Debate:

SUPPORT THE PEOPLE’S WARS AND ARMED STRUGGLES IN THE WORLD BY COMBATTING AND CRUSHING REVISIONISM AND OPPORTUNISM!

The current situation in the international communist movement, and in different countries where people’s war and armed struggle is being waged under the banner of Maoism, make the need for ideological and political two-line struggle even more urgent. First of all, we reaffirm ourselves in the principles of proletarian internationalism, and more specifically in Chairman Gonzalo, Gonzalo thought and the Communist Party of Peru, its Central Committee and its whole system of Party leadership; therefore, we support and struggle for the initiation and development of people’s war in every country on earth, which naturally includes the revolution in India. A victorious people’s war in India - crushing the old state, throwing out the imperialists and crushing semi-feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism, carrying out the New-democratic revolution, establishing the new power as the joint dictatorship of the revolutionary classes under the leadership of the proletariat and then without interruption continuing with the socialist revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat with cultural revolutions until Communism- would be a great and important victory for the international proletariat. The sooner such a victory is realized, the better, and thus it is the duty of all communists and revolutionaries, as an expression of our proletarian internationalism, to give our support to our comrades in India.

However, we insist that that support cannot and will not serve the victory of the Indian proletariat and people if it does not base itself on principles, i.e. the principles of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism. If the international support for the Indian revolution tries to avoid criticism and debate, to avoid the two-line struggle against revisionism and opportunism, and instead apply the revisionist thesis that conciliation will lead to unity (“two unite into one”), it does in fact not serve the proletariat and the people at all, but only defends the interests of a few “leaders”, and more importantly, it serves the counterrevolutionary plans of imperialism and reaction. It is a characteristic of revisionists, and very much so of the new revisionists of today, that they avoid struggle in any way they can. They are the ones that, when differences arise and contradictions sharpen, simply prefer to leave, to capitulate altogether or form all kinds of new groups and organizations. Opportunists will follow and support whatever party or movement that at the moment has the most guns or gets the most publicity in the bourgeois press – because they are so eager for a rapid victory, so eager to secure important roles for themselves as “great personalities” within their own lifetime, hoping to get posts.  We communists must not fall into that trap. We must be prepared for protracted war, for long years of struggle, and understand that if the ideological and political line is incorrect, our victories will in fact not be victories at all.

 

The situation of the people’s war in Peru and the importance of Chairman Gonzalo in the world

The importance of the Communist Party of Peru and the People’s War in Peru for the international communist movement and the proletarian world revolution is undeniable and has been widely recognized: It was because of Chairman Gonzalo and his red line that the first People’s War was initiated in the world after the revisionist coup in China, and it was Chairman Gonzalo who defined Maoism as the third, new and higher stage of Marxism. As the people’s war in Peru developed, it gained massive support among the international proletariat and the oppressed peoples, and inspired communists in many countries to take up Maoism and initiate armed struggle. It is not strange then, that the world reaction saw the PCP and its Great Leadership as a grave threat that they wanted to destroy by any means necessary. Having learned from their own mistakes, the enemy understood that simply killing the communists and the revolutionary people of Peru would not be sufficient (although they tried their best to do that too). Yankee imperialism and their reactionary Peruvian lackeys came up with the hoax of the “peace accords”, hoping to 1) defame the Great Leader of the Peruvian revolution and 2) turn the PCP into a legal, bourgeois, revisionist party, a “maoist” party in name only, integrated into their own system of exploitation and oppression. This was important to them not only in order to “save” Peru from revolution, but perhaps more importantly, to “save” the world from Chairman Gonzalo’s and the PCP’s dangerous influence in the world.

