A Critical Evaluation of Gonzaloism

In recent years, struggle between different trends within the International Communist Movement (ICM) has intensified. In particular, the debate on Gonzaloism has taken something of a center stage as numerous parties and organizations have put out statements with a variety of different evaluations of Gonzalo and his theoretical contributions to Marxism. In previous issues of Red Pages, we discussed some of these matters, including a comprehensive breakdown of why Protracted People’s War is not a universal strategy for revolution,¹ and commentary on the debate between the Communist Party of Brazil – Red Fraction² (CPB-RF) and the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan (C(M)PA) on the evaluation of Gonzaloism.³

Recently, the CPB and the Communist Party of Peru (PCP) have published a joint statement summing up what they see as Gonzalo’s major contributions to Marxism.⁴ These groups and others have also recently formed a new international communist organization, the International Communist League (ICL), which is composed mostly—but not exclusively—of Gonzaloite organizations. In their founding statement, the ICL upholds many central tenets of Gonzaloism, including the so-called “universality of People’s War.”⁵ They also claim that Gonzalo “defined Maoism in a complete and scientific way.” The ICL is now presenting itself as the center of the ICM and aims to unify all Maoist parties and organizations under its banner and program, while demanding that those who join submit to democratic centralist control by the ICL. The basis of unity of this organization follows the theoretical outlines of Gonzaloism, a doctrine that leading Maoist parties internationally do not uphold.⁶ In this article, we breakdown and critique the main features of Gonzaloism theoretically and historically in order to advance clarity on the question. We hope that this analysis will help to expose the deceitful maneuver the ICL is attempting, distorting the proud example of Maoist revolutionary struggle past and present and covering over the substance of our movement with crude slogans and half-truths.

The CPB—one of the leading organizations in the ICL—claims that those who do not uphold Gonzalo Thought (what they call Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism aka “MLM-pM”) are revisionists. For example, in their document Lenin and the Militarized Communist Party,⁷ the CPB makes the following claim:

While they correctly identify Avakianism (“solid nuclei with much elasticity”) and Prachanda-path (“multi-party competition”) as forms of revisionism,⁸ the rest of this articulation indicates that the Gonzaloists believe that every party which does not uphold the “militarization of communist parties”⁹ and “concentric construction¹⁰ of the three instruments”¹¹ is, in fact, promoting a new form of revisionism. As if this were not enough, they make it clear these two approaches are “the determining factor [sic]” which “sets the basis” for starting a people’s war and even forming a communist party in the first place. All of this is confusing, even downright absurd, as the two parties leading the biggest people’s wars in the world at present—the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI (Maoist))—do not uphold the lines of concentric circles of party building and militarizing the Party.

The CPB and associated Gonzaloite parties have put out various solidarity statements and efforts for the CPP and CPI (Maoist), and yet, at the same time their analysis of what revisionism is implies that these two leading parties are, in fact, revisionist. Though the CPB stops short of stating this directly, it is the logical implication of their political line. This is concerning, particularly at a time when they are positioning themselves as something of an international center within their recently formed ICL. While things have not yet come to a head, there is a need for comrades in the U.S. and internationally to take stock of these developments and learn from this important debate.

Given that a constellation of organizations have unified under one banner and are arguing that it was Gonzalo and the PCP who “defined Maoism in a complete and scientific way,” there is an urgent need for a sober evaluation of Gonzalo and the PCP’s theoretical and practical contributions to the ICM.¹² This is especially important because many positions put forward by Gonzalo and the PCP are in direct opposition to those promoted by Marx, Lenin, and Mao.

The ICL is wrong to claim that Gonzalo “defined Maoism in a complete and scientific way.” In fact, despite struggling against forms of revisionism in Peru and internationally, Gonzalo also “revised” (and therefore negated) key lessons of MLM, in the name of supposedly “synthesizing” Maoism. In order to see this clearly one must understand basic lessons of MLM, in particular the history of the Russian and Chinese revolutions; generally the Gonzaloites today are deeply ignorant and confused on these matters. What little they understand is often regurgitated in an extremely formulaic fashion, mechanically grafted onto a different situation or selectively quoted to justify a fundamentally different (Gonzaloite) conclusion than the lessons of the class struggle summed up by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. So, when they claim that Gonzalo played a key role in creating what they often refer to as “MLM, principally Maoism” (whether they use the word “synthesized” or “defined”), they only reveal their own disagreements with the basic principles of MLM.

Here we aim to provide an overview and critique of the central tenets of Gonzaloism as an ideology, in the form that it was promoted by the PCP after 1988, and explain how these related to a series of significant mistakes made by the PCP during the course of the People’s War. In particular, we analyze the PCP’s 1988 General Political Line to show how, at least by that time, Gonzalo and the PCP had abandoned MLM in favor of a form of revisionist politics, with a distinct similarity to Lin Biaoism. This is part of the larger necessary effort in the ICM to sum up the successes and failures of the PCP and the theoretical contributions and mistakes of Gonzalo. We hope that this effort enriches the present debate within the ICM over these important questions.

A Few Introductory Remarks

This document is not, and cannot be, a comprehensive summation of the successes and failures of the PCP. We are aware of some efforts to take steps in this direction; doubtless there are others of which we are unaware. We look forward to reading and critically engaging with these as they are published.

At present, however, some of the most prominent voices from Peru in the ICM promote an extremely reductive and dogmatic analysis of the history of the PCP.¹³ These accounts generally refuse to critically assess the leadership of Gonzalo and tend to echo various mechanical (and even quasi-religious) slogans from the PCP in the period from 1980 to 1992 to justify such an approach. The extreme belligerence with which such forces treat any critical reflection on the history of the PCP and Gonzalo’s leadership constitutes a significant barrier to clarity within the ICM on the real history of the class struggle in Peru.

What’s more, this narrow and vociferous dogmatism—which, at times goes so far as to insist that not only did the PCP never make any mistakes but also that they represent the apex of revolutionary theory and practice—plays into the hands of various anti-communist forces who seek to whole-sale discredit the heroic struggles of the Peruvian people under the leadership of the PCP during the people’s war. When various bourgeois and anti-communist commentators are the only ones critiquing various shortcomings of the PCP—albeit often in an exaggerated fashion aimed at entirely discrediting the revolutionary struggle—a significant portion of people will be at least partially convinced by these narratives. This will be the case also as long as genuine Communist forces are unable to provide a sufficiently clear and objective materialist analysis of the revolutionary struggles in Peru under Gonzalo’s leadership. Our hope is that, despite our own limitations, we can contribute in a modest way to this effort of providing an objective and materialist analysis.

This task is not easy, and it is made harder by the extreme dearth of publicly available documents from the PCP during the people’s war. For example, the three volumes of the Collected Works of the Communist Party of Peru which span the years 1968-1992 are missing numerous documents from this crucial period. Even some documents written by Gonzalo and the PCP which were published in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement’s (RIM) publication A World to Win are not included in these “Collected Works.” Since A World to Win is publicly available online, examining these documents is not a problem. However, we have been unable to find copies of numerous other documents that we know were written. For example, the Collected Works does not contain a single document from the years 1983 or 1984, two key years in the armed struggle; it is also missing all the documents from the Party’s pivotal Second National Conference in 1982. Numerous other important documents such as Gonzalo’s Military Thought of the Party and Great Plan: To Conquer Bases are also not included, and we have been unable to find copies of them elsewhere. Likewise, we found no copies (electronic or physical) of the PCP’s theoretical journal Nueva Democracia.

Lack of access to key documents necessarily makes it impossible for us to provide an overall analysis of the successes and failures of the PCP during this period, or a comprehensive analysis of the development of their political line. Despite these difficulties, in this document we aim to critically analyze some of the main tenets of Gonzaloism (especially as synthesized in the PCP’s 1988 First Party Congress and published in their General Political Line from that year), demonstrate conclusively that they are in contradiction to lessons of the Chinese and Russian Revolutions (as well the lessons of the Paris Commune and Revolutions of 1848), and thereby show that concerning the PCP’s “synthesis,” what was good was not new and was new was not good. Although the lack of access to key materials means there will doubtless be shortcomings in our analysis, we nevertheless must make an effort to analyze and criticize the key tenets of Gonzaloism given the negative role that the Gonzaloites play at present in the ICM today.

All of this being said, it is important to note that the leaders of the PCP did not start off promoting revisionist and eclectic ideas. In the 1960s and 1970s, Gonzalo and others waged a successful struggle to break from revisionism in the old PCP and set out on a new and revolutionary path. They were inspired by the Chinese Revolution and the Cultural Revolution in particular, as well as the work of José Carlos Mariátegui, the founder of the PCP in 1928,¹⁴ who took important first steps in applying Marxism to Peruvian conditions. They worked to launch the armed struggle, and broke from various incorrect ideas and trends that existed in the communist movement in Peru at the time.

This was a heroic and revolutionary effort, and at this point the PCP was a genuine Marxist organization with some significant, but secondary, confusions and shortcomings. That a Marxist Party or organization would have such confusions and shortcomings at this stage of development is not surprising or unique. For example, in the 1960s in India, Charu Majumdar led the efforts to break from the revisionist Communist Party of India (Marxist) and set out on the revolutionary path. This led to the Naxalbari Revolt in 1967 and subsequent uprisings in thousands of villages across India in the next few years. Charu and his comrades were real Marxist revolutionaries, but also had some key confusions. In his famous Eight Documents, Charu promoted a number of incorrect lines, including opposing the need for mass organizations, promoting the slogan “Chairman Mao is our Chairman,” and arguing that “he who has not dipped his hands in the blood of the class enemies can hardly be called a communist.”

Every party needs its own chairperson, the chair of the Party in China could not be the chair of an Indian Party. Likewise, not all struggle is violent in nature, and many communists are not directly involved in revolutionary violence, even though such violence is necessary to overthrow the ruling class. Likewise, in order to lead a successful revolution, communist parties must create and support the development of various mass organizations, which while under the ideological leadership of the Party are independent organizations with their own internal democracy. Difficulties that flowed from these mistaken lines led to serious setbacks in the movement in India. However, the comrades in India were able to sum up these mistakes, engage in serious self-criticism over them, and chart a new course forward. This allowed the Naxalites to stay on the revolutionary road, overcome these setbacks, and eventually form the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in 2004.

Revolutionary organizations are divided by the two-line struggle, and thus alongside the possibility of rectifying errors there is the possibility for a genuine Communist Party to consolidate around negative ideas and conclusions. Unfortunately, in Peru, the PCP was unable to sum up their mistakes, or even recognize many of them as mistakes. Throughout the course of the armed struggle, they doubled down on many of their incorrect positions. By at least 1988, these incorrect ideas had become dominant in the Party; they were synthesized in the PCP’s General Political Line and explicitly promoted as Gonzalo Thought. This no doubt contributed to the Party’s setbacks, including the capture of Gonzalo and much of the Central Committee in 1992, and the defeats the revolutionary movement suffered over the next few years.

Contemporary Gonzaloite groups, especially the CPB and many of their allied parties in the ICL, promote Gonzaloism as Maoism. Therefore, it is necessary to deal specifically with the politics eventually promoted by the PCP itself, and expose in detail how the views they promoted in the General Political Line are fundamentally revisions of the essential lessons and verdicts of MLM, which amount to a significant “left” deviation in line with many of Lin Biao’s views. These views include a commandist approach to leadership which is incompatible with democratic centralism (despite the PCP’s claims to uphold democratic centralism); a form of religious a priorism based around the claim that Gonzalo personally guaranteed the victory of the revolution and would guide the people all the way to Communism; a promotion of a bourgeois view of socialism in line with Trotsky’s fantasies of militarizing society, and more. At the same time, it would be incorrect to deny the successes of the PCP or their contributions to the ICM.¹⁵ However, a sober analysis is needed to properly sum up the theory of Gonzalo Thought and its differences with MLM, especially at a time when Gonzaloite Parties and organizations are claiming that only those who uphold their warped interpretation of Maoism are free from revisionism.

In this document, we will go through a number of the revisionist and “left” deviationist views promoted by the PCP in their General Political Line and contrast those with the lessons of MLM.¹⁶ We also include various examples of mistakes made by the PCP, and provide some analysis of how these mistakes relate to some of the central revisionist tenets of Gonzaloism. We begin with a brief overview of some of the shortcomings of the PCP’s class analysis of Peru, in particular their limited analysis of the various contradictory class forces among the peasantry and their related ultra-left approach to intermediate forces. These shortcomings contributed to their eventual defeat.

From there we dive into more of the central theoretical tenets of Gonzaloism, beginning with the “concentric circles” approach to Party building. We contrast this with the approach taken in China and Russia, explain how the Gonzaloist view is tied to the idealist policy of jefatura and the supposed “absolute leadership of the Party over the United Front,” and show how these views led to setbacks in Peru. In particular, we show how their articulations of absolute leadership reflect an idealist fantasy of eliminating class contradictions in the United Front because of the supposed correctness of leadership. We also explain how this idealism pushed middle forces into the arms of reaction. In this section we also discuss the idealist a priorisms promoted by the PCP including the absurd claim that Gonzalo personally guaranteed not only the victory of the revolution in Peru but also would carry them all the way to Communism. We note the parallels between such grandiose proclamations and Lin Biao’s reactionary “Genius Theory” as well as Dühring’s idealism.

We then analyze the three main justifications the PCP provides in their General Political Line for why all Communist Parties must militarize (and what exactly they meant by militarization of the Party), justifications which reveal the PCP’s deep infatuation with violence as the key link at all times, a sentiment typical among petty-bourgeois revolutionary romantics but antithetical to MLM. We show, in detail, how their emphasis on the Party being militarized under socialism—supposedly because this is the only way to prevent counter-revolution—is based on the absurd idea that the principal task of the Party under socialism is to carry out “military-type actions” and the related delusion that violence is the key for eliminating the vestiges of exploitation which remain under socialism. We contrast this with the approach taken in the USSR and China during the socialist periods. We also note the parallels between the Gonzaloist dreams of a “global people’s war” and Trotsky’s “permanent revolution.” The Trotskyism of the PCP does not end there. We also demonstrate how their views of socialism as a militarized society and their promotion of the policy of War Communism are basically a replica of the positions which Trotsky (and Bukharin) promoted at the end of the Russian Civil War, and which were strongly opposed by Lenin and Stalin.

The core of what is promoted as the PCP’s and Gonzalo’s synthesis of Maoism in their 1988 General Political Line reflects a profound lack of historical knowledge about the basic practices and lessons of the Chinese and Russian Revolutions, as well as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.¹⁷ All of this is a tremendous step backwards compared to the clarity achieved in China and in the leading revolutionary movements in the contemporary era. To this day, Gonzaloite ideology continues to exert a negative influence on the ICM, and now Gonzaloites are working overtime to claim the mantle of Maoism and form a new Communist International, the ICL. Therefore, it is time for genuine Maoist forces to struggle against this malformed ideology, and to expose the rotten bourgeois core that is contained in many of their positions.

A Few Notes on the PCP’s Class Analysis and their Underestimation of the Enemy

The PCP’s General Political Line suffers from a number of glaring issues. While claiming to uphold Maoism, and while offering some correct criticism of the Soviet and Chinese revisionists, the document is not a work of Maoism. Instead, it synthesizes various Lin Biaoist and Trotskyist positions into a “left” deviation. This is perhaps most evident in the reductive class analysis of Peruvian society put forward in it. While there are some basic and correct conclusions about Peruvian society’s class character (e.g. that it is semi-feudal and semi-colonial), this is not the same as a comprehensive class analysis.¹⁸

The limitations of the PCP’s basic understanding of Peruvian society can be seen, for example, in the fact that they do not distinguish between different strata of the peasantry beyond poor, middle, and rich. In fact, the middle peasants are only mentioned twice in the General Political Line, and agricultural laborers are not mentioned at all,¹⁹ limitations which are typical of the document as a whole. Especially in a country in which the majority of the population is living in the countryside, understanding the complexities of class contradictions, and various levels of stratification between different sections of the peasantry (including how these vary in different locations), is of central importance in developing a correct political line. The PCP completely failed to do this.

Overall, the PCP’s class analysis amounted to ignorance of the basic class realities in the countryside and in Peruvian society at large. In order to develop a correct line, a Party must have an objective analysis of the fundamental class dynamics in the country. This requires more than just simply noting the existence of various classes. Instead, the Party must make a detailed analysis of the complex and contradictory class forces at play and how they vary regionally. In practice, the PCP’s reductive class analysis led to various difficulties, for example their failure to win over the middle peasantry to consistently support the revolution due to their ultra-“left” focus on the poor peasants.²⁰ It’s not that the poor peasants aren’t a key force in the revolution, they are, but that the question of how to unite them with other progressive classes is key to developing a correct line and charting a course forward for the revolution. The PCP failed to address this task in their General Political Line.²¹

In his Critique of Soviet Economics, Mao noted that in the USSR, there were various confusions on the nature of the middle peasantry and various types of stratification in this class. He also spelled out the issues that inevitably arise from an oversimplified understanding of the middle peasants:

Mao’s comments are instructive, and they also help to clarify a distinct weakness in the PCP’s political line as it was synthesized in 1988. Without a clear class analysis of various contradictions among the peasantry, and in particular within the middle peasantry, it is impossible to maintain rural leadership and continue a revolutionary direction of development.²³ This confusion on basic aspects of Peruvian society—a result, in part, of ignorance of or disagreement with the basic approach to class analysis promoted by Mao—clearly contributed to the eventual setbacks the PCP faced in many rural areas in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which in turn led them to “retreat forward” to the cities.²⁴

During this period a significant section of the peasantry, in particular the middle peasantry, in the Party’s guerrilla zones and support bases began to rally behind the landlords, rich peasantry, and state-sponsored efforts to oppose the PCP.²⁵ Rondas campesinas, armed peasant patrols sponsored by the military and under the leadership of the landlords and rich peasantry,²⁶ proliferated across the countryside and closely collaborated with the armed forces in the fight against the PCP. By 1990, rondas had been formed in over 3,500 villages in the departments²⁷ of Ayacucho, Apurímac, Huancavelica, and Junín, including in many in areas that had formerly been strongholds of the PCP.²⁸ The fact that a section of the peasantry would collaborate with the state and armed forces is not a surprise, nor is it necessarily an indication of mistakes on the Party’s part. However, the rapid proliferation of the rondas in the late 1980s and early 1990s—especially in areas where the Party had been organizing for years—indicated that serious errors had been made on the PCP’s part. By 1990, thousands of villages in these departments had formed rondas which put the PCP on the back-foot in rural areas and forced them to retreat from their former strongholds.

While coercion was used by the ruling class in the formation of some of these rondas, there was also clearly a real base of support for them among the peasantry. The PCP’s inability to defeat this campaign of mobilizing the rondas should be contrasted with the success of CPI (Maoist) in defeating the state-sponsored Salwa Judum campaign, where numerous Adivasis were conscripted as Special Police Officers (SPOs). While some declassed and lumpen elements did readily cooperate with the paramilitary forces, the state was not able to cultivate a mass base to oppose the revolutionary struggle, and in a few short years the Party was able to defeat Salwa Judum.

Part of the reason for the PCP’s inability to overcome this campaign was that they fundamentally misunderstood the basic strategy employed by the ruling class during this period, and therefore strategically underestimated the forces of reaction. For example, Gonzalo and the PCP repeatedly refer to the armed forces as “experts at defeat,” noting the inability of the armed forces to crush the revolution during its 1983-1984 offensive. During this offensive by the ruling classes, despite making various mistakes, the PCP had been able to beat back the armed forces and withstand the unprecedented repression they faced. In the context of the military’s wholesale slaughter and repression of the masses, the PCP was able to win over many middle of the road forces. However, they made a serious error in assuming that the armed forces and the ruling class more broadly would not learn from their mistakes and adjust the strategy and tactics of their counter-revolutionary offensives.

These assumptions were related to various idealist formulations promoted by the Party, including that they were “condemned to win.” For example, they stated “but hasn’t our Party taught us that we are condemned to win? A beautiful verdict. This is more valid today than yesterday, and tomorrow it will be even more so.”²⁹ The idea that forces of reaction were incapable of learning from their mistakes and formulating new strategies to defeat the People’s War was codified in the PCP’s General Political Line: “The reactionaries dream about elaborating ‘superior strategies’ to people’s war, but are condemned to failure since they are against history. Our People’s War after nearly eight years blazes victoriously, demonstrating the invincibility of people’s war.”³⁰ The idea that the reactionaries could not defeat the people’s war because “they are against history” is an idealist distortion of basic reality. Various people’s wars around the world were defeated in the 20th century.

To argue that an abstract force of history guarantees the victory of a given revolutionary struggle is an abandonment of materialist principles. It is an idealist fantasy of an external force supposedly determining the course of events. The correctness of the political line of the communist party leading a given revolution is the only thing that can “guarantee” its victory. There must always be two-line struggle internal to the Party to that it stays on the revolutionary road and that its line does not degenerate into opportunism and adventurism or even revisionism. These sort of idealist formulations are commonplace in the PCP’s documents, and by at least 1988 they were not a secondary trend, but the cornerstone of the PCP’s line. We analyze some of the fundamentally idealist tenets at the heart of Gonzaloism in the second and third sections of this document.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the reactionary armed forces, while continuing to carry out various massacres and brutal oppression, changed their general strategy for counter-revolution. They abandoned the prior policy of blanket repression of the masses and large-scale forced relocations of the peasantry into concentration camps, and instead focused on cultivating the rondas and other counter-revolutionary forces at the village level, working in close collaboration with the rich peasantry, landlords, and other local reactionary elements.³¹ They focused on the various grievances the peasantry had with mistakes the PCP had made, in particular the ways in which various ultra-“left” policies (including cutting off the peasants from rural markets, which we discuss more below) had hurt the middle peasantry. This strategy allowed the forces of reaction to rally the middle peasants—and even some of the poor peasants—under the leadership of the rich peasantry. Thus, the armed forces not only had taken stock of some of the reason why they failed in the 1983-84 campaign, but also had an understanding of some of the PCP’s mistakes and shortcomings. In particular, they were aware of the ways in which PCP’s faulty class analysis of Peruvian society had led them to alienate significant sections of the peasants.

