The celebration of the Mao Centenary comes at a fortuitous time. In the past few years the world has gone through tremendous convulsions as the Soviet Union and its former bloc have collapsed, the exploitation and misery of the majority have increased while new alignments and jockeying for power are taking place among the imperialist powers. The U.S. imperialists have declared a "New World Order" in which they will rule unchallenged for the next hundred years and they have already launched one vicious war against Iraq and stepped up interference, aggression and bullying in many countries in order to anoint this world order in the blood of the oppressed. However much the imperialists and reactionaries try to stop it, the proletariat and people will continue to struggle, compelled to do so by the very nature of the imperialist system itself, whether it be in Palestine, Turkey or Los Angeles. And, as Mao put it, this struggle also gives rise to the search for philosophy - for an explanation of why the world is as we find it, and most importantly, how to change it.

The revolutionary communists have the solution to the problems of the masses. It lies in revolution, the proletarian dictatorship, the step by step construction of a completely new society without classes and exploitation. The name and work of Mao Tsetung are inseparably linked to carrying forward this struggle. The Mao Centenary is then a reaffirmation of the proletarian revolution and its final goal of communism.

Mao Tsetung raised the ideology and science of the proletariat, Marxism-Leninism, to a whole new level. Whether to recognize this new stage, to make it the basis for our theory and our practice - this is the struggle that has been going on in the international communist movement, especially since Mao's death in 1976 and the subsequent coup d'etat in China in which his line was overthrown, trampled and slandered.

Unfortunately, most of the communist movement, including those sections which had been allied with the Communist Party of China before the 1976 coup, were quick to follow Deng Xiaoping in abandoning Mao's line. The results of these betrayals are well known - the departure from principles, the sabotage of revolutionary struggles, and the conciliation with revisionism in all its forms. Others who opposed the new revisionist leaders in China swallowed the poison spread by Enver Hoxha of Albania who launched an open attack on Mao Tsetung Thought. All this showed that even amongst those forces who had been allied with China, the real grasp of Mao's development of Marxism-Leninism was uneven and incomplete.

Today the former pro-Soviet revisionist parties are either collapsed or in disarray, and the former pro-Deng parties have either disintegrated or revealed their revisionist nature. Against this backdrop, the crimson red of Mao Tsetung stands out ever more sharply. And the People's War in Peru stands in stunning contrast to the confusion, demoralization and capitulation of those struggles which lack the leadership of a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line.

The Revolutionary Internationalist Movement was formed in 1984, regrouping the core of the Maoist forces in the world opposed to the revisionist line coming out of China and determined to advance on the revolutionary path. In the ten years since then, the influence of the RIM has developed steadily along with the progress of its participating parties and organizations. The key to these advances has been holding firm to the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line.

MLM - Beacon of World Revolution

Throughout many decades of leading the People's War in China, an extremely complex upheaval involving the masses in their millions, as well as in the battle to create a socialist China after power was seized, Mao Tsetung enriched and developed all of the components of Marxism-Leninism. These included analysis of semi-feudalism and semi- colonialism in China and the need to wage a New Democratic Revolution in the countries oppressed by imperialism; line on literature and art; line on waging revolutionary warfare; political economy and other fields. Mao advanced the understanding of the philosophy of the proletariat, dialectical materialism, and masterfully applied this philosophy to the problems of making revolution.

Mao had to resurrect and restore the basic teachings of Marxism-Leninism that had been under attack by modern revisionism. He had to reexamine the experience, positive and negative, of the International Communist Movement and especially the experience of building a socialist country in the Soviet Union and then having that proletarian fortress taken from within by Khrushchev and his successors. Mao analyzed the contradictions in socialist society and formulated the theory of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Mao put this theory into practice by launching the path-breaking Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which brought the whole experience of the proletariat in transforming society to an unprecedented level.

The principal question that has faced the international communist movement objectively since the death of Mao Tsetung and the reversal in China is whether or not Mao's development of the Marxist-Leninist ideology to a whole new stage would be assimilated in theory and practice by the revolutionary communists in different countries and on a world scale, whether MLM would become the beacon of the world revolution, or whether, in one form or another, Mao's teachings would be trampled on or put away in a closet.