Were they successful in this? Were they able to annihilate the people’s war in Peru, the red line of Chairman Gonzalo and its influence in the world? As we know, the PCP continued to apply Gonzalo Thought and has not stopped the people’s war even for a second, and its influence in the world continued to play an important part as an example to follow in the formation of Maoist Parties and the initiation of revolutionary armed struggles in several countries. However, it is also a fact that the enemy did manage to inflict great damage and strike hard blows against the Peruvian revolution, and today the PCP continues to lead the people’s war under difficult circumstances. We also know that their plan on the international level has been partly successful in achieving the isolation of the PCP, mainly because the new revisionists played along with these plans perfectly, doing exactly what the imperialists wanted them to – and they continue to do so today. A part of this was to try to undermine and divide the PCP’s generated organ for the Party work abroad – the MPP – and in this the new revisionists have played a central role as well. The ROL and the hoax of “peace accords” in Peru was a pilot plan, and after applying it in Peru they went on to do the same in Nepal; and they are without a doubt attempting to do the same in other countries. To achieve this, it was and is necessary for imperialism, reaction and revisionism to isolate the PCP from the rest of the ICM, by slandering Chairman Gonzalo, the PCP and its ideological and political line.

So, in the light of the above, what does it mean when some “solidarity groups” around the world organize support campaigns for the people’s wars in India and the Philippines, but mention nothing about Peru? What does it mean when some intellectualoid supposed defenders of Gonzalo Thought repeat the very lies spread by the reaction – that “the PCP no longer exists” and that “now there are only competing fractions”? (And the Indian comrades must be quite familiar with that kind of hoax from the reaction in their own country). And furthermore, what does it mean when the same people call themselves supporters of the revolution in India, but do not say a word about the significant contributions of Chairman Gonzalo, not a word about sharing the experiences from Peru with the Parties and organizations in other countries?

Just like an older type of revisionists reject Maoism, with the argument that Teng and his capitalist roaders were able to take power in China (supposedly proving that “Maoism does not work”), today’s intellectualoids reject Gonzalo Thought with the argument that it is the cause of the supposed “defeat” of the people’s war in Peru. And just like those old revisionists reject the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, saying that it was only a “personal power struggle”, the intellectualoids now proclaim that “there is no more PCP” and that the PCP and its Central Committee is only one of many fractions in a struggle for personal power. The fact that some of these intellectualoids present themselves as “defenders” of Gonzalo Thought makes their opportunism even more blatant.
Their cowardly so-called criticism, their demand that the PCP should have expelled or executed the opportunist renegades (the LOL), echoes the revisionist Hoxha’s argument against the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, i.e. the revisionist idea of the monolithic Party. It is clear that this “criticism” was nothing but a pretext to justify their own capitulation and opportunism. Facing a difficult situation, they preferred to take the “easy way out”, forming their new grouplets to become supposedly prestigious leaders of petit-bourgeois “solidarity” organizations, conciliate with revisionism and thus serve the plans of the enemy. Note how these self-proclaimed leaders, without principles, now look for allies everywhere, desperately trying to find out what “fraction” to collaborate with in their attempt to undermine the PCP and its Central Committee. Perhaps they have found what they were looking for in the Internet phenomenon that claims to be a base of the PCP, and that now says the ROL and the LOL are “deviations that need to align themselves with the line of the Party”. The position of the PCP is struggle to the death against the ROL and the LOL and against all capitulation.

“Even if the guiding line of the revolution is correct, it is impossible to have a sure guarantee against setbacks and sacrifices in the course of the revolution. So long as a correct line is adhered to, the revolution is bound to triumph in the end.” (The Polemic on the General Line of the International Communist Movement, Communist Party of China, 1965)

The old anti-maoists and the current new revisionists, grouplets and intellectualoids have one thing in common: all their arguments are but pretexts to justify their own opportunism; their willingness to follow those who at the moment mobilize more masses, or have more guns, or receive more recognition from bourgeois intellectualoids – because they care more about their own prestige and their dream of having an important role, as individuals, in “great events” in their own lifetime. We say; No! The fact that the enemy manages to inflict damage, the fact that there are twists and turns on the road of revolution, does not mean that our line is wrong. On the contrary, the experiences of the people’s war in Peru and in other countries confirm the universal validity of Maoism as well as the validity of its application to the Peruvian revolution, Gonzalo Thought. Furthermore, the present situation in the ICM confirm that Chairman Gonzalo’s and the PCP’s warnings concerning the ideological and political problems in the ICM and in the RIM were correct, i.e. concerning the hegemonist aspirations of the RCP-USA and Avakian, and concerning the revisionist line in Nepal. Those who upheld Nepal as the supposed “new torch of the world revolution” and labeled the PCP “dogmatic” because it took up the struggle against this revisionism, have now “suddenly” realized the obvious, that the leaders of the Nepalese party are a bunch of revisionists that serve no-one but themselves and imperialism. But have we ever heard any kind of self-criticism from these comrades? Once again, opportunists do not apply the Maoist method of criticism and self-criticism, but the revisionist method of conciliation and dirty struggle.  

