As the world is rapidly heading into a major economic crisis and prolonged depression—with significant inflation already gripping many oppressed countries and forecast for the near future in the imperialist powers as well—there is overall an increasingly favorable international objective situation for revolutionary developments. These contradictions within the U.S. are developing in a similar fashion, with growing popular outrage at the government, major disruptions of basic supply-chains, skyrocketing inflation, and a revitalized strike movement the likes of which has not been seen in this country in decades. However, in order to seize the time and take advantage of these increasingly favorable objective conditions, communists must get organized, deepen our ties with the masses, and solidify our theoretical understanding of MLM.
An essential part of this is learning from the contemporary revolutionary movements around the world, in particular the revolutions in India and the Philippines. For over fifty years these movements have held high the red flag even in the face of global setbacks and furious attacks from reactionary forces. They have navigated the twists and turns of the revolution, overcome countless obstacles and setbacks, and provided hope and inspiration to the people of the world. The five plus decades of experience that these two parties each have is a treasure trove for communists everywhere. Despite the differences between these countries and the U.S. these is much to be learned from the experiences of CPI (Maoist) and the Communist Party of the Philippines.
Many U.S. Maoists have some familiarity with these movements, but it is necessary to get beyond a cursory understanding. A thorough-going study of the lessons of the Commune was central to the Bolsheviks' victory in the October Revolution. Lenin’s study of the German Party during his life not only taught him valuable lessons about communist organizing, but also allowed him to see the rise of revisionism within its ranks and to lead the struggle against Kautsky and others in the International Communist Movement (ICM). Mao’s study of the Soviet Union helped him chart a course forward for socialist construction in China which learned from the success of the USSR’s experience while avoiding repeating many of the same mistakes. It is not enough for Maoists in the U.S. to support other parties through declarations, statements, and demonstrations. We must also make a serious study of these movements, as they are a detachment of the world proletarian revolution, just as we are.
Recently both the CPP and CPI (Maoist) lost important members of their Central Committees. In the Philippines 74 year old Jorge Madlos (alias Ka Oris), National Operational Commander of the New People’s Army (NPA), was killed on October 29 by the fascist U.S.-Duterte regime on his way to receive medical treatment. In India, 63 year old Politburo member Akkiraju Haragopal (alias Comrade RK) died from kidney disease on October 14. The death of these two comrades is a blow, not only to the movements in their respective countries, but to the ICM as a whole. We pay tribute to them and the leadership they provided. They are a true inspiration to the people of the world.
Ka Oris originally got involved in the revolutionary movement as a student in the 1970s and was a steadfast communist revolutionary for the past five decades. When martial law was declared by the Marcos dictatorship in 1972 he dropped out of college and joined the struggle full-time. He was arrested in this period and released in 1976, after which he went to the countryside and joined the NPA. During this period he played a crucial role in the growth of the NPA, especially in the southern island of Mindanao, through linking the national revolutionary movement to the anti-feudal struggles of the peasant masses.
This was a difficult period for the International Communist Movement, as the counter-revolutionary coup in China in 1976 left many disoriented and confused. Many parties and individuals turned revisionist and capitulationist, rallying behind Deng Xiaoping and even giving up the struggle entirely. In these dark times, the CPP served as a living example and reminder that it was possible to continue on the path of revolution and communism even in the face of grave setbacks internationally. Their struggle provided hope and clarity to communists and the masses of people around the world.
In 1987, Ka Oris was again captured and imprisoned after peace talks with the Corazon Aquino government collapsed after the government carried out a brutal massacre of peasants at Mendiola. It was during this imprisonment that he suffered a severe bladder infection for which the state refused to provide treatment. This resulted in bladder issues which would last the rest of his life, but which never deterred him from the difficult life of a revolutionary.
While he was imprisoned, the Party pursued an incorrect line of premature regularization of the NPA. This was a strategy of trying to move from guerrilla warfare to more regular mobile and positional warfare prematurely. This included a shift from smaller squads of guerrillas as the basic unit of the NPA to larger scale companies (units dozens to hundreds of soldiers) and battalions (units of ~1,000 soldiers).