The PCP failed to take stock of this changed strategy of the armed forces, and continue to insist that the army was pursuing a policy of “steal everything, burn everything and kill everybody.”³² This quote is a reference by the PCP to the policy of “Burn All, Kill All, and Loot All” eventually adopted by the Japanese fascists during their invasion and occupation of China. While there were some similarities between this policy and that of the Peruvian Armed Forces in this period, the truth is that the basic strategy the military pursued was quite different. However, the idealist beliefs of the PCP prevented them from taking stock of this and realizing the success the ruling class was having in eroding their mass base. For example, as late as 1990, the PCP insisted that the armed forces were pursuing the same strategy as in the past:

This and other statements by the PCP indicate that the Party’s evaluation was that the rondas were largely being defeated and that the army would soon be forced to return to more extreme forms of overt repression and wholesale slaughter.³⁷ Only in 1991 did the PCP begin to realize the scope and scale of the success the ruling classes were having in mobilizing the peasantry against the revolution.³⁸

The ability of the ruling classes to carry out such a large-scale counter-revolutionary mobilization of the peasants, under the leadership of the landlords and rich peasantry, speaks to the significance and scope of the mistakes the PCP was making at the time. Relations between the Party and the peasantry had been damaged to such a degree that a significant portion of the middle peasants—and even poor peasants and agricultural laborers—rallied behind the leadership of the landlords and rich peasantry against the Party. These mistakes included the large-scale closing of rural markets and fairs, part of efforts by the PCP to cut off the supply of goods from the countryside to the city.³⁹ The Party hoped that this policy would help to exacerbate the growing crisis in the cities, deprive them of food and other necessary agricultural products, and thereby prepare more favorable circumstances of seizing control of the cities and combatting the government’s counter-revolutionary offensive.⁴⁰

However, this approach reflected deep confusions about basic political economy and revolutionary strategy. The peasantry are highly dependent on the flow of finished goods from the cities to meet their basic economic needs. Without tools, clothes, medicine, and other essentials, the peasants will experience a precipitous drop in their standard of living, as well as their level of production. This is what happened in many villages in Peru, and it severely damaged relations between the Party and the masses.⁴¹ The PCP understood clearly that the peasants’ demand for land was central to the revolutionary struggle, but they struggled to continue the revolutionary transformation of the relations of production beyond smashing the semi-feudal ownership of large-scale landholders and some related successes bringing cattle rustlers and other lumpen elements to justice. They did carry out some forms of collective and cooperative agriculture, but failed to grasp basic elements of political economy, in particular the key role of rural markets in allowing the peasants to sell surplus agricultural products and purchase key finished goods. Their approach of stopping the peasants from selling their surplus in the markets also alienated elements of the national bourgeoisie and is part of the reason that the PCP was unable, even in the midst of a major revolutionary crisis, to win the support of any significant section of this class.⁴²

In contrast to this approach, the CPI (Maoist) has fought against efforts by the Indian state to close various fairs and markets in their guerrilla zones and base areas. As the Party’s former General Secretary Ganapathy noted,

These remarks help to clarify the basics of a Maoist line on the matter in question. They reflect an understanding of the lessons of the Chinese Revolution—where the CCP fought hard against Chiang Kai-shek’s economic blockade of their base areas. Ganapathy’s comments highlight the complex and interrelated tasks facing a revolutionary Party in the economic sphere during a PPW. These tasks are not reducible to smashing semi-feudal property relations. These mistakes were not properly analyzed and corrected, and instead the Party doubled down on them. This line was years in the making, but it was eventually systematized in the PCP’s 1988 General Political Line. And it is this and other backward lines the PCP promoted—and contemporary Gonzaloites continue to promote—as both a synthesis of Maoism and its extension and application to Peru, termed Gonzalo Thought.

The PCP’s extremely limited class analysis of the peasantry is not unique, but typical of their overall surface level understanding of Peruvian Society. In General Political Line and other documents from this period, there is no analysis of the lumpen-proletariat, despite the significant presence of nacro-traffickers in many regions in which the PCP was active and the huge urban slums around Lima and other cities.⁴⁵ While these slums contained many members of the working-class, there was also a significant presence of declassed and anti-social elements, but the Party failed to provide any analysis of these forces in the General Political Line.

Likewise, there is no discussion of the various indigenous groups in Peru. In the 1960s, the PCP drew on Mariátegui’s analysis of the “Indian Question” from the 1920s but did not further expand upon it or take stock of various developments since that time. In their General Political Line, the only mention of this question is the statement that the People’s War “is the solution to the land question, the national question, and the question of the destruction of the landlord bureaucratic state and the reactionary armed forces.” Of course, a thoroughgoing social and political revolution under proletarian leadership is the only true solution to the myriad of issues the masses face under the present system. However, as they say, the devil is in the details; without a correct political line on how to handle various contradictions (including the national question), it is impossible to lead a successful revolution.

These are just a few further examples of the flawed class analysis put forward by the PCP in their General Political Line. There are many others. These mistaken understandings of the basic class realities in Peru had significant practical consequences and contributed to the defeat of the revolution. The class analysis put forward by the PCP in this document is no model to follow; it should be a teacher only by negative example. It was ultimately a dogmatic caricature of a Maoist class analysis.

Heads Spinning in Concentric Circles

As we noted above, the Gonzaloites today, following in the footsteps of the PCP (and perhaps in their minds “improving upon” or even “synthesizing” Gonzaloism) put forward a series of articulations about the construction of the Party and the supposed need to militarize communist parties. Given that the CPB and others insist that these questions form the dividing line between Maoism and revisionism, these formulations provide a good starting point for an examination of the basic politics of Gonzaloism, as synthesized in the General Political Line,⁴⁶ and how it differs from Maoism. The logic behind their assertions is quite circular. But first, we will follow them around in circles to see that, in fact, this approach to politics goes nowhere.

Concentric circles are circles inside of one another (as opposed to, say, a Venn diagram of partially overlapping circles). In the PCP’s view, this is the model: “Great Leadership” aka jefatura at the center of everything. The Party is then the central circle; around it is the army (with every member of the Party also being part of the army), and then the United Front. The CPB provides contrasting images in their document, Lenin and the Militarized Communist Party which are illustrative. It should be noted that the CCP’s approach (apparently revisionist!) was in line with the image on the left in Figure [fig:concentric], as was the Bolsheviks.

The basic idea inherent to this Gonzaloist approach to Party building is that the Party has “absolute leadership” over everything. This is supposedly secured by having every Party member be part of the army⁴⁷ and by an (undefined) “great leadership. Below, we will examine the concrete content of this idea of jefatura and explain, first and foremost, why it is pure subjective fantasy to believe that the Party can have absolute leadership over the United Front, and second, why this is a revisionist fantasy born of petty-bourgeois impetuosity, which significantly contributed to the liquidation of proletarian politics in Peru.

Before getting into the specifics of these points, it is important to note (and this should be obvious to anyone familiar with Maoism and the history of the Chinese Revolution) that the idea of a militarized party and “concentric circles” of the Party, People’s Army, and United Front are not in line with the basic strategy advocated by Mao, nor with the practice of the CCP and People’s Liberation Army in China. This should, at the very least, give the Gonzaloites pause in declaring themselves Maoists, but these and other contradictions are instead dismissed with various forms of handwaving, logical leaps, wordplay, and ritual incantations. After all, according to our Gonzaloites, Mao did not “synthesize Maoism”⁴⁸ so he could not really have grasped the supposed universality of the “military strategy of the proletariat” (aka PPW) nor the “Maoist” approach to Party building…We needed to wait for Gonzalo to accomplish this glorious task…If these mental gymnastics have the reader’s head spinning, we must apologize. In order to understand the basic politics put forward by the CPB and other Gonzaloites, we will have to travel deep into the maze of their circular logic, a task which can be dizzying, but is necessary to expose the revisionist essence of their basic views.

It is absurd to argue that, in order to be a Maoist, one must abandon the basic principles of revolutionary struggle promoted by Marx, Lenin, and Mao. Of course, the particularities of different countries requires that tactics and strategy vary accordingly, but adjusting tactics and strategy in line with particular conditions is different than adopting a fundamentally different approach to basic organizational questions and principles, especially those concerning the organization of a Party of professional revolutionaries. All of this also pertains to the questions of party discipline, the mass line method of leadership, the contradiction between leadership and the led, and much more. As we will see, by advocating for the absolute leadership of the Party—built around the supposed “great leadership” of one person—over the United Front, the Gonzaloites are promoting a form of one-man leadership which is quite different than the political and ideological centralization which is central to MLM.⁴⁹ This amounts to advocating for a negation of hard-won lessons of the class struggle which were synthesized by Marx, Lenin, and Mao.

This is really what is at stake in the debate around Gonzaloism: What are the fundamental principles of Maoism? Because the claims of the Gonzaloites are so surreal and absurd, it’s worth reiterating that according to their parties and organizations, the fundamental principles of Maoism with respect to Party organization (and basically everything else) are not those spelled out and summed up by Mao, but instead Maoism is actually composed of completely different principles (many of which directly contradict Mao and the CCP’s views) summed up by Gonzalo and the PCP in the 1980s.⁵⁰

Absolute Leadership, Idealism, and Class Contradictions

As we noted, the theory of “concentric circles” is inextricably tied up with the PCP’s insistence on the “absolute leadership” of the Party over the United Front. In the first issue of Red Pages we criticized this Gonzaloite idea, which was put forward in a May Day statement by the CPB and others. As we noted at the time:

By arguing for the absolute leadership of the Party over the United Front,⁵² the PCP not only contradicts the lessons of Maoism—and promotes a commandist approach to mass organization in which the role of the masses is principally to “listen up” to the supposedly correct leadership—but also reveals a deep commitment to an idealist understanding of class contradictions. No Party can eliminate the existence of class contradictions (and therefore contending class forces) in the United Front—not to mention the army and even the Party itself. These class contradictions will not disappear until the arrival of communism. The question is how to correctly handle them. No amount of hand waving can do away with this basic objective reality which is a result of the class society in which we live. A basic lesson of Maoism is that even after a successful revolution, the existence of class contradictions and class struggle will continue to exert a powerful influence in society. In order to overcome these contradictions and continue on to communism, parties must analyze them and work out a line to resolve them. Fantasies of “absolute” leadership negate materialist analysis of class society and replace it with a form of magical thinking, expressing an underlying belief that class contradictions can be eliminated immediately. Unfortunately, by the time of the publication of their General Political Line, the PCP had consolidated around idealist views on these topics and made these views a centerpiece of their practical efforts.

In practice, the “concentric circles” approach to Party building, and related idealist fantasies of absolute leadership over the United Front, led to significant problems in the PCP’s United Front work, especially ultra-“left” and commandist tendencies. Early on, the Party had some significant success uniting with broad popular opposition to new repressive government measures, despite various shortcomings in the PCP’s line. For example in 1981, shortly after the launch of the PPW, the Belaúnde government passed a new “Anti-Terrorism” Law, known as Legislative Decree 046⁵³ which gave broad sweeping powers to the government to crack down on popular struggles, including the ability to imprison people and journalists for up to five years if they “publicly defend an act of terrorism.” Broad sections of the people, including the peasantry, progressive intellectuals, trade union leaders, Catholic priests, and even revisionist parties mobilized against this law, worried that it was a step back towards the military dictatorship which had officially ended in 1980.

The PCP did not create this broad popular opposition, but it was able to engage with the movement to oppose the law, help win freedom for some political prisoners, and garner support for the armed struggle—which was still at a low level at this time. They were helped in their efforts by the fact that most of the electoral left parties and progressive intellectuals thought that the PCP’s attacks on power stations, electrical towers, and other such infrastructure were actually being carried out by right-wing paramilitary forces as a “false flag operation” to justify new repressive laws.⁵⁴ Thus, while the PCP was able to take advantage of this relatively favorable situation, it was not predominately because of popular support for their sabotage efforts.⁵⁵

One example of the PCP’s early successes in united front efforts can be seen with campaign to free Edmundo Cox Beuzeville, a cadre in the Party who was captured by police in the Cusco Department on May 26, 1981. After being severely tortured, he admitted to being a PCP member and revealed the location of a cache of dynamite. A video of his confession was leaked to the press and aired on TV in Lima; his appearance revealed clear signs of extreme torture. This elicited a large popular outcry, and even the Catholic Church’s Episcopal Commission of Social Action released a statement in his defense, demanding that the government “guarantee the physical and moral integrity of the individuals detained.”⁵⁶ Due to this and other related efforts, Cox was eventually released, and later went on to play a major role in the Party’s Metropolitan Committee, which led their activities in Lima.

Similar efforts were made to free PCP cadre and supporters who were arrested in this period all around the country. In April 1981 three people accused of belonging to the PCP and dynamiting a TV transmitter were arrested in the remote Department of Puno. Various religious leaders (many of whom were sympathetic to liberation theology), as well as trade unions and the parliamentary left (which had significant leadership over the peasant organizations there and had recently won mayorship of the province) mobilized for the release of those imprisoned and were able get two of the three people freed.

These early successes working with other organizations in a broad United Front show the relative clarity that the PCP had at the time. They were able to take advantage of available openings to free cadre, engage with popular opposition to new repressive laws, and more. However, by 1988, the PCP had consolidated to the view that the Party had to have absolute leadership over the United Front, and explicitly identified the United Front with the construction of the new state. In fact, in Section 5 of the General Political Line, titled “Line of Construction of the Three Instruments,” the United Front is no longer mentioned as one of these instruments. Instead, it is replaced by the new state, showing how the PCP directly equated the two.

The view that the United Front is reducible to the new state that the PCP was building in its base areas is in direct contradiction with the experiences and lessons of the Chinese Revolution. For example, during the Second United Front with the Guomindang (GMD), Mao and the CCP entered into a tactical United Front with the Chinese Nationalists and led the country-wide movement to resist the Japanese invasion—that is, they were tactically united in the need to resist the Japanese invasion, but strategically the CCP and GMD had very different objectives and goals for the future of China. While the CCP was building a new state power in the countryside, they did not limit the United Front to these efforts alone. And, after the defeat of the Japanese fascist forces, it became necessary to fight a civil war against the GMD and renew the agrarian revolution. However, in this period they were able to—in part because of their tactical United Front—build and lead a countrywide strategic United Front for the New Democratic revolution.

This sophisticated and subtle approach to the United Front was based on a materialist analysis of the class contradictions in Chinese society and an understanding of the need to unite with a variety of unreliable and unstable allies. This was not limited to the GMD, but also included a whole series of different forces including intellectuals, reformists, bourgeois democrats, and patriotic landlords. The Party was willing to work with them even if they were not under the Party’s direct leadership, and even if they were not part of the new state that the CCP was building in the countryside. This is in direct contradiction to the PCP’s approach. If the CCP had argued that the United Front was reducible to “the new state” their tactical alliance with the GMD against the Japanese invaders would never have been possible. Instead, they would have been forced to fight against both reactionary forces at the same time, and the victory of the revolution would have been jeopardized.

To better understand the Maoist approach to the United Front it can be helpful to refer to Ganapathy’s remarks on the topic:

Early on, the PCP adopted something fairly similar to this approach; however, by 1988 they had a narrow and sectarian understanding of the United Front, reflecting their fantasies of absolute leadership. Some practical examples can help to clarify this point.

In 1987 in Puno—where six years earlier the PCP successfully helped forge a broad united front against new repressive laws—the Party began to carry out “selective annihilations” (assassinations) of many of the parliamentary left leaders in the region, and even went so far as to assassinate numerous peasant and teachers’ union leaders. For example, in April 1987, they entered the town of San Juan de Salinas, captured the parliamentary-left Mayor Zenobio Huarsaya, and put him on trial. Despite popular opposition to killing him, the PCP went forward with his execution anyways based on the justification that he was an enemy of the people because he was an elected official in the reactionary state.⁵⁸ This was part of the PCP’s strategy to create a “power vacuum” by assassinating various mayors and elected officials; to justify these attacks they argued that “hitting or beheading State authorities or bureaucrats of whatever level hampers the running of the State and even more generates a Power vacuum.”⁵⁹ In justifying such assassination against Huarsaya and other members of the parliamentary left, the PCP argued that, “although having the complexion and appearance of humble peasants, served and serve the exploiters and betray their class; they did it in the times of the Conquest and they do it now in the Republic.”⁶⁰

Huarsaya was part of a petty-bourgeois pseudo-Marxist Party, the Partido Unificado Mariateguista (PUM); however, just a few years earlier he had been sympathetic to the PCP, and involved in a number of campaigns to support the release of captured cadres and supporters. The assassination of Huarsaya and others, as well as attacks on the PUM’s reformist agricultural initiatives, created a good deal of popular outrage in Puno and around the country against the PCP. This was exacerbated by the PCP blowing up various PUM and church-run buildings used by peasant organizations in Puno for their meetings. Many members of the masses who had formerly been sympathetic to the revolution became outraged.⁶¹

In Puno, the PUM was not a marginal organization. Under their previous name, Vanguardia Revolucionaria (VR), they had been a major component of the Confederación Campesina del Perú, a peasant organization which led land seizures in the 1970s in Puno and elsewhere and which had around 250,000 members by 1978. They had also led Department-wide general strikes under the military dictatorship and afterwards. The PUM was also one of the leading forces in the Federación de Campesinos del Puno (FDCP) which led a massive seizure of 340,000 hectares of land from the state-sponsored semi-feudal “cooperative” farms (which were largely a reorganization of the old feudal estates along semi-capitalist lines).⁶² They enjoyed significant support from progressive intellectuals and from the liberation theology inclined priests and bishops in the region.⁶³

Actually, the PUM as whole was somewhat sympathetic to the PCP. They had formed as a new Party in 1984, and argued that there was a need to “[unleash] a war” after constructing a series of mass organizations; they rejected the approaches of other parties in the parliamentary left who had given up on the need for armed struggle. Overall, they had something of a petty-bourgeois radical approach, and were not consolidated to parliamentary cretinism. That being said, given the PUM’s politics, they were not able to win lasting victories for the masses, as their efforts constantly floundered on reformist and liberal illusions about the state. However, they enjoyed significant mass support among the peasantry, working class, and petty-bourgeoisie in the region. It was not easy to quickly change this and reveal to the masses the limitations of PUM’s political orientation.

What’s more, given the sharp conflict between PUM and the central government, it may have been possible for the PCP to engage in a tactical united front with them, and work together to oppose the central government’s refusal to fulfill its promises to distribute land to the peasantry. This, in turn, could have helped to win PUM’s continued opposition to the deployment of the military to Puno against the PCP. In such a United Front, the PCP would have been able to struggle with the PUM for leadership of the peasant organizations and other mass organizations as well. Or, if this was not possible, the PCP could have, at the very least, exploited the contradictions between PUM and the central government. Either way, as Ganapathy notes in the above quote, it is necessary to win over the masses who are following the backwards leadership of various corrupt and opportunist Parties.

However, after being unable to quickly wrest leadership of the peasant struggle from PUM (despite PUM’s numerous limitations and backwards politics), the PCP resorted to selective annihilations of PUM politicians and leaders, as well as leaders of mass organizations aligned with PUM. This approach not only foreclosed on any sort of United Front with PUM, it also isolated the PCP from significant sections of the masses, especially the peasantry in Puno. It reflected an extreme impetuosity, seeking to short-circuit the necessary struggles to demonstrate to the masses, in practice, the limitations of PUM and other revisionist parties. In short, the PCP’s narrow understanding of the United Front, and their fantasies of absolute leadership led them to liquidate organizing efforts, push PUM closer to the central government, and alienate themselves from large sections of the peasantry and progressive petty-bourgeoisie.

The extremely backwards approach the PCP took in this situation can be further elucidated by examining the contradictions internal to the PUM at the time, which was divided between two major factors, the libios and the zorros. The former, representing the majority of the Party, was fairly sympathetic to the PCP and argued that the PUM should take up the armed struggle in the short term. The latter was more conservative and argued that the PCP was a “regressive force.”⁶⁴ In their Second National Congress in July 1988, the libios won the majority in the Party, the zorros split and left, and the PUM began preparations to start their own armed struggle, which they would abortively try to launch first in 1989 and then again in 1990. Both efforts failed to get off the ground. However, by 1991 the PCP’s continued assassinations of PUM members and various leaders of their associated mass organizations led to another split in the Party, this time between those who wanted to solely rely on the rondas to oppose the PCP and those who wanted to also collaborate with the military. By that point, the PUM had consolidated to strongly opposing to the PCP, the question was just over how best to do so.

The point of this exposition is not to claim that the PUM was a thoroughly revolutionary force—they clearly were not. But they can be understood as something vaguely akin to the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) in Russia. There were serious divisions between the right and left wings of the Party, and the left wing was fairly sympathetic to the PCP. Had the PCP not pursued such a narrow and sectarian approach to the United Front, it would have been possible to win over significant sections of the PUM to support the people’s war, and to wrest from them the leadership of various mass struggles, much like the Bolshevik’s did with the Socialist Revolutionaries. However, Gonzalo had declared the PUM to be “enemies of the revolution”⁶⁵ and did not differentiate between differentiate between different contradictory tendencies internal to the organization.

