SALUTE IMMORTAL CHAIRMAN GONZALO
FOR HIS CONTRIBUTIONS OF SYNTHESIZING MAOISM AND LEADING THE GREATEST PEOPLE’S
WAR AFTER THE CHINESE REVOLUTION. STILL WE HAVE TO CRITICALLY ANALYZE ERRORS
LIKE 'JETAFURA' OR 'GREAT LEADERSHIP', 'PRINCIPALLY MAOISM' AND 'MILITARIZATION
' OF THE PARTY. PCP (Communist Party of Peru) MADE GREAT STRIDES IN PEOPLE’S
WAR LIKE NO OTHER COUNTRY AND CHAIRMAN GONZALO WAS THE GREATEST MAOIST OF OUR
TIME. STILL WE HAVE TO ANALYSE GROSS ERRORS THAT CAUSED THE REVERSAL IN THE
PEOPLE’S WAR LIKE ADOPTING INSURRECTION LINE IN CITIES AND CLAIMING STAGE OF
STRATEGIC EQUILIBRIUM.
I am publishing the article of Struggle Sessions for comrades to study even if I disagree with important aspects. It highlights and defends the great contributions of chairman Gonzalo and PCP, and thus illuminates the flame of Maoism. However it’s conclusive analysis are not in consonance with the dialectical approach of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. - Harsh Thakor
I was alerted to this article by Harsh Thakor. It is a good, well written article, in fact it is one of the best articles defending President Gonzalo (Abimael Guzmán) and the Communist Party of Peru (PCP/ also known as Shining Path) I have seen in a long time. I am providing this article in 2 parts.
As for the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan (CmPA) and their comments against the PCP, I have written an article debunking the idea that we should take part in any "struggle against Gonzalo Thought." I have made it clear that I reject such treatment of the Gonzaloists.
But as for MOVADEF, they charge that they are actually working for the Peruvian National Intelligence Service (SIN), I find that hard to believe. That is because the Peruvian Government today treats that party as if they are just a front for the Shining Path and are just as dangerous as Shining Path. How is that possible when they don’t use guns or bombs? This is what I wrote and posted in “Peru and the US are threatened by ideas—such as by Maoism and Gonzaloism”:
“That means that the government believes they have beaten PCP once and for all. But are they breaking out Champaign or resending all the draconian police state actions that came as result of being challenged by an armed group—NOT AT ALL.
A lot of young Maoist have joined with ex-PCP people in forming a new political party around the idea of pushing for amnesty for all political prisoners including all those captured guerillas of the PCP, including Chairman Gonzalo (Abimael Guzmán). This new party, MOVADEF (Movimiento Por Amnistia Y Derechos Fundamentales/Movements for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights) has tried to register as a legal political party. The government has treated them as if they are just another formation of the PCP guerillas. In other words—it was not just the violence the government opposed—it was the ideas.
For example:
"...MOVADEF’s increased efforts to gain political legitimacy, as MOVADEF filed papers with
On January 20, 2012, the JNE rejected the application for a second time because it did not comply with requirements. Among the points that JNE cited for rejecting the application was MOVADEF’s lack of commitment to democracy and their failure to break with their previous subversive activities. Further proof of MOVADEF’s lack of objectivity and their ongoing commitment to Shining Path ideology was in the appeal that MOVADEF presented to the JNE for an amnesty for Guzmán, corrected in Guzmán’s own handwriting, along with other documents captured from Shining Path members (El Comercio [Lima], April 27).
- សតិវអតុ
From Struggle
Sessions:
“Once again I repeat that I am
not an impartial, objective critic. My judgments are nourished by my ideals, my
sentiments, my passions.”
− José Carlos Mariátegui. Lima
We open with this quote from
Mariátegui to showcase without question that we are all imprinted with a class
bias. We are biased in our advocacy for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,
the ending of exploitation, the ending of classes and a Communist future. We
are biased in the sense that we are committed to the promotion of
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism and defending it from cretins of
all kinds. We are not alone in our bias. The enemy for all their huff and puff
surrounding “objectivity” in history do so only in the sense to preserve the
existing order. In the case of Senderologists, or those bourgeois academics
dedicated to the “study” of the People’s War in Peru led by the Communist Party of
Peru (PCP), their bias is towards discrediting the most powerful and
influential People’s War since 1949.
The Peruvian People’s War
and Latin America
The People’s War led by the PCP
marks a radical turning point breaking with the traditional model of Latin
American armed struggle that has its origins in the Cuban Revolution and ends
with the Sandinistas and Chapultepec Peace accords that mark the end of the
civil war in El Salvador .
This period of revolution is characterized by a form of romanticism and
promotion of the guerrilla as the vanguard of revolution.
