A WORLD TO WIN    #21   (1995)

 


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!"