SOME COMMENTS ON THE DOCUMENT “ON MAOISM ITSELF” OF THE RCP OF CANADA- By the Communist Party of Ecuador- Red Sun- Part 2

In publishing this article I also wanted to provide the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada document listed below, “MAOISM AS ITSELF: AGAINST THE IDEALISM OF THE “MAINLY MAOIST” CURRENT.” So far I have been unable to find it on line. I know it can be found somewhere because it is discussed in an article, “Unitary Road Update,” on Woodsmokeblog. So I will continue to look for the article. Any document that specifically names another article calls out for us to find and post that article. Once I find that article I may want to add my own comments on that article and this one. So far I find it interesting that Communist Party of Ecuador- Red Sun, said they no little about the comrades of RCP Canada. That is one of the problems we all have when dealing with parties of other countries. There may be circumstances that make it understandable that political parties of different countries may have different opinions based on their influences by such things as the local culture and local conditions. Also, due to the length of this article, I have broken it into two parts.

-SJ Otto

 

From Communist Party of Ecuador- Red Sun/ Partido Communista Del Ecuador- Sol Rojo.

To see this document in Spanish, click here.

The comrades of the RCP, consider that even before the People's War in Peru there was already a universal recognition of Maoism without being Maoism (¿), however, the comrades refuse to recognize that Maoism, as such, was defined, recognized, wielded and defended as such, as the third and superior stage of Marxism-Leninism with the beginning and development of the people's war in Peru.   

The comrades, in a clear idealistic manifestation, refuse to understand how and under what conditions Mao Tse-tung Thought was generated and how it came to be defined as Maoism; initially within the framework of the revolution in a country like China with characteristics different from those that existed in Russia before the Bolshevik revolution; on the basis of inter-imperialist contradictions (USA_URSS);  world wars, cultural revolution; international proletarian movement, national liberation movement, struggle between Marxism and revisionism and later  the development of the GP in Peru.

The RCP points out that: Before the People's War in Peru, did Mao Tse-tung Thought already have the same weight and meaning as what we now know as Maoism? No comrades; After the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Khrushchev, Deng Xiaoping and his clique took pains to distort it, besides attacking it, they always tried to show it as unfeasible; Nor was it put in tension in Vietnam or in any other place on the planet, as indeed it was done in Peru in the  reconstitution of the Party and other instruments for the revolution; where Chairman Gonzalo, Gonzalo Thought and the Party had a deeper understanding of Mao Tse-tung Thought initiating and developing people's war, otherwise it would have been impossible for this to happen and with it the recognition of what today we communists of the world, MARXISM-LENINISM MAOISM.

And no comrades, when the PCP and particularly Chairman Gonzalo systematizes Mao Tse-tung thought, it does not do so "in a vacuum" regardless of practice -as you point out-, it does so certainly by analyzing the experience of the Chinese revolution and Furthermore, in the course of preparing, initiating and developing the People's War in Peru, that is, validating the theory in practice, in fact, of course, without underestimating the important two-line struggle that was generated at the time. MRI.               

As a means of arguing its presentation, the RCP points out that Stalin “did not systematize Leninism. He defended Leninism ”. Yes, it is true, Stalin defended it, but they ignore a fundamental fact, which before then defined it as such, as Leninism and applied it in a new context, in that of the Cold War, in the counteroffensive of Yankee Imperialism with the support of the imperialist and capitalist powers of Europe in and after World War II, and do not forget comrades that it was precisely Stalin in 1924 who affirmed that "you could not be a Marxist if you were not a Marxist-Leninist", just like us, Particularly the communists of Ecuador say it with force, determination and without ambiguity, at present you cannot be a Marxist-Leninist without being a Maoist and in a particular way,  To be a Maoist today is to recognize the contributions of universal validity of Gonzalo Thought, in such a way that we consider   Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Gonzalo Thought! considering that this is the correct ideological line to develop the people's war in our country and put it at the service of the   World Proletarian Revolution .

