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Carry the Two-Line Struggle
Through to the End!
Once, as he grew
older, Karl Marx reflected on his lifetime in the revolutionary
movement, and remarked that the battles he had fought against opportunists
at close quarters had almost been as consuming as the overall struggle
against the bourgeoisie itself. Indeed, since the founding of Marxism,
the battle against the ideology of the bourgeoisie inside the revolutionary
movement has been an inseparable part of fighting to continue to
advance along the revolutionary road.
It is not surprising
then that, only a few issues after AWTW focused on the struggle
against K Venu revisionism in India, this edition of the journal
is devoted exclusively to the two-line struggle that erupted within
the Communist Party of Peru. From October 1993, the first anniversary
of the capture of PCP Chairman Gonzalo, when Peruvian President
Fujimori announced that there had been a call from within the PCP
for peace negotiations, a great deal of the attention of the world's
revolutionaries has been centred on the struggle within the PCP.
The main documents in this two-line struggle are gathered here,
so that the struggle waged so far and the understanding accumulated
can be put at the service of AWTW readers, and this two-line
struggle can become a great school of revolution.
This two-line
struggle will have important consequences not only on the People's
War raging in Peru today, but also on the entire world revolutionary
movement. This reflects the fact that the People's War there is
the most important revolutionary struggle going on in the world
today. Its outcome cannot help but profoundly affect the fight to
prepare for and launch People's Wars elsewhere. The most basic reason
this is true, however, is that the challenge mounted by the Right
Opportunist Line against the PCP and the People's War is an assault
on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism itself, which has been the line guiding
the People's War from its beginning. It concentrates questions that
are key not only for the immediate battle to maintain and advance
the People's War in Peru, but also for all those who seek revolution
anywhere in the world.
As Mao Tsetung
summed up, the struggle and opposition of different ideas is a constant
feature of the revolutionary movement. He pointed out that this
reflects the contradictions between classes and between the new
and the old in society. An important textbook of the Chinese Communist
Party written under Mao's leadership stated that, "Class struggle
in society inevitably has its reflection inside the Party, and this
appears in a concentrated fashion in the form of the two-line struggle
within the Party this is also an objective law. The reason why
there can be no doubt that class struggle in society has its reflection
in the Party is that our Party does not live in a vacuum, but in
a society in which classes exist, and it is possible for bourgeois
ideology, the force of old habits and international revisionist
trends of thought to affect and poison our Party organism.... The
ten major two-line struggles which our Party has gone through in
the course of its 50 year history have all been reflections inside
the Party of the class struggle on the national and international
levels...."
Two-line struggle
between Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and revisionism is thus not something
that can be prevented if the party leaders' policies are "good enough".
It is not something that can be wished away, any more than can the
need for People's War itself. It is an inevitable feature of the
class struggle. While two-line struggle is sometimes at a low tide,
at other times it breaks out into a high tide and can sweep away
the revolutionary party, as a revisionist headquarters emerges to
fight to overthrow the revolutionary line and leadership of the
party. But if the party and its leadership meet the challenge, waging
this two-line struggle can lead to leaps forward in the revolutionary
process. Meeting such tests of strength is part of the process Marx
described as the proletariat making itself fit to rule.
All this is amply
borne out by the experience of the world proletarian revolution.
At the time of the First International, Marx fought the anarchist
Proudhon, helping pave the way for the Paris Commune and developing
principles that would later help Lenin lay the foundations of a
new type of revolutionary party. But Lenin's breakthrough on the
communist party only came about in the course of his own fierce
two-line struggle against the reformist politics of the Mensheviks.
At the time, this seemed to be an obscure struggle in a small member
party of the Second International. Yet the leaps Lenin led the Bolsheviks
in making encapsulated in the pathbreaking work, What Is To
Be Done? were key for preparing the party to wage armed insurrection
and civil war a few years later.
Another momentous
struggle erupted with the outbreak of World War 1 and the wave of
capitulation that swept over the 2nd International. Here too Lenin
and the Bolsheviks seemed to be a small party of thousands criticizing
the leaders of the more established millions-strong Social Democratic
Parties in Western Europe, who said there was no choice but to "defend
the fatherland". Yet the revolutionary internationalist line the
Bolsheviks fought for was indispensable to leading the masses of
Russia against their own ruling class in the October Revolution
which followed shortly thereafter.
Some were surprised
when such struggle erupted even after the revolutionaries
had seized power: once the old exploiters have been overthrown,
what basis is there for inner party struggle, they reasoned. Yet,
for example, Stalin's struggle against Trotsky was decisive for
whether the Bolsheviks would go forward to build socialism in the
USSR, over Trotsky's protest that this was impossible. Out of this
struggle emerged a number of vital points that are part of the core
understanding of Maoists today, including the possibility of constructing
a socialist society in a single country if necessary, the two-stage
character of the revolution in the oppressed countries, and many
others.
