p Let us recall that the concept of world revolutionary process, which is accepted by the Communist Parties, establishes the general content of our epoch as an epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism and also implies recognition of the qualitative diversity of the progressive liberation movements proceeding throughout the world (proletarian revolutions, bourgeois-democratic revolutions, national liberation revolutions, general democratic struggle in the countries of monopoly capital, anti-fascist struggle in the countries with fascist and semi-fascist regimes, and other types of movements). Furthermore, this concept implies recognition not only of definite general laws governing socialist construction in countries where the proletarian revolution has triumphed but also a diversity of forms of the socialist reconstruction that is taking place in these countries, forms which are determined by the economic, political and cultural levels 107 attained, forms which accord with the historical, national traditions in each country. Finally, the concept of world revolutionary process implies a definite duration of the renovation movement which is inexorably running in every part of the globe and which is ultimately to put an end to the epoch of oppression, violence and war.

p In contrast to this realistic concept, which takes account of all the diversity, complexity, qualitative distinctions, and definite difficulties in revolutionary processes and the possibility not only of advances but also of temporary retreats, of zigzag courses, the Chinese leaders have long been spreading among the people illusory and essentially mythical notions about the events taking place in the world outside China.

p Thus, the deepening crisis of US imperialist policy has been presented in this vulgarised and caricatured form: “US imperialism, this arch-enemy of the peoples of the world, is steadily plunging downwards. Once in office, Nixon took over an economy bursting at the seams, faced an insoluble economic crisis, and tremendous resistance from the peoples of the whole world and the masses of people at home, and found himself in a difficult situation, in which there is complete confusion among the imperialist countries while the rod of US imperialism has been steadily losing its force.” It is true that it has at his command “vast quantities of planes and guns, nuclear bombs and guided missiles”, but the use of these can result in only one thing: it can cause “an even broader revolution throughout the world”. One would expect such statements to come from a mediocre propagandist, but these happen to be theoretical disquisitions from the report at the 9th Congress of the CPC. To these “ conclusions" were added wild ideas about the whole world soon becoming a field of application for the selfsame ideas of the “great Mao”. The new Rules adopted by the 9th Congress, for instance, declare: “Mao Tse-tung thought is the MarxismLeninism of an epoch in which imperialism is moving to a general collapse, and socialism to victory all over the world.”

p The myth of an almost imminent “general collapse" of imperialism and of “revisionism”, and of the triumphant advance of the “world revolution" in every part of the world was undoubtedly of some propaganda importance at home, being designed to leave the Chinese people with the 108 impression that the difficulties faced by the Chinese People’s Republic do not in any sense spring from the leadership’s fatal policies but from the incompleteness of international revolutionary processes and that these difficulties will be overcome only after the revolution triumphs in the international arena, and that this will be done overnight, in one great leap. Let us note that these attempts to make success in socialist construction in China directly dependent on successes of the “world revolution”, the attempts to prove that the internal problems of the Chinese revolution cannot be solved without a solution of international problems, without a “world-wide” defeat for imperialism, were first made precisely towards the end of the 1950s, following the failure of the “Great Leap Forward" which was to have “introduced” communism in China within a matter of three or five years.  [108•1 

p However, it would be wrong to reduce the “world revolution" slogan only to an urge on the part of the Chinese leaders to evade responsibility for their failures in domestic policy and to put the blame for the delay in China’s socialist construction on other Communist Parties. The facts show that from the end of the 1950s, the Chinese leadership did indeed try to replace the policy of peaceful coexistence with a policy of “cold” (and not only “cold”) war, attempting to push the socialist camp into a military overnight solution of contradictions between the two systems. And the greatest danger is that the future victory of socialism over imperialism was even then connected with the prospect of a world thermonuclear war.

p At the 1957 Moscow Meeting, Mao argued that a world thermonuclear war could be a real way for socialism’s future victory over imperialism. He reasoned: “Is it possible to estimate the number of human victims a future war could cause? Yes, it is, it will perhaps be one-third of the 2,700 million population of the whole world, that is, only 900 million people—-I argued over the issue with Nehru. In this respect he is more pessimistic than I am. I told him that if one-half of mankind were destroyed, there would still remain the other half, but then imperialism would be completely wiped out and only socialism would remain all over the world, and that within half a century or a full century 109 the population will once again increase even more than by half as much again.”

p When spokesmen for relatively small nations expressed legitimate fears over such prognostications, because their nations could be totally wiped out in a thermonuclear war, Chinese officials assuaged their fears by saying: “In the event of a devastating war, the small countries would have to subordinate their interests to the common interests.” Or: “But the other nations would remain, while imperialism would be destroyed.”

p The Soviet Government, expressing the interest and the will of the Soviet people and standing up for the interests of the peoples of the other countries, including the peoples of China, issued a clear and unequivocal statement over such irresponsible and inhuman “prognostications”. It declared: “But has anyone asked the Chinese people who are being doomed to death in advance about whether they agree to be the firewood in the furnace of a nuclear missile war; have they empowered the CPR leadership to issue their burial certificates in advance?

