p A point strongly made at the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties held in Moscow in June 1969 was that every effort had to be bent to counteract Right- and Left-opportunist distortions of Marxist-Leninist theory and policy and to combat revisionism, dogmatism and Left-sectarian adventurism. Many of the speakers noted that today opportunism and adventurism were most strikingly in evidence in the policy of the present Chinese leadership. In particular, they underscored the harm and danger of the Maoists’ divisive activities, chauvinism and anti-Sovietism.

p The political and ideological make-up of Maoism has gone through several stages-,determined by the development of the Chinese revolution and the struggle that is going on in the Communist Party of China between the MarxistLeninist internationalists, on the one hand, and the nationalists and opportunists, on the other. A specific of Maoism’s evolution is that being a petty-bourgeois, nationalistic, revisionist doctrine and increasingly departing from MarxismLeninism, it has made constant use of Marxism-Leninism as a screen. At first it was given out as Sinicised Marxism allegedly representing the integration of Marxism with the practice of the Chinese revolution, and then as a new and higher phase of the development of Marxism-Leninism as a whole.

p In other words, Maoism has used this great teaching, as a cover in order to exploit its prestige, deal it a blow, discredit it and gradually replace it with the "thought of Mao Tse-tung”, first in China and then throughout the world. While screening the opportunist substance of his views with Marxist-Leninist terminology Mao Tse-tung has made statements such as "Leninism is inacceptable to China”, "the road for China has been charted not by Leninism but by Maoism”, "everybody, including the Russians, will recognise Maoism five or seven years after the Chinese revolution" and so on.  [5•* 

p Mao Tse-tung gave a deep insight into his political views and objectives when he was interviewed by the American journalist Forman in 1944. Speaking of China’s future, he said: "We shall differ"from the USSR economically. And we shall differ from the USSR politically, too. We by no means want to establish a policy of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact, we welcome free competition and private enterprise, and we shall allow and welcome, on a basis of mutual agreement, foreign investment in trade and industry in the areas under our control.. .. We welcome foreigners and foreign capital in China. As regards government, we shall differ from the USSR in that respect, too... . Our democratic government will include landowners, merchants, capitalists, bourgeoisie, peasants and workers.”  [6•* 

p Statements of this kind might have been interpreted as having been dictated by purely tactical considerations, but developments over the past decade have shown that this was not simply tactics. The Maoists’ hopes of enlisting United States assistance in 1945 were not justified. The USA continued their assistance to the Kuomintang and for some time the Maoists abandoned their flirtation with the US imperialists.

p In a short introduction it is not possible to show what the real views of the Maoists have been and how they have been camouflaged at every stage, but it is necessary to examine Maoism at its new stage, which began with the socalled 9th Congress of the CPC in April 1969. Our objective is to expose what lies behind the definition, given in the new CPC Constitution adopted at that Congress, that the "thought of Mao Tse-tung" is the "Marxism-Leninism of the epoch when imperialism is moving to its total downfall, and socialism—to victory throughout the world”.

p An analysis of Maoism’s evolution gives us grounds for asserting that this evolution has been marked by a steady intensification of elements of nationalism, which in the views and political actions of the Maoists grew from worship of China’s specific, from Sinicentrism, into Great-Han chauvinism, racialism and anti-Sovietism. The 9th Congress was a major landmark in this long nationalistic transformation of Maoism, for it gave final shape to the Maoist claims to 7 world domination, which Mao Tse-tung and his entourage have been hoping to secure through a world war. That explains why they are maintaining that a world war is inevitable, calling on the Chinese people to prepare for war and elemental calamities, militarising China and speeding up the development of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery.

p China is being turned into an armed camp and the people are being accustomed to the idea that war will break out in the near future.

