p The line of intensifying the barrack-room regime, the country’s militarisation, which is due to Mao’s urge to maintain the system of extra-economic coercion, is one of the basic elements which determine the character of the specific foreign-policy line imposed on China by the Maoists, a line which is just as alien to Marxist-Leninist principles as is their domestic-policy line. Historical experience shows that war communism is justified as a system for organising production and distribution in a country without a high economic potential forced to carry on a drawn-out war against the counter-revolutionary forces of the overthrown bourgeoisie, and the interventionists. But it is unfit for peacetime construction. The Maoists have sought to use the methods of war communism even in peacetime, thereby distorting them, killing their communist content, and converting them into a means of militarising the country and creating an ideological climate which gives the population a sense of impending danger of war. For many years, the creation of such a climate, the build-up of an atmosphere of war hysteria in China, was being done with the help of the idea that another world war was fatally inevitable and that it was impossible for the world socialist revolution to develop without a direct armed clash between its forces and those of international imperialism. In recent years, the same purposes have been served by the war hysteria built up over the “threat from the north”, that is, from the Soviet Union, which the Maoists have invented.

p Since the late 1950s, statements by Mao and his followers on such key questions as the content of the present epoch, the balance between the contending forces, the place of the various revolutionary streams within the single world revolutionary process, have ever more clearly revealed the denial of the need of economic prerequisites for socialist revolution and of the role of the socialist system as the economic mainstay for unfolding the world socialist revolution.

p In his speech at the 1957 Moscow Meeting of fraternal parties, and in his articles “On the Historical Experience of 243 the Proletarian Dictatorship" and “Once More on the Historical Experience of the Proletarian Dictatorship" Mao still expressed the view that war was the only means of achieving revolution together with recognition of the decisive role of the socialist system in the development of the world revolutionary process. However, in the course of the polemics which Mao started by coming out against the CPSU’s stand and the principles written into the 1957 Declaration and the 1960 Statement, he arrived at the denial of the decisive role of the socialist system in the world revolutionary process, and came to contrapose the national liberation movement and the forces of socialism.

p Mao’s followers ignore the fact that the character of the national liberation movement is determined by its economic content, that the outcome of the national-democratic revolution depends on the kind of economic tasks it sets out to tackle: tasks expressing the interests of the bourgeoisie, which seeks to direct the country’s development after national independence along the capitalist way, or tasks expressing the interests of the proletariat which seeks to carry on the revolution beyond the bourgeois-democratic stage and to fill it with socialist content.

p National-democratic revolutions in countries without internal economic prerequisites for the triumph of socialism would inevitably be confined to a solution of bourgeoisdemocratic tasks unless the working people in these countries were able to rely on the support of the world socialist system and the assistance and experience of the socialist countries. The Maoists’ denial that the socialist system is the decisive factor of the world revolutionary process has been expressed in the CPR’s foreign economic policy, which took a sharp turn after 1960. By breaking their economic ties with the Soviet Union and other socialist states, ties which under the first five-year plan had determined the successes of economic construction in China, the Maoists pushed the country into autarchy, into isolated development of the national economy, which in fact developed into a policy of orientation upon the international capitalist market and extension of economic ties with the capitalist countries.

p The cancellation, on the CPR’s initiative, of the agreements concluded with the socialist countries resulted in a sharp 244 drop in China’s trade with this group of countries. In 1968, it was down by more than 66 per cent as compared with 1959, when it was at its peak. In that period, China’s trade with the capitalist countries increased by 120 per cent. In 1968 and 1969, the share of non-socialist countries in China’s foreign trade went up to 75 per cent (with the capitalist countries’ share coming to roughly 50 per cent of total trade), while the share of the socialist countries was down to less than 25 per cent of China’s foreign trade.

p The Maoists have used the “relying on one’s own strength" thesis to back up their break of economic ties with the socialist countries, a thesis they believe to mean, for the state, a refusal to participate in the international division of labour, complete self-sufficiency of the national economy in every type of product needed, regardless of whether the home production of this or that item is warranted in terms of economic efficiency.

p Their references to the “relying on one’s own strength" principle are untenable theoretically and also hypocritical, like their declarations of implacability with respect to imperialism. This is well illustrated by the CPR’s ever more pronounced orientation on the system of the international capitalist division of labour. The Maoists have been extending direct trade ties with the advanced capitalist countries (Japan and the FRG in the first place), relying less and less on intermediaries (Hong Kong, etc.) which had helped them to cover up these ties and ever more actively supplementing them with scientific and technical co- operation, invitation of foreign specialists, conclusion of credit agreements, etc. Mao and his followers have also been openly seeking to establish economic ties with the United States.

p In an effort to justify the turn-about in foreign economic policy which they had foisted on the country, the Maoists tried to blame the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries for the “Great Leap Forward" fiasco, and spread slanderous inventions about co-operation with these countries having hampered China’s economic development, about their economic assistance to China having been insignificant and ineffective, etc.

