«People, be vigilant»
Julius Fucik
The process of ultra-revisionist counter-revolution in Czechoslovakia is developing at rapid speed. The clique of Dubchek and other reactionary elements, which bases itself on various strata of the bourgeoisie, especially on the Slovak nationalist and fascist elements, on all those who have accounts to settle with the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the liberal-revisionist intelligentsia and on the students gone astray as a result of the bourgeois ideas and morality as well as on the international bourgeoisie, have taken full control. In the meantime, the supporters of the abortive revisionist clique of Novotny are striving to save their posts through «frank self-criticism» or are given «compulsory rest» from political life and are withdrawing into lairs dreaming of «better days» to come.
Theorists of the new ultra-revisionist course such as Smrkovsky and others are bragging that now Czechoslovakia «is blazing the way to an unexplored terrain», that what is happening at present in Czechoslovakia is the «first experience of true democratic socialism in the world». Taking into account what is now happening there and translating this phraseology into simple language it becomes evident that capitalism is being completely restored in Czechoslovakia. This is also proved by the so-called «program of action» adopted at the plenum of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in early April, a program that the Czech news agency «Ceteka» broadcasts under the heading «The Czechoslovak road to socialism».
The Czechoslovak revisionists rightfully call this switch back to capitalism as «their specific road«-, because while being in essence similar with that of the Titoites, the Soviet and other revisionists who are or are not in power, it has its own characteristics, its own specific forms.
The Titoites have long since worked out their own system of «workers’ self-management» which neither today nor in the future can reach stability not only because of its being anti-Marxist but, though they have striven to disguise it as an original elaborated form of the restoration of capitalism in Yugoslavia, it has caused an indescribable chaos in the entire Yugoslav political and economic capitalist structure even up to the Yugoslav federal state structure. The Titoites, seeking to have the working class, too, involved in their capitalist system, set up such an anarchic system in their capitalism that it is difficult for them, or it would take them time, and still more strict measures would be required to restore all features, characteristic of capitalist oppression and exploitation. Their system does not fully correspond with the commitments that they have to their capitalist masters and with the needs and commitments linking them with their revisionist partners. The «workers’ self-management system of the Titoites, ’workers’ in name only», is creating a strata of the new capitalists: it is concentrating and polarizing the trusts and concerns. At the same time, it is still more sharpening the serious contradictions of the Titoite system, the contradictions between the working class and the employers, between the poor peasants and the kulaks, between the employers themselves, between the kulaks, the Republics and the various nationalities, and so on.
As the course of events is showing, the Dubchek group is seeking to prevent the Yugoslav chaos occurring in Czechoslovakia. Therefore, under the new conditions, it seeks to achieve the restoration of capitalism in Czechoslovakia by turning Czechoslovakia to the capitalist forms, methods and content of bourgeois-capitalist Czechoslovakia of Masaryk and Benesh, taking advantage, at the same time, of the experience of the other capitalist countries, from their political and economic theories. Thus, revisionist Dubchek is going straight ahead to reach his desires more quickly and to avoid, as he thinks, the contradictions and difficulties. Therefore, on this famous «Czechoslovak road to socialism» we hear demagogical talk that the regime is allegedly socialist and relies «on the working class«-, but nothing is said about the Titoite «workers’ self-management».
Let us look closely into this question; how is the Dubchek clique acting and how can it act further.
They openly declare from the very start that the «whole actual political system of Czechoslovakia must be changed». It could not be said more clearly.
The new group that seized power in Czechoslovakia is a group hostile to socialism, an anti-Marxist group, sworn enemy to the political system of the dictatorship of the proletariat. When this group says that the whole actual political system of Czechoslovakia is to be changed, this means that it will liquidate even those allegedly socialist or proletarian forms preserved by the pro-Soviet Novotny group. The question is not to make corrections to the «socialist regime» of the revisionist Novotny group, to its «mistakes» and «hesitations». No, what we have to do with here is a radical transformation of the political regime in Czechoslovakia.