p For tactical considerations the Maoists continue to use Leftist phrases as a means of camouflaging their Great-Han annexationist designs, but a comparison of what was allegorically stated at the Congress and mirrored in its documents with what Chinese post-Congress propaganda is saying for home consumption clearly shows what really lies behind the hegemonistic aims of the Maoists. Of the propaganda material being spread by the Maoists in China, attention is attracted particularly by an article lauding and glorifying war carried in the newspaper Chiehfangchun Pao on May 14, 1969. "The proletariat,” this article states, "cannot achieve final victory throughout the world without war.” In present-day China Mao Tse-tung’s supporters are called the “proletariat”. This gives the above quotation from Chiehfangchun Pao a pronounced hegemonistic meaning, and it is interpreted as such by the Chinese reader to whom the article is addressed. "A new China has emerged,” the article goes on to say, "and a new world is bound to appear”, i.e., a world, we may add, modelled on the China of Mao Tse-tung.

p This lays bare the true meaning of the definition which the CPC Constitution gives of the “thought” of Mao Tse-tung. By declaring that this “thought” is "the Marxism-Leninism of the epoch when imperialism is moving to its total downfall, and socialism—to victory throughout the world”, the Maoists are in fact asserting that the present epoch will witness the establishment of Chinese domination over the entire world because they include the USSR and other socialist countries in the concept “imperialism”, and by “socialism” they mean only China. The 9th Congress of the CPC has thus given a totally new definition of Maoism. First, it stated bluntly that Maoism is no longer confined to the 8 boundaries of China but claims world-wide significance and, second, divulged that the Maoists have set their sights on winning world-wide domination.

p Of course, the claims of Mao Tse-tung and his sycophants to world supremacy are very much reminiscent of the dreams which the Chinese bourgeoisie and its ideologists nursed at the turn of the century. It would be appropriate to recall the words of Liang Chi-chao, whose ideas fascinated Mao Tse-tung early in his career: "There is one great cause to which our ancestors devoted all their strength continuously for five thousand years. ... What is this cause? I call it the cause of extending the Chinese nation. Originally our Chinese nation consisted only of a few small tribes inhabiting Shantung and Honan. In the course of thousands of years they gradually grew and developed into a great nation, which created a vast and grand empire. They grew along two channels. The first was through the assimilation of the countless nationalities inside and outside our borders. The second was through the steady migration of the people of our nation to the frontiers and the extension of territory.... History has been moving along these channels for five thousand years.”  [8•*  The frankly expansionist views of Liang Chichao and his ilk are being enlarged on in China today by Mao Tse-tung and his supporters, who are, in effect, preaching the further "extension of the Chinese nation" and, in line with this preaching, making territorial claims on the USSR, the Mongolian People’s Republic, India and other countries. As distinct from the Chinese bourgeoisie, which stated its predatory plans openly, the Maoists have donned the toga of revolutionaries and promise to deliver the peoples "from exploitation of man by man”, and so forth.

p However, this masquerade is divested of its colour as soon as we compare what the Maoists say with the political line pursued by them in China and on the international scene.

p Since 1958, when Mao Tse-tung and his supporters managed to revise the decisions of the 8th CPC Congress on the further building of socialism and impose the notorious adventurist "three red banners" policy on the country, the elements of socialism created by the CPC and the Chinese people in the course of the first seven years after the 9 proclamation of the People’s Republic of China 4iave been gradually eradicated. The Maoists’ "big leap" and "people’s communes" were a heavy blow to the Chinese economy and held up the building of socialism, while during the " cultural revolution" Mao Tse-tung and his supporters struck mainly at the socialist gains in the superstructure. They shook and weakened the basis on which this superstructure was erected. This patently exposed them as an anti-socialist force and showed that what they want is not socialism and the welfare of the Chinese people but international hegemony. Further evidence in support of this conclusion was provided by the 9th Congress of the CPC. It did not produce any constructive programme for socialist construction in China, only repeating the "big leap" and other ideas of Mao Tse-tung which have been cast overboard by life. The main task set by it was not the development of the productive forces (after the Congress the very idea of developing the productive forces was branded reactionary) but the intensification of the "class struggle”, which the Maoists regard as the prime motive force of present-day China’s development.

p The Congress endorsed the revolutionary committees as the principal organs of political power instead of the statutory Party and constitutional state bodies. Set up during the "cultural revolution”, these revolutionary committees are the instruments of the military-bureaucratic dictatorship of Mao Tse-tung and his supporters. The army was named by the Congress as the "main component of the state”. That is why the military play the first fiddle in the party committees now being set up.