Such a shift is needed at a certain point in the development of a protracted people’s war, and even before that point it is necessary to temporarily concentrate forces for military operations against reactionary forces. However, this shift to regularization is different from the temporary concentration of forces. It has to happen at an appropriate time. The revolutionary movement must be sufficiently developed, the agrarian revolution must have advanced and spread to a sufficient degree that the mass base can support regularized troops, and the forces of the people’s army must be strong enough relative to the enemy to fight and win regular mobile and even some positional battles.
If forces are regularized prematurely, it leads to all kinds of challenges, not the least of which is that the reactionary forces are able to eliminate large sections of the people’s army because of their numerical and technological superiority. Regularized troops cannot carry out guerrilla warfare in the same way that squads can, and cannot easily evade the enemy forces after fighting battles. Premature regularization prevents a people’s army from carrying out the fundamental principle of concentrating forces for fighting the enemy and dividing forces to deal with the enemy. It allows the enemy to more easily track the movements of the people’s army and concentrate their forces to destroy companies and battalions.
These mistakes were made in the Philippines in the 1980s in part based an incorrect line that the Philippines was no longer a semi-feudal society but had developed into an industrial capitalist country. This “left” opportunist line placed too much emphasis on the urban struggle and advocated premature urban insurrections. Some of those in the Party pushing this line argued that the NPA was merely a military adjunct to these urban insurrections. They pushed for the neglect or even abandonment of key aspects of rural mass work, arguing that the urban struggle should be the decisive front of the Party’s work. In this sense they repeated many mistakes of the disastrous line advocated by Li Lisan during the Chinese revolution.1
After the party suffered setbacks due to this line, there was initially not a clear summation of the mistakes that lead to the setbacks. Instead, the theory was promoted that the Party was losing ground and mass support due to “deep-penetration agents” (DPAs). While the state always works to infiltrate revolutionary movement and sow discord, the anti-DPA campaign that the CPP launched in this period was disastrous both because it targeted many good comrades and led to a climate of paranoia, but also because it was part of a larger inability to self-critically appraise the mistaken line of premature regularization and urban insurrections that the Party had been following.
After his release from prison in 1992, Ka Oris played a leading role in the Second Great Rectification Movement to address both the mistakes of the anti-DPA campaign and the line of premature regularization and urban insurrections. In the CPP’s statement on his death, they noted:
Ka Oris served as one of the strongest pillars of the Second Great Rectification Movement which the Central Committee declared in 1992 to reaffirm the Party’s basic Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideological principles and its strategic line of people’s democratic revolution through protracted people’s war. He stood firm against the revisionists and “Left” opportunists among whom were some former cadres of the Mindanao Commission who eventually turned traitors to the revolutionary cause. He would always say that it was not the enemy which almost decimated the NPA in Mindanao in the 1980s and early 1990s, but the NPA’s own weaknesses and bad decisions.2
After this rectification movement, he continued to play a key role in promoting MLM and expanding the mass movement. In guiding the protracted people’s war in Mindanao, he helped to recover the areas lost due to the mistakes of the previous period and worked to seed the revolutionary movement across the country through sending support from more advanced guerrilla zones to those at a lower stage of development.
In 2016 the CPP held their Second Party Congress, and Ka Oris was a key organizer of this historic event. His tireless work was central in bringing together about one hundred cadre from all the regional Party committees. The Party had not held a Congress since 1968, but was able to hold the most recent one in the face of an increasing onslaught from reactionary forces. This helped to solidify the Party’s basic line and further develop their program. All of this was crucial to their outstanding resilience and determination in the face of Duterte’s imposition of martial law in Mindanao, his so-called “war on drugs” (which is really both a war on the people and to solidify his dominance of the national drug trade), and continuously growing military support from the U.S. for the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP).
Ka Oris' death is a tragedy, a loss that is felt not only in the Philippines, but all around the world. But the fascist Duterte regime is deceiving itself if it thinks that by killing Ka Oris it will defeat the Filipino Revolution. As Black Panther Fred Hampton once said, “You can kill a revolutionary but you can never kill the revolution.” Ka Oris devoted the last five decades of his life to serving the people. In this period he made countless contributions to the revolution in the Philippines and to the ICM. While he has been taken from the people by the fascists' bullets, he trained numerous revolutionary successors and helped to advance the Philippines Revolution. His memory and legacy is an inspiration to the people of the world.
