Harpal Brar, chairman of the CPGB-ML, speaks at a conference hosted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, on 14 October 2015.
A significant section of the Chinese communist party and people are increasingly interested in re-examining the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Our party contends that the reason for the ignominious collapse of the once mighty USSR was the introduction of capitalist economics and capitalist culture, weakening and corroding the country economically, politically and ideologically.
The logical and perhaps inevitable outcome of this process were Mikhail Gorbachev’s programmes of Perestroika (Restructuring) and Glasnost (Reform), which led the way for the complete abandonment of socialism, the final collapse of revisionism, culminating in the denouement, in which the 20 million strong CPSU(B), at the head of the once mighty Soviet people, could be toppled by a third-rate intellect and clown of the class of Boris Yeltsin.
It must be borne in mind that this was a feat that the entire Nazi imperialist German army had failed to accomplish in four years of total Blitzkrieg.
The lessons for the CPC and people of China are indeed clear. The USA is the dominant imperialist power which today imposes its domination globally by means of its monopoly capitalist financial and industrial might, its economic and banking sanctions, supplemented by all-embracing and widespread propaganda and psychological operations.
When these measures are insufficient, it paves the way for direct recolonisation by means of military interventions and genocidal slaughter. Adopting the market will not appease the USA, but only nurture an enemy within – which is bound, in the last analysis, to progress beyond corruption and subversion of the party and state to outright betrayal of the people in its own economic interests.
If measures are not taken to rectify the situation, it is only a question of time before domestic millionaires and billionaires make common cause with the US imperialists in attempting to destabilise and supplant the socialist state and the gains that the Chinese people have made through their hard won anticolonial and anti-capitalist struggle.
The impact for the working and oppressed masses of the entire globe, should the People’s Republic of China be subject to counter-revolution and outright restoration of capitalism, would be devastating. It is in all our interests to avert this worst possible outcome.
As Lenin said in his article Imperialism and the split in socialism: “The only Marxist line in the world labour movement is to explain to the masses the inevitability and necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by waging a relentless struggle against opportunism.”