To clarify the extremely backwards nature of the PCP’s approach, it can be helpful to contrast it with the policy pursued by the Bolsheviks to expose the limitations of the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary leadership after the February Revolution. In June 1917, when the First All-Russia Congress of the Soviets was held, the Bolsheviks were a relatively small minority: only 105 of the 1,090 delegates were Bolsheviks. But by the time of the Second All-Russia Congress of the Soviets in October, the Bolsheviks had a majority. They did not accomplish this by assassinating Menshevik and SR leaders, or deputies and soviet delegates (often trade union and peasant leaders) who sided with these other parties. Instead, the Bolsheviks organized tirelessly in the factory committees, among the soldiers, and with the peasants to expose the bankruptcy of these petty-bourgeois parties, including especially their willingness to resume Russia’s participation in the imperialist war. Thus, without carrying out any “selective annihilations” of these opportunists and revisionists in this period, the Bolsheviks were able to lead a successful revolution. What’s more, they were able to split the left SRs off from their Party and win their support at a crucial moment in the revolution.

In contrast, the PCP’s actions led to their rapid isolation from a significant section of the masses. Support for forming rondas to drive out the PCP grew among the peasantry, and likewise among the PUM and various liberal forces in the church. By the time of Fujimori’s coup in 1992, the parliamentary left in Puno had grown so antagonistic to the PCP that they did not even issue a statement of opposition to the coup. On the one hand, this shows the political bankruptcy and feebleness of these parliamentary forces at this time. However, it also shows the way in which the PCP’s line of absolute leadership of the United Front pushed wavering forces into the arms of reaction. Ultimately the PCP was unable to utilize the basic contradictions between different sections of the ruling class, the petty-bourgeoisie, and electoral parties and use these contradictions to form different united fronts.⁶⁶

Jefatura, Metaphysical Guarantees, and Idealist a Priorism

In Peru, these idealist fantasies of “absolute leadership” were tied to extremely backwards ideas, like that Gonzalo was “the guarantee of the triumph of the revolution who will carry us to Communism,”⁶⁷ the promotion of Party members swearing loyalty oaths to Gonzalo, and articulations of the Central Committee’s “conscious and unconditional subjection to the sole leadership of Chairman Gonzalo.”⁶⁸

Such articulations go beyond reductive class analysis and idealist fantasies; they veer into the territory of religious thinking. This sort of thinking, unfortunately, is the heart and soul of jefatura and the “concentric circles” approach to Party building.

The idea that Gonzalo’s jefatura was the guarantor of victory is a form of idealist a priorism, which the Party took up in the place of revolutionary Marxism. Enshrining these a priorisms in the Party’s General Political Line speaks to how the Party had consolidated to revisionist ideas by 1988. No individual’s leadership can guarantee the victory of a revolution. To assert otherwise is Dühring-esque; it is akin to Dühring’s self-aggrandizing proclamations of his individual genius being free from any “subjectively limited conception of the world” and his related claims of having discovered “a final and ultimate truth.” The parallels are further elucidated by the PCP’s messianic claims that not only does Gonzalo guarantee the victory of the revolution, but that he will also “carry us to Communism.” This is a negation of the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge, substituting for it a form of deeply religious idealism that disarms the masses of people.

Practical experience has shown the incorrectness of this line, but it was clear before Gonzalo’s capture that these assertions contradicted foundational principles of dialectical materialism. Promoting these formulations contributed to the growth of various non-proletarian class tendencies in the Party and in the revolutionary movement, especially bourgeois commandism. These issues were particularly evident in the way in which, after Gonzalo’s capture in 1992, the revolution went into an acute retreat and was largely defeated by 2000, if not before.⁶⁹

In On Practice, Mao emphasizes the central role of social practice in verifying the correctness of knowledge:

The PCP’s sloganeering about Gonzalo guaranteeing their victory negates the Marxist theory of knowledge. Even before the setbacks in Peru, it should have been clear that claiming that an individual would guarantee victory was deeply backwards. Such claims are not only extremely individualistic but also reek of formalism and a petty-bourgeois desire for “guarantees” of correctness or victory. They also put a major damper on internal line struggle.⁷¹ Such sloganeering is antithetical to MLM and stands in sharp contrast to the approach promoted by Mao and the CCP. Instead of religious proclamations about the metaphysical power of a leader “guaranteeing victory,” the CCP relied on a clear understanding of the relationship between democratic centralism and collective leadership. This was spelled out in A Basic Understanding of the Communist Party of China:

The idea that Gonzalo personally guaranteed victory undermined the system of collective leadership in the PCP. It promoted subjectivism in their ranks and inhibited proper functioning of democratic centralism. What sort of inner-Party democracy can exist if a leader is declared to be absolutely correct and to be the individual who personally guarantees not only the victory of the revolution, but the transformation of all human society to Communism? This view is idealism, pure and simple.

Each individual has subjective limitations; we all have a mix of correct and incorrect ideas. In Anti-Dühring, Engels ridiculed Dühring for the claim that his philosophy was free from any “subjectively limited conception of the world.”⁷³ Yet with Gonzalo and the PCP, we find that they have discarded Engels and taken up Dühring. True, this form of a priorism is cloaked in a new garb and prettified with new phrases, but its idealist essence is one and the same as the pitiful philosophy of Herr Dühring.⁷⁴ It has just as little value for the proletarian cause.

This religious form of devotion to Gonzalo which the PCP promoted was extremely detrimental to the struggle. In the wake of Gonzalo’s capture, the CC doubled down on this devotional tendency, stating “The Central Committee of the PCP reaffirms itself in its plain, conscious and unconditional subjection to the sole leadership of Chairman Gonzalo and to the entire system of party leadership.”⁷⁵ No Party member should place themselves under the “unconditional subjection” of any person, nor should any organ of the Party. Following the leadership of any individual and the Party is conditional, namely on whether or not they are promoting a proletarian line on a given topic and overall. If a key leader in a Party does adopt a non-proletarian line, then this must be struggled against! If the Party overall takes up such a stand, this must be opposed.

If there is still a practice of democratic centralism in the Party in question, then it can be possible for those holding minority opinions to do so within the Party, even as it maintains unity of action. Then, the correctness or incorrectness of a given approach gain be clarified through struggle and practice over time. Likewise, if a key Party leader is making some key but secondary mistakes (and this is not uncommon), then this can be struggled against in the spirit of unity-struggle-unity.⁷⁶ If Gonzalo guaranteed the Party’s victory, how could (and why should) any Party member oppose anything he put forward? Doing so would, according to this view, be opposing the guarantee that the revolution is bound to succeed, and may as well be opposing the revolution itself.

In contrast to this approach, it can be helpful to refer to Mao’s views on democratic centralism in the Party:

In contrast to the PCP’s idealist fantasy that Gonzalo’s leadership was an a priori guarantee of victory, Mao emphasized the importance of democratic centralism in the Party. He noted that he regularly acceded to the majority view while in the minority, and contrasted this with the situation in some Party committees where “whatever the first secretary says goes.” He described the latter situation as “quite wrong” and noted that it was “nonsense if whatever one person says goes.” And yet, this was ultimately the view that the PCP enshrined in their General Political Line. By promoting these sorts of idealist fantasies about Gonzalo, the PCP ended up practicing a form of one-man leadership, somewhat akin to Lin Biao’s “genius theory,” instead of democratic centralism.

Mao’s Self-Evaluation and the PCP’s Lin Biaoism

The PCP’s grandiose proclamations about Gonzalo—which were endorsed and promoted by Gonzalo himself—should be contrasted with Mao’s humble and dialectical analysis of his own strengths and weaknesses. One of the best examples of this is in his July, 1966 letter to Jiang Qing at the start of the GPCR. In this letter, he offers many poignant remarks, including spelling out his concerns about Lin Biao’s promotion of idealist views about Mao. Although it is cumbersome to include such a long quote, it is necessary to quote extensively from this document.

Mao’s insightful analysis of the political situation in 1966 and his own strengths and weaknesses is of great importance. Of particular relevance is the way in which he opposed the religious idolization of him promoted by Lin Biao. While it was necessary to work closely with Lin Biao in the early GPCR to topple the Liu-Deng clique and ensure the support of the PLA for the GPCR, Mao had deep reservations about Lin’s approach. Mao was concerned by promoting the cult around him, Lin was actually maneuvering politically for his own gain (a fear which would prove well founded based on Lin eventual coup attempt). Mao was also worried about the impact that such idolization had on the Party and the masses. In contrast to Mao’s concerns about Lin, Gonzalo and the PCP had no such scruples about adopting Lin Biaoist practices.

We can see this, for example, in their repeated promotion of Gonzalo as the “greatest living Marxist-Leninist-Maoist.” This was not just a phrase that they used after his capture, but was codified in their General Political Line in 1988.⁹⁶ In their 1991 document Concerning the Two Hills, they go so far as to explicitly attribute all of the achievements of the Party to Gonzalo and Gonzalo alone. Gone are the masses who make history, and in their place we find jefatura, which is really just another “Great Man” theory of history:

This is Lin Biaoism, not Maoism. Mao himself repeatedly opposed Lin and others promoting such hagiography.⁹⁸ The PCP seems to largely model itself off of Lin’s promotion of the cult of personality around Mao in the early GPCR. Their confusion on this topic does not just stem from a lack of historical knowledge of this period, but also reflects various non-proletarian understandings of leadership in the PCP.

In the early months of the GPCR, Mao and the left were forced to be less public with their critiques of Lin’s absurd formulations, so as to not pour cold water on the emerging mass enthusiasm. However, after the defeat of the Liu-Deng clique, it was possible to wage a more resolute struggle against the cult of personality promoted by Lin and related forms of feudal and bourgeois devotion to Mao’s image. While Lin was promoting these practices to further his own agenda, their widespread adoption related to various backwards trends that still existed in Chinese society, including significant vestiges of Confucianism and feudal thinking. As Mao put it when speaking with Edgar Snow in 1971, “It was hard… for people to overcome the habits of 3,000 years of emperor-worshiping tradition.”⁹⁹ The struggle against these ideas in the back of people’s minds was a central part of the GPCR, which aimed to overcome the “Four Alls.”¹⁰⁰ This is why, after Lin’s failed coup attempt, Mao and others on the left launched the “Criticize Lin Biao; Criticize Confucius” campaign.

Gonzalo and the PCP not only failed to take stock of the important lessons of this struggle in China, they in fact promoted many of the same practices that were struggled against! It is one thing for a Party to make some mistakes; this is inevitable to one degree or another. However, it is another thing entirely for a Party to codify these mistakes as the cornerstone of their practice and insist that they have universal validity! And, now the contemporary Gonzaloites absurdly insist that only those who uphold these Lin Biao-esque formulations are free from revisionism. According to the CPB and others, one must follow Lin Biao’s approach (and ignore Mao) in order to be a Maoist today!¹⁰¹ What an absolute mess of infantile rubbish.

A Chinese Maoist group recently published an excellent document, History Project of the Republic: The history and logic of revolution and restoration, which provides some important insight into Mao’s views on formulations such as claims that he was “the greatest living Marxist-Leninist of his time.”

Mao was clearly opposed to labeling him the “greatest Marxist-Leninist of our time,” precisely the way official PCP documents describe Gonzalo. Mao viewed such statements as “useless and offensive to others,” and yet the PCP promoted them. They likely based themselves on the Communiqué of the 11th Plenary Session of the 8th Central Committee and other texts which repeat such slogans. But they did not understand (or did not care to understand) that these articulations were promoted by Lin Biao and his clique.¹⁰⁴ They clearly remain ignorant of the crucial lessons of the GPCR, in particular from the “Criticize Lin Biao; Criticize Confucius” campaign.¹⁰⁵ While there was a great deal of confusion in the ICM post-1976 on the lessons of the GPCR—and therefore various misunderstandings were not uncommon in Parties around the world—the depth of the PCP’s confusion on democratic centralism and their deep commitment to a Lin Biaoist politics go far beyond basic misunderstandings, and reveal a serious deviation in their approach.

A Militarized “New Synthesis”?

In their General Political Line, the Central Committee of the PCP outlined twelve basic principles of their program. Number 7 is “militarization of the Party and concentric construction of the three instruments of the revolution.” This is no accident, these are inseparably tied together in their line, as we have mentioned above. The idea of militarization of the Party, as outlined by the PCP, is not reducible to the fact that the Party must prepare for warfare and revolution. It is specifically an articulation of how to organize and structure the Party, namely, as a military organization.

This is spelled out quite clearly in the GPL and is in line with the basic understanding of what it means to militarize an organization. For example, they state, “the militarization of the Party can only be carried forward through concrete actions of the class struggle, concrete military-type actions” and that “we must carry out mainly these forms so as to provide incentive and development to the class struggle, teaching with deeds, with these types of actions as the principal form of struggle in the People’s War.”¹⁰⁶ They likewise note “The mass work of the Party is done through the People’s Army and the masses are mobilized, politicized, organized and armed as the new Power in the countryside and in the People’s Defense Revolutionary Movement (MRDP) in the cities.”¹⁰⁷

In contrast to this “propaganda of the deed” approach to revolution, CPI (Maoist) cadre have noted that actually—and here they are following the footsteps of Mao and the Chinese Revolution—around 80% of the work done by the Party and the Peoples Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) is non-military. These including the PLGA engaging in productive activity (e.g. helping to reclaim wasteland, harvesting forest produce, etc.) as well as mobilizing the masses, doing educational work, distributing goods to the masses displaced by the counter-revolution, and more. During their trip to Dandakaranya, Gautam Navlakha and Jan Myrdal were told that without these activities, military action would cease to carry much weight or be able to sustain popular support.¹⁰⁸ Mao, speaking of the Chinese Revolution, likewise noted that “While the Party did play a leading role, it was against doing everything itself and thus substituting for the masses. Indeed, its concrete practice was to ‘pay call on the poor to learn of their grievances,’ to identify activist elements, to strike roots and pull things together, to consolidate nuclei, to promote the voicing of grievances, and to organize the class ranks — all for the purpose of unfolding the class struggle.”¹⁰⁹

This is a lesson that the PCP did not heed; their confusion on this topic reflected their naive understanding of the strategy of Protracted People’s War, and was tied to their focus on “military-type actions” as the key form of activity at all times. The line of “militarizing the Party” in Peru resulted from related confusions and in turn deepened them. In practice, this meant not only overemphasizing the importance of military actions and underemphasizing non-military ones, but also replacing Party discipline with military discipline.

Maoists Parties must have Party discipline, but this is significantly different from the military discipline of a revolutionary army. And while the PCP claimed to uphold democratic centralism even while militarizing, in fact the democratic centralism advocated by Mao was quite different than what was preached by the PCP. Both used the same term, but meant very different things, as the PCP’s promotion of jefatura related idealistic notions about Gonzalo clearly demonstrate. This is something of a pattern with the Gonzaloites, who use various Marxist terms and concepts, but have a fundamentally different understanding of them.

For the Gonzaloites, the methods of Mao and the CCP are outdated, because a new synthesis of Maoism was made by Gonzalo.

In their General Political Line, the PCP at least has the honesty to admit that this approach of militarizing the Party is quite different than what was practiced in Russia and China:

According to the PCP, the militarization of the Party is needed is because of the supposedly “new circumstance of the class struggle.” A key element of this supposedly new circumstance is that they were “entering into the times of war, so that all forces should be militarized.” However, the CCP and the Bolsheviks both dealt with revolutionary struggles during wartime without militarizing the Party. This factor alone is not sufficient to explain why militarization (which constitutes, as the PCP openly acknowledges, a different approach to Party organization than that advocated by Lenin and Mao) is needed, in Peru or elsewhere. And the PCP had no qualms about claiming that militarization of the Party is “a requirement and necessary” not only in their own circumstances, but for all “the Communist Parties of the world.”

One of the PCP’s main justifications for militarization is that “it is the militarization of the Party which enabled us to initiate and develop the People’s War.” This claim is dubious. Was militarization actually the key link in launching the People’s War? Or was it the relative political clarity of the Party at the time and the very favorable objective circumstances in Peru?¹¹¹ Even if one does believe that militarization was the key link, it is quite something to jump from this to the conclusion that this “experience has universal validity” and relatedly that “it is a requirement and necessary for the Communist Parties of the world to militarize themselves.”

This is not a scientific analysis or approach to summing up experiences. To conclude that the approach of militarization of the Party is universal based on the experiences of Peru alone is not the problem, since experiences from one country can have universal validity. But concluding this requires careful consideration and analysis to differentiate between particular and universal.¹¹² The problem is concluding that the organizational principle of militarization of the Party is universally applicable and necessary to initiate a people’s war, in spite of the fact that it was not applied by the Bolsheviks (who did not fight a protracted people’s war but did lead a successful revolution) or the CCP. Nor was it applied by numerous other parties have which successfully launched people’s wars, including the CPP, CPI (Maoist), the Vietnamese Communist Party, the TKP/ML, the Nepalese Party, and others.

The claim that militarization of the Party is needed to start a PPW also flies in the face of basic factual evidence; it smacks of dogmatism and empiricism. Mao noted that “Dogmatism is divorced from concrete practice, while empiricism mistakes fragmentary experience for universal truth.”¹¹³ Clearly, both apply here to the PCP’s 1988 document and the CPB’s contemporary utterances. It is the height of dogmatism to assert—in the face of basic and obvious practical evidence to the contrary—that militarization is a necessary prerequisite for initiating a people’s war. At the same time, it is also extremely empiricist to argue based on a one-sided appraisal of the PCP’s own experience that the militarization of the Party, “concentric circles,” and the strategy of PPW are universal truths. The presence of both these deviations in the PCP’s basic approach is in line with Lenin’s point that dogmatism and empiricism (much like economism and adventurism) are two sides of the same coin.

As we noted above, the contemporary adherents of Gonzaloism take all of this a step further, and argue that opposing the supposed need to militarize and “concentric circles” is the “essence of new revisionism.” In reality, Maoist forces who refuse to uphold the Gonzaloites’ absurd approach are not revising MLM, but rather opposing Gonzaloism, which is itself a revision of the basic lessons of MLM.

Before breaking down in detail the three other main reasons that the PCP provides for the supposed necessity for Communist Parties to militarize, it is important to analyze one other issue in the above quoted paragraph; namely, the PCP’s claim that “war is the highest form of resolving contradictions, of empowering the faculties people have to find solutions.”

This is not a Maoist line, though it seems to be cherry-picked from a quote from Mao (to give the PCP’s dogmatism the form of appearance of Maoism). In Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War, Mao wrote that “War is the highest form of struggle for resolving contradictions, when they have developed to a certain stage, between classes, nations, states, or political groups, and it has existed ever since the emergence of private property and of classes.”¹¹⁴ Here Mao is not arguing that war is the highest form of struggle for resolving all contradictions (a fact which is obvious even to a toddler), but that this is the case for a certain specific set of contradictions, and even then only once these contradictions have developed to a certain stage.

This is exceedingly basic and speaks to the existence of deep-seated confusions in the PCP. Is war the highest form of struggle for resolving the contradiction between the Party and the masses? What about the contradiction between the lack of gasoline in a car and the need to drive to work? What about the contradiction between the relations of production and the productive forces under socialism? The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie reached its hitherto highest form in the GPCR.¹¹⁵ While there were episodes of violence during this period, it was generally the right which provoked them. The left, in contrast, advocated that the masses “use reason, not violence” in the struggle against the capitalist roaders.¹¹⁶ Different types of contradictions require different methods for resolving them.

In On Contradiction, Mao emphasized that a key feature of dogmatism was the inability to grasp this basic point:

Given the PCP’s argument that war is “the highest form of resolving contradictions” it’s clear why they argue that the Party should principally carry out “military-type actions” — if all other means of resolving contradictions are lower and less-effective then the Party shouldn’t waste its time with them. This is an extremely narrow and dogmatic understanding of revolutionary struggle. At any given moment, the Party will have a series of different principal tasks in different situations. For example, it could be the case that in one Party committee, some serious study is needed to deepen their theoretical grasp of MLM. Elsewhere, in a village, it could be the case that production is lagging behind because of the prevalence of various feudal superstitions, and so the principal task is to wage a mass educational campaign. And so on. This is all exceedingly basic, provided one has even an elementary grasp of dialectics. However, our Gonzaloites, in a typical petty-bourgeois “radical” fashion, look for sweeping “one size fits all” solutions to complex problems. Their impetuosity harkens back to those in the Chinese Revolution who put forward all sorts of fantastical theories.¹¹⁸ Such an approach promotes reductive thinking about how to handle all the different complex contradictions Communist Parties are bound to face in the course of revolutionary struggles. Instead, they claim that “military-type actions” are the key link and the guarantee against revisionism.¹¹⁹ This is little more than a fantasy.

We shall return to this topic later in the document. For now, it should suffice to say that clearly war is not the highest form of resolving all types of contradictions.

The belief that “war solves everything” is a “magic bullet” approach to politics typical of revisionist groups. It is in line with a petty-bourgeois infatuation with violence and impetuosity which does not have the patience for details but instead seeks out simplified formulas and slogans. This is, unfortunately, a consistent thread that runs through Gonzaloism; by 1988 it had become an official cornerstone of the PCP’s practice. This is the Gonzaloite “New Synthesis” which has little in common with Maoism beyond some proper names but does share certain clear parallels with Lin Biaoism.

Subjective Fantasies and Fortune-Telling or Concrete Analysis of Concrete Situations?

We now come to the meat of the PCP’s explanation and justification for why all Communist Parties must militarize themselves. In The General Political Line of the Communist Party of Peru and elsewhere the PCP repeatedly asserted that their experiences of militarizing had universal validity and that other Parties must therefore follow them. As we have already stated the CPB and other Gonzaloites today argue that those Parties which do not agree are revisionists. A basic analysis of the PCP’s rationale shows that it was based on an incorrect appraisal of the objective situation internationally as well as the lessons of MLM and the history of the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and the GPCR. To have some confusions is one thing, but to build a political line on the foundation of these incorrect conclusions cannot but lead to opportunism and ultimately revisionism. All of this raises some serious questions for those who—like the CPB—claim that Parties not upholding the PCP’s general line are the “new revisionists.”