p These inventions are patently absurd. The scale of the economic assistance the socialist countries gave China will be 245 seen from the fact that the Soviet Union alone helped China to build and modernise enterprises ensuring the production of 8.7 million tons of pig-iron, 25-30 per cent of the country’s electric power generation, 80 per cent of its lorry and tractor output, etc. The Soviet Union supplied China with complete sets of plant for 90 projects out of 211 going up in China under the first five-year plan. It should be borne in mind that these deliveries were so arranged as to accelerate the development in China of the leading branches of the heavy industry and to help her create the necessary basis for technological progress. In 1957, China’s industry already supplied 50 per cent of the equipment for the industrial projects going up with the Soviet Union’s assistance. The vast economic, financial and technical assistance from the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries helped China to establish within a short period a developed iron and steel industry, heavy and precision engineering, an automobile and tractor industry, an aircraft industry, a powergenerating equipment industry, a radio engineering industry and an atomic industry.

p Co-operation with the socialist countries helped China rapidly to build up the basis of her economic independence. Just now, her orientation to the international capitalist market is producing the opposite results, because the imperialist countries see no point in letting China have large quantities of the producer goods she needs to develop her economy.

p The turn-about in her foreign economic policy is a source of large losses for China, because, on the one hand, it has reduced her export potential and has forced her to sell at reduced prices the products the capitalist countries want (agricultural raw materials and some minerals, non-ferrous metals above all); on the other hand, China now has to pay high prices for the goods she has to buy from these countries. Add to this the losses arising from the need to pay high interest rates for the capitalist countries’ credits, and the high price of the various types of scientific and technical assistance, which the socialist countries had made available to China virtually free of charge.

p The fact that the Maoists have decided to reorientate the country’s external economic ties, despite the vast losses this has inflicted on China, is sufficiently clear evidence that 246 this step of theirs was not in any sense motivated by concern for national economic development. It was motivated by political considerations springing from the Chinese leadership’s hegemonistic propositions and the hope of promoting their self-seeking aims by making use of the contradictions between capitalism and socialism. Unscrupulous politicasting is the substance of the line being pursued by Mao and his followers at home and in relations with other countries. That is the essence of the ill-famed principle of “politics is the command force”, a principle which they have adopted for their banner, and which serves to vindicate their policy expressive of Great-Power interests, instead of the vital economic interests of the working people. Their policy has no socialist economic content and in all its forms cuts across the objective requirements of socialist construction in China and the development of the world socialist revolution.

p History has shown that Lenin was quite right when he kept stressing that the outcome of the world socialist revolution crucially depends on the economic successes in countries where the working class has taken over. Lenin insisted that the economic front was the fundamental one for the first proletarian dictatorship, the young Soviet Republic, and added that unless victory was scored on this front, unless a powerful socialist economy was built up, “nothing will follow from our successes, from our victories in overthrowing the exploiters, and from our military rebuff to international imperialism, and a return to the old system will be inevitable".  [246•1 

p Lenin showed the dialectical interconnection between economics and politics, and proved that the development of the socialist economy is not only the basic condition for a full and final victory of socialism in Soviet Russia, but also a necessary condition for the political victory of the working class advancing at the head of great masses of exploited people in their liberation struggle, victory over the bourgeoisie on a world scale. He wrote: “We are now exercising our main influence on the international revolution through our economic policy. The struggle in this field has now 247 become global. Once we solve this problem, we shall have certainly and finally won on an international scale."  [247•1 

p The last half-century of world history has shown very well that the national liberation movement has become a mighty force in a world divided into two camps—the socialist and the imperialist—a world in which the first socialist power, relying on the mighty economic potential it had built up, routed the most reactionary forces of imperialism, with socialism established as a world system, bringing together a number of countries and scoring more and more victories in the economic competition with capitalism.

p With China for its example, history has also presented an unfortunate lesson showing that neglect of objective requirements in economic development, bearing on the “deepest foundations of the existence of hundreds of millions of people”,  [247•2  as Lenin put it, tends to revenge itself by turning politics into baseless adventurism.

p In 1948, Mao wrote: “Policy is the starting-point of all the practical actions of a revolutionary party and manifests itself in the process and end-result of that party’s actions.

“What we call experience is the process and the end-result of carrying out a policy. Only through the practice of the people, that is, through experience, can we verify whether a policy is correct or wrong and determine to what extent it is correct or wrong."  [247•3  In this formulation Mao seems to “have forgotten" that the social practice of the masses does not amount to a mere implementation of a policy but that it is the basis on which it is alone possible to work out a correct policy, that it is not policy that serves as the starting point, because it cannot be correct if it is a flight of fancy, but that the starting point is scientific analysis of the social practice of the masses, of the concrete conditions in which this takes place, a scientific generalisation of historical experience. The Chinese people have to pay a stiff price for Mao’s “forgetfulness”. The enshrinement of a subjectivist, 248 adventurist policy, not in any way anchored economically, has led to disastrous failures in the CPR’s economic development, and has sent Mao and his followers hastily abandoning their illusions about the possibility of establishing communism in China before this is done in other countries, and panically embracing the idea that no country can reach communism even after centuries of development. This has impelled them to take anti-socialist action, which has resulted in their growing isolation in the international liberation movement.