p “Another question also arises. If, according to the Chinese leaders’ forecasts, roughly one-half of the population of such a big country as China is destroyed in a thermonuclear war, how many men will die in countries whose populations do not run to hundreds of millions but to tens or to simply millions of people? It is, after all, quite obvious that many countries and peoples would find themselves entirely within that half of mankind which the Chinese leaders are prepared to scrap from the human race. Who then has given the Chinese leaders the right to make free with these people’s destinies or to speak on their behalf?

p “Who has given the Chinese leaders the right to denigrate the ultimate goal of the international working-class movement—the triumph of labour over capital—by making assertions that the way to it runs through world thermonuclear war and that it is worth sacrificing one-half of the globe’s population in order to build a higher civilisation on the corpses and ruins? This conception has nothing in common with Marxist-Leninist doctrine. We oppose this bestial conception. We have carried on and are carrying on a tireless struggle for the triumph of Marxist-Leninist ideas, for the emancipation of the peoples from all exploitation and 110 oppression, and for the triumph of labour over capital, with the use of methods which are worthy of the great humanistic ideals of socialism and communism."  [110•1 

p On the one hand, their attitude is characterised by an underestimation of the monstrously devastating force of thermonuclear (and other) modern weapons, an underestimation which has its classic expression in the notorious Maoist slogan: “The atomic bomb is a paper tiger.” In his well-known interview with Edgar Snow, Mao spoke of modern weapons with extreme scorn. He said that “ Americans also had said very much about the destructiveness of the atom bomb, and that Khrushchev had made a big noise about that.. . . Yet recently he had read reports of an investigation by Americans who had visited the Bikini Islands six years after the nuclear tests had been conducted there. From 1959 onward research workers had been on Bikini. When they first entered the island they had had to cut paths through the undergrowth. They had found mice scampering about and fish swimming in the stream as usual. The wellwater was potable, plantation foliage was flourishing and birds were twittering in the trees. Probably there had been two bad years after the tests, but nature had gone on. In the eyes of nature and the birds, the mice and the trees the atom bomb was a paper tiger. Possibly man had less stamina than they?”  [110•2 

p On the other hand, the Maoists have underestimated the strength of the united forces of peace and socialism standing in the way of thermonuclear war, and have in effect been spreading the fatalistic idea that another world-wide conflict is inevitable because the future of war and peace, they insist, is in the hands of the imperialists alone.

p The collection Long Live Leninism insisted that “whether the imperialists ultimately start a war does not depend on us, for we are not the chiefs of the imperialists’ general staffs"  [110•3  A CPC Central Committee’s letter of June 14, 1963, says that it is an “absolutely vain illusion" to hope to avert wars. When it comes to world wars, the Maoists use only words like “always” and “inevitably”. To create the impression that on this question the present Chinese leadership take 111 a Marxist stand, while their opponents pursue a revisionist line, they present quotations from Lenin without considering the actual epoch in which he made the statement. Imperialism is latent with war: from this truth, Mao’s followers draw the conclusion that another world war is inevitable.

p In contrast to the CPC leaders, Marxists-Leninists do not believe that the possibility of world war is equivalent to an inevitability. Although the nature of imperialism has not changed, it is no longer able to dictate its will to the peoples of the world, because the sphere of its activity has been narrowed down and the scale of its influence has been reduced. Imperialism is the soil for aggressive wars, but to prevent a third world war from growing on this soil there is need for definite conditions which may or may not materialise, that is, there is need for a balance of forces within the individual countries and in the world arena favouring the start of a war. It is the task of the popular movement for peace and against war to make these conditions as unfavourable as possible. The Document of the 1969 Meeting of the Communists of the world declared once again that “a new world war can be averted by the combined effort of the socialist countries, the international working class, the national liberation movement, all peace-loving countries, public organisations and mass movements".  [111•1 

p The Chinese leaders like to repeat Marx’s words about ideas becoming a material force when they get hold of the masses. Radio Peking often starts its broadcasts by quoting Mao as saying that the “people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history".  [111•2  “The Chinese people and all the revolutionary peoples of the world" constituting, according to Chinese propaganda estimates, over 90 per cent of the population of the globe, are capable of performing all sorts of miracles, except one—to prevent another world war. Isn’t this a rather curious line to take for those who insist that the peoples are all-powerful?

p Actually, however, in the present epoch the question of a war depends above all on the joint efforts of the progressive anti-imperialist, anti-war forces. The truth must be faced; it is precisely the splitting policy of the Chinese 112 leadership, which weakens the united front in the struggle for peace, that is untying the hands of the “chiefs of the imperialists’ general staffs”.