What is the direction of this political transformation? In the direction of full restoration of capitalism. The bourgeois capitalist system with all its fundamental features is being restored there. To have it disguised, the restoration is called the «Czechoslovak road to socialism».
This is in essence the known opportunist thesis of Togliatti’s on the «Italian road to socialism» but started from the other end. Both these anti-Marxist and reactionary roads pursue the same aim: to serve capitalism. The Italian and Czechoslovak revisionists share the same views and agree with each other. The Italian revisionists who have long degenerated into anti-Marxists, reformists and counter-revolutionaries are seeking to come to power, to participate in the bourgeois state power through «structural reforms», the peaceful road and alliances with the parties of the bourgeoisie. This they call the «Italian road to socialism» which, according to them, is to be traversed not only by the Italian Communist Party alone but also by other parties of the bourgeoisie as well. This is a big fraud against the working class aimed at giving up class struggle, strangling the revolution and is of special assistance to the monopoly bourgeoisie; it is suitable at the present stages of the development and decay of imperialism. This then is in a few words the road pursued by the Togliatti renegades.
The Czechoslovak revisionists headed by Dubchek, on their part, are following the same Togliatti road but coming from the opposite direction. It is relatively easier for them, for they are not meeting resistance from the Czechoslovak revolutionary Marxist-Leninists, while Togliatti’s group encounter resistance from the bourgeoisie, which for the time being, in the present situation, does not accept them in the state power. Dubchek and his friends are treading the road of destroying and liquidating the dictatorship of the proletariat, of all the forms, organisations and laws as many of them as had existed. In reality, the Czechoslovak working class has not been in power for a long time. This is a fact. As long as the revisionist Novotny group was in power, work was going on in depth in the direction of the capitalist restoration, towards liberalisation, though, for the sake of appearances, some outward forms of the system of the proletarian dictatorship were still preserved. These forms were liquidated by the Dubchek group following their complete replacement of the Novotny group, the purging of opponents by replacing them with licensed anti-proletarian elements. Instead of going to «socialism» and consolidating the positions of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Dubchek and his clique are weakening these positions and sharing them with the parties of the bourgeoisie. Longo is not tolerated in the state power by the bourgeoisie, for, while it accepts the re-seizure of power, as it is now happening in Czechoslovakia, it does not want to share its power with others.
By sharing the power with bourgeoisie it is understandable that the political system will also change; this is precisely what Dubchek is doing. It is also understood in what direction this change of the system must be carried out: should it go towards the complete construction of socialism or communism, certainly it would not be either Dubchek or Novotny with their bourgeois capitalist friends that would do this.
Within the framework of the radical transformation of the system, the Dubchek group is, naturally, changing all the political, economic, state, organisational and military structures. All these changes that are taking place to completely restore capitalism in Czechoslovakia are approved and acclaimed enthusiastically by the Italian revisionists who, with this «livings example, want to tell their bourgeoisie: «We want to do the same thing here in Italy; such faithful servants of yours we are and will be, give us a bone if you do not wish to have the working class on your back».
The Soviet revisionists can by no means agree to this development actually taking place in Czechoslovakia, though they themselves are also treading the road of capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union.
They agreed with the Czechoslovak revisionists so long as their clique of Novotny was in power and Czechoslovakia was a humble «satellite» of the Soviet revisionists, allegedly one of the «freer and more economically independent socialist democracies». Novotny’s Czechoslovakia had kicked off the dictatorship of the proletariat just as the Soviet revisionists have done. The Czechoslovak Communist Party was allegedly in power and the only party in power, as «a party of the entire people» and was degenerating with the same forms and on the same tempo as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Even here, everything proceeded in a coordinated manner. The Czechoslovak economy, allegedly independent and advanced, had become dependent on the raw material supplied to it by the Soviet leadership; the Czech foreign policy was decided in the office of the Soviet Foreign Ministry. Thus, they have agreed only to such an extent.
