People’s War and Revolution – Communist Party of Brazil – Red Fraction
Return to Brazil
People’s War and Revolution 1
by
The Communist Party of Brazil (Red Fraction)
May 2014
“Revolution is war. Of all the wars known in history it is the only lawful, legitimate, just, and truly great war. This war is not waged in the selfish interests of a handful of rulers and exploiters, like any and all other wars, but in the interests of the masses of the people against the tyrants, in the interests of the toiling and exploited millions upon millions against despotism and violence.”
Lenin, Revolutionary Days, “The Plan of the St. Petersburg Battle” – 1905
“Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat to defeat, expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie. These are the only tactics possible for a revolutionary class, tactics that follow logically from, and are dictated by, the whole objective development of capitalist militarism. Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie will it be able, without betraying its world-historic mission, to consign all armaments to the scrap-heap. And the proletariat will undoubtedly do this, but only when this condition has been fulfilled, certainly not before.”
Lenin, The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution
“Experience in the class struggle in the era of imperialism teaches us that it is only by the power of the gun that the working class and the laboring masses can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed”
Chairman Mao, Problems of War and Strategy
“The heart of the strategy of the proletariat and its Party is the development of the People’s War through guerrilla warfare.”
Manoel Lisboa, “Letter in Two Points to Revolutionary Communists”
1. Introduction
The matter of revolutionary violence being the way to make proletarian revolution was already set out by Marxism in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, when Marx and Engels, for the first time in history, presented their doctrine in a systematized form. Since its foundations, Marxism affirmed both that the proletariat must organize itself in a Party different to all others that had previously appeared in history, and that revolutionary violence is the method of making revolution. In the Communist Manifesto, it is unambiguously emphasized that Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims, that they proclaim openly that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. 2 The first attempt of the proletariat to assault the heavens, the Paris Commune of 1871, despite all its heroism, failed after 70 days. Marx drew the lessons to be taken and the historical significance of this event, demonstrating that the absence of the proletarian revolutionary party and its absolute leadership, as well as the incomprehension of the revolutionary dictatorship needed in all spheres over the bourgeoisie and the other exploiting classes which had been overthrown, were the principal causes of its defeat. He also drew yet more lessons from this experience, such as the new type of state which he had glimpsed therein, different from and opposed to that which was utilized by the exploiting classes throughout history, as well as that the bloodbath carried out by the unified forces of reaction to vanquish the Commune demonstrated to the proletariat, which up until then had only known the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary force, the role of this class in the counter-revolution. 3
With the transition of capitalism to its highest and ultimate stage, that of monopoly capital, and when predatory war imposed itself as an inherent policy of imperialism and opportunism manifested itself openly among Marxists, Lenin understood the split in the socialist ranks as inevitable and necessary to defend Marxism from its falsification. 4 Lenin elevated Marxism to a new stage of its development, from which resulted the Party of the New Type as the vanguard detachment of the proletariat, the fighting organization of revolutionary leaders, and the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general and of the proletarian dictatorship in particular. 5 Leninism declared that communists must forge themselves in the struggle against opportunism and in revolutionary violence. “Revolution is a war”, 6 he summarized and thus lead the first victorious proletarian revolution, the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917. Lenin set out from the fact that the central question of every revolution is power, and that the heart of State power is its armed force and that we cannot defeat it except by opposing it with another armed force. 7
Thus, in the final analysis, the task of the proletariat consists in organizing itself into a Party and into an armed force led by this Party.
After the Second Great Imperialist War, the proletarian revolution underwent a qualitative leap, which was expressed in the world socialist camp, with the victory of the Great Chinese Revolution. This great success brought the balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to equilibrium. This created the situation in which a more desperate and ferocious imperialism, commanded by the Yankees, unleashed its strategy of the “Cold War”, with nuclear blackmail and where the class contradictions and class struggle in the socialist countries (USSR and People’s China) entered into a new stage, in which a new revisionism was brought to the surface. The death of Comrade Stalin presented itself as an opportunity for the Khrushchev clique to usurp the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet State, by preaching capitulation and betrayal with their “two wholes” and “three peacefuls” 8 in an effort to revise Marxism-Leninism, restore capitalism and destroy the International Communist Movement with the revisionist myth of peaceful transition.
Chairman Mao at the head of the CCP, already in the midst of a fierce struggle within his own Party against the rightists who wanted to return China to the capitalist road, rose up against modern revisionism in defense of Marxism-Leninism, reaffirming that revolutionary armed struggle is the only path to revolution for the proletariat, the only way for the oppressed nations and oppressed peoples to win national-liberation, carry out the New-Democratic revolution and continue on to socialism without interruption. He remarked that:
“Experience in the class struggle in the era of imperialism teaches us that it is only by the power of the gun that the working class and the laboring masses can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed.” 9
This was the experience of the Chinese Revolution over 25 years of armed struggle, which confirmed the historical experience of all revolutions and with which Marxism-Leninism made great progress in the formation of the Communist Party with the handling of internal contradictions through the method of two-line struggle and the complete formulation of proletarian military theory, People’s War. As Lenin had already done, Chairman Mao drew from Clausewitz that war is the continuation of politics by other means, 10 affirming that Communists are advocates of the “theory of the omnipotence of revolutionary war” and that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” 11
After the death of Chairman Mao, the Rightist faction of the Party, which had been politically crushed all along the era of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, found the opportunity to raise up its repulsive head once again and the clique of Deng Xiaoping engineered a coup d’état and usurped the power of the proletariat. Certain Communist Parties and organizations all over the world condemned Deng’s revisionism and denounced the capitalist restoration and continued to defend Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and the path of revolutionary armed struggle. But it was not until 1980, when the People’s War in Peru began, that the most consistent defense of Marxism-Leninism was undertaken, grasping that the contributions of Chairman Mao now constituted a new stage in its development, Maoism, 12 and the correctness of revolutionary violence was fully expressed through the understanding that People’s War is the military theory of the proletariat and an issue of utmost importance for the ideology and science of the proletarian revolution.