Comrade Akkiraju Haragopal, 63 year old Indian revolutionary, a member of the Central Committee and the Politburo of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), passed away on October 14th, 2021 due to acute kidney issues. Haragopal dedicated his life for the revolutionary movement and made immense contributions to the Party and the revolution in a number different capacities over four decades. In his underground work he was known by numerous names, such as Ramakrishna, RK, Saket, Madhu, Srinivas. To the outside world, he is most commonly known as Ramakrishna or Comrade RK.
Comrade RK was born in 1958 in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh. His father was a school teacher and mother was a homemaker. Along with his father, Com. RK worked as a school teacher for some time after completion of his studies in political science. While working as a teacher, he was influenced by revolutionary politics in the areas surrounding his village. At this time—in 1978 after the lifting of Emergency—the Andhra Pradesh Radical Students Union (RSU) was carrying out its “Go to Villages” campaign in which students who supported the Naxalite movement went down to the countryside to join in the people’s struggles and support the revolutionary movement.3 Convinced by the political program of the erstwhile party, CPI (Marxist-Leninist) (People’s War) of which the RSU was an affiliated organization, he got actively involved in their revolutionary campaigns in the countryside. Influenced by this movement, he came to a firm conclusion that protracted people’s war was the only way to liberate the oppressed masses in semi-feudal and semi-colonial India.
In 1980, Comrade RK decided to join the Party and became a primary member. From that point on, he stood firm in his revolutionary convictions through all the twists and turns of the Indian Revolution. When he joined the Party there was a massive movement ongoing in the Guntur district from which he hailed. In the cities the masses were occupying unused land to make it into house sites, and land-starved peasants in the countryside were likewise occupying forest and barren lands and bringing it under cultivation. The 1980 Guntur district Party conference was held in the midst of this movement and Comrade RK was an active participant in this important conference. This conference helped the district Party committee solidify their organizing and sum up their experiences.
This conference helped the Party leadership to review the impact of the “Go to Villages” campaign on students and their understanding of the social structure and the mode of production in the countryside. The campaign was a major driving force for hundreds of students to join the movement and realize the revolutionary potential of the masses. For Comrade RK, the campaign helped him to understand and realize the power and prestige attached to his class and “upper” (Brahmin) caste positions in the society and to consciously repudiate them to identify with Dalit and Adivasi masses. He played a very important role in building the anti-caste movement in Guntur district, where caste oppression was brutal. Overall, the conference provided guidance for understanding the relationship between class and caste contradictions, and how the revolutionary movement could effectively address them. Inspired by the conference and subsequent events, he became a full-time Party member in 1982.
In 1986, he was elected as the Secretary of the Guntur District Committee. Due to his steadfast revolutionary leadership and dedication to the masses, he was promoted to the Andhra Pradesh State Committee in 1992. As a State Committee member, he guided the Party in South Telangana until 1996. His role in building a strong revolutionary movement in South Telangana was remarkable; he worked among the peasants, Dalits, and Adivasis (indigenous people), and played an important role in the Party’s efforts to provide proletarian leadership to their struggles. With these experiences, in 2000 he was elected as the Secretary of the Andhra Pradesh State Committee. Shortly thereafter, in the 9th Congress of the Party, he became a Central Committee member in 2001. Even though there was severe repression in the erstwhile united Andhra Pradesh, he led the Party and expanded it to new areas. During this junction he played a key role in building and strengthening a number of mass organizations among students, women, dalits, and adivasis. In the period of severe repression, the development of strong mass organization was crucial as the Party was facing intensified attacks from the forces of reaction and needed support from the legal mass movement.
Comrade RK also led the Party delegation in the so-called peace talks with the Government of Andhra Pradesh in 2004. During the “peace talks,” Comrade RK and his team put forward people’s demands for discussion. His team clearly declared that they didn’t have any illusions about the talks, however they decided to participate in the process to expose the nature of the state to the general public, civil rights activists, and academic intellectuals. His eloquent and clear spoken statements undermined state propaganda that framed the Naxalites as unruly terrorists. Thus, his work helped the Party to not only expose the insincerity of the government in the talks (and their related unwillingness to address the fundamental economic and political issues affecting the masses of people), but also showed a wide section of the public that the Party was working hard to address the fundamental issues facing the masses. This was crucial to shifting public sentiment to increasingly support the revolutionary movement in Andhra Pradesh.