In The General Political Line of the Communist Party of Peru, the PCP provides three main reasons for the militarization of the Party and the related “concentric circles” approach to Party building: 1) The “strategic offensive of the world revolution” is at hand; 2) Preventing capitalist restoration is principally a military matter; and 3) Socialist society is a militarized society. We will deal with each one individually.

This document was hardly the only time that the PCP made this claim. Similar articulations were made in Gonzalo’s 1980 speech We are the Initiators, at the start of the armed struggle, and were repeated throughout the PCP’s existence. For example, in their 1985 statement in the third issue of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement’s (RIM) magazine A World to Win, the CC of the PCP stated: “The world situation increasingly reveals the existence of an unevenly developing revolutionary situation” and that “the main trend is revolution, because only revolution can resolve the basic problems of the world today.”¹²⁰ This last statement is particularly absurd because the fact that revolution is the only way to solve the basic problems of the world today in no way proves or even implies that revolution is the main trend in the world at this moment.

The PCP’s fantasies about this supposed strategic offensive seem to be based on Mao’s 1966 assessment that, at that time, revolution was the main trend in the world, and that the situation was quite favorable for revolutionary advances in China and internationally. This was the case in 1966, but it was pure subjective fantasy to argue in 1988 that there was a “strategic offensive of the world revolution.” As early as 1971 the situation had changed markedly, driving the rationale for China “opening to the West” in order to buy some breathing room, in particular from Soviet Imperialist aggression.¹²¹ Later, post-1976, there was a major downturn in revolutionary struggles around the globe after the coup in China and capitulation of many Parties internationally.

By 1988, it was clear that the revolutionary forces globally were quite weak. Especially in the U.S. and other imperialist countries, reaction was quite strong and there was nothing remotely close to a revolutionary situation. In fact, after the major upsurges in the 1960s and early 1970s, the situation had stabilized and the movements receded in most countries around the world.¹²² It was hardly the case that “those on the bottom refuse to go on living in the old way and those on the top can no longer rule in the old way”¹²³ in most countries, despite the PCP’s claim to the contrary.

In Peru, revolutionary forces were fairly strong, and in Nepal important advances were being made. But in Turkey the movement was divided. In India, the Maoist Communist Center of India and People’s War Group—which would later merge to form CPI (Maoist) in 2004—were literally fighting each other. In the Philippines, the CPP was pursuing a policy of premature regularization of their forces which led to major setbacks.¹²⁴ The RCP in the U.S. had degenerated into a revisionist organization, and so on. We dealt with this view of “the strategic offensive of world revolution” in our document on the debate between the Brazilian Gonzaloist Party and the Afghan Maoist Party. In it we noted,

In short, the PCP substituted their subjective fantasies for reality. In place of concrete investigations of concrete situations, they upheld one quote by Mao, failed to consider that it was a situation specific analysis—and not a religious revelation—and blindly repeated it without taking into account the larger objective reality. In its most extreme forms, this sort of dogmatism manifested in seemingly arbitrary predictions of the future date of global proletarian victory. For example, they “calculated” that “it will take 200 years to consolidate the proletariat’s dictatorship, counting from 1871 when the proletariat first took power in the Paris Commune.”¹²⁶ Of course, they never shared the math behind such “calculations.” These sorts of prophetic predictions were repeatedly put forward by the PCP as a justification for their views on the “strategic offensive” of the world revolution, despite clear evidence contradicting this thesis. They seem to have forgotten the basic point that Marxists are not fortune tellers.

The Strategic Offensive as Abstract Generality

Leaving aside the issues with the PCP’s analysis of the global situation, it is unclear—even if it was the case that there was a “strategic offensive” of the world revolution—why this would indicate that militarization of Parties was necessary. As such, the PCP’s argument that being in the “strategic offensive” dictates that communist parties must militarize amounts to a flat assertion without justification or evidence.

In a typical fashion, the PCP and their contemporary disciples turn the specific concept of the three stages of PPW¹²⁷ into an abstract generality and then apply that to the global situation. In On Protracted War, Mao explains these three stages in terms of a literal war, the Sino-Japanese War. The essential content of this concept is inseparable from the fact that it applies to a specific war, not to a general evaluation of the balance of forces globally between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.¹²⁸

In a revolutionary war, various classes are engaged in an armed conflict with each other. While it is possible to speak, in a vague and analogical sense, of the world situation in this way, it confuses more than it clarifies, and in no way is it justified to claim that the general laws of revolutionary warfare apply to the global situation—especially at a time when the proletariat and bourgeoisie are not engaged in a global war! The PCP’s insistence on characterizing the global situation this way—a practice frenetically mimicked by CPB and other contemporary Gonzaloites—is tied to their infatuation with violence and their flat analysis that the highest form of resolving all contradictions is warfare. Given these non-proletarian tendencies, they cannot but see every situation in military terms.

The reality is that the bourgeoisie globally is divided into different countries and blocs. And, as Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto, “the proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.” Even after a successful revolution in one country, it is entirely possible that a socialist country could be at war with one bourgeois bloc internationally while simultaneously at peace or even in a tactical alliance with another section—for example, the USSR fought on the same side as various imperialist powers in WWII. Likewise, while the proletarian forces of one country can be fighting a war against an imperialist aggressor, another can conclude a tactical agreement with that same imperialist power, such as was done by China with the U.S. at the same time that the Vietnamese people were fighting their war of liberation against U.S. imperialism and its domestic reactionary allies. This tactical agreement did not stop China from continuing to support the Vietnamese Revolution. This is all in line with the basic internationalist policy of a socialist state that Mao and others in the CCP outline in their polemics against Khrushchev and the Soviet Revisionists.¹²⁹

All of this speaks to the need to be rigorous and scientific with concepts. Concepts have both general and particular content, but they are also only applicable within certain bounds. To insist on sloppiness with such details as a hallmark of political practice leads to all sorts of confusion. For example, Marx made extensive use of biological analogies in Capital; he spoke of metabolism, fermentation, etc. These analogies are helpful; they clarify many concepts to the reader. But Marx was always clear these were analogies. He never once tried to argue that, based on his use of these analogies, we should apply biological methods to understand political economy.

To double-think around the basic evidence that the proletarian forces are, in fact, very weak globally right now relative to the bourgeoisie, the CPB claims that we are in the “defensive phase” of the strategic offensive! We leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what could possibly be meant by this genius turn of phrase.

This sloppiness—which conflates analogies with concepts—and the PCP’s related dogmatism is tied up with their claim in the General Political Line that there is a need to develop a “world revolutionary war” to counter the forces of reaction and developments towards World War 3. This is another version of the “worldwide people’s war” which the PCP also promoted, and which we also criticized in our above-mentioned document on the debate between the Afghan and Brazilian parties.¹³⁰

To jump from this analogy to the idea of a global people’s war is a major leap. It is not a Maoist position but a Trotskyist one. It resembles Trotsky’s idea of “permanent revolution” and his insistence that, after the October Revolution, the Red Army should have invaded Germany to “export the revolution.” The PCP’s “worldwide people’s war” thesis negates the need for socialism in one country and the central importance of the class struggle under socialism, replacing it with a “quick victory” through military action, largely in line with Trotsky’s views. Today the CPB—largely following in the footsteps of Trotsky and Gonzalo—claims that various people’s wars will fuse together and be “transformed into world people’s war.”¹³¹ The belief that complex and varied contradictions can all be solved with warfare is a running theme in the PCP’s and CPB’s documents. As we will see below, their views on socialism being a “militarized society” and related musing on “war communism” are also deeply Trotskyist.

Before moving on, let us circle back to one last part of the PCP’s first reason for militarizing the Party. They state:

However, it does not follow that because the reactionary forces of the world are increasing their military expenditure that Communist Parties must, in turn, militarize. Historically, Communist Parties fought huge reactionary militaries without militarizing themselves. The CCP fought very powerful forces (the Japanese fascists, the Nationalists, and the U.S. military in Korea). The Bolsheviks faced a joint-invasion of numerous imperialist powers in the wake of WWI. Neither Party was militarized. They did not militarize because they understood that the Party must command the gun,¹³² and that becoming a military organization would jeopardize this, as well as weaken the Party’s ability to handle various contradictions correctly (i.e. with non-military means). The ruling class needs to be overthrown by force; however, if the Party transforms into a military organization and makes its principal form of activity “military-type actions,” then it will not be able to carry out the complex and multi-faceted tasks necessary to lead a successful revolution.

What’s more, as the recent defeat of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan shows, the massive expansion of military expenditure on the part of the imperialists does not necessarily correlate to their combat capabilities. In fact, increased spending can produce a form of decadence and create favorable conditions for revolution (e.g. huge portions of state budgets being spent on the military often leads to serious disinvestment elsewhere). And even when the reactionary forces are exceedingly well armed and trained, this does not in any way imply that the primary form of a Party’s activity must be “military-type actions.” The PCP’s view that Parties need to militarize because of increased military expenditure by reactionary forces is based on exceedingly mechanical views and clarifies nothing, except that they understood neither the contradictory nature of the present reality, nor the lessons of past revolutions. In short, they were revising the lessons of history and Marxism to justify militarizing the Party.

Political Line, Violence Under Socialism, and the PCP’s “One Size Fits All” Approach

According to the PCP, militarization of the Party isn’t just needed to successfully overthrow the bourgeoisie of any and all countries. They also see a militarized Party as the key for the whole socialist period, until communism. Indeed, as we will discuss later, they see socialist society itself as a militarized society. On this question, they once again fundamentally revise the lessons and basic principles of MLM.

So why is a militarized Party key for socialism according to the PCP? Let’s now examine the second point used to justify militarizing communist parties:

Here the PCP incorrectly frames preventing the restoration of capitalism as principally a matter of military combat against the old defeated bourgeoisie which—according to the PCP—infiltrates the Party and the army to become the red bourgeoisie. This is a basic distortion of Marxism and the lessons of the GPCR. This is a fundamentally incorrect understanding of the basic class contradictions under socialism. It is not the case that the old bourgeoisie “introduces itself inside the Party,” but rather that a new bourgeoisie arises within the Party itself!¹³³ Confusion on this topic reflects the PCP’s lack of serious study of class struggle under socialism, and represents a step backwards compared to the relative clarity expressed on this topic in some of their earlier documents in the 1960s and 70s.

In fact, in the entirety of the General Political Line, the PCP put forward no real analysis of the successes and mistakes of the GPCR, just an idea that more military actions and a greater awareness of the threat of capitalist restoration will prevent future restorations. While there was some confusion in China at the end of GPCR about the imminent dangers of capitalist restoration, the fact that Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping were able to mobilize a significant section of the masses against the Four by framing this campaign as “opposing the bourgeois reactionary life of the Gang of Four” shows that the Chinese people were overall not unaware of the threat of capitalist restoration, but that many of the masses were confused on how to identify capitalist roaders.

In fact, millions of members of the masses were part of people’s militias in China at this time. However, many were effectively neutralized because of this confusion on how to identify capitalist-roaders, not because of a lack of guns or awareness of the threat of capitalist restoration. The people’s militias are an essential element in guarding against capitalist restoration, but they are a form of mass organization, not a part of the “militarized Party model” which the Gonzaloites promote. Their approach, built around “unconditional subjection” to leadership, cannot but lead to more centralized military control, which is one of the most parts of the socialist state most vulnerable to becoming a counter-revolutionary headquarters.

What’s more, it is absurd to argue that the militarization of the Party could have prevented the restoration of capitalism. The PCP does not deal with any of the concrete reasons for the defeat in China. It was not principally military matters which decided the victory of the bourgeois line in the GPCR, but rather the overall balance of forces in the class struggle and various errors in the political line of the left in the Party. The GPCR was not a military struggle until the coup in 1976. Even then, the left had been working hard to prepare for such a coup and had extensive military forces at their disposal, but they had made key political (not principally military) mistakes—especially difficulties in uniting the middle section of the Party to oppose the right—and therefore were vulnerable and somewhat isolated at the end of the GPCR. Mao was aware of some of these mistakes and had tried to warn the Four against making them. The recently translated documents from the late GPCR which we wrote about in the second issue of Red Pages provide some great clarity on these matters as well.¹³⁴

It was simply not the case that the right had superior military forces and that this factor was the key link that won the day, but rather that the left was not able to unite all who could be united to prevent the right from launching a coup, and therefore the right had superior military forces at their command at the decisive moment.¹³⁵ At the risk of being repetitive, it is important to reiterate that the military weakness of the Left at the time of the coup was a result of issues in their political line, and not the other way around. This is because as Mao put it, political line decides everything, including the military forces the Party has at its disposal. A Party’s political line is not reducible to abstract principles, but is a concrete thing, based on the situation specific understanding of how the advance the proletarian cause. It is the political line which determines the strength of the proletarian forces, including under socialism.

The PCP’s prattling about militarization of the Party under socialism—and their ignorance of the fact that a new bourgeoisie arises within the Party during this period—is tied to the fact that the PCP never dealt with the question of class struggle under socialism in a systematic way. They did not have a clear understanding of restricting bourgeois right under socialism; they did not grasp how it was that a new bourgeoisie could arise within the Party itself; and, perhaps most importantly, they did not grasp how putting the Party under a system of military discipline would reinforce bourgeois relations in its ranks and contradict the principles of democratic centralism. They not only remained blind to this process unfolding in their own ranks, but actually advocated that this mistaken approach should be adopted by all other Parties.

But the passage quoted above does not just negate the basic lessons of the GPCR. Nor is it simply yet another demonstration of the PCP’s basic lack of familiarity with the history of capitalist restoration in China. In reality, it expresses, in the most concise and concentrated form, the PCP’s supposed solution to counter-revolution under socialism. Therefore, it is important to examine in great detail their views on this topic, as they provide insight into the PCP’s understanding of the nature of class struggle under socialism and how this relates to the militarization of the Party.

As we have discussed earlier, for the PCP militarization of Party means the Party is primarily carrying out “military-type actions.” They say that there are four types of such action which are: “guerrilla actions, sabotages, selective annihilation, propaganda and armed agitation.” Putting aside for a moment the senselessness of saying that the primary activity of the Party should always be to carry out military action, it does at least make sense for a Party to carry out some of these types of actions during Protracted People’s War. But clearly—although perhaps not to the PCP and their contemporary disciples—sabotage, guerrilla actions, and selective annihilation of class enemies are generally not necessary under socialism (and decisions by people’s courts to execute some counter-revolutionaries are not the same as “selective annihilations”). One could argue that various forms of action by a People’s Army under socialism amount to forms of armed propaganda, but this is not new or different than anything that was done in China and the USSR during the socialist period (e.g. military parades, the army helping train militias, etc.).

So, what sort of concrete military actions is the PCP proposing to maintain the “militarization of the Party” under socialism? And how will these supposedly prevent the restoration of capitalism? Earlier in the document, the PCP spelled out their views on the matter:

From these quotes, it is clear that the PCP sees armed combat and revolutionary violence as central to the class struggle under socialism. And so, given that they repeatedly emphasize that the militarization of the Party can “only be carried forward” through concrete “military-type actions,” it is clear that they view these forms of struggle as the key link under socialism, they view armed actions as the way to prevent capitalist restoration, and they view revolutionary violence as the main means by which to carry out the socialist revolution (in Peru after the New Democratic Revolution) and the cultural revolutions under socialism.¹³⁹ This is a direct departure from the lessons of the GPCR.

First, there are different types of contradictions in the socialist period and these must be handled through various methods. The existence of exploitation cannot be eliminated through violence alone. For example, the rich and even middle peasants engage in some form of exploitation, but this contradiction is not handled through violence, but through discussion, debate, land redistribution, and the development of socialist agriculture.¹⁴⁰ This is because this is a contradiction among the people, despite the existence of some forms of exploitation of the poor peasants and agricultural laborers by other sections of the peasantry. And while these struggles happen in the larger context of the New Democratic Revolution and the Socialist Revolution, they are not forms of revolutionary violence. In short, we find here that the PCP is revising Maoism, yet again.

It is not even true that revolutionary violence is the only means to eliminate all forms of capitalist exploitation. This is a fact that was proven in the Russian and Chinese Revolutions through practice. Although the violent expropriation of the bourgeoisie in control of large industries was central to the revolutions in Russia and China, a policy of buying out was used in the case of some small and medium capitalists. In fact, in his text “Left-Wing” Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality, Lenin drew on Marx and emphasized the possibility, in certain conditions, to engage in a “specific type of ‘buying out’ which the workers must offer to the most cultured, the most skilled, the most capable organisers among the capitalists who are ready to enter the service of Soviet power and to help honestly in organising ‘state’ production on the largest possible scale.”¹⁴¹ This was the basic policy adopted by the Bolsheviks, with significant success.

Likewise, in The Shanghai Textbook this point was emphasized and elaborated in detail:

The subtle and nuanced proletarian understanding of how to handle the socialist revolution expressed in this text stands in sharp contrast to the PCP’s prattling about the centrality of violence as “the highest form of resolving contradictions.”

From all of this we can see that violence is not, at all times, the key link to eliminating exploitation. Revolutionary violence is needed to overthrow the ruling class, to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat (or the people’s joint democratic dictatorship), to seize many of the means of production (especially large-scale industry), and to repel attempts at external invasion or internal sabotage. It is necessary to conquer political power. However, this revolutionary violence only lays the foundation for the elimination of exploitation. This is because various vestiges of exploitation and inequality linger after the overthrow of the ruling class. The Chinese communists allowed the national bourgeoisie to continue exploitation during the New Democratic period, and the elimination of that exploitation was mainly carried out via buyouts along with other measures which did not involve violence.

To assert that violence is the key link here, reflects the PCP’s failure to grasp the lessons of MLM learned through the experiences of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions.¹⁴³ This confusion is tied to their “listen up” approach to politics and related fantasies of having absolute militarized leadership over the United Front, in which all mass work is done by the army and other military organizations. This approach negates the basis for patriotic members of exploiting classes to support and be partners in the New Democratic Revolution.

At the risk of being redundant, it must be emphasized again that for different contradictions (and different contradictions exist even with exploitation), different methods of resolving them are needed. This is true not only in the elimination of exploitation in the course of the Socialist Revolution, but also in the various cultural revolutions needed under socialism. Instead of a patient and clear historical analysis, the PCP promotes cut-and-dried solutions, principally the call for more violence (their contemporary adherents double-down on this trend, for example with their slogans of “People’s War Until Communism!”¹⁴⁴).

As we mentioned above, throughout the GPCR, there was an effort by both the right and the ultra-“left” forces in the Party to turn the struggle into a civil war and/or military conflict.¹⁴⁵ In contrast to this, as we noted above, the general slogan promoted by the Left during the GPCR was to “Use Reason, Not Violence.”¹⁴⁶ When Jiang Qing promoted the idea that the rebel masses should “attack with words, defend with weapons” she was criticized by Mao and others for this articulation, which was used by various factional and ultra-“left” forces to justify their efforts to transform the GPCR into a military conflict. Mao and other leaders in the Left criticized various Red Guard groups who pushed things in this direction as well.¹⁴⁷

The focus on revolutionary violence and the related idea of militarizing the Party as the key way to prevent capitalist restoration fails to grasp the contradiction, in a cultural revolution, between the principal task and the goal. In a typical petty-bourgeois fashion, the PCP equates the question of preventing capitalist restoration with suppressing and eliminating class enemies with violence. In doing so, they not only fail to grapple with the need to mobilize the masses to struggle (not principally in a military fashion) against the capitalist-roaders, but also fail to understand the class relations under socialism which inevitably give rise to a new bourgeoisie within the Party itself. Given this ignorance, they cannot grasp how the struggle of the masses in various fields to restrict bourgeois right and break with old ideas is central to eliminating the basis for revisionism.¹⁴⁸ Contrary to the PCP’s assertions, the inner-party bourgeoisie is not a secret faction of rightists who sneak into the Party. Rather, it develops as a result of the class contradictions under socialism, with rightists primarily generated from within the Party rather than sneaking into it. Mao emphasized that without a dialectical view on these matters, it was easy to misunderstand the aims of the GPCR:

From this it should be clear that, once again, the PCP’s basic approach on a fundamental question of Maoism—namely, the goals and methods of cultural revolutions under socialism—is a direct departure from, and revision of, the practices advocated by Mao. By promoting militarization of the Party and revolutionary violence as the “solutions” to preventing capitalist restoration in socialist society, they make it clear that they see the class struggle under socialism as principally a thing to be overseen via military and administrative means devoid of mass initiative. This is a view of socialism that does not acknowledge the revolutionary breakthrough achieved during the GPCR or the key verdicts on the question of the inner-party bourgeoisie advanced by Mao during this time. The PCP puts forward no clear analysis of how to grasp revolution and promote production, nothing about how to overcome the contradictions among the people, and remains silent on how to overcome various backwards ideas that the masses have internalized. They reject the need to methodically and patiently overcome the “Four Alls” via various forms of struggle, a striking abandonment of Marxism. As we can see, not only is the militarization of the Party not justified by the danger of capitalist restoration (as it is no solution to the problem), but the PCP’s views on socialism and cultural revolutions are fundamentally at odds with the basic lessons of MLM.

Trotskyism, War Communism, and “the Militarization of Society”

This brings us to the third and final argument the PCP advances for why Communist Parties must militarize:

This point is just as muddled as the previous two. Under socialist society, it’s true that the masses will be highly armed. But this does not make it a militarized society so to speak; people having arms and being organized into militias does not mean that they are “militarized.” The PCP and contemporary Gonzaloites like the CPB have repeatedly emphasized that militarizing the Party does not just mean fighting a people’s war or arming the Party. Instead, they emphasize that militarization of the Party means that the principal form of activity of the Party is “military-type actions.” So, the militarization of society should be understood along similar lines, unless they are completely eclectic, and words mean nothing to them. And to the PCP’s credit, they are remarkably consistent on this topic. So it is clear that when they speak of war as “the highest form of resolving contradictions,” and socialism as a “militarized society” in which “everything grows out of the barrel of guns” they mean that, under socialism, the principal form of activity of the people should be “military-type actions” and organization of socialist society is principally military.

