Gorbachev Calls for Peaceful Competition With West

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev said Wednesday that capitalists and Communists must learn to coexist and compete peacefully, even if they never love each other.

“We do not expect our class adversary to become enamored of us,” Gorbachev said. “We do not need that at all. We count on his reckoning with the realities and realizing that we are all in the same boat, and we must behave ourselves so that it will not capsize.”

He made the observation at a Kremlin meeting of foreign political parties and workers’ organizations in Moscow for the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Traditional Allies

But he appeared to be aiming his message at President Reagan and the conservative leaders of other Western countries that have been the traditional adversaries of the Communist Bloc.

Alexander N. Yakovlev, a member of the Politburo and a close associate of Gorbachev, has said that Gorbachev firmly intends to pursue improved relations with the United States. But Gorbachev, in his brief remarks Wednesday, called for international cooperation on a broad range of global problems beyond the arms control issues he will discuss with Reagan at a meeting in Washington starting Dec. 7.

“No country is likely to radically solve the energy problem on its own, any more than develop the riches of the world’s oceans,” he said. “Only joint action can weaken and remove the global danger of an ecological seizure. Finally, only the collective reason of humankind is a match for the job of going into outer space, and further to the solar and stellar spaces.”

At one point, Gorbachev acknowledged that socialism is trailing the capitalist world in technology, but he added that “the conditions for overcoming this lag are taking shape as perestroika , the revolutionary reorganization of Soviet society, makes headway.”

Removing Justification

He said that the international impact of his program is removing the political justification for an arms buildup in the West.

“Awesome signals are also being issued by the financial system, which is not coping with the super-burden of the arms race, the astronomical state debts and the hegemonic economic egoism,” he said.

His speech, carried by the official news agency Tass, contained assurances for leaders of other national Communist parties who have assembled in Moscow for the anniversary.

“As we set forth our concepts of the new way of thinking, we do not in the least claim a monopoly on the truth,” he said. “We are engaged in a search ourselves and invite others to look jointly for ways whereby humanity could cross the mine field of our times and emerge in the 21st Century in a nuclear-free and nonviolent world.”

He had some harsh words about Moscow’s fading prestige in the 1970s, when Leonid I. Brezhnev presided over what is now called the “stagnation period.”

“Like much else in the modern world, the Communist movement needs renewal and qualitative changes,” he said. “We ourselves felt strongly how socialism’s international impulse was declining in the stagnation period.”