 

(…) The comrades of Canada have an inexplicable disagreement with the most elementary Marxist, historical materialist, dialectical analysis; in fact, it easily reminds us of Avakián's vain pretensions. No comrades, you cannot compare the contributions Lenin made to Marxism, or Chairman Mao to Marxism-Leninism; We are not there for that, although it is true it is a whole, as you well point out, they are also a dialectical sequence that becomes a synthesis, although it is true that it begins with Marx and Engels, we cannot think that it will end with Chairman Mao and Maoism. That is idealism, comrades, mechanism of the grossest;

We even find it rude, comrades when they point out that “how is it possible that the Communist Party of China, several decades before the emergence of“ Gonzalo Thought ”, managed not only to lead a people's war but to lead it to victory? How is it that the Vietnamese communists, several years before the so-called "synthesis" of Maoism, managed to do the same? " in relation to what was sustained in one of the statements in which we pointed out the impossibility of a people's war without having assimilated the contributions with universal validity of Gonzalo Thought.

They want to compare and oppose the People's War in Peru with other historical processes. They again throw a handful of lentils into the river, this time pretending a tsunami: “ even the Vietnamese resistance wars against French and American imperialism (…) had a much greater influence than the People's War in Peru in the world and that unlike the latter, resulted in victoria ”What an analysis !; What a comparison! Comrades, analyze the context; the characteristics of the war in Vietnam were of national liberation, they did not consider the possibility of developing a New Democracy revolution; Furthermore, in 1967 they chose to follow the Soviet social-imperialism led by Khrushchev and implement in Vietnam a bureaucratic dictatorship over its people, alien to the leadership of the proletariat. However, and unperturbed, comrades countless times accuse us comrades of the PCB-FR and "their satellites" of being idealistic, petty-bourgeois, of being ignorant of historical materialism. (?)

 

(…) People's War until communism

The comrades of Canada also give each other ways to point their rifles on the slogan: People's War until Communism!

Likewise, they qualify it as wrong; as a “ reduction of what the people's war means ”, they consider that people's war is a “form of revolutionary action and a strategy to dismantle the military forces of the class enemy and take power” (…) “ that once power is conquered throughout the country and the enemy armed forces have been crushed, the military confrontation ends for the simple reason that there is no longer a militarily organized adversary to face r ”.

Comrades. The seizure of power alone does not represent anything; Nor does the destruction of the military apparatus guarantee that the enemy has been totally liquidated. In fact, to some extent he regains his strength because imperialism is going to support him more and better.  Power is expressed not only in the arrest of the means of production; Power is no longer only expressed in the military apparatus, it is also shown solidly in the field of consciousness and in another aspect that has become very powerful today: the militarization of societies.

The imperialism of today is obviously not the imperialism of the last century; deploys new strategies, they have been recreating them for decades in Colombia to combat armed revisionism using alternate apparatuses, paramilitary groups, or opposing masses against masses. They have done it in Peru, where imperialism put its greatest effort. Let's see what happens in Syria, they continue with that line of balkanization; they instrumentalize the masses of the same countries to weaken or overthrow governments or states. Comrades, it is not enough to defeat the old military apparatus, it is important to develop people's war to defend the new power. It is fundamental, and that defense has long since ceased to be the responsibility basically of the new apparatus, of the new army, it is up to the armed sea of ​​masses to do so; As Marx and Engels said, without this “armed sea” of masses, there is no possibility of defending Power and bringing it to communism. We insist on the need to recognize and rescue the experience of the international proletariat in the Paris Commune, or of the USSR, where the lack of militarization of the party and of arming the masses helped the leadership apparatuses of the party and the professional army to be easily assaulted by restorative revisionism.

Comrades, the People's War is much more than an army made up of guerrillas organized into local forces, main forces, and armed militias destroying the enemy's living forces until the seizure of power, and achieving this purpose, going to lock up in the barracks. The war that the proletariat and the poor peasantry raises is a comprehensive, systemic, dialectical war, where every vestige of the old Power is destroyed, that is, its old armed apparatus, its old productive structure, its old relations of production, its old culture. and the masses, under proletarian leadership, have that task, but on the same premise and with the same vehemence, they must defend the new Power that will try to be undermined and destroyed by the bourgeois and landlord remnants with the support of imperialism in the same spheres. .

