First Published: Revolution, Vol. 3, No. 13, October 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.
On the face of it, the silly attacks and distortions leveled against the Mao Tsetung Memorial Meetings in the pages of the CPML rag the Call are exactly what would be expected and are hardly worth commenting on. But what is very interesting and worth pointing out is the dilemma they face which is revealed in their September 25 “report” on the Mao Tsetung Memorial Meetings and the summation of Klonsky’s speech at their so-called “memorial meetings” in their October 2 edition.
The dilemma for the CPML and other “pro-China” opportunists is how to attack Mao and what he represents while still pretending to uphold him. They know that inside China itself attacks on all that Mao stood and fought for are becoming more open day by day.
They know that those who, as Wang Hung-wen described them, saw the Cultural Revolution as a dark night or a ravaging flood and a savage beast are now riding high in China. So the CPML clearly cannot do much more than throw Mao’s name around a bit. After all, a franchise operation has to follow the lead of the main office. On the other hand, they don’t like it at all that the RCP has boldly stood up to expose what the revisionists are up to and to raise the revolutionary banner of Mao Tsetung and lessons and achievements of the Cultural Revolution.
Not that the CPML wants to defend Mao and the Cultural Revolution and the revolutionaries in China. But the CPML knows that millions see the name of Mao Tsetung inextricably connected with revolution and the fight against revisionism. This is the source of a dilemma. It is, of course, because of this that the CPML does not and cannot truly uphold Mao, yet at the same time, since the CPML is anxious to appear “revolutionary” they prefer to make passing and perfunctory reference to Mao while utterly betraying his teachings.
The contradiction between Mao’s revolutionary line and the garbage spewing forth from the revisionists in Peking is becoming more apparent to everyone daily. The CPML cannot answer the political arguments and documentation that the RCP has brought out to show that the so-called “gang of four” is actually a “gang of five” led by Mao himself, and that the attacks leveled at the Four by the Hua-Teng crew are directed at Mao’s line.
In the face of the substantive political questions raised by the struggle in China—the relation between revolution and production, the role of education and science under socialism, the question of the bourgeoisie arising within the Party—on these questions and others the CPML offers either silence or a thin and empty analysis, shameless and laughingstock pablum which is increasingly unsatisfactory even to their own cadre and sympathizers.
In fact, at the U.S.-China Peoples Friendship Association convention in San Francisco, the CPML leadership went so far as to instruct their cadre not to say anything on the question of China and the revisionist takeover if confronted by members of the RCP.
Thus their current stock-in-trade is to avoid the line questions altogether and simply repeat that in China everything is fine. “Some people who have recently visited China testified today to the great advances they saw under socialism and how it felt for once in their lives to feel free of exploitation and oppression,” said Klonsky. No doubt, the revisionists have not yet been able to undo all the great accomplishments of the Chinese people under the revolutionary leadership of Mao Tsetung.
But what about the people who have come back recently to testify that their official hosts and guides and other people in positions of authority are saying that the Cultural Revolution was a “disaster for China, a big mistake.” Now they are not just attacking the “excesses of the Cultural Revolution” as they did in their opening shots, but the whole Cultural Revolution itself.
Of course “Madison Avenue Mike” Klonsky did not have a single thing to say about the Cultural Revolution—can’t talk about that these days, nor Mao’s role as its initiator and leader.
In an effort to explain to their cadre the large turnout at the Mao Tsetung Memorial Meetings, 1100 in New York and 1200 in the Bay Area (of course they had to lie about the size of the attendance), particularly in comparison to the paltry showings at their own sham memorials (at most 300 at the Bay Area opportunist amalgamated circus 50 people in Chicago and even less in New York), Klonsky & Co. tried several different approaches.
First they took a page from bourgeois anti-communist scum like Victor Reisel and Fulton Lewis Jr. to make the patently ridiculous charge that “the bourgeoisie” paid to fly people to the memorial meetings. (A particularly ridiculous charge for one thing since the U.S. bourgeoisie is openly welcoming Hua’s revisionist cause.) Apparently according to the contemptuous outlook of the CPML, masses of revolutionary-minded people couldn’t possibly pay their way to these meetings and contribute to them. Only the bourgeoisie could do that. But since even the Call yellow journalists know this would not get over, they then tried to explain it by claiming that preparations for the meetings had been the RCP’s “only work for more than six months.”
Well, we will not only admit, but proudly state that the exposure of the revisionist coup d’etat in China and the defense of Mao, the Cultural Revolution and the Four who fought heroically for Mao’s line and proletarian revolution has been the major political task of our party in the last period, because this has been the major question facing Marxist-Leninists in the U.S. and worldwide
As a final explanation, Klonsky says that the CPML has their “own way” of commemorating Mao’s death. “Modestly,” he says. In fact, they commemorate not what Mao fought for, but his death! (It will be more accurate in short for them to talk about “celebrating” it.) Their San Francisco leaflet, appropriately, featured a picture of Mao’s tomb. “It is not necessary for us to make a big fanfare at the present time he says. Of course not!
The less said about Mao these days the better, as far as the revisionists a concerned. “The best way to commemorate our fallen leaders is to apply Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought to the concrete conditions our own country.” All this is but a nice way of saying that the CPML will continue following Hua Kuo-feng’s lead in tipping his hat to Mao’s mausoleum while spitting on his life achievements and making their central task reversing the course he set for China.