The understanding
we have today of two-line struggle was developed by Mao Tsetung,
as a key part of his development of Marxism-Leninism to a new, third
and higher stage, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. It was in the cauldron
of the Cultural Revolution in China that this understanding was
forged, and the greatest two-line struggle ever waged. Here in the
introduction to this issue, it is only possible to touch briefly
on the GPCR.<* Mao not only analyzed the nature of the two-line
struggle in the party, as indicated above, he also showed that the
masses themselves in their millions were capable of taking up and
resolving the cardinal political and ideological questions facing
a society. The revolutionary headquarters in the party led the workers
and peasants to continue the revolution under the dictatorship of
the proletariat and to beat back the efforts of the new bourgeoisie
to restore capitalism, as had happened in the USSR. They led the
masses to engage in mass debates on issues of state, the organization
of work and society, even questions of philosophy, science and the
arts. In every sphere, struggle was waged to uproot the revisionist
line and put revolutionary politics in command.
The bourgeoisie
and their scholars and revisionist underlings have often tried to
slander the Cultural Revolution as a power struggle between cliques
at the top of the CCP. According to this view, the masses in the
GPCR were cynically manipulated by Mao and the revolutionaries.
This same line of attack, that the GPCR was nothing but a bourgeois
power struggle at the top ranks of the party, is echoed by so-called
communist critics as well. This was a hallmark of Albanian Party
of Labour leader Enver Hoxha's attack on Mao after the latter's
death and the reversal of proletarian rule in China. Some others,
who did not agree with Hoxha's reactionary conclusions that Mao
was a "nationalist", a "populist", and so on, still tended to share
some of Hoxha's method of thinking, especially his inability to
grasp the real nature of the two-line struggle in China. They speculated
out loud about why Mao did not simply dismiss the revisionists in
the Party by administrative methods and be done with them.
Mao gave a remarkable
interview in 1967 to the Albanian military delegation: "Mao answered
the delegation's question, 'What do you believe is the goal of the
Great Cultural Revolution?' [Voices respond, 'to struggle against
the capitalist roaders within the party'.] Mao said:
"Struggling against
the capitalist roaders is the principal task, but in no way is it
the goal. The goal is to resolve the problem of world outlook; it
is the question of pulling up the roots of revisionism.
"The Central
Committee has emphasized many times that the masses must educate
and liberate themselves, the world view cannot be imposed upon them.
To transform ideology it is necessary that external causes work
through internal causes, although these latter are principal. What
would victory in the Cultural Revolution be if it did not transform
world outlook? If the world view is not transformed the 2000 capitalist
roaders of today will become 4000 the next time." (This entire article
is reprinted in A World to Win, 1985/1.)
Thus for Mao
waging two-line struggle was intimately connected not only to the
immediate objective of overthrowing the revisionists who were seeking
to take China back down the capitalist road (as ultimately happened,
after Mao's death), but also to the more sweeping battle to dig
up the roots of bourgeois ideology itself.
One of the features
of the two-line struggle in the PCP has been the heavy involvement
of the enemy police apparatus. It was Fujimori himself who announced
the initial call for peace accords, and claimed that this call originated
from Chairman Gonzalo yet Fujimori has continued to hold Comrade
Gonzalo in complete isolation. The involvement of the direct hand
of the enemy in such struggles is not, however, unusual, and does
not change the point that challenges on key questions of line at
important junctures in the class struggle cannot go unmet, if the
party is determined to persevere on the revolutionary road. Indeed,
waging the two-line struggle on key questions of line is one of
the most important ways that the enemy's efforts at manipulation
and its manoeuvring room can be minimized.
The documents
in this issue of AWTW are gathered here for the purpose of
carrying out the two-line struggle, in order, as the PCP CC urges,
"to raise the struggle to the level of line". In this way, people
around the world can more fully take part in criticizing, repudiating
and defeating the Right Opportunist Line (ROLLOD in Spanish). This
is not only an important task for those in Peru. There are many
political questions involved that are matters of life and death
for the world revolutionary movement as a whole. In the process
of fully and energetically taking up this two-line struggle, the
whole Movement can and must come to a deeper and richer understanding
of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist principles, particularly of the laws
of People's War.
Shortly after
Fujimori announced the call for a peace accord, the PCP CC issued
a statement of its intention to carry forward with the People's
War (page 18). In February 1994, it issued a more in-depth clarification
of its stand (page 20), calling for the struggle to be raised to
the level of line, explaining its decision to denounce the peace
negotiations trend as a Right Opportunist Line and pointing to antecedents
to this line in the Party's own history.
