In June 1978, the Communist Left warned of the nearness of a Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea. It added: "it is unlikely that this collapse [the collapse of the Pol Pot regime] will be isolated". Now, after the fall of Kampuchea to 12 Vietnamese artillery divisions, the Vietnamese-Kampuchean border clashes are replaced by a far more savage far more dangerous far more threatening Chinese Vietnam border war. Should the Soviet Union intervene on China's northern border, half of what once called itself the "socialist camp" will be forcing worker to shoot worker in a bitter nationalistic military conflict in which the only victor will be world imperialism.
The responsibility for the new possibility of fratricidal war, which could call in question every gain of the world communist movement since 1917, rests squarely with Stalinism. The theory of "socialism in one country" originated by Stalin, and accepted by all the "socialist" countries now preparing to destroy each other, divides workers along national lines, and prepares them to die for their own "socialist" country, rather than fighting against world imperialism on an internationalist basis. The "nations" Chinese Kampuchean and Vietnamese workers alike are now being killed for are in fact state machines whose only reason for separate existence is the suppression of workers' democracy and the continued payment of extortionate salaries to different sets of "national" bureaucrats. The workers of the world have no country. They must shoot the traitors ordering them to kill each other - the privileged bureaucrats of the states transitional to socialism, TURN NATIONAL WAR INTO POLITICAL REVOLUTION! TURN THE GUNS THE OTHER WAY !
Kampuchea's resistance to Vietnamese invasion does not demand an extension of the militarisation of national rivalries throughout the Sino-Soviet bloc, A real Kampuchean revolutionary party would have appealed to the Vietnamese workers and peasants fighting them to turn their guns away from their Kampuchean class brothers against the Vietnamese Stalinist bureaucrats. Such internationalsim has been too much for those remnants of the Leng Sary leadership which the Kampuchean workers and peasants still tolerate. The fight for Kampuchean self-determination has been entrusted treacherously to China, which repeats in the border war with Vietnam the same nationalist brinkmanship that led Kampuchea to disaster. The U.S.S.R., with more troops on its frontier with China than it has facing NATO, lays open its defences against imperialism as it threatens war with China. With the threat of a general war of all "socialist" states, it is impossible to support any of the contending bureaucratic nationalisms. POLITICAL REVOLUTION THROUGHOUT THE SINOSOVIET BLOC NOW! The threat of war both immediate and future, can only be ended when the national bureaucracies each claiming the "socialism" in their country is the only authentic article, and reinforcing their position not with arguments but with guns and workers lives are overthrown and SOVIETS RESTORED THROUGH THE SINO-SOVIET BLOC.
The Stalinist bureaucracies are now headed for mutual suicide. Their national rivalries mirror at second hand the rivalries of the imperialist powers. While the Stalinist nationalism tries to destroy the anti-capitalist world, the imperialists sit back and cheer, preparing to move in later to pick up the pieces themselves. A major crisis of Stalinism, of which only the Communist Left and its New Zealand fraternal party warned, now confronts all workers. The various "Fourth Internationals" now all prove in practice that they long ago abandoned the fight against Stalinism for which Trotsky founded the Fourth International as they argue over which Stalinist nationalism is most "progressive" and urge workers to kill others on behalf usually of the Vietnamese bureaucracy. In the deepest crisis of Stalinism since 1953 the sellout Spartacist League cannot even publish a paper stating its point of view in Australia! Only the Communist Left refuses all support to the contending Stalinist bureaucracies and urges political revolution against the bureaucracies as the only alternative to worker fratricide.
The unity of the world anti-capitalist bloc can now only be secured by a total break with Stalinist nationalism. The monstrous mutual slaughter in which the bureaucrats of Moscow, Peking, Hanoi and Phnom Penh have plunged their workers and peasants stains the honour of Stalinism as indelibly as its acquiescence in the slaughter of the First World War stained the honour of social democracy. The way out of this nationalist madness remains now, as in 1914-1918, the program of the Soviet October 1917 revolution, which means organised revolutionary opposition to the Stalinist version of "social patriotism", The "Fourth Internationals", "Healyite�, "Posadist", "Mandelist", "Pabloite" or "Robertsonist" which in this crisis of Stalinism refuse to condemn all the Stalinist participants in mass murder will be swept away by history along with the Stalinism to which they have betrayed, Stalinism or working class internationalism - these are the only choices: there is no middle road.
Issued by the Communist Left
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