However, with the entire period of the triumph of revisionism and the standstill which the proletarian struggle suffered, in the midst of numerous difficulties imposed by the counter-revolutionary offensive unleashed at the end of the 1980s, including from the revisionist parties which had accumulated since the advent of Khrushchevite revisionism, the revisionism of Hoxha, Deng, and armed revisionism in Latin America, it was not long before new expressions of revisionism manifested within the very fires of Maoism itself. The most striking examples are the positions of the ROL (Right Opportunist Line, capitulationist and revisionist), former members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Peru who present themselves today as MOVADEF, 13 Bob Avakian of the RCP-USA’s ‘New Synthesis’, and the “Socialism of the 21st Century” of Prachanda/Bhattarai.
The common denominator of all these revisionist currents, among others, has been the attempt to distort and deny the fact that People’s War is a fundamental and inseparable part of Maoism. In the 1990s, there was already a fierce struggle in the RIM (Revolutionary Internationalist Movement) against these tendencies led principally by the Chairman of the RCP-USA, a struggle in which the PCP relentlessly affirmed that Maoism constituted a third and higher stage of development of Marxism and the universality of People’s War, understood as a fundamental part of Maoism, being the military theory of the proletariat applied to the particularities of each country and their revolutions. And it is because of his failure to impose his revisionist theories in the RIM that Avakian spent years plotting for its liquidation.
Therefore, without combatting and defeating all manifestations of revisionism and its influence, it is not possible to respond to the demands imposed by the general crisis of imperialism and the ongoing popular rebellions. Without combatting revisionism and opportunism, the revolution cannot advance. It is crucial to deepen all debates to raise the comprehension of Maoism, which necessarily implicates raising the understanding of People’s War as the highest form of application of revolutionary violence, and its universal validity. In this regard, given the crucial significance of this issue for the world proletarian revolution, and based on the efforts and challenges which we are facing in order to launch People’s War in our country, we want to expound upon our position.
2. Imperialism and Revolution
The Great Lenin, in his outstanding work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and in the debates on the colonial and national question, synthesized that the distinctive feature of the imperialist epoch is that the world is divided in two: on one side, backwards and oppressed countries which constitute the majority, and on the other side, a handful of developed countries which oppress the former. 14 This is a circumstance which has been nothing but confirmed, a circumstance which is aggravating after more than a century of its correctness. Despite the heavy blows dealt to this moribund system of exploitation by the revolutionary proletariat and the liberation movement, which pushed it up to the edge of its grave with the new-democratic and socialist revolutions, it has regained the field. And it was by the deleterious action of revisionism which led to capitalist restoration that imperialism passed to the counter-offensive, dominating the whole world, but in a much more advanced degree of decomposition, whose actions are becoming criminal than ever before.
Chairman Mao, rejecting the attempts of Khrushchevite revisionism to peddle capitulationism, reaffirmed that imperialism is a paper tiger and demasked the storm of resurrection of Kautsky’s rotten theory of ‘ultra-imperialism’, demonstrating that in the epoch of imperialism, “three worlds are taking shape”. 15 In other words, the imperialist camps remain in contradiction with one another, passing through collusion and struggle, in which the struggles overtake collusion because of the very nature of capital itself, and that inevitably, at certain periods of its general crisis, the struggle for the redivision and repartitioning of the world and for hegemony becomes more acute. Thus the existence of a “First World” is formed, the “world” of superpower(s); a Second World, that of imperialist powers (powers of the second order) and a Third World, composed of backwards nations oppressed by imperialism, and at the time there existed also the people’s democracies and socialist countries (independent countries, but still less developed) – currently nonexistent – (since then, the Third World is composed of nations oppressed by imperialism, in great majority semi-colonial semi-feudal countries).
Deng Xiaoping’s revisionist babble of the “Three Worlds Theory”, 16 which he tried to attribute to Chairman Mao, has absolutely nothing in common with the Marxist-Leninist analysis of the Great Helmsman. And this is key to clarifying why exactly the Deng clique resorted to trickery to justify their revisionist treason and participation in the game of imperialism, claiming that the First World is that of the superpowers and imperialist powers, the Second World that of the socialist countries, and the Third World that of the backwards and ‘developing’ countries.
The evaluation made by Chairman Mao at the time of and immediately after the capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union which converted it into a social-imperialist superpower while China remained a socialist country, was to specify the fundamental contradictions in the world, identifying the principal contradiction among them. Thus, he measured the correlation of forces between imperialism and proletarian revolution, to counter Khrushchevite revisionism, to defend Marxism-Leninism and the revolution. It was to synthesize the correct General Political Line for the International Communist Movement, in order to establish the forms and methods for making revolution in all types of country, and in a general manner for the world proletarian revolution. And it must be stressed that this was done in the midst of a fierce struggle against the revisionists entrenched in the Central Committee of the CCP and in the leadership posts of the State and the People’s Liberation Army. Hence, in the famous Chinese Letter of June 1963, the “Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement”, among other definitions correctly presented the fundamental contradictions of the epoch as being four, namely: the contradiction between [oppressed] nations and imperialism, the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the contradiction between the monopoles and between the imperialist countries and the contradiction between socialism and imperialism (given that a socialist camp existed in that epoch). However, in this document of great importance for Marxism, for proletarian revolution and for the struggle against Khrushchevite revisionism, it was not specified which of these four was the principal contradiction, a question which Chairman Mao more than anyone defended as being the contradiction between oppressed nations and imperialism. This significant gap and various others that permeate the Chinese Letter and the Nine Commentaries on the reply of the Khrushchevite revisionists was due to these being the positions of the Central Committee of the CCP in the middle of a fierce internal struggle, which would blow up with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
After the defeat of the GPCR, Chairman Gonzalo developed the staunch defense of the Leninist conception of imperialism and Chairman Mao’s understanding that the world, with the worsening of the general crisis of imperialism, had entered the era where imperialism will be swept off the face of the Earth by proletarian revolution, highlighting that he foretold of its occurrence within the “next 50 to 100 years”. 17 Chairman Gonzalo synthesized the entirety of the experience of the Chinese Revolution led by Chairman Mao and with its application to the reality of the revolution in Peru through the People’s War, he understood and established Maoism in an inseparable manner as the third, newest and highest stage of Marxism. He astutely analyzed the events of the 1980s and the early 1990s and characterized them with a great deal of precision, demonstrating that a combined counter-revolutionary offensive of revisionism and imperialism had commenced, 18 a general counter-revolutionary offensive in which Gorbachev, Reagan-Bush and Pope John-Paul II were united, and whose events from the war of aggression against Iraq under the flag of the UN onwards marked the ascendancy of the USA to its status as the sole hegemonic superpower existing in the world today. He revealed clearly that a new moment was emerging in the conflict between counter-revolution and revolution, a situation resulting from capitalist restoration having taken place in all former people’s democracies and socialist countries, a time where Communists would encounter their harshest trials and brazen renegades under the black banner of revisionism.