Chairman Mao points out about the importance of arming the masses even after victory has been achieved: “As the imperialists commit so many abuses against us, we have to treat them seriously. We must not only have a powerful regular army, but also organize contingents of popular militia everywhere, so that the imperialists, if they attack us, can hardly move to a single point in the country ”. “If imperialism dares to unleash a war of aggression against our country; The people's militia will operate in coordination with the People's Liberation Army and will reinforce it at all times to defeat the oppressors”. And not only that, comrades, but Chairman Mao considered the militias and the armed forces as an instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Today, in the absence of the socialist camp (since 1976), the Yankee imperialist superpower is much more daring, violent, it feels itself owner of the world despite the counterweight that Chinese and Russian imperialism tries to apply. It shows it in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen. Precisely in recent times it has not ceased in its threat to invade Venezuela, to position itself more solidly with its armed contingent in Colombia and other countries where it has puppets, lackeys, all armed, just as violent, because imperialism and reaction in general know that Power defends itself with violence. Should we communists invent another way to defend Power outside of violence that must necessarily be expressed as people's war?

It is that surely the comrades of the RCP think that we communists, with Power in our hands, become humanitarian souls, that we must treat the bourgeois remnants with white gloves, with cowardice (¿). No, we are not going to make that mistake again! The problem of Power also lies in how to defend it. We well know that it is accessed by war and is defended by war whose limits can only be established by its ability to decisively and definitively annihilate or neutralize its enemy, that the problem is ultimately defined by who " uses force without regard, without economy of blood ”.  Clausewitz maintained this and also warned of what you draw regarding how to handle the bourgeois remnants in socialism; "the mistakes that are made out of benignity are precisely the most harmful ”; And if to wield the defense of the New Power with People's War is to want to show a radicalized vision of it, well, we are for that.

No comrades, they cannot, in fact, they do not have the right and make mistakes in that way; In the current circumstances in the world there is a certain tendency towards a greater fascism and reaction of the old states; waging war to destroy the old power becomes a much more bloody, harsh, complex strategic exercise that does not necessarily conform to dogmas or formulas that must be mechanically replicated, not comrades, the conditions are different; today it is necessary to militarize the communist parties, militarize the masses to defend the new power with people's war, understand that people's war is  "a strategic perspective to guarantee the dictatorship of the proletariat" as stated by Chairman Gonzalo.

Well says Chairman Mao: " the proletariat aspires to transform the universe according to its conception of the world, and the bourgeoisie according to its own ." Although it is true that the proletariat and its allies destroy the old bourgeois-landlord power (in the semi-colonial), are not the old bourgeoisie and the big landlords going to organize the recovery of power by armed or violent means? Are their military apparatus defeated, will they resort to “democratic” means to destroy the new power? Both in the New Democracy and in socialism the antagonistic classes survive and as long as societies are made up of antagonistic classes, the war is to the death!

The maintenance of the people's war until communism establishes, as a basis, the absolute predominance of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-mainly Maoism until a new thought emerges and is consolidated worldwide as the development of the MLM.

One of the brilliant contributions that Chairman Mao made to Marxism and which would establish itself as one of the starting points that would mark the emergence of Mao Tse-tung thought was the study of the correct treatment of contradictions within the people. In fact, within the people there will be contradictions that must be resolved in this order, of the two-line struggle, as the one we propose will develop with you to the extent that they do not become antagonistic; However, with revisionism raised directly to a restorative strategy or preventing the revolution from breaking out, it must be a fight to the death; against the bourgeois-feudal remnants it must be driven to death, and not because one wants to show a version of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a new "radical" version, as you point out, but because the history of the class struggle has taught us that it must be that way. If the enemy does everything it considers doing to be able to hold the old Power, why shouldn't the proletariat do that, and more so to hold its dictatorship?

