[PRWC Party Documents] Pomeroy's Portrait: Revisionist Renegade, April 22, 1972

Pomeroy's Portrait: Revisionist Renegade

Apologia for Soviet Revisionism

III. On The Question Of Superstructure

Basahin sa Pilipino

Amado Guerrero

April 22, 1972

Revolutionary School of Mao Tse Tung Thought, Communist Party of the Philippines

Chairman Mao Tsetung is the Lenin of the present era. He has inherited, defended and developed Marxism-Leninism with genius, creatively and comprehensively, and has brought it to a higher and completely new stage, Mao Tsetung Thought. To him we owe the invincible ideological weapon that makes certain the total collapse of imperialism and the worldwide victory of socialism.

Upon the rise of modern revisionism and the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, the imperialist and their running dogs were gleeful and congratulated themselves for their view that a dictatorship of the proletariat can be peacefully eroded through a number of generations. But Chairman Mao has come forward and brought forth the key to the solution of the problem of the restoration of capitalism in a socialist society after analyzing and summing up the historical experience of socialist countries. He has put forward the theory of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat and has successfully put it into practice through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is a great revolutionary mass movement under the leadership of the proletariat for seizing the superstructure and making it conform to the socialist economic base.It has resulted in the overthrow of Party persons in authority taking the capitalist road, consolidated the dictatorship of the proletariat in China and tempered the People's Republic of China to become bulwark of socialism in the world. In the process of this unprecedented epoch-making revolution, successors of the revolution have come forward to frustrate the hopes of the imperialist and the social-imperialists for a restoration of captitalism in China.

For all these, the Soviet revisionist renegades and their hack Pomeroy hate Chairman Mao and everything that he stands for. They have a grain fright for their own inevitable doom in the hands of the revolutionry masses. They would utter anything as they try to seek comfort from their shadows. Thus, Pomeroy describes the Great Proletarian Revolution as "based on an effort to build socialism and communism on 'a very low level'". They describe modern revisionism, the restoration of capitalism an putting material incentives in command of everything as being "on a higher level".

Pomeroy further tries to misenterpret the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution:

The occurrence, during the proletarian cultural revolution, of indiscriminately rejecting and even detroying the literature, art and other cultural forms of the past, caused one of the most disturbed reactions among the Soviet people I met, who ascribed the behavior among to extreme nationalism. It is generally asserted to me that the Red Guards, who carried this out had seriously damaged the image of socialism and of communist behavior in the eyes of the world.

The main current and outcome of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution were excellent. The ghost and monster were swepts away positions of dominance in the superstructure. But in the main there was no "indiscriminate rejections and destructions" of the literature, art and cultural forms of the past. Traditional and foreign forms that can serve the present revolutionary needs of China and the proletariat were given correct revolutionary content, as splendidly evident in the literary and art models that emerged in the course of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Even those things of the past that are definitely not proletarian in character were preserved in their isolated places to serve as negative examples. With regard to the Red Guards, they constitute a great mass movement that has heightened the revolutionary spirit of serving the people among the youth, that has tempered the youth in revolutionary struggles under the leadership of the proletariat and that has trained hundreds of millions of youth as successors in the revolution. The imperialists and the Social-imperialist have been most disappointed with the Red Guards because their emergence has served to explode the sinister hope that modern revisionism would take over China as it as the Soviet Union upon the coming of the "third or fourth generation".

As fools who never discard their worn-out tricks, the Soviet revisionist renegades with through Pomeroy to discredit Chairman Mao and everything that he stands for in the same manner thay they have tried to discredit the great Marxist-Leninist Comrade Stalin. They harp on what they call the "personality cult" and the "the harmful effects of Stalinism".

The revisionist renegades are as absurd as "mayflies plotting to topple a giant tree" as they try to picture the universal theory of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought as a mere expression of the "nationalist outlook". This theory encompasses the new-democratic revolution and socialist revolution and guarantees the transition and socialism and communism. In taking the great contributions of Chairman Mao to the stage of Leninism alone, no genuine revolutionary would ever fail to give him due respect as great leader of the world proletariat.

