As we write, the revolt of Tibet appears to be quelled. The Dalai Lama, who in the eyes of the Atlantic press has become the new symbol of the struggle against ‘atheistic materialism’, has reached Indian territory. The living Buddha, the Great Ocean incarnate, is safe! Conformists around the world, suddenly made aware of the importance that Lamaism possesses in the struggle for ‘spiritual rights’, have breathed a sigh of relief. Is this any wonder? The Western bourgeoisie, in order to use the influence of the Catholic Church, has renounced all the traditions of anti-ecclesiastical thought which, for better or worse, allowed the development of powerful intellectual tools, such as those forged by the scientific revolution of Darwinism, and in its frantic search for dams to oppose the proletarian tide, has thrown itself on its knees before the Catholic Popes. But now even Catholicism is no longer enough: and here it is, prostrating itself before the Pope of the Tibetans!

The bad faith of the Western press is proven beyond doubt by its completely opposite behaviour towards the revolts of the ‘coloured peoples’ oppressed by white colonialism. The expedition to the other side of the world of a few thousand Tibetan monks, accustomed, like religious figures of all latitudes, to living off the backs of the people, has had the magical effect of kindling human passions in the granite hearts of those who look on impassively at the massacre of the Algerian people and the repressions of the colonialist police in Cameroon, Congo, and Nyasaland. The ‘colour bar’ has suddenly fallen. The racism of the illustrious intellectual prostitutes who write in Il Popolo, Corriere dalla Sera, Il Tempo, and Il Secolo has, overnight, granted an exemption to the Tibetan feudal aristocracy. Those who predict that ‘Africa, abandoned by its civilisers, would inevitably fall back into the darkness of barbarism, and perhaps into cannibalism’, discover ‘the right of the peoples of Tibet to develop their own type of civilisation!’. Under the Jesuitical excuse that any crack in the NATO bloc must be avoided, bourgeois journalism justifies colonial domination in one way or another, but converts to anti-colonialism as soon as the news agencies of Chiang Kai-shek – another champion of the ‘freedom of peoples’! – spread the news of the Tibetan monks’ revolt. Nevertheless, if the Western bourgeoisie is ready to seize, with absolute unscrupulousness, any opportunity that allows it to denigrate communism as a mass of contradictions, it must indeed be said – and we will certainly not shy away from saying it – that the sordid work of bourgeois propaganda is greatly facilitated by the effects of the theoretical distortions and opportunist actions of the parties that claim to follow the ‘communism’ preached by Moscow and Beijing.

In the days that followed the release of the Beijing government’s statement confirming the Tibetan uprising, a controversy has arisen between l’Unità and Avanti! The socialist newspaper, which since the Hungarian uprising has dedicated itself to the critique of the methods followed by Moscow in its ‘satellite’ countries, was supporting the legalitarian argument according to which the uprising would have broken out because the Beijing government had failed to respect the Sino-Tibetan agreement of 25 May 1951. Under this agreement, Tibet recognised the fait accompli of the Chinese military occupation that had begun in October of the previous year, while China undertook to respect Tibet’s autonomy and social structure. Well, l’Unità responded that the initiative to break the agreement had come from the representatives of the Tibetan feudal theocracy. An argument no less legalitarian and anti-revolutionary, because it justified the repression of the uprising not on the grounds of class struggle and revolutionary illegality, but on the ultra-bourgeois grounds of international law. I, the dominant power, occupy you and force you to sign a treaty where you recognise my sovereignty, granting you however a certain degree of administrative autonomy. At a certain point, you, the subjugated power, do not abide by the terms of the agreement? Well then, I will shoot you, and no one can accuse me of injustice, because my action is legal...

Alas! Have you already forgotten, you who boast of having put an end to the shameful period of China’s enslavement, that the imperialist brigands paid by England, France, Japan, Germany, and today by the United States, who came to carve out large slices of territory in Manchu China or Chiang Kai-shek’s China, reasoned no differently? Have you forgotten that every abuse inflicted on China, from the Opium War to the establishment of the Manchukuo puppet state, was invariably presented by imperialist diplomacy as an act of atonement for Chinese bad faith and dishonesty? For an entire century, China has had to pay for not ‘respecting the agreements’, and the ordeal is not yet over. Does US imperialism not tend to justify its military occupation of Formosa by waving the treaties it got the puppet Chiang to sign?

