Democracy and Class Struggle views this statement from 2014 by the Red Sun Editors has timely and raising important issues in the International Communist Movement particularly over peace processes and we publish this document to further debate and discussion and clarification of our struggle.
CONCERNING THE INTERVIEW WITH COMRADE GANAPATHY:
The editors of the Red Sun magazine
As part of our support for the people's war in India and our struggle for the unity of the communists on world level, we here present the English (DCS) translation of the interview with the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), Comrade Ganapathy, made by the Maoist Information Bulletin (MIB) in 2014 on the occasion of the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the formation of the United Party. We call all communists and revolutionaries around the world to study the interview to be able to better understand the process of the people's war in India and draw lessons from its experiences; no revolution or people's war can be developed in isolation, but must be developed as a part of and serving the world revolution. Every advance or setback in a people's war, every struggle against revisionism, must serve to forge and develop our forces on world level. We emphasize that no Communist Party, and no International Communist Movement (MCI) can unite, advance and win through conciliation - the revisionist thesis of "two unite into one" - but only in implacable two line struggle against revisionism and opportunism as the main danger, upholding the Marxist principle "one divides into two".
Considering 1) the enormous and decisive importance of the revolution in India for the world proletarian revolution and 2) the experience of the hoax of the "peace accords" in Peru, the betrayal and capitulation in Nepal and the repercussions of Avakian's and Prachanda's revisionism, we think that it is important to discuss the problems pointed out by Comrade Ganapathy in the interview. For this purpose we will give a few examples from our people's war in Peru, of how our Party under the Great Leadership of Chairman Gonzalo has been able to solve problems, develop the people's war and maintain the course of the revolution.
There are also problems concerning the application of Maoism on international level, concerning the general line of the MCI, that are urgent to debate for us to be able to unite, and in this the Parties that lead people's war have a special responsibility. Among these problems we emphasize the question of the universal validity of the protracted people's war as the highest military theory and strategy of the international proletariat to be applied in all countries, imperialist countries as well as oppressed countries, according to the specific conditions of each country.
On the other hand there are those who call themselves "maoists" but spread the thesis that in the imperialist countries, the communists must limit themselves to legal work in order to "accumulate forces" to prepare for a supposed "insurrection" that would follow the road of October; a position that only serves to obstruct the construction or reconstitution of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, principally Maoist Parties, forged to fulfill their task of leading the revolution and conquer power with people's war in the imperialist countries; a position that leads to reformism, opportunism and capitulation.
The CPI(M) and its General Secretary, when they refer to the history of the ICM and the world proletarian revolution, analyze the experiences of the Soviet Union and China, but avoid taking position on the whole subsequent experience: of the people's war in Peru, of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM) etc. We consider that it is decisive and inevitable to debate precisely these experiences and all the struggles linked to them in order to make the evaluation of the application of Maoism, unite the communists on world level around a general line and make the bold advance that is due. To avoid the debate about these points to maintain a supposed "unity" will not allow us to advance, it will only serve to divide us and to conciliate with revisionism. We also note that the comrades of the CPI(M) do not refer to the world proletarian revolution, but to the term used by Prachanda in Nepal, many Trotskyites and other revisionists, the "world socialist revolution". If the comrades consider that there is any reason for this change, we are willing to debate it along with the other questions mentioned here.
We call all communists, in India and the whole world, to participate in the debate on these points.
On the two line struggle
Among the significant achievements of the people's war in India, Comrade Ganapathy mentions: "The merger into one party of CPI(Maoist) and CPI(M-L)NAXALBARI as another turning point in the effort to achieve unity of genuine revolutionaries in our country./ PW in India serving as one of the important focal points around which international unity of Maoist forces and an international solidarity and support movement could be built."
While we express our joy over the advances of the people's war in India and recognize the importance of this people's war's advance in uniting the communists and revolutionaries of the world under Maoism, we insist on what Chairman Mao Tsetung pointed out: "If unity is sought through struggle, it will live; if unity is sought through yielding, it will perish" (Current Problems of Tactics in the Anti-Japanese United Front). What does the current "unity" of the Maoist forces consist of, and how has this "unity" been achieved? What revisionist positions or lines have been crushed to reach this "unity"? For communists, it is not enough to talk about struggle or of revisionism in general; we always have to specify. To talk of "unity" in general, not specified, is a characteristic of revisionism and serves to conceal the existing differences and the revisionist positions. We communists bring the two line struggle to the masses, we forge the masses in the ideological and political struggle and mobilize them in the struggles against the revisionist positions inside and outside the Party. Chairman Gonzalo says:
"A communist has the duty to combat revisionism, tirelessly and implacably.