Comrades, basically the town criers of a bourgeois military line can think that way, focusing on the idea that the popular army as a vertical, unique, bureaucratic, professional armed structure, divorced from the masses; is to think like Khrushchev,  Peng De-juai and Luo Rui-ching who promoted the idea of ​​a professional army, separated from the people, from the masses. Why did they think and act in this way? Because in this way the army leadership could easily be assaulted and turned into an instrument to usurp the party leadership. History showed us that this line is opportunistic, rabidly anti-dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact, to some extent it also happened in Peru, where Feliciano and Alipio from the command of the Army backfired the Party leadership to want to neutralize the development of the people's war.

Lenin alerted him by pointing out " that the bourgeoisie remained stronger than the proletariat even after the latter had seized power, and that it will always try to make a return to power ." Stalin was weak in that regard; This is one of their mistakes, not to fully recognize and in its true dimension the existence of antagonistic classes in socialism and how to resolve these irreconcilable contradictions.

 Comrades, the class struggle is a struggle for Power and the fundamentals of Maoism is that, Power, Power for the proletariat. The fundamental thing in Gonzalo Thought is Power, but also how to sustain Power in the framework of new contradictions where an imperialist superpower such as the US survives; imperialist powers that enter into the division of the world, but also, in a scenario where the petty bourgeois reformism puts us new scenarios and where a neorevisionism has clearly emerged that has given ways to fight the correct ideological line of the international proletariat.

 

(…) The comrades of Canada also consider that those of us who hold the thesis of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism, give it an equivocal assessment of what the Cultural Revolution represented.

No comrades. We start from a fundamental premise that our comrades do not seem to understand correctly. The cultural revolution is above all CLASS STRUGGLE.

In Chairman Mao's China, after the seizure of power, the structural transformation did not occur mechanically and in the midst of a sacrosanct peace. That is, the productive forces were developed, private property over the means of production was suppressed, and exploitative relations of production were eliminated. Not comrades, an ideological revolution was also necessary because it was necessary to root out the conceptions that tied the masses to feudalism, to the old structure, to the bourgeois conceptions that survive and of which the restorers take advantage to undermine the new power.  These leaps occurred in the midst of confrontations, some, antagonistic, to the death; others, within the people, one, red line, of Chairman Mao, the other, the other, the Chinese Khrushchev, Teng Xiaoping and his clique, which ultimately served social-imperialism and the path of restoration.

The cultural revolution did not respond to operating basically in the field of consciousness, as you suggest; Through this revolution, the consolidation of proletarian power had a notable impact. It is important to recreate what Chairman Mao pointed out in this regard: “ the social being of man determines his thinking. The correct ideas characteristic of the advanced class, once dominated by the masses, become a material force that transforms society, the world ”. Without the Cultural Revolution, the teachings of Marx and Engels that the emancipation of the workers is the work of the workers themselves would not have been evident; consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat, strengthen its class consciousness and advance production.

We must not forget comrades that Chairman Mao did not see the revolution isolated from the central problem that arose in the structure, but rather saw it in a systemic, related way, making the cultural revolution was a problem of the class struggle that was linked to the tasks of also fighting for scientific production and experimentation. In fact, Chairman Mao considered that " we often find incomprehensible leap phenomena in everyday life in which matter can become consciousness and consciousness into matter ", so you cannot be banal and not consider this dialectical relationship that is expressed as a contradiction.

Comrades, if somehow we, the communists of Ecuador, the nobodies, the little ones, the tiny satellites of the PCB-FR could define the cultural revolution, we would do so by arguing that this was, above all, class struggle; weapon for the consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but above all the way in which the absolute predominance of Mao Tse-tung thought was established in China.

