Polemic on General Line of International ... - From Marx to Mao

We have attentively studied your views concerning the rangeof questions which could be discussed at the meeting of representativesof the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and theCommunist Party of China. These are important questions,and we are ready to discuss them.In our turn, we would like to dwell in this letter on somequestions of principle, which, in our opinion, are the centre ofattention of the fraternal Parties and their struggle for ourcommon cause. We do not mean, of course, an exhaustivestatement of our views on these questions. We only wish tonote that which is of paramount importance, by which we areguided in our policy in the international arena and in ourrelations with fraternal Parties.We hope that this statement of our views will help to definethe range of questions requiring an exchange of opinions at abilateral meeting and will contribute to overcoming the existingdifferences. We are doing this so as to stress once againour determination to uphold firmly and consistently theideological standpoint of the entire world communist movement,its general line as expressed in the Declaration andthe Statement.During the time that has passed since the adoption of theStatement, experience has not only not invalidated any of itsmain conclusions, but has, on the contrary, fully confirmed thecorrectness of the course taken by the world communist movement,as worked out jointly through generalization of presentdayexperience and the creative development of Marxism-Leninism.The Communist Party of the Soviet Union proceeds from thebasis that our epoch, whose main content is the transition fromcapitalism to socialism, initiated by the Great October SocialistRevolution, is an epoch of struggle between two opposed socialsystems, an epoch of socialist revolutions and national-liberationrevolutions, an epoch of the collapse of imperialism, ofthe abolition of the colonial system, an epoch of transition to499