 

The imperialist plan for “peace accords”

Based on the experiences in Peru with the hoax of the “peace accords”, the ROL and the fact that this was a plan conceived and led by yankee imperialism, and based on the analysis of the international situation, the PCP has established that there is today a world-scale imperialist plan for “peace accords”, with which they hope to annihilate every revolutionary armed struggle, especially those led by Maoist parties, by turning them into “tamed” Maoists, i.e. bourgeois legal organizations that conciliate with the reaction, participate in elections and become part of the old system of exploitation and oppression (or turn into armed revisionists waging armed struggle to “put pressure” on the old state in order to get a piece of its power, like we see in connection with the ROL and the LOL in Peru). To achieve this, they hope for old revisionist positions to gain influence within the revolutionary movement: the old theory of “peaceful transition”, the old “personality cult” slander etc. In short, imperialism wants to impose the following ideas on the revolutionary movements:

Of course, these ideas have already become sacred principles for all the old revisionists around the world and a big part of the masses they mobilize (especially in the imperialist countries). But through parties such as the RCP-USA and its leader, defined as the new revisionists, they are now being spread among those who call themselves Maoists as well. What is Avakian’s “new synthesis” if not precisely the ideas presented above? What is Prachanda’s and the other Nepalese revisionists’ line if not the application of these ideas under the guise of Maoism? And guided by these ideas, these new revisionists want to form their so-called “new international” to impose the same ideas all over the world.

If we communists and revolutionaries do not recognize that this imperialist plan exists, and if we do not clearly and firmly condemn it and crush it, we leave the door wide open for revisionism to fulfill the goals of that plan. While some may condemn the revisionist traitors and their “peace accords” in Nepal, they still defend the “possibility” of peace accords in other countries (and justifying it by referring to earlier “peace accords” in the history of the ICM – which took place under completely different circumstances). In the world today, when imperialism is weakened by its final crisis and its internal contradictions, and when it has launched its plan of “peace accords” to accompany their ongoing repression and genocide against the revolutionary peoples – like the PCP says: Here, like in the whole world, there is no room for capitulation, peace accords, or truces at all!

 

Concerning the revolution in India

When we look at the current situation of the revolution in India, we must do it in the light of the above facts. If we want a victorious people’s war to be developed in India, we must base our position on the principles of MLM and carry out ideological and political struggle in order to ward off revisionism and opportunism. It is from that starting point that we express our concerns about the revolution in India and some of the positions expressed by the Indian comrades.

A part of the problem is precisely the lack of willingness to openly debate, and the fact that there are few documents of the Central Committee of the CPI(M) that express clear positions on the urgent questions mentioned above. Instead, there are a large number of documents, or interviews and statements by individual leaders that express more general positions but avoid the most urgent points of discussion. To a large degree, the statements of the CPI(M) can be found in books and articles by the bourgeois intellectuals that the Indian comrades seem to rely on to publish their positions. In general, the international movement of support for the Indian revolution seems to base itself to a large extent on the support of such bourgeois intellectuals and on petit-bourgeois “solidarity” work. While such bourgeois and/or petit-bourgeois intellectuals, like the Swedish author Jan Myrdal or the Indian author Arundhati Roy, might very well serve the cause of proletarian revolution if the communists are able to correctly manage that form of support , they also serve revisionist and reactionary goals under other circumstances. To take Myrdal as an example; his reports from China from the 60s and 70s did play a positive role, but this does not mean that he is a communist or any kind of revolutionary. Since the revisionist coup in China, he has consistently failed to clearly and firmly reject and condemn Teng and his followers; in fact, his only comment on the Tiananmen massacre in ’89 was that it was “understandable” and “necessary”, not to mention his positions concerning comrade Stalin or the revisionists in Yugoslavia.

