First Published:The Workers’ Advocate Vol. 8, No. 8, August 21, 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
Sounding the alarm to the “ultra-Right danger” and the “fascist threat”, the modern revisionists of the “C”PUSA and their offspring, the “three worlders” of the OL have launched a new campaign of class collaboration and revisionist betrayal. The modern revisionists of the Gus Hall clique and Michael Klonsky’s social-chauvinists are sermonizing to the working class and people that the danger facing them does not come from the monopoly capitalist class and its state power with the Carter administration at its head. The danger facing the working masses, they allege, is a “new coalition of big business interests” (OL), a “new ultra-Right” (Gus Hall), which they claim is “on the offensive” against both the Carter administration and the working masses alike. Thus, in this “dangerous situation”, according to the revisionists and social-chauvinists, the only salvation for the working people lies in a joint struggle with the chieftains of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class in a common class collaborationist alliance.
Developing fascism is the program and policy of the entire U.S. imperialist big bourgeoisie. However, the “fight” of the revisionists and “three worlders” against the “ultra-Right” is not a struggle against this growing fascism but is in direct service to it. The monopoly capitalists are fascizing their state apparatus and all aspects of life. They are developing fascism against the rising revolt of the proletariat, to make the people bear the burden of the economic crisis and to prepare for aggressive war. The monopoly capitalist dictators have installed the deceptive Carter administration, which uses the mask of “human rights” and an army of sold-out labor bureaucrats, in order to conceal and step up this growing fascism. Under the guise of “reforms” and even in the name of “labor and the minorities”, the Democratic Carter administration has been introducing one fascist measure after the other against the proletariat, the working masses and the oppressed nationalities. For their part, the revisionists and “three worlders” have become enthusiastic apologists for the actual growing fascism of the bourgeoisie which is taking place under the smiles of the fascist “human rights” demagogue Carter. They are part of the campaign of deception to hide and serve the fascism of the bourgeois state, telling the people that Carte’s smile is genuine and not false and that the “fascist menace” lies somewhere else, anywhere else. The revisionists and social-chauvinists are, in fact, anti-fascist only in words but are social-fascist boosters of Carte’s “human rights” fraud and the monopoly capitalists’ growing fascism in deeds.
In the July 17 and July 31 issues of the social-chauvinist rag, The Call, the OL “three worlders”, in their typical hysteria-mongering fashion, raise the specter of “the growing menace of fascism”. The source of this looming “fascist threat”, they elaborate, is not to be found in the monopoly capitalist system itself but in “a recently-formed coalition of some of the most reactionary, fascist-minded sections of the monopoly capitalists”. The OL scribblers write: “According to some Washington insiders, this reactionary campaign appears to be engineered by a newly-formed coalition of monopolists and other businessmen. Its aim, in the words of some of its leaders, is to ’bring back big business to its rightful role’ in running the country”.
By way of “proof” of this ridiculous fairy-tale meant to scare little children, The Call articles then attempt to explain how each and every evil in the U.S. society is but “another example of the power of this coalition”. Everything – from the Bakke Decision, the nazi gangs, the campaign for mandatory wage controls, the blocking of the ERA, “the defeat of every important piece of pro-labor legislation” (including a list of half a dozen or so of Carte’s fascist anti-working class “reforms”) – to the “re-emergence on the political scene of Richard Nixon”, are all supposedly “sign(s) of the growing initiative of this coalition.”
While the headline reads “Big Business Launches New War Against the People”, the OL social-chauvinists make it perfectly clear that it is, in fact, the Carter administration itself which is under attack from “big business interests”. Allegedly “there is a growing rift within the ruling class over tactics”. However, this is no ordinary “rift” among the blood-soaked monopoly capitalist dictators but one with the Carter administration being supposedly for ever more “concessions” to the working people, fighting the “new coalition” which is instead in favor of “attacks on the people”. According to The Call: “One target of this new coalition of monopolist interests seems to be President Carte’s money-guzzling, bureaucratic programs”, “some powerful financial interests are critical of Carter for going too far in the past trend of making minimal concessions to labor and civil rights”, “Some of Carte’s own men... such as Michael Blumenthal, ex-president of the Bendix Corp., and Charles Schultze, Carte’s chief economic adviser, have been critical of numerous Carter policies lately. Both advisers have opposed recent restrictions on big business during the present crisis. ” (Just imagine that – the big capitalists in the Carter administration are critical of “Carte’s policies... of restriction on big business during the present crisis”!)