On the topic of this period, it is necessary to point out that the temporary defeat of the revolutionary proletariat with the capitalist restoration carried out by the revisionists in the USSR (1956), in China after the defeat of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1976) and other people’s democratic countries (from 1960) led the world situation to a new phase of capitalist domination under the hegemony of the Yankee imperialist superpower in collusion and struggle against the social-imperialism of the USSR, to then not long into the 1990s, as the sole hegemonic imperialist superpower, restore the single capitalist world market through wars of aggression and plunder. Such a general offensive was intended to crush the proletarian revolution, targeting Marxism and proclaiming its obsolescence. After having dealt a heavy blow to the Peruvian Revolution, and without having attained full worldwide domination, it launched its strategy of “the War against Terror”, targeting “Islamic fundamentalism” as a pretext to crush national liberation struggles. However, the proletariat and the oppressed nations have not for a single day ceased to give battle and resist, attaining new summits with the pursual of the People’s Wars in Peru, the Philippines, Turkey, India and Nepal as well as the armed struggles of national resistance waged by the nations occupied by imperialism. In these new conditions of imperialist domination and movements of resistance waged by the proletariat, the masses and the oppressed nations, imperialism has reached an unprecedented degree of decomposition. One manifestation of this is the sheer proportion, severity and duration of the social-economic-financial and political crises of today, along with the increase in wars of aggression, expressing not only the intensification of the contradiction between nations and imperialism, but also of the contradiction among imperialist powers, and the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, as exemplified in the successive assaults of popular revolts that have traversed the world, which cry out for revolutionary leadership.
Indeed, as Chairman Gonzalo pointed out and established, the current development of the general crisis of imperialism has definitively entered the historical phase where it will be completely swept away by proletarian revolution, a situation predicted by the armed struggles for national liberation and principally the People’s Wars which have never let the glorious flag of the world proletarian revolution fall, in a new second wave of the world revolution which must be driven forward, and this requires the development of proletarian leadership, of militarized Maoist Communist Parties, and finally the development of the Maoist International Communist Movement. Thus, in these concrete conditions which represent the development and decomposition of imperialism today, having deepened what Lenin had already outlined in his time, 19 the whole of society has been militarized to an extreme degree, and in all nations only one path can lead to liberation for the proletariat, the masses and the oppressed nations – the path of revolutionary armed struggle with a proletarian approach and leadership: People’s War. Today more than ever, as Lenin expressed so well, we cannot truly struggle against imperialism and reaction without also simultaneously struggling against all forms of opportunism, rejecting reformism and all kinds of parliamentary cretinism, drawing lines of demarcation with and demasking the partisans of opportunism before the masses to help them understand and distinguish friends from enemies and release their powerful energy in the revolutionary armed struggle.
3. Marxism and People’s War
People’s War, like in the experience of the Chinese Revolution upon which Chairman Mao has formulated it, is the war of the masses directed in an absolute manner by the Communist Party, and this has been confirmed by diverse attempts to lead it to victory in the final decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the current century. It is the war which, in basing itself upon the principle that the masses make history, starts from the concrete reality in which the masses are relatively disorganized in general, but in the long run will become organized, going from a powerful disorganized force to a powerful organized force, through well-defined stages of the development of armed struggle, applying relative superiority of forces on the strategic level, and absolute superiority in tactics. Accumulation of forces, going from weak to strong, strictly obeying the correlation of forces in the course of the three stages of Strategic Defensive, Strategic Equilibrium and Strategic Offensive. The People’s War begins without a rearguard in the immediate goal of creating one in the form of a revolutionary Support Base, which establishes New Power, the revolutionary political power of the proletariat and popular masses, relying on this to support itself, expanding it bit by bit until the conquest of power throughout the entire country, and in general terms, from country to country, throughout the world.
It is unleashed as a Guerrilla War, through small groups with the immediate goal of organizing the Guerrilla Army, beginning with armed propaganda actions and soon guerrilla warfare, creating Guerrilla Zones and Operational Zones with the objective of encircling vast areas, mobilizing the masses, politicizing them, organizing them and arming them bit-by-bit, in order to create the Revolutionary Support Bases and the New Power. The Guerrilla Zones are tactical objectives and solely the Guerrilla War and the Support Bases are strategic factors that run through the entire course of the People’s War, from their establishment and initiation at the beginning all the way up to the Conquest of Power throughout the entire country.