But Novotny fell and the Dubchek clique came to power. Everything changed from what we mentioned above. The split occurred, the contradictions occurred both over the question of the guise to be used for kicking off the dictatorship of the proletariat, concerning the question of the Party, the question of economy, of the foreign policies, the state structures and so on. These contradictions will certainly deepen, the conflict will take acute forms.
The Czechoslovak reaction and bourgeoisie, which are an integral part of and linked with many threads to world reaction and European ultra-reactionary bourgeoisie, know very well what the dictatorship of the proletariat is. The Czechoslovak bourgeoisie has fought with arms and entire legions against the Soviet power established by Lenin in the Soviet Union. Today, it does not advertise this struggle against the dictatorship of the proletariat but applies it consistently. It uses as the only background the grime and dirt that the Khrushchovites have flung at the dictatorship of the proletariat and its glorious work in the Soviet Union; it uses the just and unflinching struggle that the Bolshevik Party with Stalin at its helm and the Soviet power waged in an exemplary manner against the White Guards, the Trotskyites, the deviators, the traitors to the Party, socialism and Marxism-Leninism, as a spectre to intimidate the people and take revenge.
The betrayal of the Khrushchovites has helped the Czechoslovak capitalist bourgeoisie to carry out their counter-revolutionary deed, therefore there is no reason for the Brezhnyevs and the Kosygins to groan when the Dubcheks attack the period of Gottwald, re-examine the cases of the traitors, rehabilitate the bourgeoisie, the fascists, robbers, criminals, the clergy, when, besides the staunch proletarian elements who, of course, are the first to be attacked and persecuted, they also purge the people of the Novotny group and of the Soviet revisionists. In Czechoslovakia, a climate of white terror, a climate of bourgeois revenge against the dictatorship of the proletariat has been created. People of the most frenzied reaction camouflaged as communists have emerged in the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. In the streets, the spectre of the demonstrations by hooligan students which have been given the false label of «people’s demonstrations» prevail. The Czechoslovak Home Ministry is now directed by a person who was recently released from prison to which he had been sentenced for hostile activity against the socialist regime. The Ministry of Defence is directed by a person who has also been released from prison. According to reports, workers of the Czechoslovak security force are daily committing suicide in their offices, others are being arrested and many others from all the sectors will certainly be arrested and condemned by the bourgeois dictatorship that is being established.
All this capitalist transformation, white terror, purges and revenge, are taking place under the cloak of alleged legality; that allegedly the transition from «a dark and troublesome epoch of murders, arbitrary trials and so on» to a period of «peace on earth, true social justice, class peace and people’s freedom» and so on and so forth is taking place; these are outworn slogans of capitalist propaganda that is operating quite nakedly.
Naturally, the Czechoslovak bourgeoisie which is seizing power and whose bed has been made by the revisionist traitors is looking ahead, capturing key positions one after another without making crazy gestures like those of the Hungarian capitalist bourgeoisie at the time of the counter-revolution of the year 1956, but «slowly and surely» until the opposition has died away, until no resistance on the part of the working class and the labouring masses appears on the horizon.
The Czechoslovak bourgeoisie which is taking power unhesitatingly uses the term «socialism» which is in fashion in many circles beginning with Indira Gandhi and ending with fascist Franco to deceive the masses. In this respect, it has been given its diploma by the Khrushchovites and the Titoites. In this point, they part from the Soviets who have declared that they «are going to communism» at a time when in reality they are firmly switching back to capitalism and seek to preserve the forms and appearance of the socialist order. The revisionist Czechs do not concern themselves with such trifles. They are openly for capitalism. Thus, for their «changing the political system» which means complete destruction of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its laws in Czechoslovakia, the Czech bourgeoisie which has come to power coats this bitter pill with talk of «good behaviour» towards its opposite class, the proletariat, of «not returning to the old subjective methods». For the modern revisionists, the laws of the dictatorship of the proletariat are subjective methods while the bourgeois capitalist laws «are sacred, objective and humane».