In this regard, the PCP’s reference to War Communism—a specific policy pursued during the Russian Civil War by the Bolsheviks with a misleading name—is quite telling. Actually, their promotion of “War Communism” as a goal and their related views on socialism being a “militarized society” are largely in line with the policies promoted by Trotsky at the end of the Russian Civil War. Lenin argued that Trotsky’s policies were a political mistake, which, if not corrected, would lead “to the collapse of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”¹⁵¹

During the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks were in a very dire situation. Attacked by numerous imperialist powers as well as the forces of domestic reaction, with the economy in ruin, and famine and disease rampaging throughout the country, they were forced to adopt extraordinary and exceptional measures to ensure victory in the Civil War. To illustrate the difficulties they faced, it is helpful to elaborate on the circumstances at the time. In 1918, many peasants began to keep for themselves large portions of their grain surplus (which was needed at the front for the war effort and to feed the cities), large-scale absenteeism was developing in industry, and workers in some industries were selling off stocks of goods and spare parts on their own in the black market so that they could afford basic goods (which were rapidly rising in price). These actions amounted to rampant individualism which, if left unchecked, would doom the dictatorship of the proletariat.

While the Party was able to promote some forms of Communist spirit and political discipline among the advanced section of the working-class and some of the peasantry (for example with the Communist Subbotniks), they were not able to do this on a broad enough scale to prevent many of these issues. Therefore, in a situation where the political consciousness of the masses was not sufficiently developed the Bolsheviks were backed into a corner and forced to use a form of administrative centralization and discipline¹⁵² to ensure that the economy did not collapse and that the Civil War was won. In short, they had to use state power to coerce a section of the peasantry and working class into maintaining the economy so that the war effort could proceed. Lenin and the Central Committee repeatedly emphasized that these measures were temporary and only adopted because of the extremely dire situation in which the Party found itself.

In the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik), Stalin spells out some of the measures that were taken in this period:

In addition, a system of militarization of labor was introduced. This included a system of coercion and labor discipline where workers would be sent to penal labor camps for labor desertion and shirking. It also entailed the organization of all workers into labor units which were run with the same strictness “as was and is being shown towards officers in relation to the army’s needs.”¹⁵⁵ Likewise the Party adopted policies of requisitioning grain from the peasantry (e.g. non-voluntary collections of surplus grain, at times even without proper compensation) and a “governmentalizing” of the trade unions, which significantly limited the internal democracy of these mass organizations and placed them under the direct administrative control of the Narkomtrud, the Commissariat for Labour.¹⁵⁶

These measures were necessary given the exceedingly difficult situation faced by the Party and the people as a result of the Civil War and famine as well as the lack of discipline and proletarian class consciousness among a significant section of the workers and peasantry.¹⁵⁷ However, these policies, given their necessary reliance on the administrative and bureaucratic methods, sharpened various class contradictions at the time. For example, state departments like Glavpolitput (the Chief Political Department of the People’s Commissariat for Communication, which worked to rehabilitate the railways) and Tsektran (the Central Committee of the Joint Trade Union of Rail and Water Transport Workers, placed under state control) were given extraordinary powers during this period. These powers, on the one hand, enabled them to rehabilitate the railroads and the economy, but, on the other hand, bred various bureaucratic, undemocratic, and bourgeois administrative practices which caused the state organs and “governmentalized” trade unions to start to lose touch with the masses. Similar dynamics arose with the requisitioning of all surplus grain from the peasantry.

Lenin summed up the successes and failures of the “War Communism” period with a number of insightful remarks. First, he noted that the policy was forced on them by the circumstances, but that it was, in the main, a correct policy despite various mistakes and excesses:

He also noted that—despite it being a necessary and largely correct policy in a time of Civil War—War Communism was not a policy capable of transforming the relations of production from the old society into socialist relations of production and thus unleashing a corresponding development of the productive forces:

All of this should make it clear that it is extremely strange that the PCP promotes the idea that socialism is a “militarized society,” one in which “everything grows out of the barrel of the gun,” and claims that “in that way we develop War Communism.” As the above quotes show, War Communism was a temporary measure, one which Lenin described as “makeshift” and which he noted “could not be a policy that corresponded to the economic tasks of the proletariat.” The PCP disagrees with Lenin’s analysis of this period, and instead sees it as a model for socialism. A militarized society, with labor organized along military lines, and with a militarized Party which, in order to “carry forward” its militarization, principally performs “military-type actions.” Military, military, military!

What a mess this all is! What a garbled distortion of the lessons of MLM! All of it justified by the supposedly “new circumstance of the class struggle” and the idea that this will prevent capitalist restoration. What typical petty-bourgeois impetuosity and infatuation with violence!

What the PCP reveals here is that their supposed “new synthesis” of MLM is based either on a profound lack of knowledge of the basic writings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao (and a related basic lack of familiarity with the lessons of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions) or a profound and conscious distortion of these lessons to elevate Gonzalo as the supposed “Fourth Sword” of Marxism, after Marx, Lenin, and Mao.

In fact, what Gonzalo and the PCP put forward about socialism, with their talk of War Communism and a “militarized society,” is nothing new, but is largely a rehashing of the position put forward by Trotsky at the end of the Russian Civil War, the very position which Lenin noted risked destroying the dictatorship of the proletariat. Let’s examine this more closely.

As the Russian Civil War was drawing to a close, the Bolshevik Party was preparing to enter into a new phase of the revolution. In the extremely difficult years of the Civil War, they had only been able to take some provisional steps to overcome capitalist and pre-capitalist relations of production and social relations. But having largely defeated the counter-revolution and foreign invasion by late 1920, a series of questions confronted the Bolsheviks. In effect, they were at a crossroads: they could continue the revolutionary transformation of society, or preserve, in various forms, the existing capitalist and pre-capitalist social relations and relations of production. Part of this question pertained to the methods used during War Communism, which tended to strengthen bureaucratic and bourgeois tendencies in the state organs—especially those in charge of various sectors of production—and in the Party as well. It was in this context that the Party Crisis arose, with Lenin and Stalin on one side and Trotsky and Bukharin on the other.

In late 1920, the Bolshevik Party concluded that there was a need to move away from the policies of War Communism, to evaluate the successes and failures of these experiences, and to focus on the key tasks at hand of developing socialist relations of production. Trotsky and Bukharin, however, were unsatisfied with this approach. Earlier in the year, their line had been defeated at the 9^th Party Congress. There Trotsky and Bukharin had advocated that the militarization of labor and the trade unions (and the related system of one-man management) was required for the entire period of transition from capitalism to socialism and beyond. This was justified by a form of productive forces determinism. For example, in a pamphlet prepared for the Congress, Trotsky advocated “planned, systematic, persistent and stern struggle be waged against desertion from labour, in particular by the publication of black lists of labour-deserters, the formation of penal battalions made up of these deserters, and, finally, their confinement in concentration camps.”¹⁶¹

At the Congress itself Trotsky put forward his theses on the need for a militarization of labor. First, he insisted that “the mass of the workers must be bound to their jobs, made liable to transfer, told what to do, ordered about.” He also insisted that, “before it disappears, state compulsion will, in the period of transition, reach its highest degree of intensity in the organisation of labour.” He explained all of this in terms of the need to militarize the working class throughout the whole period of transition from capitalism to socialism:¹⁶²

Trotsky’s position—largely in line with the PCP’s emphasis on socialism as a militarized society—is that trade unions and other mass organizations should be subordinated to the Party and the state under a form of military control.¹⁶⁴ This is in line with the Gonzaloist view of the “concentric circles” of Party building, and the need for absolute leadership by the Party of the United Front (and therefore the trade unions, which are mass organizations within the United Front). This, in effect, reduces the role of trade unions to enforcing military discipline in production, a form of extreme administrative centralization which chokes mass initiative.

Trotsky’s views were rejected at the 9^th Congress and the temporary and exceptional nature of the measures adopted during the period of War Communism was reasserted. This was Lenin and Stalin’s line, which won out over Trotsky and Bukharin.¹⁶⁵ However, in late 1920, when the Party began to move away from many of the temporary measures of War Communism, Trotsky and Bukharin kicked up a storm, creating what Lenin referred to as “the Party Crisis.” On November 3^rd, at the Fifth All-Russia Trade Union Conference, Trotsky argued that the Party had to “tighten the screws of War Communism” and advocated a “shakeup” of the trade unions; namely, removing from above any trade union leaders who disagreed with the continued militarization of labor and methods of coercion, or who criticized the bureaucratic tendencies then developing in a section of the Party and state machinery. Lenin, criticizing Trotsky, noted that the disagreement was about a fundamentally “different approach to the mass, the way of winning it over, and keeping in touch with it.”¹⁶⁶

In short, Trotsky’s approach—which was again defeated at the 10^th Party Congress—advocated a fundamentally different relationship between the Party and the masses than did Lenin’s. Lenin opposed the militarization of society and the trade unions; he argued that a trade union “is not a state organisation; nor is it one designed for coercion, but for education.”¹⁶⁷ What’s more, he warned that Trotsky’s approach—including his insistence of the absolute leadership of the Party over the trade unions and the Party’s related ability to “shake up” the leadership of the unions at any time—would lead to “the collapse of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”¹⁶⁸ This mistake, common to both Trotsky and Bukharin’s platforms at the time, was reproduced by the PCP and is also promoted by Gonzaloites today. Common to these erroneous positions is an assumption that the proletarian character of the Party is guaranteed, and thus, quite naturally, the Party’s absolute authority over the United Front, mass organizations, and the masses broadly guarantees the victory of the revolution and socialism.¹⁶⁹ This is clearly a revision of the basic lessons of Leninism, which were clarified in stark terms in this struggle against Trotsky and Bukharin.

Lenin’s line ultimately won the day, and the Central Committee published a statement condemning “the degeneration of centralisation and the militarising of labour into bureaucracy, arrogance, petty functionarism and pestering interference in the trade unions.” The CC also reaffirmed the need to move away from the militarization of labor and the other measures of War Communism, as the Civil War had largely been won by that point, and these measures had given rise to a series of new problems.

Lenin also noted that trade unions and other mass organizations were essential under socialism, and had to have sufficient independence from the Party and the state so that they could protect the masses from various bureaucratic and bourgeois tendencies that arose in socialist society. He highlighted that this independence would, in turn, help protect the DoP: “we, for our part, must use these workers’ organisations to protect the workers from their state, and to get them to protect our state.”¹⁷⁰

From all this it is clear that the PCP’s line on socialism is, in fact, deeply revisionist. In fact, by promoting the idea of socialism as a “militarized society” and claiming that the goal is to develop “war communism,” the PCP and its contemporary adherents are discarding Lenin and instead taking up Trotsky and Bukharin. This is revisionism through and through. It demonstrates a profound lack of historical knowledge, deep-seated bourgeois ideas of leadership, a fundamental difference with MLM in how the Party should relate to the masses under socialism, and a typically petty-bourgeois infatuation with violence and militarism. In short, a stinking heap of revisionist garbage. But again, for the PCP—and especially for contemporary Gonzaloites—historical details and the immensely important lessons of the ICM are too much to bother with. When one gleefully proclaims that “warfare is the highest form of resolving contradictions” what else is needed? The lessons of the class struggle are reduced to trivial details in their millenarian fantasies.

Conclusion

The PCP fundamentally revised key lessons of MLM. In instances detailed above, rather than integrating the key lessons of Mao and the GPCR they oriented towards Lin Biao’s analysis. In other cases, they put forward Dühring-like views of an all-knowing genius; on questions of socialism and an evaluation of War Communism they discarded Lenin and took up Trotsky’s position. At the same time, despite their shortcomings, their achievements must be recognized: they initiated a people’s war, maintained that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the prerequisite for the liberation of the masses, and that this must be achieved by violent revolution.

In contrast to the grandiose claims that Gonzalo “synthesized/defined Maoism,” the truth is that when it comes to Gonzalo’s theoretical contributions, what is good is not new and what is new is not good. While the PCP led the revolutionary movement in Peru, their leadership ultimately was unable to work out a correct line to guide the movement and squandered a revolutionary situation in Peru, eventually adopting a “left” deviationist line. This was not inevitable. The PCP, despite some initial mistakes, could have corrected various errors and summed up their successes and failures in a dialectical materialist manner. They did not do this; instead, they enshrined numerous mistaken ideas and wrong tendencies as the foundation of their politics in their General Political Line, and insisted these mistaken ideas had universal validity. The consequences of this no doubt contributed to the defeat of the revolution in Peru, which unfortunately has still not been able to regroup, even after three decades.

Now, various Gonzaloite groups have created their new international organization. They are promoting various revisionist theories inspired by Gonzalo and the PCP, and calling this MLM. There has been a dearth of struggle in the ICM over the question of Gonzalo and the PCP’s theoretical views and their contribution to Maoist theory. Our hope is that this document can spark some further debate and necessary struggle. We also hope that comrades can point out and elaborate on our shortcomings and mistakes in this analysis.

See Protracted People’s War is Not a Universal Strategy for Revolution in Red Pages issue no. 1, available online here: http://www.bannedthought.net/USA/MCU/RedPages/RedPages-01-Jan2021-rev3.pdf ↩︎
Now known as simply the Communist Party of Brazil (CPB).↩︎
The debate between these two parties covered a number of important topics, including the question of militarization of the party and the idea of jefatura. We generally agreed with the C(M)PA’s criticisms of the CPB’s Gonzaloist views. However, as we noted at the time, the Afghan Party also remained under the influence of Gonzaloism to some degree, and upholds the universality of Protracted People’s War. For more on this topic see The Debate on Gonzaloism in the International Communist Movement: On the Recent Exchange Between the C(M)PA and the CPB(RF) in Red Pages issue no. 1↩︎
https://ci-ic.org/blog/2022/09/27/eternal-glory-to-chairman-gonzalo-4/↩︎
https://ci-ic.org/blog/2022/12/26/historical-news-of-the-successful-holding-of-the-unified-maoist-international-conference-the-international-communist-league-was-founded/, https://bannedthought.net/International/ICL/MajorDocs/HistoricNews-ICL-Founded-2022-Eng.pdf ↩︎
The recent founding statement of the ICL does differ in some respects from Gonzaloism. For example, it does not explicitly promote Gonzalo Thought, and they use the term "interrelated construction" with reference to Party building, avoiding the term "concentric construction" which is used by the PCP and is discussed below. For more on this, see this recent statement by the Revolusjonære Kommunister organization in Norway: https://www.maoisme.no/2023/01/notes-on-the-founding-declaration-of-the-international-communist-league-icl/↩︎
https://www.demvolkedienen.org/index.php/en/12-dokumente/2791-second-issue-of-el-maoista-released-spanish and in English: https://ci-ic.org/blog/2019/06/14/el-maoista-lenin-and-the-militarized-communist-party/↩︎
For more on Avakian and Prachanda’s revisionism see Ajith, “Against Avakianism,” Naxalbari: Theoretical Journal of CPI (M-L) Naxalbari, Issue 4, July 2013, p. 6-82 and “On The Line and Tactics of the UCPN (Maoist),” Naxalbari: Theoretical Journal of CPI (M-L) Naxalbari, Issue 3, December 2010, p. 6-44.↩︎
As we analyze below, militarization of the Party, as articulated by Gonzalo and the PCP, is not reducible to waging armed struggle or developing a military force. Gonzalo and the PCP were quite clear that, in order for a Party to be militarized, its primary form of activity must at all times be “military-type actions” of which they list four “guerrilla actions, sabotages, selective annihilation, propaganda and armed agitation.” We breakdown the issues with such an approach in greater detail below.↩︎
As with militarization, concentric construction has a particular meaning under Gonzaloite doctrine, one which is opposed to the mass-line method of MLM organizational development. This also will be detailed below.↩︎
By this they mean the Communist Party, the People’s Army, and the United Front.↩︎
Jose Maria Sison gave a number of interviews and wrote a number of important articles on this topic in the past few years before his passing. These are worth reading closely as they contain many important remarks on the strengths and weaknesses of Gonzalo, the PCP, and contemporary Gonzaloites. For example, in critiquing contemporary Gonzaloites’ claims that Gonzalo synthesized Maoism, he noted:

“As I have earlier pointed out, Mao himself constituted in his own lifetime Mao Zedong Thought or Maoism by making great contributions to the development of Marxism-Leninism in philosophy, political economy, party building (especially the rectification movement), the people’s war and the proletarian cultural revolution in socialist society. Mao Zedong Thought has gained universal significance long before Gonzalo called it Maoism. The universal significance of Mao Zedong Thought or Maoism does not depend in any way on Gonzalo who has not really summed up all the great achievements of the great Mao. (...) Before, during and after the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the foregoing six components of Mao Zedong Thought or Maoism were already acknowledged and propagated in CPP publications and grasped by CPP cadres and members. What the Gonzaloites are doing is to tear apart Mao Zedong Thought or Maoism and exaggerate protracted people’s war as prescription for all countries under all circumstances and require militarization of the party as the principal or essential elements of Maoism. This is not Maoism but a grotesque Gonzaloite distortion of Maoism.”

Questions on Mao Zedong Thought/Maoism, available online at: https://web.archive.org/web/20201120215529/https://ndfp.org/questions-on-mao-zedong-thought-maoism/

For a detailed breakdown of Sison’s debate with a Gonzaloite on the question of the supposed universality of Protracted People’s War see, Andy Belisario, On the so-called universality of protracted people’s war. Available online: https://www.josemariasison.eu/on-the-so-called-universality-of-protracted-peoples-war/↩︎
For example, see the works published at: http://www.solrojo.org/↩︎
When he founded the Party in 1928 it was known as the Peruvian Socialist Party, and was renamed to the Peruvian Communist Party after his death in 1930.↩︎
These contributions include providing revolutionary leadership to the people’s struggles in Peru against U.S. imperialism, domestic compradors, and semi-feudal forces, and developing these struggles into a people’s war. The PCP also defended the Four, the GPCR, and Mao’s legacy after the coup in 1976, and they worked to expose Deng Xiaoping and the revisionists in the CCP internationally. They also played a positive role in RIM, despite also promoting various dogmatic ideas there as well. These are significant contributions.↩︎
We had originally planned to include a criticism of the PCP’s urban strategy in this document. It is important to take stock of the mistakes the PCP made in urban areas in the late 1980s and early 1990s as these mistakes were central to the defeat of the revolution in Peru. Moreover, this urban strategy also has particular relevance internationally as some Gonzaloites claim that the PCP’s urban strategy should be the cornerstone, or at least starting place, of the strategy for carrying out a PPW in imperialist countries. We will provide analysis and criticism on this topic in a future article.↩︎
Actually, it may be more accurate to state that these revisionist formulations in the General Political Line were not so much due to ignorance as a conscious rejection of the lessons of MLM. The PCP’s documents from the 1960s and 70s contain significant analysis of the lessons of the Chinese Revolution and GPCR that was more in line with Mao’s line. But, by the mid-1980s at least, they had largely abandoned such analysis in favor of strange and dogmatic formulations.↩︎
The PCP was originally inspired by Mao’s Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society and Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan as well as the related MLM understanding of semi-feudal and semi-colonial countries. However, other than in provisional way, they failed to really apply this type of analysis of Peruvian conditions. In Jan Myrdal’s book India Waits, he meets and discusses with a number of Naxalites about the need for a thorough and comprehensive class analysis of Indian society:

“We had no Mao in the twenties and thirties,” said Suraj [A Naxalite who participated in the uprising in Srikakulam]. “There was no communist or peasant leader capable of making an analysis the way Mao did of the Hunan peasant movement, where he united the cultural demands with the social, and identified the forces which could liberate China. Nor has anyone been able to produce a similar summary of that which is historically predetermined and inevitable in India. We have been content to spread Mao’s thought and Mao’s analysis of Hunan, which does serve some purpose, since similarities do exist between China and India. But the differences are so great that one cannot use Mao’s description of Hunan as a guide to Andhra Pradesh or Bihar.” p. 64

Since this point CPI (Maoist) has carried out a comprehensive analysis of classes in India society and just recently published an important analysis on the relations of production in India: https://bannedthought.net/India/CPI-Maoist-Docs/Books/ChangesInRelationsOfProduction-2021-Eng-View-OCR.pdf. In contrast, the PCP never really went beyond a surface level analysis of the class relations in Peru.↩︎
Agricultural laborers were a significant portion of the population in Peru, especially because during the “land reform” carried out by the military dictatorship, various forms of corporate agriculture had been set up which displaced and dispossessed many peasants.↩︎
The PCP repeatedly emphasized the need to focus principally on the poor-peasantry, for example stating “the Party broadly developed its mass work in the zones of the Sierra, linking itself with the peasants, primarily the poor peasants.” General Political Line, p. 94. The PCP repeats similar formulations throughout this document, always emphasizing the need to principally rely on the poor peasantry. This line was also evident in the fact that the PCP’s main peasant organization was the “Poor Peasant Movement” (MCP).