“The Support Bases are the strategic bases which the guerrilla forces rely on to fulfill their strategic tasks and to achieve the objective of preserving and increasing their forces as well as annihilating and throwing back the enemy. Without such strategic Bases there would be nothing to base ourselves on to carry out any one of our strategic tasks and to reach the war’s objective.” (…) “Chairman Gonzalo has established a system of Support Bases surrounded by guerrilla zones, operational zones and points of action taking into account the political and social conditions, the tradition of struggle, the geographical characteristics and the development of the Party, the Army and of the masses.” 20
Unified People’s War applies to the countryside and the city, in the case of the oppressed countries the countryside is taken as the principal front and the city as a necessary complement to prepare the future general insurrection. And in the case of the capitalist and imperialist countries, it is applied to large, medium and small cities for the development of revolutionary power and the preparation of the general insurrection. In accordance with the accumulation and development of the People’s Army and the United Front, the People’s War will, while maintaining guerrilla warfare, simultaneously and in a combined manner apply other forms, principally mobile warfare and, particularly in the final phase – the strategic offensive – positional warfare in addition to the others, combining with insurrectional uprisings in the cities (such as general insurrection), in the last bastion(s) of the enemy, the principal urban center(s). The course of the whole People’s War obeys the general laws of war, of revolutionary war, and specifically of revolutionary war in the particular country. On its laws, it should be noted that by its very nature, the People’s War requires, all along the course of its development, a categorical application of the dynamic of strategic centralization and tactical decentralization. The incorporation of the masses into the People’s War also obeys these laws.
We must also emphasize when we take his concept in a general way that, as Chairman Mao stated and explained – in war, it is men, and not weapons, which are the decisive factor, because of the dynamic role they play. As for the People’s Army, it is not a burden on the masses, because not only does it fight in their favor, but it also mobilizes, politicizes and organizes them and participates in production. In addition, taking the People’s War in its entirety, it relies on its own efforts; the main form of arming the People’s Army is through combat, in recuperating weapons, ammunition and other means of war from defeated enemy troops, in addition to secondarily producing and buying them. Furthermore, war imposes a debt which must be paid in blood in accordance with the basic principle of “preserving our forces and destroying the enemy”, 21 that is to say, in order to annihilate the enemy and preserve the revolutionary forces as much as possible, we must enter into combat by paying a debt in blood. To always fight “with reason, advantage, and not to over-extend oneself”, being guided by “when the enemy advances, we retreat, when the enemy camps, we harass; when the enemy tires, we attack; when the enemy retreats, we pursue.”, to “attract the enemy to penetrate deep within our lines in order to surround him in parts and annihilate his forces one-by-one”, “not to fight without preparation, not to fight battles we are not certain we can win”, to apply the principle of “in tactics, ten against one, in strategy, one against ten.” 22
That is to say, in strategy we apply relative superiority, and in tactical operations, absolute superiority. In a general manner it implies, taking the war as a whole, that we scatter forces to wage guerrilla warfare and concentrate them to wage mobile warfare. And, as much as in one case as the other, we apply the same principle of “concentrating a force several times bigger than the enemy to destroy their forces one by one”, 23 but always in accordance with the strategic stage in which it finds itself. In the initial stage of strategic defensive of the People’s War, the dispersion of our forces in the revolutionary political work with the masses and principally guerrilla actions forces the enemy to divide their forces to attack us in different points, which creates the conditions to concentrate our forces and attack those of the isolated enemy in each point, to annihilate them and to sweep them away, generating a political vacuum, the condition on which we establish Support Bases and New Power. In the stages of strategic equilibrium and offensive, we concentrate our forces to attack and annihilate those of the enemy one by one, principally with mobile warfare supported with guerrillas. However, we always fight with the objective and in the direction of annihilating the enemy’s active forces, to destroy and sweep away the old social relations of production, and to establish, step by step, New Power. Based on this understanding, the problem and challenge always presents itself as knowing how to apply these principles and ideas, in each concrete situation, in actions guided firmly by plans. In general, we can say that the key problem is to always maintain the initiative and to be able to concentrate our forces for each engagement, in the tactical and strategic plans. Finally, the enemy “fights in his way and we fight in our way” 20. The problem of war in its entirety is to “be good at learning”. 24
The Prolonged Character of People’s War
The prolonged character of People’s War is determined by the contradictions that the capitalist mode of production engenders, in passing to its higher stage, that of monopolies, of imperialism, which dominates society in each country and in the whole world. The laws which govern the development of these contradictions and the balance of forces between the counter-revolution and the revolution impose in general a prolonged period for the solution of these contradictions in favor of revolution. Of course, starting from a specific level of advancement of the World Proletarian Revolution in which, taking the world as a whole, the revolution had majorly triumphed, there would always be the possibility that in the rest, it could be victorious in a more or less short period of time.
In the case of the backwards and oppressed countries, these contradictions and their development are derived from four general characteristics which determine the prolonged character of the People’s War:
- Their semi-colonial condition, in which bureaucratic capitalism develops, with underlying semi-feudal relations;
- The enemy forces are large, strong, and have developed great experience in the struggle against subversion and revolution;
- The revolutionary forces are initially weak, taking count of the low level of development and backwardness, not yet having a Guerrilla Army; 4) the People’s War depends on the established minimum existence of the Communist Party so that it can exercise its absolute direction. As Chairman Gonzalo formulated well, in establishing the People’s War, the first and fourth characteristics permit the People’s Guerrilla Army to grow and to vanquish the enemy, and the second and third conditions mean that the People’s Guerrilla Army cannot grow rapidly, demanding time to develop and incorporate masses into the war, changing step by step the relation of forces in favor of revolution.
