HEAVY SETBACK FOR KREMLIN CAMPAIGN AGAINST PEKING
By Pierre Frank
The conference of twenty-six Communist parties, which the leadership.of the Communist party of the Soviet Union set for December 15 .-with the objective of assembling a-majority against the line of the.Ghinese Communist party, has been deferred, as was expected when. Khrushchev was dismissed from office.. It has-been: announced. in addition that the Chinese have refused to participate in a confers ence proposed for next March,
Without any daubt, the project of banning the Chinese Communist party from the official Communist movement suffered a heavy set- -back, The project itself played -a big, if not determining, role in Khrushchev's downfall, After that it became inevitable that the conference would not be opened on December 15. But the question still remains ~- is a compromise possible?
‘In recent weeks, the Soviet and Chinese leaders have wade public statements on the differences which were formerly accompanied by | so much abuse. The abuse has disappeared but not the differences, The Soviet and Chinese leaders each insist on the positions they previously: maintained, without any softening whatever. The interpretation can obviously be made that at the opening of negotiations each side will maintain its maximum positions and that. this need not signify. the impossibility of arriving at’ a compromise, But..it should be noted that neither side has said much about the differences on the state level. Moscow -- without fundamentally modifying the inter: national policy of the Soviet bureaucracy, ~- has stiffened its... declarations concerning imperialism with regard to the Congo and Vietnam. Thus the expression of differences is now ocnurring primarily on the ideological level,
If the pro-Moscow Communist parties are remaining as silent as possible on the Sino-Soviet conflict, Tito is not bound by the same considerations and at the Congress of the League of Yugoslav Communists, he violently assailed the Chinese, claiming that it was not a question of ideological differences but of PL power designs and hegemonist methods among the Chinese leaders. This declaration is inconsistent, Tito forgets that on the state level Khrushchev conducted himself toward the Chinese the way Stalin did toward the Yugoslavs; he forgets the period when he correctly denounced the Soviet leaders in the same terms.
At the very brink, the downfall of Khrushchev temporarily halted the drive toward a split. The ideological differences separating the Soviet and Chinese leaders are not the result of mental lucubrations; they flow from the very different conditions in which the two bureaucracies operate, The one is hoping to be able to reach an over-all agreement with Washington; the other finds itself ina conflict with American imperialism and in material difficulties. in.
</
4
which it sees no way out except by weakening its antagonist.
For the moment, the Soviet bureaucracy, although it is backed by a majority of the Communist party leaderships and holds an apparently more advantageous position on the international plane, is on the defensive. It is seeking to exploit the apathy among the work~ ers of the capitalist countries and the hopes of the Soviet masses for immediate improvements in their standard of living. The colonial revolution, contrariwise, tends to favor the Chinese and it will do the prestige of the Soviet bureaucracy no good to neglect the colonial masses too much.
The present period of secret negotiations, of criticisms directed at anonymous people, of pretense, recalls the not-so-distant period when the Chinese and Soviet leaders fought each other indirectly by attacking the Yugoslavs or the Albanians... This offers no more of a solution than did the previous period, ©The ideological differ-ences cannot end in a compromise; on the contrary, their deepening is inevitable. Quite recently in the leadership of the Italian Communist party, Amendola went even further than the late Togliatti in revisionism, logically raising the question < of a fusion with the Social Democracy.
- The Soviet bureaucracy has lost considerable authority. It will never be able to re-establish an alignment responsive to its command, No bureaucracy will be able to take the place it once held. The price paid for Stalinism in the past: was a heavy series of defeats; the current price is a long period of confusion. But revolutionary Marxism will end by again assuming its legitimate place on the road of world revolution. |
Directeur-Gérant: Pierre FRANK. teur).