We are entering the new era, one where everything will change in the most profound way, at all levels, in all areas. The strategic offensive of the world revolution has now its material basis to carry itself out in the fullest way.
This perfectly confirms the assertion of Mao Zedong, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution launched in 1966, that humanity will experience upheavals like it has never known in the next fifty, hundred years. This confirms the assertion of the glorious Communist Party of Peru, led by Gonzalo, that the victory of the proletariat « will require, approximately, 200 years counting from the Paris Commune in 1871 ».
This is what has momentarily allowed the capitalist mode of production to relatively save itself which turns around in its opposite and comes to stab it.
Because this general crisis appears with covid-19, a disease in which the virus which produces it comes from a mutation directly resulting from contradictions developed by the capitalist mode of production: the contradiction between humans and animals on the one hand, the contradiction between town and countryside on the other.
Covid-19 is the product of a mutation made possible by the destruction of wildlife, its use by the capitalist market, as well as the formation of a livestock industry taking ever more horrible proportions on the scale world.
The capitalist mode of production has installed a so unnatural agroindustrial device that it causes disruption on the scale of life itself, on a planetary level.
The fact that the crisis started in China owes nothing to chance: this country has played a key role in the capitalist mode of production since its total integration into it under the aegis of the revisionist Deng Xiao Ping. Social-fascist China has helped to revive the capitalist mode of production, but its own development brings new contradictions, which are all the more explosive.
We affirm, on the First of May, 2020, that the capitalist mode of production is a complete obstacle to the development of humanity and to the enhancement of life itself. All the states which are at the service of the capitalist mode of production must be overthrown, so that humanity is able to establish socialist, dialectical and non-destructive relationships with all that forms the planetary Biosphere!
Strictly speaking, this problem has already appeared in a perfectly legible way with climate change. We even find it before with the animal question in parallel with the development of industrial farming and widespread animal testing. It is also the basis of the aggression against the human condition itself, since human beings are alienated and exploited, subjected to psychological and physiological pressures distorting them in the sense of capitalist utility.
If the capitalist mode of production developed the productive forces, which has been its historically positive role, it has now passed into the camp of destruction. It demolishes what the evolution of life has taken an immense time to develop, it distorts everything in order to integrate it into its own modalities.
It demolishes humanity, it demolishes animal life, it demolishes plant life, it demolishes the Biosphere. It advocates escapism into virtuality, into the futile consumer ego, into cynicism and selfishness, into abstractions no longer linked to reality. It produces decadence.
The concern is indeed that, at the same time as its negative aspect, it is the capitalist mode of production which ensures the reproduction of the life of humanity and the latter is therefore trapped in it in terms of values, mentalities, world view.
The cultural battle against the values carried by the capitalist mode of production is therefore essential.
In imperialist metropolises, where triumphs the 24 hours a day of capitalism, there must be a spirit of rupture at the height, an ability to be consistent to the end in the affirmation of communism. We underline the growing weight of subjectivity in imperialist metropolises and recall that revolutionary consciousness never emerges mechanically, but as a fracture with dominant values.
This aspect is also present in semi-colonial semi-feudal countries, although to a lesser extent, because instability takes precedence by definition in most of the countries of the world, which are experiencing a situation of dependence on the hard core of the mode of capitalist production which are the imperialist countries.
However, given the magnitude of the general crisis of capitalism that is opening up, the return of instability in the latter is inevitable and already appears. The global confinement has deeply shaken minds, it has broken many certainties, it has challenged many routines, it has devalued a whole series of traditions.
This is also true at the world scale. Humanity, of course, fluctuates between the idealistic hope of a hypothetical return to normal and the materialist understanding that the capitalist mode of production is at an impasse.
The higher the level of consciousness, the more there is the grasp that the current situation is the result of an evasive rush forward of the capitalist mode of production, which seeks to escape the tendency of the profit rate to fall by always finding more spaces to develop.
The covid-19 crisis then appears as a natural bulwark against the hallucinatory development of a capitalist mode of production which is global and destructive.
We affirm here that only a correct dialectical materialist understanding of the crisis can bring about a correct political and cultural orientation, naturally also of the ideological, scientific dimension.
Who does not use the concepts of Biosphere, who does not want to understand the dignity of the reality of the animal question, who has never grasped the scope of global warming, who does not use the contradiction between cities and countryside in his approach… can absolutely not capture our time.
We wish to emphasize that this is in no way a modification, a revision or a contribution to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. It is a use of existing concepts, a deeper understanding of them due to our times.