In the case of developed capitalist countries (generally imperialist), only the first characteristic differs from the case of the backward countries, since it is the very distinctive factor of the nature of the two types of countries which exist in monopoly capitalism, imperialism, in other words the distinctive nature of the vast majority of backward and oppressed countries from that of the handful of dominant powers and superpowers, the advanced capitalist countries. In these, by their nature with the advancement of their decomposition which direct the relations of production as well as all the other relations which derive from it in the superstructure, crises are engendered in ever shorter cycles, sharpening the internal contractions, the disorders and the repression of the struggles of the masses, these tend to be radicalized more and more. That is to say, the increasing degree of exploitation, along with the reduction of rights, the tendency towards fascism and reactionary violence against democratic freedoms of assembly, repression of strikes and demonstrations, characterized by the accentuation of injustices against the proletariat and the masses of people, an increase in racism, chauvinism and all kinds of reactionary prejudices, launch great waves of struggle that permit and favor the development of the revolutionary struggle in general and of the revolutionary Party of the proletariat and its Army.
According to the correlation of unfavorable and favorable factors for revolution determined by scientific analysis of reality, its objective contradictions, of the level of consciousness and organization of the masses, the People’s War develops by well-defined strategic stages – the strategic defensive, equilibrium, and offensive. The stage of the strategic defensive starts from the recognition of the relation of forces between revolution and counter-revolution, where just like in the first case, the proletariat, the poor peasantry and the other popular masses are generally still in a very weak degree of organization, the fundamental instruments of the revolution are still weak and at a low level of development, embryonic, or even nonexistent. In these conditions there is the danger of the destruction of revolutionary forces, requiring conduct and direction to avoid strategic attack, flee from it and act offensively at the tactical level. Utilizing the concept of absolute superiority in each battle, the enemy can be annihilated bit-by-bit. The stage of strategic defensive, in general, tends to be the longest, insofar as it corresponds to the inexperience of mass organizations and the Communist Party itself in war, which will learn and develop through making war. The two other stages will have their duration depend strongly on the greater or lesser aggravation of systematic crises on the national and international level and determined by the greater or lesser capacity of the leadership of the War to stick to the correct line applied by the ensemble of its contingent of forces. The strong point of the enemy is to be located fundamentally in the large size of its armed forces, the quantity and destructive potential of its war materiel, and its weak point is that it fights to defend and maintain the exploitation and oppression of the immense majority of the population.
Our strong point is that we fight for a just cause, to destroy the rotten machine which oppresses the masses, in destroying and overthrowing the old social relations bit by bit, we proceed with the increasing incorporation of the masses. We make just war upon unjust war. In the final analysis, we make war in order to conquer eternal peace. Our weakness resides in the immediate situation of the dispersion and disorganization of the masses. In this sense, guerrilla warfare is the principal and dominant form in its beginning stages and mobile warfare is its auxiliary form, initiated by armed propaganda, applying acts of sabotage, selective annihilation and assaults. With the greater development of the stage of strategic defensive, mobile warfare takes importance and is key to further developing the war, maintaining guerrilla warfare as auxiliary and in permanent combination.
At the stage of strategic equilibrium, which will be established as a function of the new situation in which the enemy has lost terrain and power and fights to reconquer them by destroying the power that the revolution has conquered. For its part, the revolution must defend the power already conquered while preparing the counter-offensive. The stage of strategic equilibrium in development presents the problems of initiating the preparation of the passage to the stage of the strategic offensive, by strengthening and expanding the work in the large urban centers. At the stage of strategic equilibrium, the People’s War will develop new forms of warfare by principally applying mobile warfare and utilizing positional warfare under certain conditions and guerrilla warfare in an auxiliary and combined manner.
The third and final stage, that of the strategic offensive, culminates with the encirclement of the city by the countryside and unfolds in the conditions where the enemy passes to the strategic defensive and we to the strategic offensive. It will conclude with encirclement by the countryside and general insurrection in the cities. All along the process of the People’s War, along which the different phases of the revolutions will have taken place, the anti-imperialist war of liberation will become more accentuated and will determine the result of the offensive.
In all its stages and in its entirety, the People’s War will develop with advances and retreats, zigzags, ascents and descents, condition which demand everything of the Communist Party and of its leaders correct political management of contradictions, of the program of the revolution, corresponding to the stage of its development.
“Chairman Gonzalo thus teaches us that the People’s War is protracted, long and ruthless but victorious and tells us that the length of its duration will be extended or shortened within its protracted character to the extent that we fight within the proletarian military line, since Rightism is the principal danger that can cause serious setbacks to the war.”25
Without the Leadership of the Communist Party, There Cannot Be People’s War
Without a Communist Party which embodies proletarian ideology, the People’s War cannot truly be unleashed, much less be pursued until final victory. Historical experience demonstrates unquestionably that the proletariat cannot succeed unless it organizes itself into a Communist Party in order to direct in an absolute manner the entire revolutionary process, the conquest of power, its class dictatorship, socialism, every path, which assures the transition of the society to Communism. The experience of the Chinese Revolution, under the leadership of Chairman Mao, in which the theory of the People’s War was conceived and formulated, went through more than two decades of revolutionary armed struggle all the way until the victory of the Revolution in 1949, as well as the stage of the Revolution and socialist transformation, as was the case with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the role of the absolute leadership of the revolutionary process by the Communist Party was clearly demonstrated. In addition, it was confirmed that the determining factor of victory (or defeat), is whether the Party’s ideological-political line is correct or not.
In all the historical experience of the struggles of the proletariat and the popular masses, of the proletarian revolution, its victory or defeat, the decisive factor is the Communist Party and the question of whether a correct or erroneous ideological-political line prevails within it.
Finally, all throughout this definition lies the scientific and Marxist character of the People’s War as an integral and harmonious proletarian military doctrine and theory. In People’s War the fundamental pillars of Marxism are inherent, such as class struggle as the motive force of history, the dictatorship of the proletariat (in its different forms according to the stages of the revolution), revolutionary violence (of which People’s War is the highest form of its materialization), the revolutionary party of the proletariat as the absolute leader and scientific socialism (communism) as the goal, in addition to the necessary struggle against revisionism and all opportunism which is inseparable from the struggle against imperialism and all reaction.