Much as he would want to present in his book a culture "on a higher level" in the present system dominated by the Soviet monopoly bureaucrat capitalist, Pomeroy merely succeeds in presenting a degenerate bourgeois culture whose best claims in Pomeroy's own terms are to "liberalism", Western influence" and even to "mysticism". He misrepresents this as the fruit of the "50-year cultural revolution". Thus, he slanders the October Revolution even as he pretends to commemorate it with his book.

He is exremely happy to observe that "the trend to liberalism has been set" and hails the Pravda editorial (January 27, 1967) "indicating that the forces of liberalization were gradually prevailing". Swaggering with his bourgeois ideology, he raves: "An emotional, or romantic, acceptance of Marixsm... had contributed to the blindness that had enabled the phenomenon of Stalinism to go uncorrected for so long." Here it is clear that the "anti-Stalinism" of the Soviet revisionist renegades is actually a pretext for their anti-Marxism and anti-Leninism.

These anti-communist scoundrels often pretend to honor Lenin and to invoke his name. But as Lenin once said:

It has always been the case in history that after the death of revolutionary leaders who were popular among the oppressed classes, their enemies have attempt to appropriate their names so as to deceive the oppressed classes.

In essence, the revisionist renegades use the name of Lenin to attack Lenin and refer to Leninism only to attack Leninism.

Pomeroy refers to such bourgeois degenerates as Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yevgeny Yevtushensko, Anatoly Zhigulin, Bulat Okujava, Andrei Voznesensky and the like as the cream of the Soviet literature in what he calls a "50-year cultural revolution". He considers as their principal qualification their being "anti-Stalinist". And he trumphets at the same time the theory of literature for literature's sake. He raves:

He who is ready to criticize must also be ready for the give and take of the process, although it should be expected that criticism of literature be kept within the literary framework.

"Criticism of literature within the literary framework" denies the political character of every literary work. Chairman Mao teaches us:

In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.

Pomeroy pays the highest tribute to Andrei Voznesensky whom he touts as "the best poet to emerge from the current literary ferment". He reports that they agreed in their talk that the 20th Congress "had contributed to a great release of expression". The revisionist scoundrel Pomeroy at the same time endorses what Voznesensky calls a "resurgence of the age-old mysticism in the Russian soul that is found in much of our literature".

He is glad that the Sinyavsky-Daniel case has become rallying point within the Soviet Writers' Union for further "liberalization". He considers as "conservative" the lip-service given by the Brezhnev to the "principle" of partisanship in art and literature and the class approach in assessing all matters in the cultural sphere".

Twisting Lenin's statement that "Marxism is an example of how communism arose out of the sum total of human knowledge", Pomeroy seeks to equate it with Brezhnev's statement that "the tasks of the Komsomol is to help the younger generation... to enrich their memory with the knowledge of all the values created by mankind." And in this regard, he praises the revisionist elements among the Soviet youth for having the "the broadest interest in the Western literature" which is "never a contradiction to what the young people loved in their own". In whom are they interested most in Western literature? Hemingway, Salinger, John Updike, Kapfka, Beckett and Ionesco! Pomeroy tries to pass off bourgeois cosmopolitanism for proletarian internationalism.

He is happy to report that Shelley and Byron are being quoted and interpreted "solely in the light of being defenders of the British working class" in the Soviet secondary schools. He approves of Hemingway as the favorite author of the revisionist elements among the Soviet youth and lauds this bourgeois defeatist author for "the courage of his heroes, his preoccupation with good and noble impulses in people" and the "moral tone of his distinctions" He also approves of John Steinbeck as another "favorite author". He praises John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and Winter of Our Discontent for "preaching protest against violence". A true Marxist-Leninist can easily see the essence of Steinbeck as a bourgeois literary pessimist, at most interested in exposure but terrified by revolutionary violence. There is no suprise at all that this anti-communist scoundrel today rabidly supports the U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam. One who is against revolutionary violence easily turns into one supporting counter-revolutionary violence.