The Czechoslovak bourgeoisie that is coming to power says in the points of the program of «its communist party» that «better laws must be sought and enacted so that individual rights and private ownership be better and more resolutely defended». The gloves are off, here. Individual property, private property! This is not talking about toothbrushes, one’s watch or bed at home, but about something big, anti-proletarian, anti-socialist, capitalist, about the private capitalist ownership which is being restored. For this property, new laws must be compiled and decided upon replacing those which had been destroyed by the dictatorship of the proletariat, and these new laws firmly defend these rights given once more to the rich, the bourgeoisie of the town and the countryside.
Where to proceed from in setting up this capitalist property? The program of the Czechoslovak revisionists explicitly says that «the existing methods of running and orientating the national economy have become obsolete and need urgent alterations». This is not simply a question of new forms in running the economy but, through these forms, to change the class system of the economy. Of course, the Czechoslovak revisionists boast of great experience in running and organising any big and small capitalist economy, and so now that they have completely taken the state power into their own hands and severed all the old threads still keeping them linked, they will carry out the radical transformation of industry, agriculture, trade and the entire economy modelled on an advanced bourgeois capitalist state. On this road, they will be helped by West German and American capital in the first place as well as by the return of the capital of the Czechoslovak capitalists from these and other western countries. These credits are not credits merely accorded one state by another one at a certain interest rate; they will have a certain economic and political character. By means of these credits, the capitalist building being restored by the Czechoslovak bourgeoisie will be consolidated. The state capitalism being restored in Czechoslovakia will have its main basis on the domestic industry and on the new one that will be given to it by the foreign capitalists.
Actually, the political positions of the various bourgeois capitalist cliques in power are being consolidated in Czechoslovakia. This process will continue until the coming elections where the rehabilitated bourgeois cliques overthrown by the revolution hope to regain their lost citizenship and recapture the power into their own hands. Of course, they will achieve this sharing it with one another not pleasantly but with brutality like wolves. The law of the jungle will reign here, irrespective of the demagogical words of the program of the Czechoslovak Communist Party» which shamelessly says that «the characteristic of the present stage is that there do not exist antagonist classes».
Thus, in Czechoslovakia not only classes and the antagonism between them exist and will become more acute still, but various capitalist groupings are being rehabilitated and are politically and organisationally being organised and systematized to perfect the organisation and management of the new capitalist economy. The new law stipulates that the bourgeois parties that are coming to power have their rights and duties and that, being «independent parties in the front, they are responsible for administering the country and the society». The new law of the Czechoslovak revisionists openly explains that the «interest of the social groups must be protected and their economic interests must be taken into account in economic policy».
Thus, not only will the state economy be ran by various groups of capitalists included in various parties, the «Czechoslovak Communist Party» included, but other social-economic groups will spring up like mushrooms after rain, outside the sphere of the state economy. This means that small and big privately-owned industries will be set up. New capitalist banks both at home and abroad that will finance this big capitalist enterprise being formed in the center of Europe will be set up.
The Czechoslovak capitalists in power will build quite openly a bureaucratic, technocratic management, a regime of big economic trusts and concerns that will be at the level of the modern technique of the world capitalist market. To achieve this as soon as possible, they must get rid of the actual situation, break with the existing «socialist» traditions of economy; they must destroy the ties and forms of work and actual cooperation with the Soviet and other modern revisionists and fully integrate Czechoslovakia with the mechanism of the world capitalist economy.
The planning of their economy and the decentralisation of its management cannot help taking entirely new forms which must suit the demands of the new political and economic situation created. They cannot be and most likely they are not similar to what has been and is being done in other revisionist countries. The modernization on a capitalist basis of the Czech industry, which is now considered as one of the most modern in the revisionist camp, will undoubtedly bring about changes in forms, structures and methods of management. In this respect, other specific conditions will be taken into consideration: not only the foreign market, the interests of foreign capitalist investors but also the specific interests of the Czechs and the Slovaks and the interests of the domestic capitalist groups that have been formed or are in the process of formation.
