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

Pomeroy's Portrait: Revisionist Renegade

Apologia for Soviet Revisionism

Basahin sa Pilipino

Amado Guerrero

April 22, 1972

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

(This essay originally appeared in the Ang Bayan special issue of November 30,1971 under the title "Pomeroy's Apologia for Soviet Revisionism".)

Half a Century of Socialism (Soviet Life in the Sixties) unfolds the role of William J. Pomeroy as both an agent of Soviet modern revisionism and U.S. imperialism. This book pretends ot celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution but in fact it celebrates the betrayal of Marxism-Leninism and the all-round restoration of capitalism in the homeland of the great Lenin. It heaps all kinds of empty praise for the 20th and 22nd Congress of the revisionist Communist Party of the Soviet Union and for the 23rd Congress and the plenary sessions of the CPSU Central Committee from 1965 to 1967 by which Brezhnev and his revisionist gand have outdone Khrushchov in bringing about the all-round restoration of the capitalism in the Soviet Union.

Speaking from a bourgeois reactionary and idealist viewpoint, Pomeroy disparages dialectical materialism, the law of contradiction and class analysis as "oversimplification". In no uncertain terms, he rails: "A revolutionary who is prone to see everything in two-toned contrasts is disconcerted in meeting a capitalist who might be a decent person or a fellow revolutionary who might be unscrupulous". What a counter-revolutionary way of summing up reality! His sinister purpose sticks out: it is to attack the revolutionary proletariat and praise the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie to the heavens.

Himself involved in the class struggle on the side of the bourgeois, he dishes up his own "two-toned contrasts" in a revisionist manner well-echoed from his Soviet Revisionist masters. He raves: "The hammer and sickle were an apt symbol in the time of Lenin". And he hastens to counterpose: "Today's symbols are the computer, the transistor and atomic ring." He slanders Lenin and Stalin as the paragons of "backwardness" and vents his spite on the dictatorship of the proletariat. He pays high tribute to his current revisionist renegade masters Brezhnev and Kosygin as the paragons of "technical progress" and describes in the most glowing terms the fascist dictatorship of the Soviet monopoly bureaucrat bourgeoisie.

Pomeroy prates that the difference between what he calls the past (the time of Lenin and Stalin) and the present (the time of his Soviet revisionist masters) lies in the "advance of techniques". This is to cover up the betrayal of Leninism and the peaceful evolution of the proletarian dictatorship into a bourgeois dictatorship through the machinations of such usurpers as Khrushchov the Second. In the process, he also manages to throw in flimsily-disguised praise for the international big bourgeoisie. He states:

People in the developed countries are fully aware of the differences in their present lives and outlooks from those of their forebears at the turn of the century or in the 1920's. They look back with superior smiles at what are considered to be rather primitive times. If this can be true under capitalism, which tends to resist change, it is much more true under socialism which has transformed the condition of living in a much more rapid and thoroughgoing manner.

The trick in Pomeroy's sophistry is simple. He puts technique and politics, and compares socialism with capitalism mainly on the basis of techniques. People in the capitalist countries are made out to appear as enjoying the bounties of technical progress in the same manner that people in the Soviet Union are supposed to be enjoying the same things now. The end of this line of misrepresentation is to "look back with superior smiles" at the "primitive times" of Lenin and Stalin. But can the Soviet revisionist renegades really do this? It is most interesting to look at how rotten Soviet society has become after the betrayal of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Pomeroy opposes to its very core the October Revolution and impugns its historical necessity in the advance of the world proletarian revolution. He goes so far as to state that "it would be wrong to say that socialist revolutions elsewhere would have been impossible without the prior existence of the Soviet Union". The October Revolution of 1917 is a historical fact and no genuine revolutionary ever doubts its necessary value to all succeeding socialist revolutions. It verified and brought to reality the theory of proletarian revolution and proletarian dictatorship, and became the cornerstone of the world proletarian revolution. Its salvoes brought Marxism-Leninism to the people of the world. Therefore, it is idle historical idealism for Pomeroy to prate that socialist revolution would be possible even without the October Revolution.