4. The Path of Encircling the City from the Countryside
“Marxism has taught the proletariat to lead the peasantry”
Lenin
What historical experience has equally demonstrated, is that the path that the People’s War has taken in the oppressed countries is that of encirclement of the city from the countryside. But this is not the essence of the People’s War as some mechanically interpret it. As written above, the essence of the People’s War is to be a war of the masses lead by the Communist Party, in which the question of power is a central objective, pursued from the outset and conquered bit-by-bit up until its conquest all throughout the country. This means that its objective, always supported by the mobilized, politicized, organized masses who are armed little-by-little, through the armed struggle, destroys the foundations upon which the old State rests, generating a vacuum in which Popular New Power supported by the armed masses can be established. In other words, power conquered and defended by the armed force directed by the Communist Party. As a scientific conception, People’s War starts from knowledge of the laws which govern the socio-economic development of reality, of the country and of the society in which it is applied.
Thus, in the case of the oppressed countries, the backwards countries where imperialism subjugates them principally with semi-colonial domination, a bureaucratic capitalism has been generated on the rotten feudal or semi-feudal base, maintaining the old relations of these backwards societies through the evolution of its forms which often appears like real development and progress. The maintenance of this rotten base and of semi-feudal relations is fundamentally supported by the non-abolition of land ownership relations centered on monopoly and the concentration in the hands of a few large landowners (grandes latifundiários), veritable landlords, to the detriment of the immense majority of poor peasants who are either landless or have very little land. In addition to a certain number of layers of middle and rich peasants. And of course, such economic bases and social relations are also projected throughout the superstructure of society as its determination and cultural, juridical, political and ideological forms necessary for its justification and reproduction. Thus, there persists a great backwardness in the countryside subjected to exploitation by the city, in which the power structures of the local dominant classes subject to and associated to imperialism are concentrated. Hence the predominance of the latifundio and the existence of numerous peasants make the countryside an important economic and political reserve for the big bourgeoisie and the domination of imperialism.
In these conditions, where the Communist Party needs a strategy which breaks the condition of the countryside of being the reserve of the bourgeoisie and installs the worker-peasant alliance, it is necessary to organize the peasants in the struggle for the conquest of land and the destruction of the latifundios, through peasant war. Further, the peasant war is what permits the proletariat of these countries to organize their armed force and to construct their hegemony. This whole situation makes the terrain, from a military point of view, tactically favorable for the revolution and unfavorable for the old State. But so that the revolutionary movement will not be isolated to the countryside, the People’s War must also be waged in the city, but as a complement and in preparation for the future general insurrection, culminating with the conquest of power throughout the entire country. This is why the route that the People’s War takes in these countries must be the path of the countryside to the city or the strategy of encirclement of the city by the countryside. That is to say, this way is nothing other than the specification of the People’s War for the countries which are backwards and oppressed by imperialism.
“Chairman Mao established the road of surrounding the cities from the countryside, with its heart in the Support Bases. He took into account that the powerful imperialists and their reactionary Chinese allies were entrenched in the principal cities, and if the revolution refused to capitulate and wanted to persevere in the struggle it had to convert the backwards rural zones into advanced and solid Support Bases, into great military, political, economic and cultural bulwarks of the revolution to fight against the fierce enemy that was assaulting the rural zones using the cities, and to carry the revolution forward step by step to a complete victory through a protracted war.” (…) “Based on this Maoist thesis, Chairman Gonzalo has established the carrying forward of aunified People’s War where the countryside is the principal theater of armed actions: Since in our country we have an immense majority of peasant masses, that is where we must build the Support Bases….Furthermore, Chairman Gonzalo specifies that in the cities armed actions should be carried forward as a complement, since international experience, as well as our own, demonstrates that this is feasible.” 26
But, in focusing on the problem of the revolution in the backwards and oppressed countries today, it is necessary to be alert towards a new phenomenon. It is the problem of the form which the development of the decomposition of imperialism and its inherent reactionary upsurge takes, which Lenin characterized as a “tendency for reaction and violence”, 27 applied by every mean and every method. Be it by the economy of bureaucratic capitalism (semi-colonial and semi-feudal) that imperialism generates in these countries, or be it by counter-insurgency wars, favoring the evacuation of the countryside and generating the phenomenon of huge megalopolises, creating thus explosive pockets of masses, principally semi-proletarians. Such a reality of latent explosions posed the matter of insurrectional uprising as an ever-present situation. We have seen this and called to pay attention to it, to develop tactics in the popular struggles in these urban centers, combatting the trafficking of revisionism and all kinds of opportunism with the revolt of these masses, and in order to serve the strategy of encircling the city from the countryside, and to ward off the danger of the deviation of the negation of this strategy in the tempting illusion that the city has become the principal theater and that the path to revolution has become that of insurrection. This is just a new trap to abandon the strategy of the People’s War that in these countries must follow the path of encirclement of the city from the countryside, since economic and social relations, both in their entirety and in the countryside in particular, remain unchanged in their essence, although often hidden by the new forms in which they cover themselves.
One of the most recent forms of expansion of bureaucratic capitalism into the countryside today, which is expressed as the latest frontiers of penetration and hoarding national and principally transnational monopolies of land and entire territories in backward and oppressed countries, is the overwhelming exploitation of mining companies, homogeneous forest crops and biofuels (sugar cane, soybeans, palms, etc.). Rather than signifying a leap in the degradation of the natural environment by imperialism, these actions are characterized as an aggravation, in more ways than one, of the agrarian-peasant question and an aggravation of the class struggle in the countryside, also affecting the peasants drastically, more than ever the national minorities (indigenous peoples) and other traditional populations. Without neglecting the problem of defending the “environment” from the predatory action of imperialist corporations, but approaching it correctly from the standpoint of the class interests of the proletariat and the masses of the people, we must first of all see the opportunity to intensify the mobilization of the masses of the countryside in defense of the land on which they work, attracting more support from the urban masses, expanding and enhancing both the worker-peasant alliance and the united front as a whole, upholding People’s War as the only way to sweep the monopolies out of the countryside. It is also of use to us to call on the peasant masses who have been displaced to the already chaotic huge urban centers to return to the countryside, to the land, and strengthen the revolution, the People’s War. And we must not allow the masses to be confused, leading them into the traps and minefields of the “ecological struggle” behind which imperialism carries out manipulation.