We note with sadness, moreover, that all of this is completely cleared out by the organizations claiming to be Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, when they should come to this by their very approach. It is true that, unfortunately, in recent years, two trends have dominated, leading straight into the wall.
The first trend, mainly grouping together all the organizations in America (North and South), wanted in an abstract-formal approach to make Gonzalo a classic of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, with a deny of the principle of guiding thought. A stereotypical style has led this tendency to negate the covid-19 crisis, to see it as a sort of bourgeois conspiracy to mask the crisis and strengthen political and police grip. Such a vision leads to total bankruptcy.
The second trend brings together organizations with a syndicalistpopulist approach stemming from their “Marxist-Leninist” origin of the 1970s. It is always strange to see the Maoist Communist Party of Italy talking about people’s war when it already existed when the armed struggle was general in Italy, which seemed to it a simple anarchism. As for the other organization forming the core of this approach, the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada, it openly assumes to consider that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is a completely secondary fact, much less important for example than the Chinese revolution culminating in 1949.
It is hardly surprising that this trend has a lot to say, but that it is part of a syndicalist-populist approach, without any depth, without any scale. The emptiness of this approach is all the more obvious now.
We affirm that there are three lines in the movements claiming to be Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. There is the opportunist left line, which offers a turnkey ideology where Gonzalo would be the universal key to do anything one wants in its own way, which is leftism. There is the right opportunist line who wants to unite all the Maoists without any regard for ideological content. Finally, there is the correct line which makes the teachings of Gonzalo and the Communist Party of Peru the correct interpretation of Maoism and advocates the formation of guiding thoughts to go to people’s war.
This amounts to a two-line struggle, because the opportunist line on the right and the opportunist line on the left have the same anti-historical materialist and anti-dialectical materialist approach, as evidenced by the many noisy and picturesque, often ephemeral groups, oscillating between both, such as those structures that have already disappeared, like Jugendwiderstand in Germany, or also in the United States the Tampa Maoist Collective, the Red Guards Kansas City, the Red Guards Charlotte, the Red Guards Los Angeles, the Red Guards Austin, etc.
We for our part, with different forces, sought to develop another tendency, going in the direction of a real level in the field historical materialism, of a real ideological clarity, which goes hand in hand with the acceptance of the teachings of Gonzalo and the Communist Party of Peru. We consider that our 2013 joint document on the guiding thought is a very rich source of information. The refutation of Prachanda’s revisionism was carried out first by the CPF (mlm) and it is also a totally correct contribution.
It is very harmful that the international refutation of Prachanda did not continue politically until it was achieved in international unity. Here we must underline the harmful role of the Colombian UOC (MLM), which yesterday denounced the Maoist Communist Party of Italy as centrist and ultimately became one of its vassals.
It must be seen that the failure of the UOC (MLM) is all the more damaging since this organization had the qualities of its faults. It did not understand the concept of semi-colonial semi-feudalism and mistakenly considered its country, Colombia, as capitalist. This however reflected a very fine observation of the development of agro-industrial (bureaucratic) capitalism in its own country. The UOC (MLM) should have played a key ideological role in the current crisis, by the nature of it. But as it was haughty with the animal question and climate change, it did not grasp the contradiction between town and country adequately, it failed to make a qualitative leap which would have been of great value.
It is possible to think that the Communist Party of India (Maoist) could also have played here a very important role, because of the situation of India within the framework of the contradiction between town and countryside, of the historical culture existing in this country in relation to the animal condition. This Party, however, preserves its tradition of non-interference in the International Communist Movement, just like the Communist Party of the Philippines. These two parties have by the way always refuted Gonzalo’s teachings, like the TKP / ML of Turkey.
In any case, the problem of the assertion of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism can only have a concrete and not syndicalist, populist, semi-anarchist, etc. basis : this must be a concrete historical basis.
The basic problem in each country is the question of assimilating the principles of dialectical materialism and the concrete study of reality from revolutionary subjectivity recognizing the dignity of reality. This forms the basis for the generation of a guiding thought, orientation for the communist engagement in class struggles having, by definition, a national framework.
This movement of generation of guiding thoughts will experience a powerful development with the crisis. The bourgeoisie has no choice but to seek to make pay for it the oppressed countries, but also the proletariat of the imperialist countries. In the same way, the massive indebtedness of the States following the pandemic of covid-19 does not consist in any way of an accounting abstraction on the part of the central banks realizing a “creation” of money, but simply in a credit to the detriment of the proletariat .
The pressure is going to be enormous, dynamiting the neutralized relations between the classes due to the great wave of capitalist accumulation which started in the 1950s and was reinforced by the collapse of Soviet social-imperialism and the triumph of revisionism in China.
