Unending Struggle

Cried the anaconda to the rabbit it was swallowing: "Stop encircling me!"

Last week Russians were again warned that they are being encircled by the world's "reactionaries," i.e., the U.S. and Britain. This time the warning was contained in a ten-page article in the Soviet Government's official magazine World Economics and World Politics. It was modestly titled: "Features of the Internal and Foreign Policy of Capitalist Countries during the Epoch of the General Crisis of Capitalism." The author: Professor Eugene Varga.

Professor Varga was People's Commissar of Finance in Bela Kun's Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919). Like Bela Kun, Varga fled to Moscow when the Hungarian Soviet collapsed. Unlike Bela Kun, who was liquidated in Russia's Great Purge, he prospered and became economic adviser to the Russian Communist Party's Political Bureau. Hence his article is an important clue to what Russia's leading political theorists and practical politicians think about world affairs.

Varga's chief points:

P: The struggle between capitalist countries, like the U.S. and Britain, against the Soviet Union is intensifying under new, postwar conditions. "The fact that the Soviet Union and the highly developed capitalist countries fought in the same camp against the fascist aggressors did not signify that the struggle between the two systems had slowed down and stopped; it did not even signify the beginning of the end of this struggle."

P: The No.1 problem of the capitalist countries is "preservation of the capitalist system," but "the bourgeoisie is frightened at the general trend to the left in the workers' movement all over the world."

P: In the U.S. and Britain, the bourgeoisie has not been discredited. The social system has remained unchanged. Military forces have emerged stronger than before the war. "The Communist Party, though strengthened, is still not an important factor in [British and American] internal politics."

P: The U.S. has emerged from World War II as "the mightiest military power in the capitalist world." But its strength is counterbalanced by the increased strength of the Soviet Union and of Europe's Communist Parties.

P: In the struggle between the two systems, the capitalist powers have three lines of strategy. They must: 1) try to turn the social-democratic parties and non-Communist trade unions into allies; 2) strengthen the Catholic and Protestant Churches and Islam; 3) encourage fascism "in a veiled form." The Catholic Church, Varga charges, is organizing a "Catholic International."

Renaissance of Fascism. Since fascism is the "political expression of the growing crisis of capitalism," look for its timely rebirth, Professor Varga warns. "At the present time in the capitalist countries there is undoubtedly taking place a definite rebirth of political reaction and fascism." Chief focus of the "renaissance of fascism": the U.S. and Britain. Reactionary forces in these countries are stepping up "an intensified campaign against the Soviet Union, striving to isolate her and organize an anti-Soviet bloc."

But there is a ray of hope: "Imperialist contradictions [i.e., political and economic rivalries] are cropping up again between the large capitalist countries, especially the United States and Britain. . . . American policy is now striving, first of all, to crush and break up the British colonial empire and to win equal conditions for American capital in competition all over the world. This is its main object. The ambition to finish the British, French and Dutch colonial empires is manifested in many diverse forms."

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