“It is fundamental to support the validity of the road of surrounding the cities from the countryside and its heart, the Support Bases, because with only wandering guerrillas of insurrection the People’s Guerrilla Army would not have the Support Bases as a rearguard that sustains it, nor would the new Power be built. We are totally against focoism.”28
5. Insurrection and the Universality of People’s War
Marx, in defining revolution as a civil war and in the perspective of his time, presented it in the form, at least initially, of insurrection. He tried to examine it with all the importance that it held for the proletariat to be able to take power, studying the laws which govern it. Marx made clear that one does not play with insurrection, and that to unleash it for revolutionary purposes required the existence of certain objective conditions, namely, a revolutionary situation, and additionally, in order to succeed it would depend on the development of subjective factors, especially of consciousness manifested and materialized as an organized class force, having its vanguard firmly at the helm with a well-defined program and objectives. Marx affirmed that one does play with insurrection because, besides the existence of the necessary objective and subjective conditions, it demanded rigorous preparation and when it erupts, it must progress, as he said, even if only a few inches per day, in order to ensure its complete triumph. Insurrection demands permanent initiative, to always be on the offensive. To be on the defensive means death, its total defeat. “Audacity, audacity, always audacity”, 29 he said, quoting Danton as the greatest teacher of revolutionary tactics up until then. But Marx and Engels also saw the limits that it presented with the modifications of city planning and the new means of war, about which Marx preached the need to combine the insurrectional uprising of the proletariat with other forms of war. In a letter to Engels, commenting on the possibilities of revolution in Germany, he argued that everything would depend on combining the workers’ uprising with a “second edition of the peasant war”30
Engels had also already warned about the problem, as he expounded on at length in the 1895 edition of Marx’s “Class Struggles in France”, 24 years after the advent of the Paris Commune. After a set of considerations based on the examination of different insurrectionary experiences in mid-19th century Europe, taking in to account the most differing political, military and economic factors, from the changes in city-planning, to the evolution of more powerful armaments, rail transport which allowed the movement of large quantities of troops rapidly, etc., he concluded that:
“For here, too, the conditions of the struggle had essentially changed. Rebellion in the old style, the street fight with barricades, which up to 1848 gave everywhere the final decision, was to a considerable extent obsolete.” (…) “Does that mean that in the future street-fighting will play no further role? Certainly not. It only means that the conditions since 1848 have become far more unfavorable for civilian combatants, far more favorable for the military. A future street fight can therefore only be victorious when this unfavorable situation is compensated by other factors. Accordingly, it will occur more seldom in the beginning of a great revolution than in its further progress, and will have to be undertaken with greater forces. These, however, may then well prefer, as in the whole Great French Revolution on September 4 and October 31, 1870, in Paris, the open attack to the passive tactics of barricades.” 31
In none of the historical experiences, and in none of the very few opportunities in the capitalist countries where the pure insurrectionary road was tried, was it successful. The October Revolution that deepened the February Revolution took three years of stormy civil war to maintain and consolidate itself. The formula that Trotskyism drones on about, the “general political strike”, over the course of centuries has never passed beyond mere reformist phraseology. Other approaches of exclusively insurrection as a method of revolution in the imperialist countries have also proven to be little more than a pretext to adhere to parliamentary cretinism, without any concrete demonstration of its successful realization. The advent of imperialism, at the time where the objective conditions for the proletarian revolution had matured in theory and in practice, also imposed important changes with the militarization of all social life and all countries. In the words of Lenin, imperialism is war, and after the triumph of the October Revolution and of the civil war to crush the counter revolution, was that the proletarian revolution could only be possible through different types of war, precisely because imperialism maintains itself with wars of all types ever seen. Lenin dealt with this question many times, especially after the triumph of the October Revolution: he drew lessons from it, pointing out that – unlike the common understanding of Marxists about how proletarian revolution would take place – as the experience of Russia showed, it would be increasingly diverse.
In his article in response to the attacks of the Menshevik, Sukhanov, in which he accused the Bolsheviks of violating Marxism, claiming that the construction of socialism required a certain degree of development of the productive forces, a certain degree of “culture” which Russia had not yet reached, Lenin affirmed that such gems from Sukhanov expressed all his mechanistic and dogmatic understanding of Marxism as a pretext to hide his rightist hostility towards Soviet Power. He affirmed that in no book of Marxism was it written that the proletariat should not take advantage of any possibility that might arise to take power, precisely for the purpose of creating these conditions of “culture”. 32 And, if Sukhanov’s astonishment at the feat of the Bolsheviks was already great, people of his kind should prepare themselves to bear witness to the other “heresies” that the proletarian revolution would present as it moved towards the East. And, of course, Lenin was not solely referring to the main course to the revolution had taken, continuing, as had happened in Russia, to break the weak links in the chain of imperialist domination, such as the backwards countries of the East – as well as all of Asia, Africa and Latin America – in addition to the general question of the dialectical character of Marxism in concretely addressing concrete reality, but he also raised awareness about the path of the seizure of power and the way in which revolutionary violence materialized more and more each time. For more than any other Marxist of his time, Lenin knew that a breakthrough of the revolution in the backwards countries, that is to say, breaking the condition of being reserves for the imperialist reactionaries as these represented, would inevitably lead to further aggravation of class contradictions and of the class struggle in the imperialist countries, and thus, the revolution in them or in some of them, would be part of this developing process.