In the controversy between Avanti! and l’Unità, we cannot take sides with either one, because neither speaks a revolutionary language. It is not a question of knowing who has torn up the 1951 treaty, whether it was the Chinese authorities or the government of the Dalai Lama. The fact is that the signing of the pact was in itself an anti-revolutionary act. By proposing that pact, which sanctioned Chinese military occupation and guaranteed the preservation of ultra-reactionary social structures perpetuating the feudal privileges of the Lamaist church, nothing less than a colonial pact was signed. L’Unità, which only today discovers that Tibet is 1,500 years behind – and IT IS TRUE – will never admit it. But the whole history of colonialism shows that the colonial regime was implanted in Africa and Asia in exactly the same way, namely by tending to reconcile the interests of the occupying power with the preservation of indigenous social structures, i.e. of the privileges of the dominant local castes (maharajas, sultans, emirs, ulema, and so on). If one really wants to find the perjurer who has broken his word, one must point to Chinese ‘communism’, which, having arrived in Tibet with arms, refrained from liberating the mountain dwellers who lived for centuries under the yoke of archaic social structures. With the 1951 treaty, Chinese ‘communism’, trampling on every tenet of the Marxism it claims to follow, came to an agreement with the Tibetan feudal aristocracy, whose bad faith it now, nine years later, ‘discovers’.

What was Tibet like when Mao Tse-Tung’s armies set foot there? To find out, let us read an excerpt from the article ‘Tibet: a feudal society unchanged for centuries’, which appeared in l’Unità on 31 March 1959, the same issue that contains the controversial note against Avanti!

‘Even today, after the 1951 agreement, this country (Tibet), which covers approximately one million square kilometres on the highest plateau in the world, is ruled autocratically by Buddhist monks. It is a feudal society, rigidly organised in a pyramid structure, at the top of which is the Dalai Lama and at whose base are the serfs. All power emanates from the monks of the three great monasteries of Drebung, Sera, and Ganden, and it is from among them that the members of the Casiag, the government responsible to the Dalai Lama, and the Lama officials are chosen (...) The supreme authority is, as mentioned, the Dalai Lama, the “Great Ocean”, who, for Lamaist believers, is the incarnation of Cerenzi, the lord of mercy, patron god of Tibet (...) However, there exists another supreme incarnation, that of Opame, the Buddha of Immeasurable Light, and it is the Panchen Lama, or commonly also called the Son, in relation to the Father, who is the Dalai Lama, and shares spiritual and temporal authority with the Dalai Lama when not divided from him by irreconcilable differences, as has happened on more than one occasion in the centuries-old history of Tibet’.

After having informing us about the political structure of this ‘mysterious’ country and the fact that the Lamaic church holds all spiritual and temporal power, governing both souls and bodies, l’Unità goes on to describe the social conditions of the country. We could glean this information from any geography textbook, but we prefer to let l’Unità inform us: ‘Monks and landowners possess all the wealth of Tibet, if one can speak of wealth in a society of nomadic tribes engaged in perpetual warfare with each other. Part of the proceeds from livestock farming must be paid to the monasteries and the central government, and until a few years ago, the lamas and notables were the only source of credit for peasants and shepherds, given at exorbitant interest rates (...) The Tibetan peasant is roughly at the same level as he was thirteen centuries ago, when contact with Tang dynasty China taught him how to use the first agricultural tools. His plough is still the same rudimentary wooden ones with nails, so light that it can be carried on the shoulder’.

This is Tibet in 1959, the year of the Chinese conquest. Certainly, and who could doubt it? The conditions in European countries invaded by Napoleon’s armies at the beginning of the last century were far more advanced than those still existing in Tibet. But the French conquest, although not immune to nationalist tendencies, energetically pursued its mission of spreading the democratic revolution in the hostile feudal world that surrounded France. Therefore, communists have never hidden their admiration for the Napoleonic achievements: Marx himself, as is well known, called Napoleon I ‘hero of the revolution’.

This assessment of Bonapartism, or at least of its consequences outside France, is in perfectly coherence with the Marxist doctrine of revolutionary violence. Communism fights first and foremost, as stated in the Manifesto, against the bourgeoisie of its own country, but the ultimate goal of its struggle is the destruction of the international domination of the bourgeoisie. The communist revolution has the right to defend itself against internal and external enemies: indeed, for it, this distinction is meaningless, because the Workers’ State tends towards the destruction of the bourgeois nation state and its replacement by the unified dictatorship of the Communist International. This means that, once power has been taken in a country, communists will seek by all means, not excluding military conquest, to enlarge the territorial base of the Workers’ State, and thus the field of the anti-capitalist revolution.