In short, the anti-Marxist team of Dubchek installed at the helm of Czechoslovakia is changing the socialist regime into a capitalist regime at a higher speed. It is carrying out radical purges of its opponents who are sometimes called Novotnysts and revisionists and sometimes «Stalinists» and does not tolerate any person of Gottwald’s or Novotny’s time in any key leading post. Dubchek installs in power next to himself the most notorious, anti-Marxist, branded revisionists and clergy, people who have recently been released from prison under the new law they announced «for the complete rehabilitation of the communists and non-communists who have been victims of the past years».
By openly consolidating the positions of capitalism in Czechoslovakia, through these actions, the Dubchek clique says to the Soviet revisionists so that the whole world can hear: «We shall not stop at your Khrushchov norms; we have decided to go further openly, even against your will, even to accuse and expose you in the eyes of the other revisionists as conservative and outmoded revisionists who fail to take any step forward towards the «democratization and liberalization» you preach». While as to the capitalist world, the Dubchek team gives great guarantees, hopes and full confidence.
Of course, this team of traitors will carry out radical political, constitutional and economic reforms. No doubt, everything will come in due course, for, as the saying has it, «the fruit ripens in its times. We are seeing it lower the leading role of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, weaken it ideologically and politically, deproletarise and bourgeoisify it, raise the role of the National Front to an unprecedented scale, sanction by law the formation, the rights and functions of the other bourgeois parties with which it is sharing the power and cooperating to consolidate capitalism. On the other hand, this team is preparing for federalism, that is, allegedly to make both the Czechs and the Slovaks «equal» in all rights. Considering the course of the revisionist clique of Dubchek, in fact this means that it encourages and keeps ready the arm of nationalism and chauvinism to attack socialism, any revolutionary movement, to speed up the restoration of capitalism, to favour Slovak chauvinism in this situation and to have it as a weapon of balance.
Of course, the Dubchek team, using the pretext that Novotny’s Czechs had ignored «the poor sister», Slovakia, will finance it more in its capitalist development until it reaches the level of the favoured «advanced sister» without ignoring the modernisation of the Czech industry.
No doubt, over this fundamental question, continuous contradictions will arise. Stability will not exist and we shall witness continual clashes between the Czech and Slovak capitalists, between the latter and the foreign capitalist masters who have greater influence, for they have more invested capital in one or another part of this federation or confederation that bears the false name of «the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic».
The Czechoslovak leading group will have to balance the forces on the Czech and Slovak nationalist platform, but it will have to balance them in the direction of the capitalist bourgeois political parties that are being rehabilitated and of the others that will spring up. All these parties are being organized, they are establishing their own press organs, their trade union and youth organizations. Each one of them is airing its own views among the masses. The noise raised and the demands advanced by these organizations, by the students, the bourgeois writers and the unbridled journalists, for independence from the revisionist Communist Party, including the claim for their own deputies and special representatives in the state organs, are nothing else but an aspect of the revival of the various bourgeois groups, of their organizing to claim participation in the state power and ruling the country.
For the time being, everything is being done under the label of pseudo-socialism and the alleged traditional genuine democratic hegemony of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, which, actually, is the largest Party numerically. However, such a situation is temporary. The strengthening of capitalism in Czechoslovakia will bring about the differentiation of the parties. It can displace the revisionist Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from its pedestal and reduce it to a party of the social-democratic or western socialist type. Other parties may win supremacy and power. A party without the slightest socialist trace but which represents the strongest Czech or Slovak capitalist group, may become the most powerful party closely linked with the most powerful capitalist group abroad.
The present revisionist team at the head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and of the Czechoslovak state is now preparing the process of capitalist development under the guise of socialism in order to avoid the hegemonistic blows of the Soviet revisionists, to lull the working class and the other working strata, to avoid and crush the eventual internal disturbances and blows. The capitalist world clearly sees the road being pursued by the Dubchek clique.