While the poor peasants are key force in the revolution, the PCP’s articulation reflects a lack of clarity on the complexity of the task of uniting the poor peasantry with the middle peasants, especially the lower-middle peasants. In practice, this can easily lead to an ultra-“left” line of neglecting the middle peasants’ interests or even relying on only the poor peasants. When taken to this extreme, setbacks for the revolution abound. During the Chinese Revolution, Liu Shaoqi at one point promoted just such a “poor peasant only” line, which threatened to lead to disasters; thankfully, Mao was able to lead the struggle against this line and overcome it. For more on this, see William Hinton, Through a Glass Darkly, p. 61-69.↩︎
Actually, the PCP’s General Political Line was a tremendous step backwards from the relative clarity of the earlier works of some Party members. For example, Antonio Díaz Martínez (a PCP member and faculty at la Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga with Gonzalo, who was captured in 1983 and killed in the infamous 1986 prison massacre) in 1978 wrote the book China: La Revolución Agraria, in which he provides a detailed account of the political line of the Chinese Revolution, including the focus on winning over the middle, and especially lower-middle peasantry.↩︎
Mao, A Critique of Soviet Economics, Monthly Review Press, 1977, p. 45. Available online at: http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/CSE58.html ↩︎
In many respects, the PCP’s “principally poor peasantry” line actually bears a distinct similarity to an ultra-“left” “poor peasantry” line promoted by Liu Shaoqi at one point during the Chinese Revolution.↩︎
We are presently working on a more comprehensive analysis and critique of the PCP’s urban strategy. In this document we will provide a more detailed analysis of the PCP’s shift of focus to the urban areas and their related incorrect conclusion that they had reached a stage of strategic equilibrium in their people’s war. For now, it is sufficient to note that their incorrect political line led to significant setbacks and difficulties in the countryside in the late 1980s. Instead of summing up these mistakes and rectifying them, the PCP “retreated forward” to the urban areas while their mass base eroded in the countryside.↩︎
Repeatedly, throughout the course of the Chinese Revolution, Mao warned against the dangers of the CCP falling into a similar trap. For example, in 1933 he warned that “the tendency to encroach upon the middle peasants is the most serious danger,” and emphasized that if the Party hurt the interests of the middle peasantry, they would not support the revolutionary struggle. Mao Zedong, Preliminary Conclusions of the Land Investigation Campaign, 1933. Available online here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_16.htm ↩︎
The fact that the rich peasantry went over to counter-revolution in such large numbers in Peru was due, in part, to the heavy-handed approach the PCP took to them, especially confiscating their land. Mao and the CCP advocated that lands of rich peasantry should only be confiscated if they went over to direct counter-revolutionary activity. In contrast, in the PCP’s General Political Line, they state “The lands of the rich peasants are not touched unless such land is needed, but conditions are imposed on them.” (p. 48) Gonzalo similarly noted in his 1988 interview with El Diaro that “On the condition that there is some land left, or if it is judged to be correct, land can be given to the rich peasants, and likewise, if it is correct or necessary, we can take land from them if there is not enough land to go around.” “Interview with Chairman Gonzalo,” Collected Works of the Communist Party of Peru: Volume 2 — 1988-1990, p. 236.↩︎
At the time Peru was divided into twenty-four administrative departments. These are further subdivided into provinces and districts. In 2002 the system was slightly reorganized, and the departments became reclassified as regions.↩︎
Orin Starn, “Villagers at Arms: War and Counter-Revolution in the Central-South Andes,” Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru (1980-1995), p. 225. This article (and others in the book) present a reactionary and anti-communist history of the PCP. Nonetheless they provide some important statistics and insight into the defeat of the PCP, from a ruling class perspective.↩︎
PCP, “III Plenum: Meeting With the Northern Regional Committee,” Collected Works of the PCP: Volume 3 1991 — 1992, p. 545↩︎
General Political Line, p. 71↩︎
Carlos Iván Degregori, “Harvesting Storms: Peasant Rondas and the Defeat of Sendero Luminoso in Ayacucho,” Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru (1980-1995), p. 148-150.↩︎
CC of PCP, “May Directives for Metropolitan Lima,” May 1991, Collected Works of the PCP: Volume 3 — 1991-1992, p. 345. Available online at: http://www.redsun.org/pcp_doc/pcp_0591.htm.↩︎
This refers to the setting up of coordination between various villages to carry out the rondas.↩︎
The PCP generally referred to the rondas as mesnadas, a term meant to highlight their historical parallels with the armed retinues of the feudal landlords which were used to put down peasant rebellions and generally enforce the power of the feudal and semi-feudal forces. While there is some truth to this parallel, it also served to cover over the important novel features of the situation, in particular that the peasants joining the rondas were, in numerous cases, doing so because of mistakes and excesses committed by the PCP.↩︎
The official English translation of this sentence is wrong. “Reedición de mesnadas” is incorrectly translated as “surrender of mesnadas.” It is possible that the translators misread reedición as rendición, the latter of which means surrender.↩︎
CC of PCP, “Elections, No! People’s War, Yes!”, Collected Works of the PCP: Volume 2 — 1988-1990, p. 392.↩︎
See, for example, the claim in late 1991 in the PCP aligned-magazine, El Diaro, that “only five percent maintained themselves continuously since they were created by the Marines or the Army. The rest have been recomposed many times and lately dozens have been vacillating without direction, between dissolving and lining up against their mentors.” c.f. “Mejores condiciones para Gran Salto en Equilibrio Estratégico. 1991 inició la Década del Triunfo,” El Diario, December 2-4, cited in Carlos Iván Degregori, “Harvesting Storms: Peasant Rondas and the Defeat of Sendero Luminoso in Ayacucho,” Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru (1980-1995), p. 149.↩︎
For example, in May 1991 Gonzalo noted that “It is necessary to reanalyze the mesnadas because the reimpulse that since last year is seen in the countryside, extends as an impulse in the cities.” PCP, “Concerning the Two Hills,” Collected Works of the PCP: Volume 3 — 1991-1992, p. 98. During the 3^rd Plenum of the CC in 1992, they acknowledge that they were losing ground in some locations, in part due to the rondas and that there was a need to win over the section of the masses who had joined the rondas. They noted, “The problem is that they express an inflection; this is the problem…they have occupied some points and displaced us. So they have subjected the masses…with threats even of death, and now they are masses pressured by the enemy. So our problem here, what is it? It is that we are restricted in our infiltration work among the mesnadas and this we must correct in order to penetrate them, unmask them, undermine them, until we make them explode.” "III Pleno del Comite Central del PCP, cited in Carlos Iván Degregori, “Harvesting Storms: Peasant Rondas and the Defeat of Sendero Luminoso in Ayacucho,” Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru (1980-1995), p. 149. Even here, they principally still saw the issues with the masses joining the rondas as one of coercion by the reactionary forces. The PCP failed to grasp how their own mistakes were contributing to this issue and eroding their mass base.↩︎
The PCP seems to have first practiced this on a large scale in Ayacucho during the 1983-1984 offensive by the military. Later on, it became more of a regular and widespread practice throughout the PCP’s guerrilla zones and base areas. c.f Gustavo Gorriti, Shining Path: A History of Millenarian Warfare in Peru, ch 20. See also Ponciano del Pino H., “Family, Culture, and ‘Revolution’: Everyday Life with Sendero Luminoso,” Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru (1980-1995), p. 171 and Orin Starn, “Villagers at Arms: War and Counter-Revolution in the Central-South Andes,” Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru (1980-1995), p. 236.↩︎
It should be noted that while widespread, the PCP’s policy of suppressing markets was not applied ubiquitously. For example, in the summer of 1991, El Diaro reported on a trip they made to the Upper Huallaga River in the department of Huánuco. They noted that, at least in those guerrilla zones and base areas, there was trade with various merchants for products like fertilizer, and that the Party limited the profits such small merchants could make off of these deals.

“The PGA: Backbone of the New State,” El Diaro Internacional, August-September 1991, p. 8-9. Available online at: https://michaelharrison.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/El-Diario-Internacional-No-8-English.pdf

It is unclear how widely these policies were pursued in this period, and if this was an effort to adjust and rectify earlier mistakes. Given the dearth of documents from this period that are available, this is a topic that requires further research and investigation. Regardless of the scale of efforts to address these mistakes, it is clear that the PCP was not able to overcome various setbacks they were facing in the countryside due to these and other errors.↩︎
Orin Starn, “Senderos inesperados: Las rondas campesinas de la sierra sur central,” Las Rondas Campesinas y la Derrota de Sendero Luminoso, p. 243 and Nelson Manrique, “La década de la violencia”, Márgenes, 3 (5-6): 137-182. Available online here: https://vsip.info/la-decada-de-la-violencia-nelson-manrique-parcial-pdf-free.html. See especially p. 14-15 of the pdf provide a clear description of how popular outrage at these policies frayed relations between the PCP and the peasantry.↩︎
They note this fact in their General Political Line:

“From all this he derives that the New State that we are forming in the democratic revolution shall be a joint dictatorship, an alliance of four classes led by the proletariat through its Party, the Communist Party: A dictatorship of workers, peasants, the petty bourgeoisie and under certain conditions the national or middle bourgeoisie; a dictatorship that today is of three classes, since the middle bourgeoisie do not participate in the revolution, but their interest are respected.” p. 86.

Even in 1991 and 1992 when the PCP claimed they had reached the strategic stalemate, they note in numerous documents that they still remained unable to win the support of the national bourgeoisie in the United Front. C.f. PCP, “May the Strategic Stalemate Shake the Country More!”, Collected Works of the Communist Party of Peru — Volume 3: 1991-1992, p. 383-384 and p. 506. and PCP, “III Plenum: Meeting With the Northern Regional Committee,” Collected Works of the Communist Party of Peru — Volume 3: 1991-1992, p. 550.↩︎
Jan Myrdal, “In Conversation with Ganapathy, General Secretary of CPI (Maoist),” Red Star Over India, p. Available online at: http://redstaroverindia.se/pdf/1-In%20Conversation%20with%20Ganapathy.pdf ↩︎
Ganapathy, “The Dandakaranya Janathana Circars of today are the basis for the Indian People’s Democratic Federal Republic of tomorrow,” in Red Star Over India, p. Available online at: http://redstaroverindia.se/pdf/3-The%20Dandakaranya%20Janathana%20Circars.pdf ↩︎
There is no class analysis of the slums in the PCP’s General Political Line or in any of other documents in their Collected Works. Instead, the PCP simply emphasizes the importance of working with “the poor masses of the slums.” This is undoubtedly important, but without differentiating between different sections of the poor masses—including poor members of the lumpen-proletariat in the slums—it will be impossible to formulate a correct political line to handle key class contradictions. We will analyze the various mistakes made in the PCP’s urban strategy in our forthcoming document on the topic.↩︎
The PCP adopted the strategy of militarization of the Party before launching their armed struggle, but provided a more comprehensive justification for this practice in 1988. While the initial practice of militarizing the Party was a mistake and led to various other mistakes, in this document we focus primarily on the concentrated expression and theoretical justification for this mistaken practice, as expressed in the PCP’s General Political Line.↩︎
This is also a key component of the militarization of the Party. For now, it is sufficient to note that in the PCP’s view this meant that all members of the Party should be members of the people’s army, and that the principal form of action of the Party should be “military-type actions.” They argued that militarization was not reducible to preparing for war, but had to be carried through by these types of actions, and that the Party should be structured as a military organization and subject to military discipline.↩︎
c.f. https://www.demvolkedienen.org/index.php/en/t-dokumente-en/3501-debate-on-people-s-war and https://www.demvolkedienen.org/index.php/en/t-dokumente-en/6261-chronicle-of-the-ii-congress-of-the-maoist-communist-party. These are just two examples of the insistence of contemporary Gonzaloites that Gonzalo “synthesized Maoism.” For a good rebuttal of this absurd view, see: https://bannedthought.net/Sweden/MF/2019/PoorMaoZedongWhoWasn'tEvenAMaoist-Turesson-2019-OCR.pdf ↩︎
In effect, this one-man leadership is a form of organization where various administrative and bureaucratic methods are used to ensure that the orders and directives of leadership are followed absent of mass initiative or application of the mass line. While, at times, various forms of bureaucratic methods are needed (such as the temporary adoption of one-man management in production after the Russian Revolution), these methods can stifle mass initiative, and in themselves are not a proletarian form of organization. In contrast, political and ideological centralization carried out through the method of democratic centralism allows for growth of proletarian organization and politics. It is based on a unity of correct ideas, which spurs mass initiative and makes the proletarian politics into a weapon to be wielded by the masses to understand and transform reality, instead of reducing it to a series of orders to follow.

Mao emphasized this point when discussing democratic centralism:

“Without democracy there cannot be any correct centralism because people’s ideas differ, and if their understanding of things lacks unity then centralism cannot be established. What is centralism? First of all it is a centralization of correct ideas, on the basis of which unity of understanding, policy, planning, command and action are achieved. This is called centralized unification. If people still do not understand problems, if they have ideas but have not expressed them, or are angry but still have not vented their anger, how can centralized unification be established? If there is no democracy we cannot possibly summarize experience correctly. If there is no democracy, if ideas are not coming from the masses, it is impossible to establish a good line, good general and specific policies and methods. Our leading organs merely play the role of a processing plant in the establishment of a good line and good general and specific policies and methods.[...]I am told that the situation exists within some provincial Party committees, district Party committees and county Party committees, whereby in all matters whatever the first secretary says goes. This is quite wrong. It is nonsense if whatever one person says goes. I am referring to important matters, not to the routine work which comes in the wake of decisions. All important matters must be discussed collectively, different opinions must be listened to seriously, and the complexities of the situation and partial opinions must be analysed. Account must be taken of various possibilities and estimates made of the various aspects of a situation: which are good, which bad, which easy, which difficult, which possible and which impossible. Every effort must be made to be both cautious and thorough. Otherwise you have one-man tyranny. Such first secretaries should be called tyrants and not ‘squad leaders’ of democratic centralism.”

Mao, Talk At An Enlarged Working Conference Convened By The Central Committee Of The Communist Party Of China, January, 1962. Available online at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_62.htm

In this case, Mao was discussing a tendency of some party members leading various local committees to act in a warlord-like manner and thus violate the principles of democratic centralism. But these remarks still show how the idea that what one person says goes is antithetical to the principles of democratic centralism. Although Lin Biao and Chen Boda tried to promote a similar approach in the CCP as a whole through their “genius theory,” their line was defeated.↩︎
To get a basic sense of the glaring differences in fundamental principles one only needs to compare and contrast two documents the PCP’s 1988 General Political Line and the CCP’s 1974 A Basic Understanding of the Communist Party of China. We include some in depth analysis of these documents below.↩︎
From “The Debate on Gonzaloism in the International Communist Movement:
On the Recent Exchange Between the C(M)PA and the CPB(RF)” in Red Pages issue no. 1. Available online here: http://www.bannedthought.net/USA/MCU/RedPages/RedPages-01-Jan2021-rev3.pdf ↩︎
For example, see Gonzalo’s remarks, quoted in the General Political Line, “The Party is the axis of everything, it leads the three instruments in an all-round way, its own construction, it absolutely leads the army and the new State as a joint dictatorship aiming toward the dictatorship of the proletariat.” p. 76. The PCP used the term “New State” interchangeably with United Front, often referring to them as the “United Front-New State.” c.f. “III Plenum: Meeting of the Central Leadership With the Northern Regional Committee,” Collected Works of the Communist Party of Peru: Volume 3 — 1991-1992, p. 553. We discuss the implications of this confusion more below.↩︎
https://img.lpderecho.pe/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/DECRETO-LEGISLATIVO-N-046-LP-lpderecho.pdf ↩︎
For example, in 1981 Javier Diez Canseco, then a Senator for the Socialist Party of Peru, speaking of the wave of dynamite attacks on infrastructure and power stations, stated that “One has to be blind not to see that the right carries out much more complex actions. This latest wave has the right’s unmistakable fingerprint.” Caretas, no. 668, October 12, 1981. For more on the response to the attacks from various parliamentary left parties and unions see Gustavo Gorriti, The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru, p. 123-124 and 139-140.↩︎
The PCP was convinced that sabotaging major electrical towers and causing long blackouts in cities (as well as similar forms of sabotage) were central components of PPW, and that these actions would help the masses to grasp the antagonistic contradiction that they have with the Peruvian state. However, in reality, such actions aroused a good deal of popular anger, as these forms of sabotage damaged and destroyed key infrastructure that the people relied on daily.↩︎
Gustavo Gorriti, The Shining Path: A History of Millenarian War in Peru, p. 145.↩︎
Jan Myrdal, “In Conversation with Ganapathy, General Secretary of CPI (Maoist),” Red Star Over India, p. Available online at: http://redstaroverindia.se/pdf/1-In%20Conversation%20with%20Ganapathy.pdf ↩︎
José Luis Rénique, La Voluntad Encarcelada: Las ‘Luminosas Trincheras de Combate’ de Sendero Luminoso del Perú, p. 85-86↩︎
PCP, “Elections, no! Peoples war, yes!”, Collected Works of the PCP: Volume 2 — 1988-1990, p. 288-289.↩︎
Causa Proletaria, No. 5, Gorriti Archive. Cited in José Luis Rénique, “Apogee and Crisis of a ‘Third Path’: Mariateguismo, ‘Peoples War,’ and Counterinsurgency in Puno, 1987-1994,” Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru (1980-1995), p. 320↩︎
This outrage was inflamed by Gonzalo’s dismissal of criticisms of the PCP’s assassinations of these leaders. He waved away this criticism by stating that it was just the “old tales and closed defense of rotten leaders on whom people’s justice fell.” PCP, “Concerning the Two Hills,” Collected Works of the PCP: Volume 3 — 1991-1992, p. 185↩︎
Gonzalo absurdly claimed that “any advance (if any) in recovering some land [by the PUM], in this case is a by-product of the People’s War.” PCP, “Concerning the Two Hills,” Collected Works of the PCP: Volume 3 — 1991-1992, p. 185. Of course the people’s war no doubt had an ideological and political impact on the peasantry and aided in the creation of various openings for mass struggles. However, this is quite different than being the by-product of the people’s war. The peasants’ confidence in the PUM’s leadership was reinforced by their ability to lead these peasant struggles to victory (even if it was a reformist victory which could not be secured in the long-term without the revolutionary overthrow of the state). In order to show the limitations of the PUM’s leadership, the PCP could not simply claim that the former’s victories were simply due to the people’s war. This sort of reductive thinking only reinforced the PCP’s incorrect views that they could simply assassinate PUM leaders and take over the struggles which they were leading.↩︎
For more on the conflict between the PCP and PUM in Puno see, Lewis Taylor, “Agrarian Unrest and Political Conflict in Puno, 1985-1987,” Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1987), pp. 135-162 and José Luis Rénique, “Apogee and Crisis of a ‘Third Path’: Mariateguismo, ‘Peoples War,’ and Counterinsurgency in Puno: 1987-1994,” Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru (1980-1995), p. 307-338.

Unfortunately, the PCP generally did not differentiate between the liberation theology inclined progressive members of the Catholic Church, and those more reactionary forces. In contrast to this approach the Communist Party of the Philippines has been able to develop a broad United Front that includes Catholic Priests and various progressive religious forces, including the group Christians for National Liberation.↩︎
“II Congreso Nacional del Partido (Informes y Resoluciones).” El Mariateguista No. 17 (August), p. 84. Cited in José Luis Rénique, “Apogee and Crisis of a ‘Third Path’: Mariateguismo, ‘Peoples War,’ and Counterinsurgency in Puno: 1987-1994,” Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru (1980-1995), p. 321.↩︎
Interview with El Diario, Section III: ‘People’s War,’ found on p. 208 in The Collected Works of the Communist Party of Peru.↩︎
For a recent example in contrast to the PCP’s infantile fantasies of “absolute leadership” of the United Front, it can be helpful to refer to the successes that CPI (Maoist) had in Nandigram and Lalgarh, where they were able to form a tactical united front with the Trinamool Congress and even the BJP (among other forces) against the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) and drive CPM from office. For more on these struggles, see Ganapathy’s interview with Open Magazine, “We Shall Certainly Defeat the Government,” available online here: https://www.bannedthought.net/India/CPI-Maoist-Docs/Interviews/GanapathyInterview-091017.pdf, as well as other documents on the struggle at Lalgarh: https://bannedthought.net/India/Lalgarh/index.htm ↩︎
GPL, p. 75. This was far from the only time they referred to Gonzalo as the guarantee of victory. For example, see “Nothing and Nobody Can Defeat Us,” Collected Works of the PCP: Volume 1 (1968-1987), p. 385. This document was written by a member of the Peoples Guerrilla Army and published by the Central Committee. In it, the cadre repeats the Party’s slogan “Long live Chairman Gonzalo, guarantee of victory!” This is but one of countless examples.↩︎
http://www.redsun.org/pcp_doc/pcp_1292.htm ↩︎
At this moment, instead of critically summing up some of their mistakes and trying to chart a new course forward, the PCP reaffirmed these idealist tendencies. For example, shortly after Gonzalo was arrested the Central Committee released a document which opens with the following statement: “The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Peru fervently greets our beloved, heroic and magisterial leader, Chairman Gonzalo; the greatest living Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, great political and military strategist, philosopher, teacher of communists, center of party unification, who creatively applying Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to the concrete conditions of the Peruvian revolution has generated Gonzalo Thought, guarantee of the revolutions [sic] triumph.” Resolution of the Central Committee, December, 1992, available online: http://www.redsun.org/pcp_doc/pcp_1292.htm ↩︎
Mao, On Practice, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_16.htm ↩︎
In 2009, CPI (Maoist) sent a letter to the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), in which they detailed numerous criticisms of the ways in which the Nepalese movement had deviated from MLM. In these remarks they noted that the errors of “Prachanda Path” were part of a larger trend in the ICM of promoting leaders as supposedly infallible and declaring their works to represent a new “path” or “thought.” These remarks provide some helpful insight into the issues brought about by this same approach in Peru:

“ ‘Fight against dogmatism’ has become a fashionable phrase among many Maoist revolutionaries. They talk of discarding ‘outdated’ principles of Lenin and Mao and to develop MLM in the ‘new conditions’ that are said to have emerged in the world of the 21st century. Some of them describe their endeavour to ‘enrich and develop’ MLM as a new path or thought, and though this is initially described as something confined to revolution in their concerned country, it inexorably assumes a ‘universal character’ or ‘universal significance’ in no time. And in this exercise individual leaders are glorified and even deified to the extent that they appear infallible. Such glorification does not help in collective functioning of Party committees and the Party as a whole and questions on line are hardly ever raised as they stem from an infallible individual leader. In such a situation it is extremely difficult on the part of the CC, not to speak of the cadres, to fight against a serious deviation in the ideological-political line, or in the basic strategy and tactics even when it is quite clear that it goes against the interests of revolution. The ‘cult of the individual’ promoted in the name of path and thought provides a certain degree of immunity [from criticism] to the deviation in line if it emanates from that individual leader.”