p It is true that just recently this idea of the inevitability of another world war has been expressed in more veiled formulations. The report to the 9th CPC Congress contains Mao’s “latest” precept on this score: “As for the question of world war, there are only two possibilities: either war will cause revolution, or revolution will avert war.” But “ dialectical" juggling with slogans like the one about “either war causing revolution or revolution averting war”, may confuse only those who have lost the ability of getting through to the real meaning of deceptively sonorous phrases, those who have lost their sense of historical reality. The point is that war—and what the Chinese leaders have in mind is a world thermonuclear war—is capable rather not of producing “world-wide revolution”, but interrupting for many decades any continuation of social and even of simple biological life in the most developed countries of the world. On the other hand, by insisting that “revolution will avert war”, the CPC leaders deprive the Marxist-Leninist concept of “social revolution" of its rich and highly diverse content, reduce the revolutionary process to extreme forms of armed struggle or even to Blanquist armed putsches, thereby scrapping the importance of general democratic struggle for peace. In either case they betray the very substance of the MarxistLeninist revolutionary doctrine, whose precepts are the relentlessly sober approach and realism in assessing the concrete historical conditions of the class struggle, on the one hand, and on the other, a choice of means and ways of political action which are most favourable in the light of social progress and the interests of the working classes.

p The reckless and irresponsible arithmetical exercises about the future destruction of one-third or one-half of mankind (and who can guarantee that these figures will not actually increase to nine-tenths or even ten-tenths?), like the falsely optimistic predictions that after an “anti-imperialist” thermonuclear war the “triumphant people will very rapidly create on the ruins of destroyed imperialism a civilisation a thousand times higher than that under the capitalist system, and will build its own, truly beautiful future”,  [112•1  have nothing 113 in common with the Marxist doctrine of war and revolution and its application in the conditions of the present epoch.

p In 1918 Lenin said that back in the 1880s the leaders of the international proletariat “with extreme caution" treated the prospect of socialism growing out of an all-European war, for they clearly realised that such a war “would also lead to the brutalisation, degradation and retrogression of the whole of Europe".  [113•1  Summing up the sanguinary experience of the First World War, Lenin anticipated the threat that this kind of conflict “might undermine the very foundations of human society. Because it is the first time in history that the most powerful achievements of technology have been applied on such a scale, so destructively and with such energy, for the annihilation of millions of human lives. When all means of production are being thus devoted to the service of war, we see that the most gloomy prophecies are being fulfilled, and that more and more countries are falling a prey to retrogression, starvation and complete decline of all the productive forces".  [113•2  These words become a hundred times more meaningful under the present military-technological revolution, which involves a great advance in destructive weapons fraught with the possibility of catastrophic consequences.

p The Communists are convinced that imperialism is bound to be destroyed and that the forces of progress will do away with the world of violence, oppression, and wars, however protracted and hard their struggle may be. But the Communists have been doing their utmost to have all the nations and all the peoples share the joys of this victory, and to have this victory secured by mankind at the lowest costs in terms of sacrifices, so that men are spared the horrors of a world thermonuclear war.

p Let us recall, that the aim Marx set himself in his Capital was to discover and analyse the laws of social development, whose knowledge could help to reduce and ease the birth pangs of the new social system. The Peking leaders have taken as their basis the very opposite proposition: to increase and to sharpen the birth pangs, without ever giving a thought that this kind of “midwifery” could well transform the pangs of birth into the agony of death. Incidentally, the “great Mao‘s’ latest precepts hold in store for the Chinese people 114 not just war, but a war with a lethal outcome. Editorials in Jenmin jihpao, Chiefangchiun pao and Hungchih have been widely circulating the following statement by Mao Tse-tung: “I favour this slogan: ’fear no difficulties, fear no death’.” That is the logical capstone to the earlier conclusion that the “world can be rebuilt only with the aid of a gun”, that war is the “bridge” along which mankind will move into a future world without wars, etc.

p Although in recent times Chinese propagandists have somehow toned down the thesis about the inevitability of a new world war and ever more often make statements to the effect that China favours peaceful coexistence, Peking keeps opposing the adoption of any practical measures aimed at solving acute problems and easing tensions. Proof of this is its attitude to the war in Indochina, its policy in the Middle East and its attempts to provoke a new conflict there. The true designs of Chinese statesmen are seen in their deep disappointment over the signing of treaties between the USSR and the FRG and between Poland and the FRG, over the signing of a quadripartite agreement on West Berlin, and in their desire to prevent the convocation of a conference on European security. Peking has pleaded against the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear arms, rejected the treaty banning the placing of mass destruction weapons on the seabed, and declined the Soviet proposal to hold a conference of the five nuclear powers to consider problems of nuclear disarmament. At the 26th UN General Assembly the Chinese representatives argued against the Soviet proposal to convene a world conference on disarmament and played into the hands of the US delegation. One of the chief designs of Peking today is to frustrate international detente, to create new hotbeds of war, and to provoke a missile-nuclear conflict between the USA and the USSR.

p Adventurist propositions governing the foreign policy of a great power, which is in possession of thermonuclear weapons, are latent with grave consequences.

The real successes in the struggle for the triumph of socialism throughout the world will largely depend on how successfully and swiftly the world revolutionary movement is able to overcome these adventurist propositions advocated by the present CPC leadership, which is pushing mankind towards a world thermonuclear conflict.