p To defend world peace, to force US
monopoly capital to retreat from its aggressive policies— this is the central task of the day. But ’the main responsibility for its accomplishment lies not in Vietnam, not in Africa or Latin America. It lies in the United States. The task of curbing US imperialism rests in the first place with the American people.

p Not least among the inconsistencies in Lin’s article is its insistence that whereas the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America must rely on their own strength in fighting for their liberation, the people of the United States must be freed from the rule of US monopoly capital by others. But if revolution cannot be exported to other countries, 144 neither can it be exported to the United States. Like all others, the American people must fight their own battles.

p Yet, like all other peoples, they must fight them as part of the overall world struggle against imperialism. Moreover, within that totality they bear a special responsibility, living as they do in the very heartland of world imperialism. To help make them aware of this responsibility, to help mobilise them for the battle—these are the particular tasks of the Communists and other forces of progress in our country.

p The logic of Lin’s position is that the interests of the American people would be best served by egging US imperialism on into ever deeper military involvement in Vietnam and other countries, so that the people of these countries may destroy it. But nothing could be farther from the truth. This is the path to nuclear war, to mass annihilation. It coincides with the course of action advocated by the fanatic ultra-Right, which clamour for all-out aggression against other peoples and the indiscriminate dropping of nuclear bombs as the means to victory in that aggression.

p The interests of the American people will be served rather by organising the widest possible opposition to the war policies of the Administration, and by making common cause with the forces of peace throughout the world. They will be served by combating ariti-Sovietism and by striving for closer ties and peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.

p The struggle for peaceful coexistence is not, as Lin and other Chinese leaders repeatedly assert, in conflict with the struggle for national liberation. On the contrary, to fight for peaceful coexistence today is in the first place to fight for an end to US aggression in Vietnam and for the full freedom of the Vietnamese people to decide their own future.

p But it does not end with this. The danger of world war today emanates not only from US imperialism but also from its chief ally, West German imperialism. To fight for peaceful coexistence is therefore to fight against the policy of building a renazified, revanchist West Germany, and supplying it with nuclear weapons, of reviving a reactionary monopolist regime with its own dreams of imperialist conquest. It is to fight against the maintenance of West Berlin as an outpost of provocation and intrigue against the German Democratic Republic and other socialist countries—an outpost which has more than once become the seat of crisis 145 bringing the world to the brink of thermo-nuclear conflict. This aspect of the struggle is completely obscured by the line of Lin’s article with its reduction of the global conflict to one between countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America against US imperialism.

p The fight for peaceful coexistence also entails the fight for recognition of People’s China, for its admission to the UN, and for an end to the senseless total embargo on trade with it. This, too, is part of the special responsibility which falls upon the American people, and upon its progressive vanguard.

To adopt the approach in Lin’s article would be to abdicate all such responsibilities, for it writes off the people of the United States as a major force in the anti-imperialist struggle, and it isolates them from their allies in other parts of the world. It is an approach which reflects a profound lack of faith in the masses of working people, particularly in the United States and other capitalist countries. But it is precisely such faith which should motivate Communists in their struggles everywhere. Only on this basis can unity of all forces opposing imperialism be achieved and ultimate victory secured in the fight for peace, freedom and socialism.