Let’s recall what a socialist country is.
It’s a country where a political socialist revolution has taken place(seizing power in historically different conditions, but leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat), then an economic revolution (socialization of the means of production, establishment of socialist relations of production). A socialist country thus constituted “builds socialism” under the dictatorship of the proletariat and, when the moment comes, prepares for the transition to communism. It is a long, drawn-out process. Now, in the eyes of the C.C.P., a critical examination of the “positive and negative experiences” of socialist revolutions—their victories and failures, their difficulties, their progress, their degree of advancement (in the U.S.S.R., in the socialist countries of Central Europe, in Yugoslavia, in China, in North Korea, in North Vietnam, in Cuba)—shows that every socialist country has found itself, or finds itself, or will find itself, even once it has “more or less” completed the socialization of the means of production, faced with a crucial problem: that of the two “roads.”
The problem is the following. We are going to state it in the form of questions.
In the different phases of revolutionary transitions that make a social formation of capitalism pass over to socialism then to communism, does there not exist, in each of these phases, an objective risk of “regression”?Isn’t this risk the result of the politics pursued by the revolutionary party, its correctness or falseness; not only its general line, but also the specific ways it is applied? In the way the hierarchy and articulation of objectives is determined and in the objective mechanisms (economic, political, ideological) put into place by this politics? Is there not a logic and a necessity to these mechanisms such that they can cause the socialist country to “regress” “towards capitalism”? Moreover, isn’t this risk exacerbated by the existence of imperialism, by its means (economic, political, military, ideological), by the support it can draw on from certain elements within a socialist country, by occupying some of this country’s voids (cf. ideology), by using its mechanisms to neutralize and utilize it politically, then dominate it economically?
Considering this general risk, and using the terms currently deployed by the Chinese Communist Party, is the future of socialism in a country completely, that is to say, definitively, irreversibly, 100 percent assured based on the mere fact that this country has achieved a twofold revolution, both political and economic? Can it not regress toward capitalism?
Don’t we already have an example of such a regression: Yugoslavia?
Is it not possible, then, that a socialist country might conserve, even for a long time, the outward form or forms (economic, political) of socialism, all the while giving them a completely different economic, political and ideological content (mechanism of restoration of capitalism), all the while letting itself be progressively neutralized and then used politically and dominated economically by imperialism?
This problem is of a piece with the C.C.P. thesis on the risk that a socialist country might “regress” toward capitalism. It is on the basis of this general thesis that it is possible to say that socialist countries constantly find themselves confronted with an alternative between “two roads.”This alternative can, in certain circumstances, become particularly critical, even today. Two roads, then, open up before the socialist countries, in view of the results obtained in their revolution:
— the revolutionary road, which leads beyond the obtained results, toward the consolidation and development of socialism, then toward the passage to communism;
— the regressive road, which falls back on this side of the obtained results, toward the neutralization then political utilization then economic domination and “digestion” of a socialist country by imperialism: the road of “regression back toward capitalism.”
The alternative between two roads, then, is this: either “stop halfway,”which really means regressing, or do not “stop half-way,” that is,*keep moving forward. In the official Chinese texts, the first road is characterized, in shorthand, as the “capitalist” road (it is a question of “leaders who take the capitalist road”), and the second road is characterized, again in shorthand, as the “revolutionary road".Such is the dominant political problem posed by the political of theconjuncture of the C.R.
A question to ML's, why do you have so much faith in the Vanguard?