p At the Congress, to discourage anybody from aspiring to complete the building of socialism in China (the general line of the CPC, recorded in documents published in 1953, envisaged the building of socialism in China within a period of 15 years), the Maoists declared that "final victory in a given socialist country not only requires the effort of the proletariat and other strata of the population of that country but depends on the triumph of the world revolution”. However, inasmuch as the Maoists maintain that the world revolution depends directly on a world war, it follows that socialist construction can be completed only as a result of a world war. Consequently, at the present stage the 10 principal aim of the Chinese leadership is not socialism but a world war, and their only purpose for mentioning the "world revolution" is to veil their Great-Han, chauvinistic policies and make the peoples believe that in driving towards war they are pursuing a revolutionary objective.

p Another specific of Maoism’s current evolution is that antiSovietism has been raised to the level of official policy. Evidence of this is that at the 9th Congress the struggle against the Soviet Union and other countries of the socialist community was proclaimed as one of the tasks of the new Maoist party. As a matter of fact, this has its own logic. After the appalling economic and political setbacks provoked by the attempts to prove that Maoism is a viable teaching, Mao Tse-tung and his supporters can no longer exist without anti-Sovietism, which they use in an effort to justify their disastrous policies in the eyes of the Chinese people. Moreover, they need anti-Sovietism in order to divert the attention of the Chinese people from the colossal difficulties and privation which they encounter day after day because the Maoists are sacrificing the interests of socialism to their Great-Power ambitions. The Maoists count on using anti-Sovietism to whip up chauvinistic passions and thereby unite the Chinese people round themselves and end the split caused in the nation by the internecine strife precipitated by the "cultural revolution”.

p Lastly, Mao Tse-tung and his supporters need antiSovietism as a means of enlisting the backing and assistance of the capitalist countries for their fight against world socialism.

p We have already seen that in 1945 the Maoists had no aversion to stretching out their hands for a sop from imperialism. But at the time they could not pay back with antiSovietism because they needed Soviet assistance. Today they receive bounties from the imperialist powers and are paying with betrayal of socialism and with anti-Sovietism.

p All the facts indicate that from a nationalistic and opportunist deviation in the world revolutionary movement Maoism has become a Great-Han, anti-communist and antiSoviet trend jeopardising the world revolutionary process and the cause of democracy, socialism, progress and peace. Tt is steadily turning into a militaristic, geopolitical system of views serving a bureaucratic group that has isolated itself 11 from the people and aspires to impose its will on all mankind.

p The articles in this volume will help the reader to understand what brought Maoism to the present stage.

p The book is divided into three parts. The first analyses the ideological sources of Maoism and examines Mao Tsetung’s views on a number of key problems of dialectical and historical materialism. The second reviews Maoism’s economic policies and shows that the guidelines of these policies are totally untenable. The third exposes the anti-socialist activities of Mao Tse-tung and his supporters on the international scene and assesses their adventurist foreign policy and subversive divisive activities in the world revolutionary and national liberation movements.

p In the broad historical sense Maoism has no future because it is anti-scientific, anti-historical and cut off from reality. But this is precisely what makes it so dangerous today. Its subjectivism and voluntarism have time and again given rise to adventurism in domestic and foreign policy. While getting entangled more and more deeply in its own contradictions, Maoism is still capable of inflicting enormous harm.

p As L. I. Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, noted in his report Lenin’s Cause Lives on and Triumphs to the joint sitting of the CC CPSU, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR held in commemoration of the centenary of Lenin’s birth, "practice shows that nothing good comes of a departure from socialist internationalism, from its replacement by nationalism and chauvinism. Such a policy, naturally, does not conform either to the interests of the world socialist system as a whole, or to the interests of the revolutionary process throughout the world. ... By their actions against the country of Lenin and against the world communist movement the initiators of this campaign expose themselves before the masses as apostates of the revolutionary cause of Lenin”.  [11•* 

p The Maoists are increasingly isolating themselves not only from the international communist and working-class movement but also from the Chinese people. Their views and actions have nothing in common with the aspirations of 12 genuine Chinese Communists or of the Chinese people as a whole. The time will unquestionably come when China will return to the road of socialist construction, progress and socialist internationalism.

V. Krivtsov