Dubchek’s revisionists now claim that there exist no more restrictions, no censorship, no passport visas to enter to and leave Czechoslovakia for the western countries, that no Czechoslovak citizen can be treated as a political exile or emigre if he goes away and stays outside the country, in a word, the Dubchek clique has transformed Czechoslovakia into an inn to which people, goods, and ideas from the West can freely enter and get out.
The Czechoslovak authorities are loudly emphasizing the rights of the national minorities, as though they did not exist formerly. Apparently, the ground is being prepared to receive into Czechoslovakia over one million Sudeten Germans. In other words, they are trying to consolidate ties with capitalist Bonn to assure the inflow of capital investments from West Germany. Certainly, this will bring about a radical change in the Czechoslovak foreign policy and in her political attitude towards the German Democratic Republic. It will also affect her attitude towards the Warsaw Treaty and her actual political stand in general towards the states of Central Europe.
In Czechoslovakia, it is now being zealously preached that, due to her geographical situation, she is destined to serve as a «bridge» to link the East with the West, and every day they speak about an active European policy that should be pursued, of a more active policy towards the unification of Europe, and so on. The present ruling clique in Czechoslovakia does not conceal at all its ardent desire for the establishment of all-out relations with Bonn. Its assurances that allegedly it will support and defend the interests of the German Democratic Republic are false, just as false also are its declarations that in its foreign policy the keystone will remain the friendship with the Soviet Union.
Concerning foreign policy, the present line pursued by Czechoslovakia is a provisional line; soon it will assume a clear form towards the West. Its emissaries have already been sent to the United States, Britain and elsewhere. Neither the content nor the forms of the actual policy with the Soviet revisionists and the other revisionists can be durable. They will undergo changes, and, perhaps, dramatic changes at that.
All these changes taking place and which will take place in Czechoslovakia, the decentralization and transformation of the economy, of the political and constitutional system, of the internal and external alliances, the nationalistic Czech and Slovak rivalry, the modernization and connection of industry with foreign capitalist trusts, the transformation of agriculture on the capitalist road, the re-establishment of private property, the grouping of the capitalists into trusts and concerns, the discovery of new raw material sources and of export markets, all these and other transformations and changes cannot be carried out without clashes, both internally and externally. All of them will certainly exert an influence in the Soviet Union and the other revisionist countries of Europe and will encounter their resistance.
The various imperialists will attach special importance and will render great support to the Czechoslovak capitalist bourgeoisie for the complete restoration of capitalism, taking into account their reasons, interests, aims and economic, political, ideological and strategic profits. Czechoslovakia is becoming for them a pivot in Central and Southeast Europe where the interests of the Soviet revisionist imperialists and of the Western imperialists clash, in which occur the dangers of a turning point in the revolutionary struggle, in the class struggle between proletariat and the working masses, on one hand, and the revisionist cliques who have usurped power in the party and state, on the other.
With the capitalist restoration in Czechoslovakia imperialism is seeking to avoid the bad example set by the Titoite chaos, to achieve at the earliest moment economic and political independence of Czechoslovakia from the Soviet Union, to bring about the simultaneous transformation of education and culture into bourgeois systems so that Czechoslovakia may become a mainstay and a revisionist country typically attractive for Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland and others.
Ideological ties no longer serve to keep in unison the revisionist states with the Soviet revisionists. What keeps them together are rather the economic issues and the Warsaw Treaty of mutual defence. If these knots are untied, then everything will be disconnected from the dictat of the Soviet leadership. If American imperialism and the other imperialist states are able to untie this knot, then the Soviet Union will be isolated. It will be left in the lurch by its revisionist allies.