The class struggle will therefore not be limited to a conflict for a better distribution of wealth, as it was mainly the case for fifty years in the most advanced capitalist countries because of the relative nature only of the pauperization of the proletariat, allowing the formation of a powerful working class aristocracy. This process was relatively true in the oppressed countries as well.
The reason for this change is that the class struggle now knows the contribution of the contradiction between town and country, which gives it an explosive dimension. It reflects the planetary dimension of the revolutionary question, it plunges the capitalist mode of production into a contradiction with life itself, it reveals to the world its tendency to destructive absolutism.
And, since it is triumphant, the capitalist mode of production will storm the broad masses to try to get out of this general crisis.
It means the materialization of the most bitter class struggle due to an immense polarization within the framework of the class struggle whose framework is planetary both in form and in content of the crisis. The proletarian fabric will recompose, the confrontation between the classes will resume its authentic character, its substance being war, the battle for power.
This is an essential aspect to grasp the new period which is coming, and whose understanding will distinguish more than ever the authentic revolutionaries from the usurpers and this throughout the revolutionary process. This is the meaning of the MLM slogan: PEOPLE’S WAR UNTIL COMMUNISM!
The question is that of power. We need a state that is that of the masses, under the leadership of the working class. This state can only be born in war, in the overthrow of the old state and we see with the crisis of covid19 how decadent, bureaucratic it is, ever more disconnected from reality and the masses.
The contradiction between State and society has been flagrant since the start of the health crisis, in all countries of the world. It is a constitutive aspect of the crisis as a product of the capitalist mode of production and its concrete embodiment. The decadence of the bourgeoisie, at the helm of the States, is as much the product of this crisis as its political and cultural, ideological manifestation.
The most fragile imperialist powers like France, Italy or Belgium have particularly marked the international opinion by their great weakness, leaving no more no less than the health crisis to settle in their country by taking measures only very late and in a largely insufficient way. The same is true in many countries of the world, whether in India where the government has literally given up confining the population due to the total disorganization of the country or even in most African countries, terrorized by the observation of their powerlessness.
This decline of the state apparatus also largely concerns the two superpowers of today, China and the United States. In China, where the covid-19 pandemic started, the state was particularly shaken in its expansionary impulse, despite an apparent capacity to manage in terms of health, which was actually of the police-military type. The United States finds itself deeply upset by a confrontation between federal authorities and state governors, recalling the situation of the 19th century, bringing the state back to instability in its very original foundations.
We affirm that the state question is central. The people must become the new state and that requires a very high level of organization and awareness. Whoever does not work in this sense has an anarchist approach, totally foreign to the principles of Bolshevism. Not a populist activity, but a basic work must be to carried, at the same time organizational and programmatic, so that a new State is constituted, violently breaking the old State, crushing it in all the fields, therefore also culturally and ideologically.
This poses, once again, the need for a guiding thought, for a correct understanding of national culture, popular mentalities, the historical course specific to a country. It is not a question of stopping, slowing down, framing, making regress the mode of capitalist production in each country, but to overpass it.
We insist on this principle of overpassing. Historical materialism, providing the concept of mode of production, underlines that History has a meaning and this meaning is integrated, in fact, in the universal movement of matter towards more complexity, more connections, more interpenetration.
A mode of production concerns the social life of Humanity and this social life always takes place in a concrete situation. This is why we cannot understand the covid-19 crisis without seeing that it is an aspect of the destructive development of the capitalist mode of production… Just as we cannot understand the covid-19 crisis without considering life on Earth as a Biosphere, an organized, moving, evolving whole.
This cannot be understood without the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production, which seeks to escape the downward trend in the rate of profit by the pressurization of wage labor, by the widening of its fields of intervention, by the imperialist war with here the background of the inevitable Sino-American conflict. This cannot be understood without grasping the nature of the overproduction of goods and the overproduction of capital, the dialectical relationship of which forms the hard core of the general crisis of capitalism.
And all this is expressed concretely, in each country, as a revolutionary contradiction with very specific aspects.
The unity of the authentic international communist movement, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, can only go through scientific exchanges on the concrete character of these aspects. We affirm the need for an international platform allowing access to each other’s perspectives on these concrete aspects.
This process is in any case inevitable, because revolutionary subjectivity breaks with the dominant ideology, inevitably tends to MarxismLeninism-Maoism, seizing the universal to return to the particular and develop the people’s war in the country having been the breeding ground for this subjectivity.
There can be no formal spread of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, this only produces an opportunism all the more folkloric in the trying to mask its real nature.
Long live proletarian Internationalism!
Long live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!
People’s War until Communism!
