Only one explanation is possible for the inordinately lengthy – it runs to 35,000 words – article the Peking People’s Daily carried from its “editorial department” on Mao Tse-tung’s theory of the three worlds last month – more than a year after his death. It is that the present leadership has thought it necessary for both domestic and foreign policy reasons to leave no one in doubt that it is firmly committed to pursue the deceased leader’s policy of treating the Soviet Union as China’s main enemy.
Domestic considerations perhaps came into play because the leadership is engaged in the process of purging the party as well as the army and feels obliged to proclaim its loyalty to the former chairman. It has even executed scores of so-called counter-revolutionaries.
The document, which clearly has the sanction of the top leadership, can admit of no other interpretation in spite of the numerous quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and, of course, Chairman Mao Tse-tung. For, it does not even maintain the pretence of treating the two super-powers on a par. In sum, it describes the United States as essentially a status quo power which will be happy if it can retain its present position in the world and the Soviet Union as an expansionist and, therefore, aggressive power which, like other late-comers such as Germany, Japan and Italy, has been building up its military might in order to achieve its imperialist ambitions.
Cryptic
This is doubtless not a new formulation. Chairman Mao made it in his talks with visiting foreign dignitaries again and again in the last years of his life. But his statements were mostly cryptic. The present document elucidates the theme at great length and thus exposes to view the staggering contradictions in it.
Since the Chinese leaders, for instance, accept the Leninist formulation on imperialism being the last stage of capitalism and at the same time describe the Soviet Union as an imperialist power, it would have been helpful if they had explained the process by which “the Soviet revisionist clique has converted a highly centralised socialist economy into a state monopoly capitalist economy” and the nature of the differences between the Soviet society under Stalin and under Mr Brezhnev, indeed between a socialist economy and a state monopoly capitalist economy of their definition.
The Soviet Union has doubtless changed from a second class military and economic power under Stalin into a superpower. Millions of Soviet citizens no longer rot in concentration camps as they did under the previous dispensation. The Soviet Union also exports arms on a massive scale today – worth over 20 billion dollars against America’s nearly 35 billion in 1976, according to Western sources that the Chinese quote (both figures are open to question) – and it is in a position to assist friendly countries and movements to a certain extent. But that cannot possibly be said to account for the alleged change from socialism to state monopoly capitalism. In reality, the Soviet Union has always practised state monopoly capitalism. But that is a different matter.
The Soviets can be said to behave like an imperial power, specially in Eastern and Central Europe where they have made three armed interventions since the end of the second World War – in East Berlin in 1953, in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 – to preserve their hegemony. But that, too, does not make the Soviet Union an imperialist power. Not to speak of its exploiting their resources, it has, if anything, been subsidising the economies of some of the East European countries since 1956 when Poland, too, threatened to explode along with Hungary. The era of crude exploitation when the Soviet Union did not pay, for instance, Poland even the labour costs for its coal ended soon after Stalin’s death in 1953.
The People’s Daily article accuses the Soviet Union of overcharging for its exports, including arms, to developing countries and of paying less than the international price for its imports from them in order to support its charge of “social imperialism” against it. But these figures cannot be accepted on their face value in view of studies in respect of India which have shown at least this country has not suffered as a result of its trade with the Soviet Union.
Even if the charge is accepted at its face value, how does it prove the central Chinese thesis that the Soviet Union has gone capitalist and imperialist? Both these are well-defined concepts in the communist lexicon and cannot be used casually.
It is even more extraordinary that in the article under discussion the Chinese leaders and experts have not addressed themselves seriously to the question of the nature of the world economy, the respective positions in it of the United States, the Soviet Union, Western Europe and Japan, the relationships between America and its West European and Japanese allies and so on. For, as Marxist-Leninists they cannot possibly assess the US and Soviet roles in the world except on the basis of such a study.
Facts
Certain facts must stand out in any discussion of the world economy. The economies of all developing countries are, for example, being increasingly linked with those of the West, including the USA and Japan and not either with those of the Soviet Union and its East European allies or with those of another. In fact, the Soviet Union and its allies, too, have been finding it necessary to borrow from the West and develop trade ties with it. The United States remains the strongest economic power despite the loss of its former pre-eminent status when the dollar reigned supreme and Western Europe and Japan continue to depend on the enormous market it provides for their goods. The assertion by oil-exporting countries of their sovereign right to raise the prices of crude since 1973 has increased rather than decreased the dependence of the third world as a whole on the West.
The West cannot use this position to ride roughshod over poor countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America as it could and did in the past. But that does not detract from the fact that the world economy continues to be dominated by the West and that the prospect of the Soviet Union challenging it does not appear as bright today as it did in the ‘sixties. On the contrary, at least the Western view is that the Soviet economy faces the prospect of a much slower rate of growth, if not stagnation, because of the leadership’s incapacity or unwillingness or both to introduce the necessary reforms.
It can be argued that on the strength of its military prowess, which has doubtless expanded rapidly since the Cuban fiasco in 1962, the Soviet Union may be able to dominate the world some time in the future in spite of its economic weakness. But it has suffered dramatic reverses, the expulsion of Soviet personnel from Somalia being only the latest. The Chinese are not unaware of this reality. The People’s Daily article itself says that, despite the expenditure of enormous resources in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, the Red Sea area, Africa and the Indian Ocean, the Soviet Union has in the end “only met with a succession of defeats.”
Presentation
The Chinese leaders’ presentation of their view of the world is too laboured to stand scrutiny and not only because their assessment of the Soviet Union is at once too simplistic and biased. Indeed, none of their so-called three worlds exist.
The super-powers cannot constitute the first world because the conflict between them remains intense despite the limited cooperation in certain fields – a fact that the Chinese themselves are more than anxious to emphasise so much so that they regard a war between them as unavoidable. If anything, they neutralise each other to a large extent and make it possible for smaller powers to assert themselves.
Western Europe and Japan, too, cannot be said to constitute the second world for a variety of reasons. They are dependent on the USA not only for their security but also for their prosperity and cannot, therefore, break away from it. Then there is the fact of the economic competition between the countries of Western Europe on the one hand and between them and Japan on the other.
Finally, the co-operation between developing countries is at best superficial. Indeed, the element of conflict between them remains stronger than that of co-operation. The world is not divided between the industrialised, prosperous and status quoist North and the poor, predominantly agricultural and revolutionary South any more than it was divided between the capitalist West and the communist East at the height of the cold war. The reality is much more complicated.
The Times of India 23 November 1977