Today, when one of the most urgent points of discussion in the ICM is precisely the question of Nepal and the position on “peace accords”, the CPI(M) has not taken a clear position. The most recent document stating the PCI(M)’s position on Nepal is from 2009, and while it does condemn the revisionist line in Nepal, it does so expressing positions that play into the hands of the enemy. For example:

“’Fight against dogmatism’ has become a fashionable phrase among many Maoist revolutionaries. They talk of discarding “outdated” principles of Lenin and Mao and to develop MLM in the “new conditions” that are said to have emerged in the world of the 21st century. Some of them describe their endeavour to “enrich and develop” MLM as a new path or thought, and though this is initially described as something confined to revolution in their concerned country, it inexorably assumes a “universal character” or “universal significance” in no time. And in this exercise individual leaders are glorified and even deified to the extent that they appear infallible. Such glorification does not help in collective functioning of Party committees and the Party as a whole and questions on line are hardly ever raised as they stem from an infallible individual leader. In such a situation it is extremely difficult on the part of the CC, not to speak of the cadres, to fight against a serious deviation in the ideological-political line, or in the basic strategy and tactics even when it is quite clear that it goes against the interests of revolution. The “cult of the individual” promoted in the name of path and thought provides a certain degree of immunity to the deviation in line if it emanates from that individual leader. (Open Letter to Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) from the Communist Party of India (Maoist), 2009)

Here, the Indian comrades take the just and correct rejection of the revisionist line in Nepal as a pretext to uphold the crushed thesis of Avakian in order to also reject the principle of Maoism’s creative application to the conditions of each country, and to repeat the old revisionist thesis of  ”the personality cult”, which is a central part of imperialism’s counterrevolutionary offensive in the world. That is, the same thesis that was used to attack socialism in the USSR, then to attack Chairman Mao, the Cultural Revolution and Maoism, and today to attack the people’s war in Peru and  Chairman Gonzalo in order to prevent them from inspiring communists and revolutionaries in other countries. The question is, do the Indian comrades consider that Chairman Mao and Mao Tse-Tung Thought, the creative application of Marxism-Leninism to the conditions of the Chinese revolution, were also an example of ”cult of the individual” or ”glorification” that did ”not help in collective functioning of Party committees and the Party as a whole”? And when its universal character as Maoism was established by Chairman Gonzalo, did the Indian comrades consider that to be a mistake? When it comes to Gonzalo thought, the PCP has never claimed it to have universal character. It does however establish that it contains universal contributions to the universal ideology of the international proletariat, and the PCP has insisted and continues to insist on debating those contributions with the Parties around the world in an open and honest debate, based on objective facts. The CPI(M) continues to avoid discussing those points, but instead dismiss them completely through generalized statements such as the above.

Futhermore, while the CPI(M) apparently does reject the Nepalese party’s participation in bourgeois parliament, it still considers ”peace accords” to be a useful method in India, and is apparently unwilling to defend that position in two-line struggle within the ICM. Documents from the CPI(M) and its representatives repeatedly express the position that their revolutionary violence is only a question of ”self-defense”, like in the following statement:

”We are ready to talk if the government withdraws its forces. Violence is not part of our agenda. Our violence is counter violence.” (“Kishenji [Koteshwar Rao] Interview on Armed Struggle, Peace Talks and People’s Democracy”, Tehelka magazine, Nov. 13, 2009)

This position is echoed by the support organizations in other countries, that describe the armed struggle of the Indian people as mere self-defense, but avoid taking position on questions of two-line struggle against revisionism (including armed revisionism).

While some statements by the CPI(M) (like the Open Letter from 2009, quoted above) reject all bourgeois democratic illusions, there are more recent statements that express a different position, appealing to the ruling classes’ supposed democratic goodwill and insisting on peace talks:

Even according to the laws formulated by these ruling classes, democratic rights would apply to our party. So the ban on our party should be lifted. Ban on our mass organizations should be lifted. Absolute democratic opportunities should be created for mass mobilization. Only in conditions where we could work democratically, we can come forward for talks. (Interview with Comrade Ganapathy, General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist): “Nobody Can Kill the Ideas of ‘Azad’! Nobody Can Stop the Advancement of the Revolution!!”, 2010)