CPI (Maoist), Open Letter to Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) From the Communist Party of India (Maoist), July 20, 2009. Available online: https://bannedthought.net/India/CPI-Maoist-Docs/Nepal/OpenLetterToCPNM-090720.pdf ↩︎
A Basic Understanding of the Communist Party of China, p. 88 See also Mao’s remarks about the importance of collective leadership and even publishing works collectively as the Central Committee of the Party during the GPCR: Chairman Mao’s Talk with Members of the Politburo Who Were in Beijing, especially p. 7-8. Available online at: http://bannedthought.net/China/Individuals/MaoZedong/Mao'sCommentaries/Mao'sTalkWithMembersOfThePolitburo-1975-May3-EnglishWithNotes.pdf ↩︎
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch00.htm ↩︎
The PCP’s documents abound with Dühring-esque statements about Gonzalo. For example, in Bases of Discussion of General Political Line: Military Line they state “[Gonzalo] departs from Chairman Mao’s thesis that the task of strategy as a science is to study the laws of leading military operations that influence the situation of the war in its entirety [...] Taking up Stalin, he links strategy with tactics and establishes the strategic-operational Plans that are the concrete way that strategy is linked to tactical operations. As a result, each Committee must elaborate its strategic-operational plans within the strategic-operational Plan common to the entire Party. The correct disposition emanates from the just decision of the commander.”

In the first issue of Red Pages we criticized this articulation, noting “Here the PCP claims that through correct leadership one can overcome the objective contradiction between strategy and tactics. While this contradiction can certainly be handled correctly or incorrectly, to claim that correct leadership is able to overcome this contradiction is subjective-idealism. A correct line does not negate the existence of an objective contradiction, rather it works out a means by which to resolve this and other contradictions. In practice, jefatura leads to a commandist approach to politics that stifles the creativity of the masses in the name of following the line set out by leadership. In this regard, it is not surprising that the PCP claims that Gonzalo “departs from Mao” and “takes up Stalin.” Under this approach to politics, which was most expressed in the cult of personality under Stalin, the masses are not free to criticize incorrect ideas from the center, and the contradiction between democracy and centralism is handled in a manner that, if left unchecked, will sow the seeds for revisionism and the defeat of the revolution.” “The Debate on Gonzaloism in the International Communist Movement: On the Recent Exchange Between the C(M)PA and the CPB(RF)” in Red Pages, Issue 1, p. 38-39. Available online here: http://www.bannedthought.net/USA/MCU/RedPages/RedPages-01-Jan2021-rev3.pdf ↩︎
Resolution of the Central Committee, December, 1992, available online: http://www.redsun.org/pcp_doc/pcp_1292.htm ↩︎
In A Basic Understanding of the Communist Party of China, the authors repeatedly emphasize the centrality of the two-line struggle in maintaining the Party’s proletarian character. Here are two of numerous examples:

“Marxism considers the struggles inside the Party as the reflection of the class struggles in the society. We should look at the struggle between the two lines in the Party from the Marxist standpoint of class struggle, making use of the method of class analysis. As long as there are class struggles in society, there can be no let-up in the two-line struggle in the Party. We should always look at our struggle against the revisionist elements in the Party in class terms. In order to camouflage their criminal aim of practising revisionism, Lin Piao and his acolytes used every means to distort the class nature of the two-line struggle in the Party, invented so-called contradictions between the "higher and lower levels" and between "these forces and those forces" and tried to pass off the struggle in the Party as a personal power struggle. All of this was completely absurd and poisonous.” p. 60

and

“For a communist, the most important thing in the struggle to preserve the proletarian character of the Party is to strengthen his proletarian Party spirit. We must understand that the building of a Marxist-Leninist political Party and the upholding of its proletarian character is the task of each one of its members. The Party is like a living organism, and its large number of members are like so many cells, each being part of the organism. The stronger the Party spirit is in each member, the higher his consciousness of class struggle and of the two-line struggle, the better he will be able to fulfill his exemplary role, and the better the proletarian character of the Party will be preserved. To strengthen his proletarian Party spirit, a communist must assiduously read and study and strive to grasp the Marxist position, point of view and method. He must be able to link theory and practice, distinguish correct from incorrect lines, and strengthen his capacity to separate true Marxism from sham. He must always keep in mind the basic line of the Party and the principle of “the three dos and the three don’ts,” and he must also dare to wage a merciless struggle against erroneous lines and tendencies” (p. 25)

↩︎
Mao, Talk At An Enlarged Working Conference Convened By The Central Committee Of The Communist Party Of China. Available online: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_62.htm ↩︎
[This and all other footnotes from the quote are taken from the translation] For examples of Mao’s many repudiations of this practice, see the translation of “A Few Opinions of Mine” on Bannedthought.net regarding Mao’s criticisms of Chen Boda and Lin Biao’s “genius theory.” See also “Central Committee Document Series 67, Number 219, July 5, 1967” on Bannedthought.net regarding the attempts of Chairman Mao and the Central Committee to restrain the mass production of statues and other symbols of Chairman Mao during the GPCR.↩︎
An allegory expressing the idea of “tooting one’s own horn.”↩︎
A reference to the righteous outlaws who dwell in Liang Mountain, from the Chinese classic, Water Margin (Shui Hu Zhuan 水浒传).↩︎
A famed scholar of the Jin Dynasty (265-419 AD).↩︎
Liu Bang was the first emperor of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), and folk-hero.↩︎
Lu Xun referenced this line in the afterword to his work Let’s Speak of the Wind and Moon 准风月谈 (准风月谈）when discussing the acclaim generated by his writings: “Time passes one day after another, and big and small things also pass alongside. Before long, they disappear from our memory. What’s more, such things are all scattered, hence from my own perspective I really don’t know how many things I have not perceived, and not known. And yet about such matters I wrote down ten or so essays, added some parallels, and also made use of an “afterword” in order to patch up the resulting clashes. At the same time, when projected onto current affairs, the patterns of the events observed were minimal. So should an impression or two also be described? Furthermore, now there are very few authors who dare to lower themselves enough to gaze on the respected faces of Shakespeare and Tolstoy, to look into the shadows and write a few lines. As a result I want more-so to preserve my mixed feelings and in doing so allow them to exist to a greater extent. Although the result is I receive more disdain from people, under siege more growth is achieved. Alas, ‘the lack of heroes in the world allows those without ability to gain fame,’ this is something I and China’s literary works should be indignant about.”↩︎
Jiepou (解剖), i.e. to analyze↩︎
A reference to the philosopher Zhuangzis tale of a mythical kun fish, that desired to see the world, and transformed into the mythical peng bird, who saw distant seas. Li is a form of Chinese measurement, equivalent to about 0.5 kilometers. Mao wrote this line in a 7-character poetic fragment in 1916↩︎
This relates to Chairman Mao’s dialectic of “one divides into two” as opposed to revisionist eclecticism of two divides into one [sic]. The critique of Liu Shaoqi and Yang Xianzhen’s “two divides into one” [sic] theory was an important achievement of the GPCR. [MCU: Here it seems the translator mistakenly wrote “two divides into one” instead of “two fuse into one.”]↩︎
Yangchun baixue 阳春白雪, a notoriously difficult song to perform from the state of Chu.↩︎
This refers to Lin’s actions, including his promotion of the Quotations of Chairman Mao Tsetung (known in the west as the Little Red Book), and Lin’s “Genius Theory” in which he referred to Mao as a genius that only comes around every few thousand years.↩︎
Ascending to Liang Mountain refers to the classic work Water Margin, in which the only recourse of the tale’s outlaws is to join a rebel army on Liang Mountain.↩︎
Zhong Kui (钟馗) is a figure in Chinese mythology and folk religion who vanquishes ghosts. His face is often painted on gates and doors to prevent evil spirits from passing through, much like a scarecrow, but for ghosts.↩︎
In Lin Biao’s counter-revolutionary “Project 571 Outline,” for his coup attempt, Lin talked about the counter-revolutionary strategy “Defeating the forces of B-52 under the banner of B-52,” (B-52 is what Lin’s son, Lin Liguo used to disparagingly refer to Chairman Mao). We see here an example of the way the revisionists tried to make use of the theme of Zhong Kui in their plots.↩︎
i.e. forget about what will happen to us, look what they have done already, even to Marx and Lenin!↩︎
This refers to formulations related to the practice of “praising to the sky,” described earlier in this letter.↩︎
Including the promotion of the use of the Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.↩︎
http://www.bannedthought.net/China/Individuals/MaoZedong/Letters/Mao'sLetterToJiangQing-660708-Alt2.pdf ↩︎
c.f. GLP, p. 75, 77. There they state: “The Peruvian proletariat in the midst of the class struggle has generated the leadership of the revolution and its highest expression: The Great Leadership of Chairman Gonzalo who handles revolutionary theory and has a knowledge of history and a profound understanding of the practical movement; who through hard two-line struggle has defeated revisionism, the right and left liquidationism, the right opportunist line and rightism. He has reconstituted the Party, leads it in the People’s War and has become the greatest living Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, a great political and military strategist, a philosopher, a teacher of Communists, and the center of Party unity.”↩︎
PCP, “Concerning Two Hills,” Collected Works of the Communist Party of Peru: Volume 3 (1991-1992), p. 183.↩︎
See, for example, his critiques of Chen Boda in A Few Opinions of Mine, available online: https://www.bannedthought.net/USA/MCU/RedPages/issue_two/a-few-opinions-of-mine/↩︎
https://www.bannedthought.net/Journalists/Snow-Edgar/EdgarSnow-Life-1971-April30.pdf ↩︎
The Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism has a helpful entry on the topic:

This is the name given by the Chinese during the Mao era to the following four points which concisely and powerfully sum up the essence and meaning of communist revolution:

1) The abolition of class distinctions generally.

2) The abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest.

3) The abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production.

4) The revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.

These four points are taken verbatim from a passage in Marx’s pamphlet, “The Class Struggles in France” (1850), MECW 10:127.

https://massline.org/Dictionary/FO.htm#Four_Alls ↩︎
It is worth reading Mao’s 1970 critique of Chen Boda (who was working closely with Lin Biao at the time) for promoting the “genius theory.” In this text, A Few Opinions of Mine, Mao breaks down the idealist premises of such theories. Many of Mao’s critiques are equally applicable to Gonzaloites today. The text is available online at: https://bannedthought.net/China/MaoEra/GPCR/Chinese/AFewOpinionsOfMine-1970-English.pdf ↩︎
The original text, in Chinese, can be found here: https://bannedthought.net/China/Individuals/MaoZedong/Other/PersonalityCult/i-File-1970-NotesOnEssayLeninismOrSocial-Imperialism.pdf Other relevant documents are also available here: full list of relevant documents here https://bannedthought.net/China/Individuals/MaoZedong/Other/Mao-NotesOnCultOfPersonality.htm ↩︎
History Project of the Republic: The history and logic of revolution and restoration, p. 182-183. Available online at: https://bannedthought.net/China/Maoism/2022/ChinaRevolutionAndRestoration-English-2022.pdf ↩︎
It is important to grasp the class basis for Lin Biao’s anti-Party clique, and to understand the underlying class position that gave rise to such tendencies in Chinese society. It is no coincidence that the PCP not only promoted Lin Biaoist ideas, but also failed to grapple with the key lessons of Maoism surrounding the class struggle under socialism. We elaborate this topic further below. For more, see Yao Wenyuan’s article On the Social Basis of the Lin Piao Anti-Party Clique, available online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/yao-wenyuan/1975/0001.htm ↩︎
One of the central lessons from this campaign was the need to struggle against the various backwards and oppressive ideas in the back of the masses’ minds, and the ways in which the right tries to take advantage of these to derail the revolution. The struggle against Lin Biao’s genius theory was more than just a struggle against a small clique in the leadership of the CCP which eventually tried to stage a coup; it was also about transforming the ideas inherited from the old society. Jan Myrdal saw this firsthand in China in 1975:

“The great theoretical campaigns in China, for instance the campaign against Lin Piao and Confucius, have never really been abstract. The question of whether certain people are born geniuses and therefore understand everything better than others, whether such geniuses should lead and others content themselves to listen and follow—this is not an abstract question. It really concerns each of us, in our own countries as well as in China. It is easier for us to discuss and decide on a matter once we rid ourselves of the notion of geniuses and elites and we instead assume responsibility for our own decisions.

“And as far as women are concerned, it has always been said that they were intended for nothing other than looking after the home. And, therefore, they should always agree with those who understand the major issues better. It has also been said that they should not only respect their elders, but also obey them. And all of this, said day after day for thousands of years, leaves an impression in the back of our minds.

“It is not just that the people are oppressed; they are also given thoughts and notions about their own worthlessness and inferiority which oppresses them. To settle accounts with that inner oppression is important. This contributes to the liberation of an enormous creative force, rich initiative and the capacity to work together for a common goal. For thousands of years, these qualities had been suppressed by longstanding prejudices about inferiority, obedience, geniuses and the people’s backwardness.

“If one views these campaigns from the watch towers of the Pekingologists and China-Watchers, they become obscure and strange, ingeniously distorted. But if one looks at them form below, they become simple and clearly necessary. And if one does an experiment, substituting other personages for Lin Piao and Confucius, and if one looks at what is really happening in Bridgeport or Kansas, then it is not too difficult to realize that notions about geniuses and the people’s ignorance and about women’s peculiarity, ideas which keep mankind shackled, exist much closer to home than in China.

“The feet of girls in Liu Lin [village] were once bound so tightly that as adults they became cripples who could only stump forward. That custom was eliminated. It was not too difficult. That kind of liberation was easy to carry out once the old society had been overthrown. But liberating oneself from stunting notions takes a longer time and does not occur automatically. It is not accomplished in a day or through one discussion.”

Jan Myrdal, “Daycare Centers in Liu Lin,” China Notebook: 1975-1978, p. 12-13.↩︎
GPL, p. 76↩︎
GPL, p. 76. The PCP also notes, “In the leadership of the People’s War there was a great leap in the mass work of the Party, a qualitative leap, which shaped the principal form of struggle—the People’s War, and the principal form of organization—The People’s Guerrilla Army. This highest task was carried forward through the militarization of the Party, and with respect to the mass work this means that all the mass work is done through the People’s Guerrilla Army.” GPL, p. 94.↩︎
Gautam Navlakha, Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion, p. 142.↩︎
Mao, A Critique of Soviet Economics, Monthly Review Press, 1977, p. 45. Available online at: http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/CSE58.html ↩︎
GPL, p. 76↩︎
The objective and subjective conditions in Peru at the time were extremely favorable for launching a revolution. Large-scale unemployment and a larger economic crisis rocked the country, and there had been a series of significant successful struggles against the military dictatorship, which had brought it to an end by 1980. What’s more, there was broad popular interest in and support for Maoism, which was due in part to the hard work of the PCP. For example, roughly one quarter of all the faculty at Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga (UNSCH) where Gonzalo taught, traveled to China during the GPCR where they saw first hand how the Chinese Revolution had changed the country. They in turn taught classes on the subject and worked closely with the peasantry and working class to show them that the new democratic revolution would provide a solution to the fundamental issues that they faced. For more on this see, Matthew Rothwell, “Forging the Fourth Sword of Marxism,” Transpacific Revolutionaries, p. 59-60.↩︎
For example, Lenin was cautious about claiming universal validity of all the Bolshevik experiences, repeatedly emphasizing that many aspects of how they organized were particular to the conditions in Russia. Likewise Mao repeatedly cautioned against other Parties, even those in semi-feudal and semi-colonial countries, mechanically applying the strategy used in China to their own countries.↩︎
Mao, On Coalition Government. Available online: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_25.htm ↩︎
Mao, Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War, emphasis ours. Available online: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_12.htm.↩︎
This relates to Lenin’s point that the resistance of the bourgeoisie is intensified a thousand-fold after their overthrow.↩︎
Actually, as we will see below, the PCP did put forward that the key to resolving contradictions under socialism was violent “military-type actions.” They generally failed to grasp that while revolutionary violence is an absolute necessity to overthrow the old ruling class and needed in various degrees under socialism (i.e. it is needed for opposing imperialist aggression and, at times, for the suppression of counter-revolutionaries, although in the later case mass supervision can also be used in many circumstances) it is not and cannot be the main method to resolve all contradictions under socialism. We discuss this, and the GPCR, in further detail below.↩︎
Mao, On Contradiction, available online here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm ↩︎
Two relevant quotes:

“We are also opposed to "Left" phrase-mongering. The thinking of "Leftists" outstrips a given stage of development of the objective process; some regard their fantasies as truth, while others strain to realize in the present an ideal which can only be realized in the future. They alienate themselves from the current practice of the majority of the people and from the realities of the day, and show themselves adventurist in their actions.”

“Our dogmatists are lazy-bones. They refuse to undertake any painstaking study of concrete things, they regard general truths as emerging out of the void, they turn them into purely abstract unfathomable formulas, and thereby completely deny and reverse the normal sequence by which man comes to know truth. Nor do they understand the interconnection of the two processes in cognition-- from the particular to the general and then from the general to the particular. They understand nothing of the Marxist theory of knowledge.”

↩︎
As was noted above, the PCP did play an important role in opposing both Soviet Revisionism and Dengist revisionism. They also struggled against various forms of social democracy in Peru. These were important efforts. But by focusing on violence as the key link, they left themselves blind to other deviations.↩︎
Central Committee of the Communist Party of Peru, “The PCP Salutes the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement,” A World to Win, Issue 3, May 1, 1985, p. 30-31. Available online at: https://bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1985-3/AWTW-03-PCP-SalutesRIM.pdf ↩︎
This excellent document on foreign policy in the late GPCR provides some helpful analysis of this: https://bannedthought.net/USA/MassProletariat/FriendsDocs/TheLateCulturalRevolution-161213.pdf ↩︎
In his 1988 interview with El Diario, when asked about international politics, Gonzalo stated “We start from the understanding that revolution is the main trend, and this continues to be so, this trend put forward by Mao continues to develop. In our view, there has been no stability since World War II, not even relative stability.” PCP, “Interview with Chairman Gonzalo,” Collected Works of the Communist Party of Peru: Volume 2 — 1988-1990, p. 241.