 

(…) Comrades; U.S We believe that today to be a communist is to be a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, mainly a Maoist, because we are experiencing a turning point determined by the conditions in which inter-imperialist contradictions develop in which there is no longer a socialist camp; where the new division of the world is between the Yankee imperialist superpower and the other imperialist powers that seek to establish a certain counterweight to the Yankee empire; where the development of Chinese imperialism, which, apart from the dictatorship of the proletariat, disputes markets with the United States; where the MCI is dispersed by the presence of neo-revisionism exposed by currents such as Avakián; the crumbs that Prachanda has left scattered in some places;

We are mainly Maoists because we consider that we are entering a stage of inflection and leap, where in countries, particularly in the third world, the weight of Gonzalo Thought is ceasing to be incidental to becoming decisive in politics and ideology.

Let us remember what happened in China, which became the center of the world proletariat after the October revolution; that Mao-Tse-tung thought was a touchstone for Khrushchev's revisionism, Teng Xiaoping; against reformism and even against those parties and organizations that hand over the responsibility of undertaking national liberation struggles to the national bourgeoisie or the petty bourgeoisie. It was constituted in the center of Marxism-Leninism until before the People's War in Peru and that from there, becoming Maoism, opened gaps for the deed of a new impulse, a new leap, Gonzalo Thought, today constituted the most effective touchstone to distinguish revolutionaries from counterrevolutionaries;

 

(…) And yes, comrades, without pretending to be pragmatic and eclectic, we can also agree with you on the need to fight against the communist parties and organizations that have distorted the class struggle, that have changed the course to follow in relation to create subjective conditions for people's war and revolution by getting bogged down in "postmodernist" struggles that contribute nothing to the revolution and that on the contrary distract the proletariat from its fundamental struggles. In any case, it must be understood that postmodernism not only results in the subjective management of the struggles of the masses and the distortion of the class struggle, it also reveals itself in the new forms of struggle that they seek to imprint within the masses.

In Ecuador it has been enough that a dynamic group that, hiding behind a Maoist claim "The rebellion is justified" and sustaining an eclectic discourse, has developed, and to some extent contaminated the forms of struggle of the class and the masses. Drums, mimes, clowns, whistles, dancers, are the actors and methods of struggle that seek to replace the determined and combative action of the proletariat, peasantry and other exploited masses.

Comrades, with the foregoing we are not referring to the fact that we agree with you in pointing out that this is the line of struggle applied by the comrades of the United States whom we respect and value in a way and that you attack with so much vehemence, but because obviously, many communist parties that define themselves as Maoists have fallen into this game of dispersion, becoming real obstacles to the revolution.

Comrades of the RCP of Canada, an internationalist call to get out of that small world to which they are shackled by a subjective vision of reality, of the contradictions that arise within the international proletariat. It is not up to us, as communists, to lean on a materialism tainted with idealism or to merge dialectics with metaphysics to rant with those who, even with errors typical of those who tirelessly try again and again to unleash the people's war for conquest and defense of Power for the class on that inevitable path until reaching communism.

You have to get out of that platonic cave that only lets you see shadows and false realities. With ideology and its correct application, it is necessary to explore, interpret and transform objective reality; It is urgent to accept criticism in a constructive way, as “medicine for the patient” and to avoid or discard those false academic claims that do not contribute to the two-line struggle and that end up being exploited by imperialism and other enemies of the class and the people to conjure up the revolution.

Comrades, if we do not fight against revisionism, we will have done nothing.

 

LONG LIVE MARXISM-LENINISM-MAOISM, MAINLY MAOISM!

LONG LIVE MARXISM-LENINISM-MAOISM, GONZALO THOUGHT!

IF WE DON'T FIGHT AGAINST REVISIONISM, WE WILL HAVE DONE NOTHING!

FOR UNITY IN THE IDEOLOGY OF THE INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAT!

LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE'S WAR IN PERU, INDIA, THE PHILIPPINES AND TURKEY!

LONG LIVE THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF BRAZIL RED FRACTION AND OTHER COMMUNIST PARTIES COMMITTED TO THE WORLD PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION!

EXCEPT POWER, ALL IS ILLUSION!

TO CONQUER THE RED SUN OF LIBERATION: COMMUNISM!