Communists: My Daddy Can Beat Your Daddy Several Centuries from Now

The ideological issue between Moscow and Peking, once so murky, was assuming an almost dazzling clarity.

Out last week were the latest statistics for Soviet industrial production, showing a 7½% increase in the first half of 1964. Many Western experts suspect the real figure to be about 5%, but even if correct, it would be the smallest percentage increase claimed since 1942. The usual claim in recent years has been closer to 10%. The lag appears to be caused by crop setbacks, which affected the food production industry, and a sharp drop in the increase in productivity. To cope with this, Khrushchev talks more and more about providing greater incentives, only recently announced a 20% to 40% wage increase for some 18 million doctors, white-collar workers, teachers.

This is the kind of thing Nikita's rivals in Red China watch with growing suspicion. As Peking put it in its latest blast, a 24,000-word article in People's Daily: "A privileged bourgeois stratum has emerged in Soviet society." In fact, Khrushchev's "phony Communism" is restoring the "forces of capitalism" and substituting for the class struggle "the struggle for a good dish of goulash." It is the "Communism of the American way of life, and Communism seeking credits from the devil."

Western Russia-and China-watchers are carefully studying the attack, and Berlin Kremlinologist Richard Lowenthal concludes that, far from being merely another anti-Russian blast, it is in effect "Mao Tse-tung's ideological testament." For the document warns that the same sort of wicked reversion to capitalism that is happening in the

Soviet Union could also happen in China. The Chinese party has had some cases of "degeneration," says the article, and there must be ceaseless vigilance to keep the newer generation of Chinese leaders from going soft, as the West hopes they will. Concluded Mao's testament: "A very long period of time is needed to decide who will win the struggle between socialism and capitalism. Several decades won't do it. Success requires anywhere from one to several centuries."