According to Fidel Castro and
Ernesto “Che” Guevara this “foco” would inspire the peasant masses to take arms
and victory crowned with an urban insurrection in the countries of Latin America . With the emergence of the PCP a new model
emerged, one that was more dangerous than the last in its stressing of ideology
and politics. The construction of the PCP and all its instruments were
constituted as a “war machine” in its own words. At the center of the PCP was
its guiding thought that informed all its political and military decisions. The
revolution was methodical and scientific as opposed to “guided by great
feelings of love”. [1] In fact the People’s War in Peru made a sharp break with the
principles of Che Guevara who stated:
“One should never try to start a
revolution against an elected government, for the populace will not turn in a
revolutionary direction while electoral alternatives remain an option and
retain an appeal.”
In the period leading up to the
initiation of the People’s War on May 17, 1980 the International Communist
Movement was in disarray. Chairman Mao had passed away just a few years prior,
his four closest comrades had been routed and the Cultural Revolution was ended
by the revisionists headed up by Deng Xiaoping. It is from this context that
makes the emergence of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism so meteoric. The need to
discredit such a revolution and its vanguard are of the utmost importance to
the international bourgeois order and imperialism.
The Capture of Chairman
Gonzalo
For the Peruvian bourgeoisie the
year 1992 was a dark one. Apart from economic crisis, attacks on the old state
by the revolution had increased to the point that many observers abroad had
begun to suggest the possibility of a victory for the PCP. The Rand Corporation
that year published a report that stated the possibility that the
revolutionaries could surround and lay siege to the capital [2]. In July of
that year, an armed strike paralyzed the city. The PCP declared that it would
negotiate nothing except the government’s surrender and in August launched the
VI Gran Plan Militar which declared the “consolidation of the strategic
equilibrium”. Most Senderologists at this time were projecting a new offensive
that was to coincide with the October elections to congress. Some were
projecting military defeat of the bourgeois government by a revolutionary
movement which had inflicted more casualties, controlled a greater percentage
of territory and was approved in opinion polls by a greater percentage of
citizens than the FMLN in El
Salvador . [3]
Almost unexpectedly on September
12, 1992 agents of DINCOTE police unit captured Gonzalo and two of the three
Politburo members and a cache of the party’s archives. By the end of the year
19 out of 22 of the members of the Central Committee had been captured. Within
12 days of this event Gonzalo and other party members were tried and sentenced
by a military tribunal under draconian laws not recognized by the international
community, which were promoted under the autogolpe of (Alberto) Fujimori. [4]
In an attempt to humiliate him, the
Fujimoristas presented Gonzalo before the world in a cage where Gonzalo then
called forth on supporters to carry out the VI Gran Plan to completion, by the
end of December the PCP had reorganized itself and began to carry out this plan
into action. [5] The Old State was rocked with attacks from all sides and
various committees were formed in Peru and abroad to “Defend the Life
of Chairman Gonzalo”.
A few weeks after the one year
anniversary of Gonzalo’s capture Fujimori read a letter at the United Nations
supposedly from Gonzalo asking to open peace talks with the government. Shortly
thereafter he read a second letter reiterating the calls for peace talks
supposedly from Gonzalo which justified negotiations as needed to “preserve
strengths”. This after a series of escalated attacks following the capture.
Both letters were accompanied with
widespread disbelief from militants and denounced as forgeries. The following
weeks on television the Old
State Old State
“Internal documents of the
terrorist organization reveal that the factional struggle between those who
support the peace agreement and those who support Feliciano is ending with a
clear victor: Abimael Guzman”. [7]
However as El Diario pointed out in
a criticism of the Committee of RIM (CoRIM) to view a police plot and a two
line struggle is an entirely different matter altogether:
“It is an ideological and political
error not to differentiate between a police plot and a two-line struggle. What
is the gist of the ‘peace letters’? Where and how were these concocted? The
‘peace letters’ were fabricated in the offices of the Intelligence Service of
the Peruvian state (SIN). These letters did not originate in any Party
organism, nor are these the product of any internal process of debate within the
Communist Party of Peru. It is an error to hold, as the leaders of RIM do, that
this is ‘a two-line struggle within the ranks of the Communist Party of Peru’.
The authors of these letters are functionaries of SIN, police agents,
high-ranking army officers, and specialists from the US Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA). A police plot is not the same thing as an inner party struggle.
The fact that some capitulators have participated in the elaboration and
distribution of this montage does not make this a two-line struggle within the
PCP.” [8]
Regardless, the confusion
engineered by the Old
State Callao
military base unable to speak to the masses. The sole purpose of these tricks
is to strangle the People’s War and to confuse its supporters and actors.
