more convincing advocates of the standpoint it wants to (merely) bring into the politics of the imperialist nations. And it does not mind if such fractions emphasize their anticommunism. In the name of peace and progress it will forgive even that.

Following this pattern, the CPSU for many years made allies of the anticolonial liberation movements, both spiritually and by military assistance. The result was easy to predict. As soon as they gained independence and turned to their “national construction” it was time to disassociate themselves from Moscow’s solidarity, unless imperialist subversion or a war forced them to request Soviet military assistance — and only if the CPSU considered it opportune to grant it. The only thing left over from these days is the imperialist habit of suspecting that the “Russians” are the wire pullers whenever something does not go the way the imperialist security fanatics want. On the one hand, the CPSU does not like to be accused of such nastiness but, on the other hand, it welcomes even this as proof that everything progressive, social and anti-imperialist has its true home in the Soviet Union.

As proof of this, the CPSU nowadays takes everything it can get. It invites Western celebrities to Moscow so they can testify to Soviet hospitality afterwards — as evidence that a more peaceful world is possible. It approaches the capitalist proletariat, who serve and go to the dogs in the great “economic powers,” only through their television darlings and philosophers. Is this any way to promote world revolution? Not even the CPSU can believe that. But it does not care; it wants no world revolution.

[GegenStandpunkt Index] [Contents] [Introduction] Part 1 [1] [2] [3] [4] Part 2 [1] [2] [3] [Part 3] [1] [2] [3] [Part 4] [1] [2] [3]

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