Of course, the Klonskyites do not describe Carter as all sweetness and light. While crusading for “concessions to labor and civil rights” and bravely taming the nasty lion of “big business”, Carter nevertheless has his weak points. They explain that the Carter administration cannot win the struggle alone, as the so-called “liberal reformers” such as Carter have proved to be weak-kneed in the face of the “fascist-minded financiers” and thus “cannot show us the way out”. Furthermore, the reader is reminded that despite everything he has just read in The Call’s articles, one should not forget that Carter still has certain ties to “big business”: “It should not be thought that the liberal politicians such as Carter have nothing to do with this coalition... As Fortune puts it, the presidents of the biggest corporations frequently meet with the President.”
Thus, according to the Klonskyites, there is a split in the ruling class, with a “reactionary offensive” by the “fascist-minded section” against both the Carter administration, the so-called “liberal section”, and against the people. In this way, the OL social-chauvinists have placed one section of the monopoly capitalist class, including its chief representatives, on the same side of the barricades as the proletariat and working masses against the “growing fascist menace” allegedly posed by another section of monopoly capital.
This is not the first time the OL leaders have called on the working masses to ally with the capitalist ruling class under the pretext of supporting one section of monopoly capital against the other allegedly to “stop fascism”. In 1973, during the Watergate crisis, when the reactionary and decadent nature of the entire monopoly capitalist politics was becoming increasingly exposed, the OL issued the slogan “Dump Nixon – Stop the Fascist Tide!” and thus called on the people to support the so-called “liberal” big bourgeoisie in its dogfight with Nixon. They explained: “The real issue is the stemming of the fascist offensive which Nixon has launched against the working and oppressed people as well as his own capitalist political opponents”, of course, by this the OL neo-revisionists meant that “the real issue” was supporting Nixon’s “capitalist political opponents”, the so-called “liberal” chieftains of U.S. imperialism in Congress, etc. Hence the Klonskyites’ notorious complaint that Congress stood “paralyzed” in the face of Nixon’s “fascist threat”. After the monopoly capitalists implemented the OL’s slogan “Dump Nixon”, all talk of a “fascist tide” disappeared from the pages of The Call, not to reappear until recent months.
Now, on the say-so of a pack of neo-revisionist “three worlders” who heard it from “Washington insiders” about a “new coalition” posing a new “fascist threat”, the OL leaders are again demanding that the proletariat join hands with imperialism under the pretext of taking sides in the inter-capitalist conflicts. In effect, the OL social-chauvinists are calling on the working class to rush to the defense of the arch-imperialist and fascist Carter administration, to the support of the monopoly capitalist party in power, thus completely betraying the proletariat’s own class interests, its historic mission and betraying the international proletariat and oppressed people as well.
The OL “three worlders” did not cook up this gross class collaborationist line of betrayal on their own, but it is a line shared in common with their partners in revisionist treachery, the Khrushchovite revisionists of the “C”PUSA.
The July issue of the revisionist journal Political Affairs carries two major articles entitled “Economic Struggles – the Decisive Arena” and “Crisis of U.S. Capitalism – Struggle for Disarmament” by the arch-revisionist jackals Gus Hall and Victor Perlo respectively. In these articles, an identical analysis is given as that given by the Klonskyites – there is a “new ultra-Right” which is on the offensive against both the “moderates” of the Carter administration as well as against “labor” and “the minorities”. The revisionists Gus Hall and Victor Perlo describe at length “the emergence... of a very active and aggressive, reactionary, cold war, Right-wing bloc”, “The ’new’ ultra-Right and its growing threat arise from... the backing it is receiving from a much larger segment of the big business community... (it is) no longer limited to ’kooks’ or ’crazies’ ”.