Not mentioning Titoite Yugoslavia, there is now another revisionist country which maintains formal political and defensive ties with the Soviet Union. These ties are limited to reciprocal commercial exchanges only and everything else is tense. Now everything depends on how things will head in Czechoslovakia. Since they will no doubt take the course we mentioned above, what is happening in Czechoslovakia constitutes a great defeat for the Soviet leading clique, because it completely jeopardizes its policy towards its revisionist satellites. Hungary or Poland may also follow, in the wake of Czechoslovakia, and then the Warsaw Treaty, the political ties, and the so-called ideological ties will collapse. The Council of Mutual Economic Aid will also collapse. Then the revisionist Soviet Union will experience a great political and economic upheaval. Certainly such a process will come to pass. It is in the making. All these noisy political and ideological changes taking place in Czechoslovakia have and will have great repercussions in the Soviet Union, irrespective of how the Soviet revisionists try to disguise, conceal, minimise and distort what is happening in Czechoslovakia in order to help their cause, to lower their effect and avoid the consequences. Everything will be found out, if not today, tomorrow; the sun cannot be concealed with a sieve. This is a chain reaction. Then, in the Soviet Union, under the circumstances of the ever simmering all-out crisis of the Khrushchovite revisionist regime, the shaken position of the ruling clique will further aggravate the contradictions between the present Soviet leadership which is furious against the Czechoslovak extremist clique, but unable to interfere openly and is trying to devise ways and means to destroy it, by undermining it from within or by means of all sorts of pressure and blackmail, and the pro-Czechoslovak Soviet elements, who likewise demand freedom of action, democratization and changes, will sharpen.
On the other hand and above all, the Soviet revisionist leadership fears very much the rise of the revolutionary wave, because all these defeats prove in the eyes of the masses and the working class of the Soviet Union the treachery of the revisionist chieftains. Under these grave conditions for them, the Soviet revisionist leaders, certainly divided among themselves, try to preserve the appearance of unity in the leadership, try to minimise their external defeats, they try to preserve the internal «status quo» and «ideological and political stagnation», they try to lull the party and the working class with alleged revolutionary leftist slogans, to create the impression that «liberalization does not enter Soviet society». However these numerous efforts cannot solve many issues. What they think to remedy today will go astray tomorrow. — This is the dialectics of the thing.
The waves have risen not only within the Soviet Union, but Soviet revisionism is being hit by waves on all sides from without. In the first place by the Communist Party of China, the Party of Labor of Albania and all the world revolutionaries who see, think and fight. But, besides the struggle waged by the Marxist-Leninists against the Soviet revisionists, we will clearly see later on how they will be abandoned by their revisionist partners in the capitalist countries. At present they have two lovers: one of the heart and the other for profit. For the Italian, French and other revisionists of the capitalist countries, the Czechoslovak revisionism will become the heart lover because it saved and realized their dream, because with it they will boast before their capitalists and, following its example, they will beg for crumbs from the capitalist table. While Soviet revisionism is the old lover that should give subsidies. The Italian revisionists, deputies and senators, at meetings and over television, will openly say: «We in Italy do not stand for the establishment of a socialist regime like that in the Soviet Union but for a socialist regime which was actually established in Czechoslovakia. The Dubchek group, on the road to the restoration of capitalism, actually has given free vent for action to all trends, with the: exception of the proletariat, the revolutionaries and Marxist-Leninists. For the whole of reaction «freedom of press» has been proclaimed and, in fact, in present day Czechoslovakia there is no censorship even for the blackest reaction. While to the working class and the revolutionary communists freedom of speech and discussion has been denied even inside the party, not mentioning their right to go out in the streets to oppose reaction or to write in the press. Such a situation does not exist even in the capitalist countries where reaction is in power, but where, despite all else the Marxist-Leninists have the right to organize themselves, to stage manifestations and go on strikes, to hold meetings and own their press organs. The Dubchek team is, therefore, going further quite openly. Entire reaction, all the fascists can speak at will and wherever they like, while for the revolutionaries is reserved the prison.
With this sort of freedom the Czechoslovak revisionist team is consistently following on its road, it seeks and works to save and enliven the process of degeneration in everything of the past. On this road it enjoys the assistance of the bourgeois press in the capitalist countries to which the doors have been flung open in Czechoslovakia to such an extent that its representatives can assist in the meetings of the grass-root organizations of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.