This is dogmatism plain and simple. Not only does Gonzalo assume that the situation in 1988 is the same as 1966, but his conclusion that there has not even been relative stability globally since WWII is absurd and un-dialectical. While there were many significant revolutionary upheavals post-WWII, the global situation was not defined by absolute instability. In fact, the U.S. was able to consolidate its position as the dominant imperialist power on the globe, establish the Bretton Woods System, and seize control of numerous neocolonies. So there were clearly periods of relative stability, even if the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s did shake the U.S. and others countries’ control domestically and internationally.↩︎
Lenin laid out these criteria for a revolutionary situation in The Collapse of the Second International, available online here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/csi/ii.htm#v21pp74h-212 ↩︎
For more on this topic, see Jose Maria Sison, Specific Characteristics of the People’s War in the Philippines, p. 1-2. Available online at: https://bannedthought.net/Philippines/CPP/Sison/2021/Sison-SpecificCharacteristicsOfPeoplesWarInPhilippines-2021-06-27.pdf ↩︎
From “The Debate on Gonzaloism in the International Communist Movement: On the Recent Exchange Between the C(M)PA and the CPB(RF)” in Red Pages, Issue 1. Available online here: http://www.bannedthought.net/USA/MCU/RedPages/RedPages-01-Jan2021-rev3.pdf ↩︎
“Five Years of People’s War,” A World to Win, Issue 6, August, 1986, p. 76. Available online at: https://bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1986-6/AWTW-06.pdf ↩︎
For some discussion of these stages see “Protracted People’s War is Not a Universal Strategy for Revolution” in Red Pages, Issue 1. Available online here: http://www.bannedthought.net/USA/MCU/RedPages/RedPages-01-Jan2021-rev3.pdf ↩︎
“Since the Sino-Japanese war is a protracted one and final victory will belong to China, it can reasonably be assumed that this protracted war will pass through three stages. The first stage covers the period of the enemys strategic offensive and our strategic defensive. The second stage will be the period of the enemys strategic consolidation and our preparation for the counter-offensive. The third stage will be the period of our strategic counter-offensive and the enemys strategic retreat. It is impossible to predict the concrete situation in the three stages, but certain main trends in the war may be pointed out in the light of present conditions. The objective course of events will be exceedingly rich and varied, with many twists and turns, and nobody can cast a horoscope for the Sino-Japanese war; nevertheless it is necessary for the strategic direction of the war to make a rough sketch of its trends. Although our sketch may not be in full accord with the subsequent facts and will be amended by them, it is still necessary to make it in order to give firm and purposeful strategic direction to the protracted war.” From On Protracted War, quoted from the section “The Three Stages of the Protracted War” online here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_09.htm ↩︎
c.f. https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/polemic/peaceful.htm ↩︎
From “The Debate on Gonzaloism in the International Communist Movement: On the Recent Exchange Between the C(M)PA and the CPB(RF)”, Red Pages, Issue 1, p. 39. Available online here: http://www.bannedthought.net/USA/MCU/RedPages/RedPages-01-Jan2021-rev3.pdf ↩︎
https://ci-ic.org/blog/2022/09/27/eternal-glory-to-chairman-gonzalo-4/ A world war “along class lines” could be possible if there is a socialist bloc of countries in the world and the imperialists tried to launch a war to destroy them, but that scenario was not on the table in the 1980’s when there were no longer any socialist countries in the world. Moreover, the wars that were going on were generally proxy wars like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. intervention into Lebanon, etc. Likewise, during a World War, it is possible that revolutionary forces link up and join together in various way. This happened to some extent during World War II where the partisan movements in Europe worked with the Red Army to liberate their countries. However, the subordination of many of these movements to the foreign policy interests of the USSR created real problems and stifled the initiative of many parties. Therefore, it is important to take stock of the lessons from these mistakes and not simple promote reductive ideas of “global people’s war” which covers over important differences in the particularities of various countries.↩︎
While the PCP often repeats this slogan in their documents, the gun commanding the Party is something of an inevitable outcome when the Party makes the main form of its activity “military-type actions” and insists that “war is the highest form of resolving contradictions.”↩︎
For more this topic, including a clear summary of Mao’s views on the matter, see A Summary of Views on the Problem of the Inner-Party Bourgeoisie, available online here: https://www.bannedthought.net/China/MaoEra/GPCR/SummaryOfViewsOnTheInner-PartyBourgeoisie-English-Partial-OCR.pdf ↩︎
See issue no. 2 of Red Pages, online here: http://www.bannedthought.net/USA/MCU/RedPages/RedPages-02-Jan2022-r2.pdf ↩︎
Actually, the defeat of Lin Biao’s coup attempt in 1971 shows that, given a correct political line, it is possible in many cases to isolate the right in such a way as to prevent them from mobilizing a coup in the first place. The Lin Biao Affair is not the only instance of this in China. Isolating Peng Dehuai at the 1959 Lushan Conference and stopping rightist efforts to provoke all-around civil war during the July 20th 1967 Incident in Wuhan are but two of many other examples.↩︎
GPL, p. 23-24↩︎
Someter in the Spanish original, more accurately translated as “subdue.” This is one of a series of strange translations in the English version of the text.↩︎
GPL, p. 23↩︎
This line is very similar to Lin Biao’s articulations before his coup attempts, when he argued that all the rightist elements in society had been caught, and therefore the main tasks after the 9^th Party Congress was to develop production (and therefore not focus on class struggle). This actually bears a distinct similarity to Liu Shaoqi’s earlier line as well:

“After our country achieved the basic socialist transformation of the ownership of the means of production, Liu Shaoqi tried his best to promote the theory of the extinction of class struggle, and together with Chen Boda picked up Voznesenskys black goods, advocating that the main contradiction in our society was between the “advanced socialist system and the backward social productive forces”. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Lin Biao spread the fallacy that traitors, spies, and capitalist roaders had all been caught, and that the main task after the Ninth National Congress would be to develop production. On a surface level, the methods and language of such capitalist-roaders in the party appear to differ. However, a black thread runs between them all, that of the theory of the extinction of class struggle and productive forces determinism.”

Translated from Chinese:

在我国基本上实现生产资料所有制的社会主义改造以后，刘少奇就竭力宣扬阶级斗争熄灭论，并且伙同陈伯达从沃兹涅先斯基那里捡来黑货，鼓吹我国社会的主要矛盾是什么“先进的社会主义制度同落后的社会生产力之间的矛盾.”

“The Bourgeoisie Within the Communist Party in the Socialist Period”: Discussing the Inner Party Bourgeoisie, by Qin Zhengxian, the writing group of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. This was a 48 page pamphlet finished near the end of September 1976. Prior to the appearance of this pamphlet a large number of seminars on “bourgeois legal rights”, “capitalist roaders” and the “bourgeoisie within the party” were held all over China. Some important arguments (but not all) from these seminars have been compiled into this pamphlet. It should be noted that in some seminars some speakers even mentioned that after the capitalist roaders came to power, China might become a social-imperialist country; this was not the mainstream argument that “capitalist roaders surrendered to the foreign bourgeoisie and betrayed the country.” This pamphlet was once broadcast on the radio, but before the series was finished the capitalist roaders launched a counter-revolutionary coup. Available online (in Chinese): https://ww.bannedthought.net/China/MaoEra/GPCR/TheBourgeoisieWithinTheCommunistPartyInTheSocialistPeriod-Shanghai-1976-Chinese.pdf ↩︎
As part of the process of land reform violence did occur, but it was far from the main method of struggling against or suppressing the feudal elite, and was definitely not the correct approach to dealing with the forms of exploitation practices by the middle and rich peasants. In fact, when and where Party cadres relied excessively on violence to accomplish land reform and redistribution they ran into numerous political problems. On the one hand, certain members of the masses were repulsed by unproductive violence and, on the other hand, reliance on use of violence disarmed the masses, failed to mobilize them to criticize and speak out politically, and allowed some cadre and militia members with a tendency towards self-advancement and corruption to separate themselves from the masses and begin to lord it over them. William Hinton writes extensively of struggles over these methods in the course of land reform in Fanshen. On the former point:

“The peasants supported violence in smashing the old regime. But violence for loot alone, violence that was basically punitive, violence that turned on those who practiced it, turned out to be stark, senseless, repellent. Though no one in the village put it thus in so many words, such thoughts undoubtedly lurked in the recesses of their minds and made them draw back. Yet as more people drew back from active participation in new campaigns, the leaders began to push harder; and so a crack appeared between the dedicated revolutionaries and many rank-and-file peasants who had supported them whole-heartedly up until that time.” (p. 224)

and on the latter:

“The militia, on whom the main burden of each campaign fell, were quick to slide into certain habits well known to traditional upholders of ‘law and order.’ They developed among themselves a battlefront psychology that served as justification for everything they were tempted to do. Since they spearheaded every drive, led in beating the ‘struggle objects,’ poured out their sweat to dig up the kangs, courtyards and tombs of the ‘old money bags,’ and above all, risked their lives through the long cold nights as they stood guard against counter-attack, they felt entitled to special privileges. Many of them thought it unfair to receive no return for service to the people beyond the fanshen in which all shared. Among them were some who also thought it unfair to be judged by ordinary standards of morality. As heroes of the hour, these began in small ways to help themselves. When some article among the hundreds confiscated from the gentry caught their fancy, they took it when nobody was looking. If some comely woman aroused their passion, they seduced her if she was willing. If she were a ‘struggle object,’ they took her whether she was willing or not. When asked to do their share of labor service, these men began by thinking up all kinds of excuses and ended up with outright refusals. They even shirked work for soldiers families and prevailed upon their neighbors to go in their stead.” (page 226).

For these reasons over-reliance on violence during land reform was considered a mistake. The whole text of Fanshen is well worth reading to get a sense of the degree of struggle, self-criticism, and transformation that was actually involved in eventually carrying out successful political campaigns in the countryside. In contrast, a “violence is the answer” one-size-fits-all solution appears childishly simplistic. Of course, in instances where the masses demanded execution of various counter-revolutionaries guilty of blood crimes, the Party did agree, though their general approach was to try to find ways for counter-revolutionaries to rectify and transform where possible.↩︎
Lenin, “ ‘Left-Wing’ Childishness and the Petty Bourgeois Mentality,” Lenin Collected Works: Volume 27. Available online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm ↩︎
Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Communism: The Shanghai Textbook, p. 43.↩︎
Even in the case of handling counter-revolutionaries, it was not the case that execution was always the solution. For example, in On the Ten Major Relationships, Mao notes that

“Counter-revolutionaries may be dealt with in these ways: execution, imprisonment, supervision and leaving at large. Execution — everybody knows what that means. By imprisonment we mean putting counter-revolutionaries in jail and reforming them through labour. By supervision we mean leaving them in society to be reformed under the supervision of the masses. By leaving at large we mean that generally no arrest is made in those cases where it is marginal whether to make an arrest, or that those arrested are set free for good behaviour. It is essential that different counter-revolutionaries should be dealt with differently on the merits of each case.”

And that, “Third, from now on there should be fewer arrests and executions in the suppression of counter-revolutionaries in society at large. They are the mortal and immediate enemies of the people and are deeply hated by them, and therefore a small number should be executed. But most of them should be handed over to the agricultural co-operatives and made to work under supervision and be reformed through labour. All the same, we cannot announce that there will be no more executions, and we must not abolish the death penalty.”

An extremely illuminating account of the way that China handled these and other cases can be found in the book Prisoners of Liberation, which shows how even an American spying for the U.S. in China was able to transform his outlook through the basic pro-people approach of criticism and self-criticism promoted in revolutionary China. The book shows that the actual policy of China was quite different than Gonzaloite fantasies of “military-type actions” being key to dealing with these cases under socialism.↩︎
https://ci-ic.org/blog/2016/02/25/celebrate-the-50th-anniversary-of-the-great-proletarian-cultural-revolution-with-peoples-war-until-communism/ In this document the signatories—including the CPB—absurdly argue that the lessons of the GPCR show that there is a need for “people’s war until communism.” For example, they state:

“As long as there are classes, there will be class struggle, because that is how the law of contradiction specifies in the class society; the highest way of solving the contradictions in the class society is the war and, because of that, until the whole mankind enters to communism there will always be the need of the people’s war. Studying the GPCR, we understand more deeply the omnipotence of the revolutionary war, meaning the people’s war, Maoism and how to apply it. All of these are lessons of the class struggle in the GPCR.”

↩︎
For example, see the discussion of the role of the May 16^th Group in William Hinton’s book The Hundred Day War. For more on how various capitalist-roaders and factional forces tried to turn the GPCR into a “total civil war” see Chapter 2 Section 3.1 (From the "February Counter-current" to the "Total Civil War”) of History Project of the Republic: The History and Logic of Revolution and Restoration, p. 166-179. Available online at: https://bannedthought.net/China/Maoism/2022/ChinaRevolutionAndRestoration-English-2022.pdf ↩︎
This was in line with Mao’s point that “Once a head is chopped off, history shows it cant be restored, nor can it grow again as chives do, after being cut. If you cut off a head by mistake, there is no way to rectify the mistake, even if you want to.” Mao, On the Ten Major Relationships, available online: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_51.htm ↩︎
For example, see Mao’s discussion with Kuai Dafu and other Red Guard leaders: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_81.htm and William Hinton’s book Hundred Day War which deals with this question in detail and also details how various forces in the Party (including Lin Biao and the May 16^th Group) helped to foment such ultra-“left” tendencies.↩︎
In one of their earliest documents—the 1977 document To Be a Marxist is to Adhere to MLMZT—the PCP did briefly discuss bourgeois right and other important questions of the GPCR, but only in an extremely provisional fashion and largely by quoting documents from the GPCR but without providing much of their own analysis. Later on, they instead focused almost exclusively on the need for violence and militarization of the Party to prevent counter-revolution while nominally upholding the need for cultural revolutions under socialism. Based on these articulations it is clear that when they do speak of cultural revolutions they have something pretty different in mind then what occurred in China between 1966-1976. PCP, “To Be a Marxist is to Adhere to MLMZT,” Collected Works of the Communist Party of Peru: Volume 1— 1968-1987, p. 206-219.↩︎
Mao, Speech To The Albanian Military Delegation, available online at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_74.htm. See also Charles Bettelheim’s point from Class Struggles in the USSR: First Period (1917-1923): “The Soviet experience confirms that what is hardest is not the overthrow of the former dominant classes: the hardest task is, first, to destroy the former social relations—upon which a system of exploitation similar to the one supposed to have been overthrown for good can be reconstituted—and then to prevent these relations from being reconstituted on the basis of those elements of the old that still remain present for a long time in the new social relations.” p. 18↩︎
GPL, p. 75.↩︎
Lenin, “Once Again On The Trade Unions, The Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin,” LCW: Volume 32. Available online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/jan/25.htm ↩︎
This stands in contrast to the form of political centralization that was developed in China, especially during the GPCR. As noted above, for more on this topic see Charles Bettelheim’s book Cultural Revolution and Industrial Organization in China: Changes in Management and the Division of Labor, especially p. 48-55.↩︎
Under the New Economic Policy, the Party ended this monopoly and adopted an approach of allowing some greater degree of freedom for small enterprises and trades to operate, within limits. The experiences of this policy (both positive and negative) would later serve as the basis for the policy of nationalization of small and medium enterprises in China post-1949 through the creation of mixed enterprises (partially state-owned and partially privately owned), and the subsequent transformation of these into wholly state-owned enterprises in which the capitalists retained, for a period, a higher salary and managerial functions—as well as receiving some interest during this transitional period—on the capital they had formerly owned. For more details, see The Shanghai Textbook.↩︎
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1939/x01/ch08.htm ↩︎
The Immediate Tasks of Economic Construction, report from 9^th Party Congress K.P.S.S. v rezolyutsiyakh, vol. 1, p. 477–490.↩︎
The divided character of this measure—as with all others adopted during the War Communism period—must be acknowledged. On the one hand, this change helped the trade unions strengthen labor discipline and reduce desertion from key industries and thereby bolstered the war effort. However, it also lead to significant popular discontent in the trade unions. This opposition to these measures also had a divided character. Charles Bettelheim provides some insightful analysis of the dynamics at play:

“The resistance of the old trade-union leaders to the line laid down by this resolution was clearly inspired by a variety of motives. For some (in particular, the Mensheviks) it was a question of sabotaging the war effort; for others, what mattered was to resist measures that developed in a one-sided way the administrative and disciplinary role of the trade-union organizations. This resistance was all the greater because parts of the congress resolution on ‘The Immediate Tasks of Economic Construction’ were not easily acceptable to a large section of the workers.

“These resolutions (which the trade unions had the task of implementing) aimed at introducing a series of measures of a coercive character: compulsory labor, militarization of the economy, obligation of party and trade-union organizations to register all skilled workers (so as to assign them to production with the same strictness ‘as was and is being shown towards officers in relation to the army’s needs’), mobilization of the workers as a whole, including the unskilled, in labor units, with a staff of ‘technically competent instructors,’ and establishment of a system of ‘scientific organization of production.’ ”

Charles Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR, First Period: 1917-1923, p. 184↩︎
While these measures were not ideal, many opponents of socialism—past and present—have tried to disparage the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution because of their use of coercion (which was secondary to the overwhelming support shown by the broad masses of people for the revolution and the leadership of the Bolshevik Party). Charles Bettelheim provides a detailed explanation of the situation and the class relations at the time:

“The victories won by the Soviet power over the bourgeoisie, the landlords, and world imperialism were possible only because it was then a proletarian power concentrating the will of the masses. If this is not seen, it is impossible to understand the outcome of the battles waged by the Soviet army, badly equipped and supplied, against the White armies backed by the imperialist great powers, to understand how and why Soviet Russia got the better of its powerful enemies although it was gripped by famine and disease. Apart from any abstract considerations, the actual course of events showed in practice the existence of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the realization of the fundamental unity of the masses, guided by the Bolshevik Party and revolutionary Marxism.

“This proletarian dictatorship, like every historical reality, was complex and contradictory. Through the work of the Bolshevik Party, through the fact that this party was deeply rooted in the working class and that it applied Marxism, which enabled it to carry out at every stage essential revolutionary tasks, the proletarian dictatorship realized the fighting unity of the proletariat and the peasantry. At the same time, for lack of a long ideological and political struggle waged on a large scale before the establishment of the proletarian power, and for lack of previous experience, the unity of the masses thus realized was not completely adequate to the tasks that had to be accomplished. A part of the peasantry and even of the working class continued to be strongly influenced by bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideas and practices, and so gave precedence to personal interests over the interests of the revolution and allowed itself temporarily to be influenced by ideological tendencies that weakened the revolutionary unity of the masses—the SRs, the Mensheviks, and various forms of anarchism. This was only a secondary aspect of the situation, for these trends never succeeded in wielding more than a limited and unstable influence, and as a rule they did not even operate openly. This secondary aspect of the situation explains some particular features of the dictatorship of the proletariat during these years—the low level of activity of some of the mass organizations (the local soviets and, up to a point, the trade unions) and the relatively large proportion of acts of indiscipline which—in a situation of extreme tension— compelled the Soviet power to use coercion against unstable elements.

“In these circumstances, the proletarian character of the ruling power was essentially determined by the bonds uniting the Bolshevik Party with the revolutionary masses, by its practice of a mass line of revolutionary Marxism, and by the merging of this party, the vanguard of the proletariat, with the most militant section of the working class.

“Whatever may have been the role played by coercion of part of the workers—a coercion that was often exercised, moreover, by workers’ detachments and not by a specialized body—power was wielded at that time above all by virtue of the confidence placed in the Bolshevik Party by the broadest masses. The latter saw in the party the victorious leader of the October Revolution, the party that had identified itself with their own desire to get out of the imperialist war, with the peasants’ desire to become masters of their own land, and that had shown itself able to unite them to fight the enemies of the revolution. Furthermore, this confidence was based not only on the party’s capacity to respond to fundamental popular aspirations and adopt the appropriate decisions, but also on the carrying out of the mass line, for this is essential for consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Charles Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR, First Period: 1917-1923, p. 190-191.↩︎
Lenin is being sarcastic here to criticize the idea—put forward by Milyutin, Trotsky, and others—that War Communism was a harmonious economic system and could allow for a direct transition to communist relations of production, given the central role of the state in distribution and the apparent elimination of money and commodity exchange. In reality, money and commodity exchange (along with other related capitalist relations of production) were not eliminated in this period, given the existence of an extensive black market. For example, the official state distribution of food covered only around 25-40% of the inhabitants of the towns. The rest was purchased by them on the black markets at very high prices. For more on this see E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution: Volume 2, p. 242-243.↩︎
Lenin, “Report On The Substitution Of A Tax In Kind For The Surplus Grain Appropriation System,” LCW: Volume 32, p. 233–234. Available online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/10thcong/ch03.htm ↩︎
Lenin, “The Tax in Kind, (The Significance Of The New Policy And Its Conditions)” LCW: Volume 32, p. 343. Available online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/apr/21.htm ↩︎
Trotsky, Sochineniya, vol. 15, pp. 126, 132, 138.↩︎
It should be remembered that, for Trotsky, socialism in one country was impossible. Therefore, his proposal was for this regime of a militarized working class and society to last through the “permanent revolution” until there had been revolutions in every country, including through “exporting the revolution” by means of the Red Army invading other countries. This bears a striking similarity to the Gonzaloist slogan “People’s War Until Communism!” and related articulations by Gonzalo and his contemporary adherents of the need for a “global people’s war,” especially in light of their articulations around the militarization of society under socialism, and their promotion of “war communism.”↩︎
Report of the Ninth Party Congress, 1934 ed., p. 101; quoted in Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 2, pp. 214–215.↩︎
During this period, Trotsky justified this position—which included expanding the use of coercion on the working class by the state apparatus and widening the scope of compulsory labor—by referring to, of all things, the productivity of slavery, claiming it was a “progressive phenomenon”! He stated: “the militarisation of labour... is; the indispensable basic method for the organisation of our labour forces…Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive?… This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery too was productive… Compulsory slave labour…was in its time a progressive phenomenon.”

Congress report, published in Moscow in 1920, pp. 84–97; quoted in Brinton, The Bolsheviks & Workers’ Control, p. 63.↩︎
Much like Trotsky, Bukharin argued for the militarization of the working class, stating that:

“under the rule of the proletariat, too, the element of coercion and repression has a major role, which is greater, the higher is the percentage of purely non-proletarian elements on the one hand and unconscious or half-conscious elements within the proletariat itself on the other. In this case, the ‘militarization’ of the population—above all in the army—is a method of self-organization of the working class and organization of the peasantry. So long as the workers’ dictatorship and its classical paradigm the soviet state system is in a critical situation, quite clearly it must assume the character of a proletarian military dictatorship”

Nikolai Bukharin, The Politics and Economics of the Transition Period, p. 142.

He also argued that this and other similar forms of coercion of the peasantry and working class would be needed for the entirety of the transition from capitalism to communism:

“in so far as the peasant is a worker, an opponent of capitalism, and not an exploiter, coercion represents his unity and labour organization, his education and involvement in the building of communism. Finally, with respect to the proletariat itself, coercion is a method of organization, established by the working class itself, i.e. a method of compulsory, accelerated self-organization. From a wider point of view, i.e. on a longer historical perspective, proletarian coercion in all its forms, from executions to labour service, is, however paradoxical this may sound, a method of creating communist mankind from the human material of the capitalist epoch.” ibid, p. 165

While coercion against counter-revolutionaries and reactionary classes is needed throughout the entire period of transition from socialism to communism, it is clear that Bukharin saw coercion and even militarization of the society as a necessity to deal with “non-proletarian elements” (including the peasantry) as well as “half-conscious elements within the proletariat itself.” In short he saw coercion and militarization of society as the means of dealing with contradictions among the people under socialism.

All of this stands in sharp contrast to Mao’s views, expressed in On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, that “all attempts to use administrative orders or coercive measures to settle ideological questions or questions of right and wrong are not only ineffective but harmful. We cannot abolish religion by administrative order or force people not to believe in it. We cannot compel people to give up idealism, any more than we can force them to embrace Marxism. The only way to settle questions of an ideological nature or controversial issues among the people is by the democratic method, the method of discussion, criticism, persuasion and education, and not by the method of coercion or repression.” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_58.htm ↩︎
Lenin, The Trade Unions, The Present Situation And Trotsky’s Mistakes, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm ↩︎
ibid↩︎
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/jan/25.htm ↩︎
Actually, insofar as the PCP repeatedly asserted that Gonzalo was the personal guarantor of the victory of the revolution and would carry them all the way to communism, the PCP actually took this form of idealism even further than did Trotsky.↩︎
Lenin, The Trade Unions, The Present Situation And Trotsky’s Mistakes↩︎