Applying their notorious thesis of “two power centers in Washington”, the revisionists have now concocted “two centers” within the Carter administration itself. Allegedly, “within the administration there is an ongoing struggle between the most aggressive, adventurist, militarist, rabidly anti-communist circles, and the more sensible capitalists and politicians”. The Carter administration, the revisionists claim, is split between the “ultra-Right” and the “moderates”, while Carter, with “his basic opportunism and lack of principle”, tries to “keep this antagonistic grouping together...by trying to move in two directions at the same time”.
Thus, according to the Gus Hall revisionist clique, there is on the one hand “the hard-liners, the cold- warriors, the military-industrial complex, the most reactionary circles”, and on the other hand there are the “moderate” chieftains of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class, who “accept reality”, are for “concessions” and a “sensible policy”. “However”, the revisionist quacks pontificate, “the latter group in no way gives up its hostility to socialism and the working class. It will not consistently resist the hardliners”. Hence the inevitable conclusion, a call for an alliance of the working class with the “moderate” group of imperialists against the “hard-liners”. The revisionists lecture the people “not to tail ideologically behind the more reasonable Establishment faction” (no self-respecting revisionist traitor would ever consider such a thing!) while at the same time “we must on occasion even be in de facto alliance with the Vances and Warnkes (the “reasonable faction” – ed.) in the Administration”!
Clearly, the Klonskyite “three worlders” hysteria-mongering about a “new big business coalition” and the modern revisionists’ hysteria about a “new ultra-Right” are indistinguishable in content. Their class collaborationist conclusions are identical as well. One might recall the OL social-chauvinists’ not-so-secret love for such war-mongering fascists as Henry Jackson and Ronald Reagan, of the so-called “anti-appeasement forces” of U.S. imperialism, as well as their well-known distaste for the so-called “appeasers”, arch-imperialist war-criminals such as Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, etc. Gus Hall, to the contrary, has quite different likes and dislikes, considering his enemies the “anti-detente forces” and his imperialist friends the “pro-detente forces”. However, such “differences” between the “three worlders” and the modern revisionists only confirms their identity of views as lackeys of world imperialism. They are both giving a line based on the same revisionist ideology of class collaboration and betrayal and based on the same revisionist fallacy of the alleged “two aspects of the state”.
According to this pseudo-theory of the “two aspects of the state”, the state is not the principal instrument of the savage and bloodthirsty dictatorship of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class for the violent suppression of the proletariat and working people. According to this “theory” it is not the monopoly capitalist class, as a class, through its state power, which is developing fascism in order to crush the proletariat, to make the people pay for the economic crisis and head for imperialist war. Instead, the state has “two aspects”, a “pro-people” aspect reflecting the aspirations of the people and an ”anti-people aspect reflecting the interests of “big business”. As the Klonskyite “theoreticians” put it so well: within the ruling circles there is the “growing influence” of “fascist-minded businessmen” as one aspect of the state, and the other aspect of the state, the pro-people aspect, which imposes “restrictions on big business during the recent crisis”.
The revisionists.and “three worlders” try to pretend that with such nonsense they are only “taking advantage of contradictions in the capitalists’ ranks”, utilizing the “rifts within the ruling class” and so on and so forth. They consider it quite innocent to differentiate between “fascist-minded businessmen” and “liberal reformers” within the leading circles of the monopoly capitalist state. They will even swear that they are against the “whole system” and “will not rely on the liberals” or “tail behind the reasonable Establishment faction”. But with such balderdash they completely repudiate the proletarian revolution, the class struggle including the struggle against fascism and the Marxist-Leninist teachings on the state in particular.