By way of countering any agreement that Soviet revisionist intellectuals are too much engrossed in Western bourgeois literature, Pomeroy makes a defense that merely exposes further the counter-revolutionary character of his Soviet revisionist colleagues as well as his own. He states:

A fierce respect for the great figures of Russian literature and art is to be found among the Soviet intellectuals, and this is in sense one of the best defenses against Western subversion, Pushkin,Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekov, even Dostoevski, are turned to for cultural sustenance.

Pomeroy completely neglects to pay even lip-service to the great proletarian revolutionary writer, Maxim Gorky. It is condemnable that he and his fellow revisionist renegades can turn for succor and sustenance only to bourgeois-feudal masters of art and literature. These anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist find nothing noteworthy or praiseworthy about the cultural achievements of the Soviet proletariat. They can only appreciate those things in the superstructure that denigrate thew dictatorship of the proletariat and that support the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. Thus, such bourgeois degenerates as Ilya Ehrenburg and Mikhail Sholokhov have officially become literary favorites of the Khrushchov-Brezhnev revisionist renegades as well as of U.S. imperialism.

Though at certain points Pomeroy seems to deny that the Soviet revisionist renegades are under the heavy influence of Western bourgeois culture, he cannot avoid citing even the grossest manifestations of such influence, as the blackmarketing youth who ask him if he has foreign goods to sell or the youth who shows interest in dope. He is glad that what he regards as the cream of the Soviet youth, in fancy Western-style get-up, twist to the tune of American jazz in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. He raves:

The best Soviet jazz orchestras, like the jazz "64 and the jazz '65 groups, are superb musicians who have distilled the very best in Western jazz and are applying it to Russian folk strains.

He states:

Young people see their interest in such cultural aspects as being in line with their internationalism, and not as an anti-Soviet attitude. They feel that any restrictions on such interests are a departure from the internationalism their organizations advocate.

Modern revisionism has arisen in the Soviet Union as a result of the failure to seize the superstructure from the bourgeois and also as a result of vigorous attempts of imperialism to push in its ideological influence. Because culture is the concentrated expression or reflection of politics and economic, Soviet culture -- as Pomeroy himself reports and praises -- is a testimony to the all-round restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union.

It is clear that before this all-round restoration of capitalism the counter-revolutionaries bred their ranks within the superstructure. They did not immediately seize political power by force of arms or openly convert the socialized means of production into private ones. What they did was to sneak into the Party, the government, the army and the various spheres of culture and gradually turn these into their instruments. Concentrating on ideological, they worked from within until conditions were ripe. In this regard, Chairman Mao teaches us:

To overthrow a political power, it is always necessary first of all to create public opinion, to do work in the ideological sphere. This is true for the revolutionary class as well as for the counter-revolutionary class.

Regarding the question of struggle in the superstructure in a socialist society, Chairman Mao has pointed out:

We have won basic victory in transforming the ownership of the means of production, but we have not yet won complete victory on the political and ideological fronts. In the ideological field, the question of who will win in the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeois has not been really settled yet. We still have to wage a protracted struggle against bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology. It is wrong not to understand this and to give up ideological struggle. All erroneous ideas, all poisonous weeds, all ghosts and monsters, must be subjected to criticism; in no circumstance should they be allowed to spread unchecked.

It will take a fairly long period of time to decide the issue in the ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism. The reason is that the influence of the bourgeoisie and of the intellectuals who came from the old society will remain in our country for a long time to come, and so will their class ideology. If this is not sufficiently understood, or is not understood at all, the gravest mistakes will be made and the necessity of waging the struggle in the ideological field will be ignored.