Workers World, Vol. 17, No. 5, Jan. 31, 1975
January 24 – Not a single, solitary day has gone by in recent weeks without some dire warning from high officials of the Ford Administration.
If it isn’t Kissinger one day, it is Schlesinger the next, and on days like yesterday, it is Ford, Schlesinger, and Kissinger.
It is scarcely possible to avoid the conclusion that the Pentagon is girding for a preemptive strike in the Middle East, renewed bombing in Vietnam, or both.
Under these circumstances it is absolutely essential that there be clarity in the ranks of the working class on the source of the war danger. At no time has it been more imperative and more indispensable to ideologically and politically arm the working class in the face of a new and most dangerous imperialist adventure. Nothing could be more harmful, however, and nothing could sow more ideological confusion and political disorientation of the masses than the peddling of the so-called “superpowers” theory, with its invariable concomitant: that the USSR has degenerated into an imperialist state and only utilizes socialist phraseology to cover its aggressive imperialist rivalry with the U.S.
This is the essence of the so-called theory of “social imperialism.” The latest pronouncement, coming from Premier Chou En-lai’s speech of January 13, states: “The two superpowers (the U.S. and the USSR – S.M.) are the biggest international oppressors and exploiters today and they are the source of a new world war.”
This assertion is not only false insofar as the USSR is concerned, but wholly pernicious and misleading in the extreme. It is high time to take this issue out of the sphere of mere theoretical differences. Its objective effect is to blur the class contradictions between the USSR and imperialism, disorient the masses, and hence objectively aid the imperialist onslaught of the U.S.
Who are the warmakers?
What is the source of a new world war?
Let us see. Who is it that is daily raining death and destruction on Cambodian villages and towns? Who is it that has been conducting a genocidal war against the Vietnamese people for more than a decade? Who supports and maintains the quisling Thieu regime? Who opened the aggressive war against the Korean people, and who to this day supports and controls the fascist Park regime and still maintains more than 40,000 troops in south Korea? Who overthrew the Allende government, and carried out one of the worst massacres in recent history?
Who but the CIA? And who but the CIT instigated and plotted the counter-revolution in Indonesia and installed the butcher Suharto at a cost of more than 200,000 lives?
Who invaded the Dominican Republic? Who overthrew the Guatemalan government and the Mossadegh government? Who (is it not embarrassing to ask?) occupies Taiwan and exploits, oppresses, and robs 25 million Chinese people there?
This list of U.S. domination and repression is practically endless. There is not a corner of the earth where American finance capital does not have some stake from which it extracts super-profits – except where, as in the USSR, China, and other socialist countries, imperialism has been overthrown and the possessing classes expropriated.
If we are to close our eyes to these facts and equate the USSR with the U.S. it can only lead to the worst sort of confusion which ultimately can only rebound to the benefit of imperialism.
Conciliators, yes; imperialists, no
It is barely a year since Nixon’s phony military alert, which was calculated not only to intimidate the Middle East countries, but also to frighten the USSR and compel the Brezhnev leadership to pull back.
It is one thing to attack the Soviet leadership and the entire Soviet bureaucracy for appeasing, conciliating, or accommodating itself to imperialist blackmail and threats, and for outright class-collaborationist policies; it is something else again to vilify the USSR as an imperialist state.
On the contrary, the USSR is a progressive social formation, in spite of the bureaucratic deformations with which it is encumbered.
The contention between the U.S. and the USSR arises from the whole different driving forces of the two economic systems. Imperialist is driven relentlessly and irresistibly to search for super-profits, raw materials, and areas for the disposal of its products, as well as cheap labor for exploitation. These are not the ills which afflict Soviet society. Nothing brings out the sharp contrast between the two competing social systems more than the current catastrophic economic crisis which is ravaging the capitalist world, while remarkable economic growth and development prevail in the Soviet Union.
Contention of opposing classes
Certainly there is contention between the U.S. and the USSR. But it is the contention of two diametrically opposed social system, each resting on opposite and antagonistic classes and having different objectives. The social system of monopoly capitalism is based on domination by the bourgeoisie, the exploitation of the proletariat, and the super-exploitation of oppressed peoples. The USSR, on the other hand, is a workers’ state in spite of all the degeneration is has gone through since the death of Lenin. It is basically a new, progressive social formation. It has a new mode of production with a planned economy and production for use. It is, in spite of all repression, bureaucratic absolutism, and high privileges and emoluments for the bureaucracy, a proletarian dictatorship, while what we have in the U.S. is a dictatorship of a ruthless, predatory, decadent, monopolist, war-breeding bourgeoisie.
Character of Soviet bureaucracy
The Soviet bureaucracy is a temporary, transitional phenomenon. It has been responsible for inhibiting and retarding the development of Soviet society. It has prevented Soviet society from moving in a wholly socialist direction. It has overthrown the working class norms and revolutionary internationalism of the Leninist period.
The violation of socialist legality and destruction of Soviet democracy is not only the work of Khrushchev and his grouping, but dates back to Stalin. It was he who introduced the dogma of peaceful coexistence and class collaboration with imperialism. Khrushchev and Brezhnev only deepened the trend.
From 1959 until the signing of the Test Ban Treaty in 1963, the Chinese CP leadership carried on a generally progressive struggle against the Soviet bureaucracy. During this entire period the attack on the Soviet leadership was centered on its accommodationist attitude toward imperialism. The Soviet leadership was accused of abandoning the class struggle, of renouncing the inevitability of imperialist war, and of collaborating with the bourgeoisie. U.S. imperialism was consistently depicted in Chinese CP literature as the “main enemy of the working class,” and “the most ferocious enemy of mankind.” The change came about abruptly after the signing of the Test Ban Treaty between the U.S. and the USSR.
Behind break with China
The Chinese opposition to the signing of the treaty was based not so much, it turns out, on what the treaty signified in and of itself – that is, the banning of nuclear tests in the atmosphere – as on the fact that Khrushchev went ahead and unilaterally signed this treaty with the U.S. without consulting China, as should have been done in the light of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty. Unquestionably, this was a flagrant breach of socialist solidarity by Khrushchev and the Soviet bureaucracy. China was justifiably outraged. It was a break in fraternal relations.
However, judged by the enormity of other hostile acts carried out by the Soviet bureaucracy, it did not necessarily change the fundamental class character of the Soviet social system. The USSR did not thereby become an imperialist state. Khrushchev, Stalin, as well as Brezhnev have carried out many such double-crosses of the international working class movement and allied socialist countries – but that is the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy, which must not be confused with the class foundations of the USSR.
To do that is to disorient and hopelessly confuse the working class movement. The USSR is still, more so today than perhaps in earlier years, a might working-class fortress which contains limitless possibilities for socialist growth and developments, whereas the camp of the bourgeoisie is one of decay and decomposition, repression, counter-revolution, and genocidal war. To propagate the spurious theory of “social imperialism” in the face of the real imperialism we are faced with day in and day out is to give objective aid to the very class enemy which must be overthrown.
Last updated: 11 May 2026