When the state refused to discuss and implement any of the people’s demands, RK and his team called off the talks and moved on with their political program. However, after the breakdown of the talks, the state targeted Comrade RK in new ways and initiated special army operations to kill him. In this situation, the Party transferred him to the Andhra-Orissa Border (AOB) zone in 2004, and he led its state committee. As a Central Committee member, he guided the AOB committee until 2014. In 2018, the Party took him into its highest committee, the Politburo. Even as a Politburo member, he worked with the rank and file cadre and mass leaders on the ground to develop defensive tactics under brutal oppression in the AOB. While facing encirclement from hundreds of thousands of enemy forces, Comrade RK continued to advance the revolutionary struggle, even in the face of challenges and temporary setbacks that the Party has faced in recent years. While doing this great revolutionary work, Comrade RK unfortunately developed a problem with his kidneys. The Party provided dialysis treatment, but he eventually went into kidney failure, followed by failures in his other organs. He died among his beloved comrades.
Comrade RK married his partner, Shirisha, in the revolutionary movement. They had one son, Munna. Comrade Munna also joined the Party and was killed in a police encounter near Ramaguda in 2018.
Comrade RK’s selfless contribution and his dedication towards building and expanding of the revolutionary movement will never be forgotten. It is a shining example for the people of India and communists everywhere.
The International Communist Movement has lost two great leading comrades. For decades they have served the people. With their passing, we commemorate their immortal contributions to the revolutions in their respective countries. We also call on comrades here in the United States to learn from these comrades and deepen their understanding of the ongoing revolutionary movements in India and the Philippines. For the last fifty years these revolutions have been a beacon of hope for the people of the world. As we enter into an unprecedented capitalist crisis, the openings for revolutionary advances are growing by the day. But we must solidify our organizations, deepen our theoretical understanding of MLM, and overcome our various shortcomings and weaknesses. The lives of these two comrades provide us with decades of experience from which to learn.
In 1930, Li Lisan, with support from Moscow, became the chairman of the Organization Bureau of the Communist Party of China. His line involved reorganizing and regularizing the Red Army to prepare for capturing the industrial cities in China. This was based on an assessment that the center of gravity in the Chinese Revolution had to be the cities and that the time was ripe to capture them because of the global economic depression, in spite of defeats suffered during similar attempts in 1927. This was in part based on an impetuosity on the part of Li and others; Li claimed that by following the strategy of protracted people’s war in China, “our hair will be white before the revolution is victorious.”
In The Great Road, a book by Agnes Smedley about Zhu De’s life (largely based on interviews of him), Zhu notes “Even if we succeeded in capturing a few industrial cities, we doubted our ability to hold them even with the help of the industrial workers. The counter-revolutionary forces were numerically superior and infinitely better armed than we; and we were more convinced than in the past that the imperialist powers which supported the Kuomintang dictatorship would actively intervene against us to protect that dictatorship[…] Apart from Mao and myself, there was very little opposition to the Li Li-san line. We had no choice but to accept it[…] The strategy was pure adventurism—an effort to leap over great difficulties and problems that had to be faced and solved before China could be emancipated.” Attacks against major industrial cities proved disastrous, and the Red Army was forced to retreat after suffering heavy losses. The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh, Agnes Smedley. ↩︎
http://bannedthought.net/Philippines/CPP/Sison/2021/Sison-SpecificCharacteristicsOfPeoplesWarInPhilippines-2021-06-27.pdf ↩︎
In his article on the 2010 killing of CPI (Maoist) Spokesperson Azad, N Venugopal describes this movement: “The village campaigns brought about a sea change in the outlook of participating students as well as spread the revolutionary message at the grassroots. The campaign became a prelude to the Karimnagar-Adilabad peasant struggles and the RSU in turn gained strength from it. The “Go to Villages” campaigns directly led to the formation of the Radical Youth League in May 1978 and Raithucooli Sangham in 1980.”
Azad himself was involved in this movement at the time. https://mronline.org/2010/07/29/killing-azad-silencing-the-voice-of-revolution/ ↩︎