Within the ranks of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement and among other Maoist forces as well a protracted discussion has gone on to grasp and apply the development of Marxism to a whole new level represented by Mao Tsetung. This discussion has never been mainly a question of terminology, of what words to use to describe our ideology, however important that question is. The key is to really come to grips with the totality of the proletarian revolutionary ideology as it has developed to successive stages by Marx, Lenin and Mao, and the application of this science to understanding the world and changing it. Today this discussion and struggle on the international level to reach a higher and more unified understanding of Mao's development of Marxism to a new stage is reaching a turning point.

It is clear that there is a great untapped audience for MLM in the world today. This has essentially two components. In countries all over the world there are masses of people who are propelled into struggle against imperialism and reaction, and indeed, this struggle is intensifying. But most of these people are young, inexperienced, and lacking the leadership of a vanguard party of the proletariat. The task of linking up the new generation of fighters with the ideology of MLM, itself the scientific concentration of the experience of the masses in struggle and in changing the world, is a great challenge to the communist revolutionaries of today. Our ideology is of no use unless it is linked with the proletariat and the people, illuminating and pointing the direction forward for their struggle.

Crave Greatness and Success

In this year of the Mao Centenary we must find the ways to boldly hoist the banner of Mao Tsetung amidst the struggling masses and dare to stand up and answer the hysterical attacks of the bourgeoisie against our ideology. The republication of Quotations of Chairman Mao (more widely known as the "Red Book") is an important weapon in this fight to defend and popularize our science. During the Cultural Revolution, hundreds of millions of copies were distributed in dozens of languages all over the world, outraging the class enemies who noted that more copies of the Red Book were sold than the Bible or the Koran. Today the need for this weapon is as great as ever.

In addition to the new generation of revolutionaries beginning to step forward, there are also large numbers of comrades who have participated in the struggles of the past period, who may or may not have had previous connections to Maoist parties and organizations, but who, for a variety of reasons, have in the more recent period fallen into the orbit of one or another type of revisionism and yet today are confronted with the complete bankruptcy of the latter. Many signs show that such forces are increasingly attracted to the Maoist position. We must welcome such comrades with open arms. But part of this welcome must include sharp struggle to help these comrades understand the ideological and political roots of revisionism so as to help their rupture with revisionism become deep and thorough and not just remain on the surface of things. This task also, of uniting more and more revolutionary forces around the only true Maoist pole in the world today, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, is another great task of the Mao Centenary.

For many years, the genuine revolutionary forces have been relatively weak and isolated, but as the Declaration of the RIM points out, the "future belongs to them". It has been necessary to resist and to combat the siren songs of the revisionists and opportunists who called upon the genuine communists to adopt a "more reasonable" attitude, in other words, to abandon the criticism of opportunism and revisionism, and seek comfort in an illusory and ephemeral unity with opportunist currents. It was necessary for the Maoists to not fear "going against the tide" of opportunism and revisionism which has swept across the international communist movement in successive waves since the death of Mao and the coup in China. And this process has further strengthened and tempered the Maoist forces, and better prepared them for future tests.

In the period ahead, tests of a different nature will be posed as well. Our relative isolation is being transformed, through struggle, into relative non-isolation. An audience of thousands is becoming an audience of millions. These advances are on the basis of upholding principles, not abandoning them. And they are also a result of a correct MLM line being transformed into a material force, expressed most sharply in the great strides of the People's War in Peru. As MLM becomes more and more a weapon in the hands of the masses in different countries who use it to wage revolution, it will win the confidence of even greater numbers of people.

As Mao Tsetung put it, "we should crave greatness and success". This means linking our ideology with the struggle of the masses. It means daring to lead. It means correctly applying the proletarian science and ideology to all political, organizational and military questions, to correctly solving the burning practical problems of advancing the struggle. It means using the Mao Centenary as a great vehicle to reach out with the liberating truth and vision of Mao Tsetung to vast new battalions of revolutionaries throughout the world. In this way, the Mao Centenary can be truly unforgettable!