We have combated it. Yes, we have combated it, and from its beginning; we have been lucky to be able to contribute here, in our country, to expel it from the Party in 1964; a fact that people always wanted to hide. It must be very clear that the immense majority of the Communist Party was united by taking up the banners of the struggle against revisionism that Chairman Mao Tsetung had raised; that revisionism was pointed out and beaten in the ranks of the Communist Party of that time, and finally expelling Del Prado and his gang. Ever since then we continue to combat revisionism, and not only here but also abroad." (Interview with Chairman Gonzalo).
When we study the history of the International Communist Movement, in the classics of Marx, Lenin and Chairman Mao, we see that a large part of the documents are detailed reports on the struggles against revisionism, and that each political or military victory has been the result of a successful struggle against the revisionist positions of the moment. Likewise, in the Military Line of the Communist Party of Peru, it is shown how each moment, each advance, each leap in the construction and reconstitution of the Party in order to initiate and develop the people's war, have had its specific struggles against different revisionist positions: Mariategui's struggle rejecting the road of elections, the struggle against Browderism, the struggle led by Chairman Gonzalo against electoralism and Khrushchev's revisionism, the struggle of the red faction and the expulsion of Jorge Del Prado's, Acosta's and Juan Barrio's revisionism, the struggle against the central leadership in the 60's, against the Patria Roja ["Red Fatherland"] fraction, against the left and right liquidationism, against the right opportunist line that opposed initiating the people's war, only to name a few examples. And thus the Party has continued and continues today to combat revisionism; crushing the rats of the right opportunist line (ROL) and the hoax of the "peace accords", and the militarist positions during the first decade of the new millennium, that later was structured as the "left" opportunist line (LOL) - armed revisionism.
In the interview, Comrade Ganapathy only mentions "bitter inner party struggles against right and ‘left’ opportunism", but we do not know how this opportunism has been expressed, or what ideological and political positions have been crushed. What is the relationship between these opportunisms and the policy of "peace talks", and what is the current position of the CPI(M) on these points, pointed out by the MPP in 2014: "what we ask ourselves today is how to interpret their ambiguous statements concerning peace talks, for example that they are in favor of "talks for establishment of genuine peace", or that there would be "a possibility to at least conduct talks to solve issues that would help in resolving the fundamental issues in order to resolve this civil war." What was the content of the struggles to be able to achieve the fusion of the CPI(M) and CPI(ML) Naxalbari?
The experience of the PCP of the struggle against the rats of the ROL and the hoax of the "peace accords" and the experience of the capitulation in Nepal confirm that without defining these points clearly and openly, without specifying and crushing the revisionist positions, expelling every structured revisionist line from the Party and mobilizing the masses against them, the communists may be able to develop the people's war to a certain point, but they will not be in a condition to make the leap of conquering the power for the proletariat and the people in the whole country.
On Chairman Gonzalo's contributions and the experiences of the people's war in Peru
In the contacts with the organizations and Parties of the ICM, the PCP and its generated organization the MPP for a long time have insisted on debating these problems - the danger of capitulation, the "peace accords", the perspective of the conquest of power etc. - considering the contributions of Chairman Gonzalo and the experiences of the people's war in Peru. One of these is the militarization of the Communist Parties, that we consider has universal validity, another is the unitary people's war, i.e. countryside principal, city as complement. Some people in the ICM, headed by Avakian and his followers, were opposed to debating these points (and others), and initiated a campaign of isolation and slander against the PCP - a campaign that continues today and that uses personal attacks and accusations of "dogmatism" to defend and hide its own revisionist positions behind words about "unity". We think that a Party such as the CPI(M), a Party that leads a people's war, has a great responsibility in giving ideological and political guidance to the communists and revolutionaries of the world; we hope that the comrades are for taking a firm and clear position on these points and that they are willing to participate in the debate concerning the contributions mentioned here.