Nonetheless Chairman Gonzalo has transformed the Callao Naval base prison into
the most shinning trench of combat as the world’s greatest living Communist and
foremost prisoner of war.
The Right Opportunist Line
and Other Deviations from Maoism
Not far behind the Old State are
their running dogs from the “Left” who are united in mission to also see about
the ending of the People’s War in Peru. We are referring principally to the
Right Opportunist Line (ROL) represented by MOVADEF (Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights)
and the Avakianites represented by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP , USA
For the ROL of MOVADEF it is
primarily a capitulationist nature. The ROL seeks to carry about the conclusion
of the people’s war and register itself as a legal party as well as push for
amnesty for those imprisoned in the People’s War by the Old
State in Peru . The maneuverings of the ROL
seek to do the work for the Peruvian National Intelligence Service (SIN) by
promoting the “authenticity” of calls to surrender which allegedly originate
from Chairman Gonzalo.
In every advancement of the masses
there exists a two-line struggle within the liberation movement that is
generally characterized through those who are satisfied with the reforms that
have been given and between those which seek to trek on in the revolutionary
road and carry on ever closer to the mountain tops until they reach it’s peaks.
This is as true in Peru
as it is in any part of the world.
The RCP, USA ’s motivation to portray Gonzalo
as a capitulationist come part and parcel with the desire to promote the figure
of its own chairman: Bob Avakian and its “New Synthesis of Communism”. This
promotion of Avakian and the New Synthesis had a disastrous effect on the
International Communist Movement (ICM) and led to the breaking up of the
Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM) due to its deceitful attempts to
impose Avakianite revisionism on the international communist movement.
The questions regarding the
discrediting of Gonzalo by the Avakianites is not simply a question of
personality but of political ideology. For years in RIM the RCP, USA
had rejected the universality of protracted People’s War which was first
brought forward by the PCP. Instead the RCP, USA
promoted an insurrection line that would lead to civil war in the United States of America , much in line with what
happened post-1917 in Russia .
In the RCP’s view “the launching of the revolutionary war depends on the
eruption of a revolutionary crisis in society.”[9] This is of course is nothing
more than a “wait and see” approach that characterizes revisionists of every
stripe who stand opposed to the possibility of waging a People’s War in the
imperialist nations.
The RCP, USA was also criticized by
various RIM parties for its insistence in viewing Marxism-Leninism-Maoism not
as an integral whole and qualitative leap in Marxism but dependent on “Leninism
as a bridge” that was a tonic for the supposed eurocentrism of Marxism and
“nationalism” of Maoism. The RCP, USA in its adherence to “crisis
theory” is tied up with its insistence of a third world war which is present in
much of its published and documented propaganda. RCP ,
USA in casting aside
eurocentrism adopts American exceptionalism by placing the success of the world
revolution to be hinged on the imperialist nations especially the United States .
In Conquer the World? The International Proletariat Must and Will Avakian says
this much:
“In the West—and I am talking about
the West in terms of the imperialist countries, including the Soviet Union—it’s
proven to be more difficult in this period to make revolution than in the East,
the East being the colonial and dependent countries in what’s been called the
‘third world.’ But it’s also proven to be extremely difficult to lead and
maintain revolution where it can be and where it has been more readily made,
and there’s no easy way out of this.
Of course, if we succeed in making
a qualitative breakthrough (which it would be) in seizing power in one (or
more) of the imperialist citadels, that would in fact be a new leap forward for
the international proletariat and would create new freedom, although we should
have no illusions that making revolution in an imperialist country means that
the proletariat when it comes to power will inherit that country and its
productive forces as they were, for example, five years before the revolution
began—and probably the world war too.” [10]
This stands in contrast to the PCP
which posed the principle contradiction in the world as imperialism. The RCP,
USA thus in centering crisis theory and by defacto the United States as
principle in the proletarian revolution has developed from a perverted and
incomplete view of Maoism and can never be counted as a Maoist Party.
In a statement released by the CmPA
on June 17, 2018 [11] we see the rejection for an emergence of a guiding
thought in the course of revolution for an abstraction of Maoism, it fails to
apply the general to the particular and that in doing so each revolution will
have guiding thoughts unique to their national conditions.
“At this moment claiming a further
evolution of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is baseless, whether these claims are the
revisionism of ‘Prachanda Path’ and ‘Avakian’s New Synthesis’ or the
deviationism of ‘Gonzalo Thought.’ Our Party has always emphasized that
premature assertions such as Gonzalo Thought, Prachanda Path and the Avakianite
New Synthesis are historically responsible for the collapse of RIM.”