In December 1993,
meanwhile, RIM affirmed its ongoing support of the People's War
with an important resolution, adopted at the same time as the historic
document, Long Live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism! This expressed
RIM's basic orientation of support for pursuing the People's War
until victory (see AWTW 1995/20). On this basis, the parties
and organizations in RIM and revolutionaries around the world undertook
a campaign of intense study and investigation of the two-line struggle,
a few of the documents of which are reprinted here. In March 1995,
as a result of this process, the RIM Committee issued a historic
statement: "Rally to the Defence of Our Red Flag Flying in Peru!"
(page 11). This Call makes important summations of the study and
investigation carried out and concludes that there is no basis for
peace negotiations of any kind today in Peru; it repudiates the
Right Opportunist Line, affirms RIM's unconditional support for
the PCP CC, and calls on the world revolutionary movement to intensify
support for the People's War.
One important
part of the process engaged in by RIM was the summation of the experience
of the International Communist Movement in handling key turning
points in past revolutionary struggles. The document "Let the Lessons
of the Past Fire the Way Forward" (p 23), which was distributed
internally to RIM parties and organizations, applies MLM to doing
just this. It focuses particularly on the experience of the Bolshevik's
negotiations with the German imperialists at Brest-Litovsk in 1918,
the negotiations led by Mao Tsetung with Chiang Kaishek at Chungking
in 1946, and the experience of the Long March in 1935. The point
was not merely to sum up past experience on negotiations, but also
to understand the principles on which revolutionaries have conducted
negotiations with the enemy (as Mao says, negotiations "must not
damage the fundamental interests of the people") and to consider
how revolutionary leaders have dealt with turning points in other
ways as well.
The Union of
Communists of Iran (Sarbedaran) wrote a seminal document refuting
the major paper prepared by the Right Opportunist Line, called Asumir,
focusing above all on the dynamics of the People's War itself (page
28). The UIC document polemicizes against the ROL point that the
"People's War can only be maintained"; it elaborates on the points
that any efforts to negotiate away the basic interests of the people,
including the people's army and the base areas, would amount to
capitulation; and it deals with the question of renewing leadership
after decapitation efforts by the enemy and counters the argument
that the objective situation, internationally and in Peru, makes
it impossible to pursue the People's War. The UIC document represents
a thorough and far-reaching refutation of the ROL, and provides
a strong foundation for further study of the questions raised.
There is a long-established
tradition in the ICM of making available "poisonous weeds" to the
broad revolutionary movement. This tradition was carried out on
a large scale by Mao Tsetung and the Chinese revolutionaries, for
example, when they reprinted and distributed the documents by Khrushchev
and the Soviet revisionists, and later in the Cultural Revolution,
when they distributed the "poisonous weeds" of Deng Xiaoping and
mobilized the masses to criticize them. Mao was fond of the old
saying that you can't raise strong plants in a hothouse. In this
spirit, AWTW is making available the "poisonous weeds" from
the Right Opportunist Line, so that readers can themselves wrestle
with the arguments put forward in them, criticize them in light
of the major documents provided here, and strengthen their own understanding.
The situation
with the People's War is brought up to date in regard to the two-line
struggle with an article (page 34) that traces developments prior
to the capture of Chairman Gonzalo, and how the PCP has dealt with
the "bend in the road" this capture represented and the outbreak
of the two-line struggle, so as to carry on the People's War today.
This is accompanied by a brief up-date on the battle to defend the
life of Chairman Gonzalo. This battle has reached an important juncture
with Fujimori's recent public declaration that Chairman Gonzalo
will die in prison "within three years".
Some may be daunted
by the task of going deeply into the line struggle involved here
to dissect the incorrect views of the peace negotiations line and
thoroughly uproot them. But making revolution is not like sailing
a boat on a calm lake - it must be steered through stormy waters.
No revolution neither in Russia nor China has ever been made
without waging such battles. Revolutionaries do not fear or regret
the inevitable outbreak of struggle with the enemy forces ideologically,
politically or in any other sphere. It is only by facing up to their
responsibilities to find the ways of leading the masses in such
battles that they will strengthen their muscles and advance their
understanding, so that they will one day be in a position to lead
the masses forward to destroy the old world and build a new one.
This issue of
A World to Win is dedicated to the communist revolutionaries
of Peru, who have persevered on the path of leading the people of
that country forward to this new world, despite the torture chambers
and genocide of the enemy, and despite the attacks launched on their
revolutionary line by former members of their own ranks. The journal
will also serve the international campaign of RIM to "Rally to the
Defence of Our Red Flag Flying In Peru!"
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