These ideological concepts of Gus Hall and Michael Klonsky come directly from their mentor, the arch-renegade and traitor to communism Earl Browder, the first theoretician of modern revisionism. Browder too, did not consider the monopoly capitalist class as the source of fascism and reaction, but considered this man-eating decadent class a “healthy” force for “progress”, while fascism and reaction were only a product of a “lunatic fringe”. As Browder taught in his revisionist classic Teheran, Our Path in War and Peace: “There is a growing volume of evidence that there are such men of vision and understanding in the ranks of big capital. Their number will grow, and their initiative and leadership will become stronger... We must learn to welcome their appearance... Nothing can be more fatal... than an attitude of uniform and undifferentiated hostility to the ranks of big capital... That only drives the intelligent capitalists back into the arms of their most reactionary fellows and unites the most powerful group in American society solidly against all progress”. (International Publishers, p. 74)
Browde’s concepts of “men of vision and understanding in the ranks of big capital” are identical with the Khrushchovite revisionist concepts of the alleged “reasonableness” of the chieftains of U.S. led imperialism – the cornerstone of the Khrushchovite revisionist doctrine of “peaceful transition, peaceful coexistence and peaceful competition”. At the 16th National Convention of the CPUSA in 1956, the revisionist leadership of the party formally adopted Khrushchovite revisionism. After doing extensive self-criticism for “over-estimating” the fascist, war-like and decadent nature of the U.S. monopoly capitalist system, the convention resolved: “We... have already discarded as obsolete Lenin’s thesis that war is inevitable under imperialism. We have long since rejected as incorrect Stalin’s thesis of the alleged law of inevitable violent proletarian revolution. Likewise, we are making important modifications in the theory of the state, as evidenced in our advocacy of the peaceful, constitutional path to socialism.”
Thus, the present call of the modern revisionist leaders of the “C’PUSA for “de facto alliance” with the “reasonable Establishment faction” against the “ultra-Right” is simply a continuation of their revisionist class treason and betrayal. It is nothing more than a further renunciation of the class struggle and the violent proletarian revolution which the revisionists long ago openly rejected.
For their part, the OL “three worlders” are the “theoreticians” of the most reactionary social-chauvinist and class collaborationist line of “directing the main blow at Soviet social-imperialism”, thus calling for an alliance of the U.S. proletariat with U.S. imperialism against the Soviet social-imperialists and the workers and oppressed people of the world. Nevertheless, the neo-revisionist “three worlders” continue to flaunt their alleged “Marxist-Leninist” orthodoxy. But all this is sham. The Klonskyites’ hysteria campaign about the “fascist threat” confronting the “liberal” Carter regime further demonstrates the falseness of their “anti-revisionist” pretenses, that their “orthodoxy” is that of Browder, the revisionist 16th National Convention of the “C”PUSA and of Gus Hall. They too have rejected the Marxist-Leninist teachings on the struggle against fascism, the class character of the state and the violent proletarian socialist revolution. It shows that the opportunist trend based on “three worlds” is nothing but a new current of modern revisionism, albeit revisionism and class betrayal in its most hideous and grotesque form.
Comrade Enver Hoxha pointed out at the Seventh Congress of the Party of Labor of Albania:
“The evil, the danger, is that by way of disguise, the modern revisionists, whether in power or not, continue to utilize these formulae that are the guiding essence of our doctrine, depriving them entirely of their force for leadership and organization. The revisionists not only apply these formulae in practice in the opposite sense, but they also distort and deform them in a cunning and sophisticated way. The whole aim of the modern revisionists is, by preserving some formulations, to distort the entire Marxist-Leninist doctrine, to build a set of other anti-Marxist theories meant to disorganize the proletariat of a given country or the world,, to extend the life of the capitalist bourgeoisie, to put off the proletarian revolution, if not to suppress it altogether, be it in a single country in which the conditions are ripe for it or in several countries simultaneously.” (p.237)
The modern revisionists and “three worlders” have preserved the Marxist-Leninist formulae on the anti-fascist struggle, only to apply them in the opposite sense. The revisionists and opportunists are mouthing anti-fascist phrases in order to deprive them of any mobilizing and organizing force, to disorient the proletariat in the face of the growing fascism of the bourgeoisie.
As Marxism-Leninism teaches, for the anti-fascist proletarian socialist revolution to triumph, for the proletariat to successfully overthrow the entire U.S. monopoly capitalist class and smash its state power, it is necessary to wage an unyielding struggle against the betrayal of modern revisionism, “three worlds-ism” and opportunism of all hues.