Bourgeois hypocrisy accuses communism of striving for world domination. And every day we witness the spectacle of the ‘communist’ parties led by Moscow and Beijing rushing to reject the ‘accusation’ with ostentatious indignation. Indeed, for Moscow-style ‘communism’, the world state of the proletariat has ceased to be the maximum cornerstone of the communist political programme: it has become an ‘accusation’, a ‘slander’ of the ‘extremist circles of the Cold War’. In the name of ‘peaceful coexistence’, they renounce a fundamental position of Marxist communism. But then events such as the feudal revolt in Tibet occur, and the tangle of contradictions between the declamation of Marxist principles and the practical conduct of ‘communist’ parties and governments appears in broad daylight.

We repeat, we strongly reject the petty-bourgeois positions defended by the motley democratic and social-democratic camp, of which Avanti! has made itself the mouthpiece. The revolution has no ‘pacts’ to respect other than those it has made, on the grounds of doctrine and action, with regard to the revolutionary class. Let the servants of the ruling bourgeoisie defend bourgeois legality, of which international law is one aspect. The proletarian revolution will not hesitate, if necessary, to cross ‘sacred national borders’ with arms in hand, spreading the social fire. The military campaign against reactionary Poland, unleashed in 1921 by Leninist Russia, remains a valid experience for us. At the time, we enthusiastically supported the action of the Red Army, and since then no doubt has touched us. From the point of view of the class struggle, communism had every reason to launch a military attack on Poland, supported and incited by Western imperialism. Russian Bolshevism and the International acted in perfect accordance with Marxist principles and the interests of the working class, striving to take the revolution beyond the borders assigned to revolutionary Russia by the balance of power. At that time, there was certainly no preaching of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with capitalism, and it was openly declared that the ‘world domination’ of communism – already the world domination of the proletariat over the world bourgeoisie – was the supreme goal of communist revolutionary action. Of course, Avanti! and other publications that share its legalistic positions would today condemn the ‘aggression’ against Poland in 1921. We, on the other hand, do not even reject the term ‘aggression’, because the revolution is always ‘aggression’ against the ruling class, against the violence imposed on the exploited class by the oppression in which it lives. We only regret, even today, almost forty years later, that the revolutionary aggression against agrarian and nationalist Poland was not crowned with success.

To return to Tibet, and give l’Unità its due, we certainly would not have criticised the Chinese armed attack of 1950 if the military conquest had had the effect of bringing the anti-feudal revolution into the nest of the most archaic Asian reaction. But the adaptation to petty-bourgeois legalistic ideologies, the need to keep ideologues like Nehru and Sukarno, who remain the Asian exponents of false bourgeois doctrines, in good favour, the fearful theoretical degeneration have led Chinese ‘communism’ to respect the ‘autonomy’ of Tibet. And limiting itself to taking possession of the territory meant leaving intact the ultra-reactionary structures, which only today l’Unità notices. This is where the denial of principles and the pretension of ‘Machiavellising’ communism lead, if the term ‘Machiavellianism’ is given the improper meaning of the art of deception and intrigue. One begins by declaring that revolutionary action is outdated, that a ‘multiform’ policy is more productive, against which the capitalist bourgeoisie would struggle with difficulty: then one ends up behaving politically exactly like the bourgeoisie.

Nor can it be said that, once the repression was complete, Tibet has reached a turning point in its history. Meanwhile, the theocratic authority has continued to be recognised, accepting that the Panchen Lama should sit on the throne in Lhasa, abandoned by the Dalai Lama. The least the Chinese government could do, in order to be consistent with revolutionary principles, was the separation of powers and the reduction of the Lamas to mere ecclesiastical authorities. Instead, Tibet remains a theocratic monarchy, with the political government still in the hands of those monks who have declared their allegiance to Beijing. By becoming a democratic republic, Tibet would certainly not have embarked on socialism, just as the rest of China has not embarked on socialism. It would only have taken the first step on the ground of the anti-feudal revolution, participating in the renewal movement affecting the entire Afro-Asian area and in particular ‘communist’ China, where the democratic – not socialist – revolution that semi-colonial occupation had prevented for over a century is now underway.

On the contrary, the Beijing government, in order to defend itself from the massive campaign unleashed by Western propaganda, knew no other way than to proclaim once again its intention to respect Tibetan ‘autonomy’. Was it time to take revolutionary measures and deal a fatal blow to Tibetan feudalism? Once again, it was preferred to pose as champions of international legality and ‘coexistence’.