The counterrevolution in the counterrevolution of Czechoslovakia is trying to consolidate the positions it has just won and is feasting for the victory. However, the working class and the revolutionaries of Czechoslovakia have not yet said their word. Will the genuine Marxist-Leninists and the workers of Czechoslovakia endure any longer the treachery committed against the Czechoslovak people and socialism?
Everybody understands now that in Czechoslovakia law is made by the bourgeoisie, the fascists and the reactionaries, the hooligans with long hair, financed by the international bourgeoisie. Will the Czechoslovak working class and revolutionaries allow such a thing? The world communists and proletariat are convinced that they will not allow such a thing.
The revolutionary communists and the working class of Czechoslovakia should kick out the false «freedoms» of Dubchek. How can one endure that the fascists, the traitors and the formerly imprisoned class enemies freely speak like hooligans and assail Marxism-Leninism, disgrace the remembrance of Clement Gottwald and of the other Marxist-Leninists and revolutionaries of Czechoslovakia? How can people not burst out in an uprising against them and win their right to defend the cause of Communism? The revolutionary communists should smash all the pseudo-norms that have been established in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia by Novotny and Dubchek, with which they have bound the communists hand and foot, and establish the Leninist norms of Gottwald, who has said: «The Party should lead the masses, it should organize their struggle... The sterner the situation, the tenser the class contradictions, the more important and decisive becomes the role of the Party». Clement Gottwald likewise said: "Every reconciliation with opportunism, every wavering, every lack of principle inevitably leads to liquidationism-'. The revolutionary communists and the working class alone, by bursting out in an uprising can thwart the treacherous plans hatched up against socialism in Czechoslovakia by the cliques of Novotny and Dubchek, the former with the assistance of the Soviet revisionists and the latter with the aid of international reaction.
The ultra-revisionist clique of Dubchek fears the people and the true communists; it fears the old guard which keeps alive the spirit of the revolutionary class struggle, of the partisan struggle, of the events of February, 1948; it fears the working class and the communists inspired by Gottwald according to the teachings of Marxism-Leninism. It is due to this fear that Novotny and Dubchek, both renegades and enemies of the proletariat, settled their accounts in the backstage gloom of the Prague fortress ignoring the working class and behind its back, avoiding and fearing its judgement. The Dubchek clique fears the workers’ militia which has arms in its own hands, that is why this clique is trying to disarm the working class. Will the working class tolerate such a thing? The arms it possesses are to defend the dictatorship of the proletariat, to defend its gains, socialism. At present, the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism are seriously threatened by the bourgeoisie, the fascist and the usurpers. Therefore, it is now or never that the strength of the working class must be demonstrated.
The tragic situation that Czechoslovakia is experiencing demands valour and courage. These are not the qualities of traitors and of cowards but of revolutionaries. What are the Czechoslovak brave people, the genuine Marxist-Leninists and the working class doing? Why do they keep silent and leave the cowards and the fascists to boast in the streets, the white terror reign and such grave situations occur that people are led to commit suicide? Whom do the revolutionaries fear? Is it that they want to respect the «legality» of their party and the laws of the dictatorship of the proletariat? But today in Czechoslovakia, there is no legality, neither the party nor the state power belongs to the revolutionaries and the workers. The party has turned into a party of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
The international communists and working class have confidence that the revolutionaries and the working class of Czechoslovakia will turn out in the street and fight to defend the interests of the people, socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the decisive days of February, 1948, proletarian revolutionary Clement Gottwald sounded the clarion call to the Czechoslovak workers and people: «I appeal to you to be vigilant and in combat preparedness ... Nip in the bud any act of provocation by the reactionary agents. Be united and determined, and your right will win!». In the battlefield, there will emerge new Gottwalds and Fuchiks, talented revolutionaries and distinguished leaders who will lead the Czechoslovak working class and working people in the battle to raze to the ground the rotten fortress of the Novotny and Dubchek cliques. This road will not bring grist to the mill of the Soviet revisionists, of Dubchek and of the imperialists but meets only the interests of the Czechoslovak people, the interests of socialism and world proletarian revolution.
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