On the militarization of the Communist Parties: In the interview, Comrade Ganapathy points out that the revolution in India is in a "very difficult situation", and that one of its main challenges is that of "preserving our subjective forces, particularly the strategic leadership of the party". He mentions that they have "lost a considerable number of party leaders at all levels starting from the central committee…" He refers to a "deceleration" of the guerrilla war and to "serious non-proletarian trends within the party. To overcome the problems, a bolshevisation campaign has been initiated "for raising the ideological and political level of the Party". It is not specified what the bolshevisation implies organizationally, or what measures have been taken as part of this campaign to overcome the problems of losses etc. It is not mentioned how the reaction in India have used precisely the "peace talks" systematically to kill the leaders of the PCI(M), and it is not mentioned how the PCP has combated the policy of "talks" (partly precisely because of its experience of how the Peruvian reaction uses such "talks"). We have not seen, in the interview nor in other documents of the PCI(M), any reference to what the PCP has put forward about the militarization of the Party. We think that the problems mentioned by Comrade Ganapathy are examples that show precisely the need for the militarization of the Party, and we emphasize the following:
"Chairman Gonzalo puts forward the thesis that the Communist Parties of the world are to be militarized (…) Firstly, because we are in the strategic offensive of the world revolution, we are living through the sweeping away of imperialism and reaction off the face of the Earth in the next 50 to 100 years, an epoch marked by violence and in which all kinds of wars are expressed; we see how the reaction is militarizing itself more and more, militarizing the old states, its economy, developing wars of aggression, trafficking with the struggles of the peoples and aiming for a world war. But since revolution is the main tendency in the world, the task of the Communist Parties is to uphold the revolution and realize the main form of struggle: the people's war, to oppose the counterrevolutionary world war with revolutionary world war."
(The Line of the Construction of the Three Instruments of the Revolution, Communist Party of Peru 1988)
"We firmly apply the militarization of the Communist Parties and the concentric construction of the three instruments. The militarization of the Communist Parties is a political guideline that has strategic content, being the “whole of the transformations, changes and adjustments that are necessary to lead the people’s war as the main form of struggle that creates the new state”; therefore the militarization of the Communist Parties is the key to the democratic, the socialist and the cultural revolutions.
On the ideological-political base, the Party simultaneously builds the organizational, in the midst of the class struggle and the two line struggle, all within and serving the armed struggle for the conquest of power, and we link the whole process of construction to the fluidity of the people’s war, starting from the fact that “fluidity in the war and in our territory produces fluidity in all fields of construction in our base areas” as Chairman Mao says."
(Communist Party of Peru - Central Committee - Impose Maoism as the Only Command and Guide of the World Proletarian Revolution!)
On the relationship between countryside and cities in the people's war: The unitary people's war, established by Chairman Gonzalo, is a specification of the people's war to the conditions of Peru, but that needs to be considered in other countries as well:
"…Chairman Gonzalo specifies that in the cities, as complement, one must carry out armed actions, since this is feasible as shown by the international experience and our own. And, draw lessons from for example what happened with the guerrilla in Philippines that was hidden away in the countryside and left the cities alone, especially the Capital, provoking the isolation of the guerrillas. In Brazil, the revolutionaries also applied armed actions in the countryside and the cities, they just did not specify which one was principal. In Vietnam important armed actions have been carried out in the cities as well. Likewise, keeping in mind the peculiarities of the cities in Latin America, where the percentage of proletariat and poor masses in the cities is very high, the masses are ready to develop actions to complement those in the countryside; only that in the cities the New Power, Support bases are not built, but the Front realized as the Revolutionary Movement for the Defense of the People with Centers of Resistance that wage people's war and prepare the future insurrection, that will take place when the forces of the countryside assault the cities in combination with the insurrection from within."
"…the People's Guerrilla Army also operates in the cities and the masses are progressively drawn together in the different new organizations in and for the people's war; the Revolutionary Movement for the Defense of the People is the realization of the Front in the cities and its goal is to bring the masses to the resistance, to serve the war and for the purpose of the future insurrection."
(Military Line, Communist Party of Peru 1988)
In this context we must analyze the problem of Nepal, where they capitulated precisely in the face of the problem of taking the cities. Instead of mobilizing and organizing the masses in the city as part of the people's war, preparing the insurrection, the revisionist leaders, riding on the backs of the heroic masses, used the triumphs of the people's war to "put pressure" on the old state and get posts within the old system, selling out the revolution and the blood of the masses of the country. Therefore, once again, we call the communists in India and the world to study the experience in Peru of "countryside principal - cities as complement", seek closer ties between the Parties and participate in the open and honest debate between the Communist Parties, principally the Parties that lead people's war.
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