Here the oft repeated and erroneous
claim is made that Gonzalo Thought and even Prachanda Thought were viewed by
its proponents as a “further evolution of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism”. The C(m)PA
correctly views the Avakianites and their “New Synthesis” as taking up
this claim, as they do so themselves, but nowhere does the PCP ever claim that
Gonzalo Thought is universal to all nations, or that it is the ideology of the
Eight organizations in Latin America that they
cite. They can bring up no citations in their statement to back up these
claims. Here is what the PCP states about Gonzalo Thought:
“[R]evolutions give rise to a
thought that guides them, which is the result of the application of the
universal truth of the ideology of the international proletariat to the
concrete conditions of each revolution; a guiding thought indispensable to
reach victory…Without Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Gonzalo Thought cannot be conceived,
because the latter is the creative application of the former to our reality…It
is the application of the Peruvian revolution; hence Gonzalo Thought is
specifically principal for the Communist Party of Peru and the revolution it
leads.”[12]
Gonzalo himself addresses the particularity of Gonzalo Thought toPeru
further:
Gonzalo himself addresses the particularity of Gonzalo Thought to
“Gonzalo Thought is none other than
the application of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to our concrete reality. This means
that it is principal specifically for our Party, for the people’s war and for
the revolution in our country, and I want to emphasize that. But for us,
looking at our ideology in universal terms, I emphasize once again, it is
Maoism that is principal.” [13]
Nothing more can be clearer. The
PCP viewed Gonzalo Thought as a guiding thought applicable to the concrete
conditions of Peru, not as an “evolution” that goes beyond
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the CmPA claims.
Their motivation in seeking to
attribute a universality to Gonzalo Thought that it does not claim is motivated
in part by their desire to peddle the historiography that it was RIM and not
the PCP which synthesized Maoism, it is also motivated by the desire to refound
RIM based on abstract Maoism of which include the likes of the opportunists
kicked out of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada, and the Maoist
Communist Party of Italy. In a 2011 statement the CmPA stated as much in that
neo-RIM would be based on:
“Marxism-Leninism-Maoism—and only
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and nothing less and nothing more than that—in the
present situation is the ideological weapon of the international communist
movement. (By nothing less we mean “post MLM” “Marxism” or “Marxism-Leninism”;
by nothing more we mean the formulations that have been added like “thought” or
“path” or “new-synthesis”.)” [14]
CmPA here once again in not so
subtle language rejects the concept of a guiding thought. That is it rejects
the application of MLM to the particular conditions of a nation, for that is
all a guiding thought is. They conceive of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as a mere
abstraction since without a guiding thought it cannot be applied in revolution.
The CmPA are no amateurs as their movement is one of the oldest in the ICM,
they are well aware of the writings of Chairman Gonzalo enough to critique it
as a self-proclaimed “evolution” of MLM. This distortion which cites no sources
is then a deliberate fabrication, one that is motivated to impose themselves,
like the Avakianites, as leaders in the International Communist Movement.
To Be Continued=>
Notes
[1]. Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
Socialism and Man in Cuba .
March 1965.
[2] Gordon H. McClintock. From the
Sierra to the Cities: The Urban Campaign of the Shining Path. RAND Corporation,
1992.
[3] Cynthia McClintock. Theories of
Revolution and the Case of Peru .
In Shining Path of Peru ,
ed. David Scott Palmer. 1994. p. 242.
[4] Carlos Ivan Degregori. How
Difficult It is To be God: Shining Path’s Politics at War in Peru , 1980-1999. p. 28.
[5] ibid. p. 62
[6]Carlos, Ivan Degregori.
After the Fall of Abimael Guzman. In The Peruvian Labyrinth: Polity, Society,
Economy, ed. Maxwell A. Cameron and Philip Mauceri. p. 189.
[7] Carlos Tapia, Diario La
Republica, 18 August 1994.
[8] El Diario Internacional. A
Response to the ‘Investigators’ of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement
(RIM). In A World to Win Magazine #22. 1996.
[9] Revolutionary Communist Party , USA Party , USA
https://revcom.us/margorp/a-pw.htm
https://revcom.us/margorp/a-pw.htm
[10] Bob Avakian. Conquer the
World? The International Proletariat Must and Will. 1988
[11] Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan .
A Glimpse At the Joint International Statement of the Eight Latin American
Maoist Parties and Organizations. June 17, 2018.
[12] Fundamental Documents of the
Communist Party of Peru .
Fourth Sword Publications 2016. p. 12
[13] El Diario. Interview with
Chairman Gonzalo. Fourth Sword Publications, 2018. p. 9-10.
[14] Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan .
A Decisive Struggle Must be Waged for the Formation of a New International
Communist (M-L-M) Organization. January 2011.
http://www.sholajawid.org/english/main_english/A decisive
Struggl_sh_25.html
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