The PCP insists on the firm rejection and unmasking of all bourgeois democratic illusions, and on the need to take firm position for the revolutionary violence, not primarily as self-defense but as the way to destroy the old state and build the new. Yes, it is necessary and correct to condemn that the bourgeoisie does not follow its own principles, it is necessary and correct to defend the bourgeois democratic rights conquered by the people, and it is necessary and correct to manage legal forms of struggle as well as illegal – but the first and principal point must always be to reject completely the idea of bourgeois democracy as a means to revolution and to uphold the principle of revolutionary violence, not as a ”last resort” or a way to put pressure on the ruling class, but as a fundamental part of the highest military theory and strategy of the international proletariat – the people’s war.

”If the revolution demands violence, authority, discipline, I am for violence, for authority, for discipline. I accept them, in one block, with all their horrors, without cowardly reservations” (José Carlos Mariátegui, founder of the Communist Party of Peru)

“We Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, Gonzalo Thought reaffirm ourselves in the revolutionary violence as universal law for taking the power, and in that it is the core in replacing one class with another. The democratic revolutions are done with revolutionary violence, the socialist revolutions are done with revolutionary violence, and facing the restorations we will take the power back through the revolutionary violence and we will maintain the continuation of the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat with revolutionary violence through cultural revolutions; we will only go to communism with the revolutionary violence and as long as there is one place on Earth where exploitation exists we will finish it with the revolutionary violence.” (International Line of the PCP, 1988)

”Lenin said that Engels made the euology to the revolutionary violence; that is what befits a Marxist, a revolutionary. What befits a reactionary is to praise pacifism, the false peace of the bayonets. These are two positions, each of which has its peace and each of which manages its war. In the world there is a frantic eagerness to talk about peace, about pacification, about dialogue, an unbridled excess of bourgeois and petitbourgeois positions of the most vulgar pacifism, a stupid venom to poison the class, the masses.” (III Plenum of the Central Committee, Central Document, PCP 1992)

The question then is, do the Indian comrades consider this form of pacifism a form of “tactic” to attract the support of petit-bourgeois and bourgeois groups and individuals? If such support is based on bourgeois rather than proletarian principles, what kind of support will it be? If the politics of a Communist Party is adapted to bourgeois democratic principles, and if that Party worries about respecting bourgeois “human rights”, for fear of being labeled “terrorists” by the reaction, what does that say about the line of that Party? We have already seen how the Nepalese party gained support from all kinds of revisionists and wide attention in the international reactionary media – and the more peace accords they made, the more they sold out the blood of the Nepalese people, the more “positive attention” they received. In that case, we all know it had nothing to do with “tactics” as Prachanda used to say, but everything to do with revisionist treason. Never has Chairman Mao’s famous quote been more appropriate:

“I hold that it is bad as far as we are concerned if a person, a political party, an army or a school is not attacked by the enemy, for in that case it would definitely mean that we have sunk to the level of the enemy. It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work.” (To Be Attacked by the Enemy Is Not a Bad Thing but a Good Thing (May 26, 1939)

We call the Indian comrades to state their positions clearly and firmly in open debate. Our criticisms and our questions are not, like the new revisionists sometimes claim, an expression of “dogmatism” or “Peruvian nationalism”, but they are in fact a firm and honest expression of our support for the Indian revolution and our defense of the principles of the international proletariat. The PCP does not in any way wish to impose its politics on any other Party. The PCP rejects the revisionist idea of “exporting revolution”, and upholds that the Communist Party in each country must apply Maoism to the concrete conditions of their own revolution. But when the PCP points out that there is a reactionary plan to draw attention away from the Peruvian revolution (and spread the hoax that it has been defeated), it does so because it understands the ideological and political motives behind that plan on world level, and because it knows that the imperialist plan of “peace accords” in practice means more genocide, more repression and more misery for the proletariat and the peoples of the world.

The counterrevolutionary war, all its genocide and brutal repression, can never be stopped by appealing to the empathy or morality of reactionaries, or to the charity or solidarity work of petit-bourgeois do-gooders in the imperialist countries – it can only be stopped by basing oneself on the deepest and broadest masses and forging them in revolutionary violence, developing people’s war until communism.