Insurrection in general, as it has occurred throughout history in the peoples’ struggles, remains a form of revolutionary war, and more than ever requires both the objective conditions for its occurrence and the subjective factors for its triumph, as well as a more elaborate and rigorous level of preparation. Insurrection cannot be presented and taken purely and simply as the path of proletarian revolution in (imperialist) capitalist countries, it is not solely an integral part of People’s War, principally as the culmination of the takeover of the last bastions of reaction already surrounded by the People’s Armed Forces from the countryside, as it is presented in partial uprisings in its own course. This was demonstrated in the case of revolutions in the dominated countries. Chairman Mao’s formulation of People’s War was due principally to concrete experience in the Chinese Revolution which he led directly for more than half a century, and he started from the study and high level of comprehension which he developed from all the military experience of the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, throughout the history of humanity in general and of the struggles in the epoch of capitalism and imperialism in particular. And it was Chairman Gonzalo who, in the practice of the Peruvian Revolution and through the People’s War, synthesized all the teachings and experience of the Chinese Revolution, demonstrating that these constituted a new stage of development of Marxism, since its contributions penetrated the three constituent parts of Marxism (Marxist political economy, scientific socialism and Marxist philosophy) and as an essential part of this, People’s War as a fully-formed proletarian military theory. 33
It is not for any other reason that the attempts of today, as in the past, to misrepresent or negate People’s War, base themselves on the revisionist theorizations of Avakian and Prachanda. Avakian asserts that those who want to “reduce Maoism to the theory of People’s War” are dogmatists, 34 accusing that they only consider partisans of People’s War as the path of the proletarian revolution as being Maoists. It is Avakian who attempts to reduce People’s War to a mere military line strictly applied to the backwards and oppressed countries. He does not understand it as the fully-developed proletarian conception of how the proletariat conquers and exerts power, leads the class struggle under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist construction and the transition to Communism. Prachanda had already attempted with the farce of the “theory of fusion” to revise People’s War to justify his capitulation, presenting himself as an innovator, in the Nepalese process which he led, under the direction of Prachanda Path, combining parliamentary struggle, revolutionary war and “people’s revolt” and presenting this as the formula for the path of socialism of the 21st century. The formulations of the former completely lack a practical material basis, and those of the latter succumbed, having been expressed in practice as capitulation and betrayal of the People’s War, the Nepalese people, and the World Proletarian Revolution.
In the final analysis, the basis of the universality of People’s War lies in the very foundations of its formulation and substantiation in the experience of the Chinese Revolution and the processes which followed it. However, this was only made evident by the synthesis which was realized by Chairman Gonzalo, in his application of it to the Peruvian Revolution, establishing that Marxism-Leninism had become Maoism, having been elevated to a new, third and higher stage. The general foundations and principals formulated by Chairman Mao who, just as Lenin established “Everything is illusory except power”, 35 emphasized that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” and that “the party commands the gun”36 and the opposite must never be permitted. The proletarian scientific conception of People’s War derives from this, the basis of its universality is found here since it is the expression and the method of the Power conquered and supported by the proletariat through an armed force led by the party which embodies the scientific ideology, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, in the different types of revolution that are integral parts of the world proletarian revolution, the New Democratic Revolution, the Socialist Revolution and the successive Proletarian Cultural Revolutions.
On the basis of this, Maoism also points out that, contrary to the conceptions of other classes in history, the proletarian conception asserts that in war, people are the decisive factor, that the People’s Army is not a burden for the masses, that it not only fights, but mobilizes, politicizes and organizes the masses and takes part in production, relying unalterably and principally on its own forces. It asserts that before the war begins, everything should serve to prepare it, and once initiated, everything should serve towards its development and triumph. In addition, Chairman Gonzalo, taking the definition of Maoism as the Fundamental Instruments of the Revolution – the three magic weapons –, the Communist Party, the People’s Army, and the Revolutionary United Front, went on to say that the construction of these must be carried out concentrically. This implies that the Communist Party, as the incarnation of the scientific ideology of the proletariat applied to the concrete conditions of a particular country and its revolution, directs everything, and this is embodied in the centralization of revolutionary leadership, as the Great Leadership of the Party and the Revolution, amidst the contentions of the class struggle and the two-line struggle for the forging and strengthening of the Left and of proletarian hegemony throughout the whole process. Emerging from this also, being at the same time a result of the learning process of the proletariat in the theoretical and practical movement and as a development of its conception of the revolutionary party, within the intense conditions of class struggle imposed by the decomposing imperialist system, whose political action par excellence is predatory war and partition and repartition of the world among the major powers, the development of the Party of a New Type became necessary, namely as the Communist Party and presently the Militarized Communist Party.
He also synthesized that once the war began, the Military Line became the center of the General Political Line of the Party and that the principal form of organization is the People’s Guerrilla Army. With the People’s Guerrilla Army and through it, under the absolute direction of the Communist Party, which mobilizes, politicizes, organizes and arms the masses, the three levels of its structure are built in the course of the war itself, that is to say, “a main force, a local force, and a base force”37 (such as militias and reserves)
Moreover, that this whole conception and universal and scientific foundations, the People’s War, governed by its laws and being the embodiment of revolutionary violence by the proletariat for the conquest and defense of its Power, must be based, from beginning to end on a clear general strategy in three axes: political strategy, that is the conquest of Power by the proletariat in the corresponding step of the revolution; the military strategy that is the protracted war itself following the path of encirclement of the city from the countryside in the case of the New Democratic revolutions (in the backwards and oppressed countries) and of protracted war applied to small, medium and large cities in the case of the socialist revolutions of the (imperialist) capitalist countries; and the strategy of construction, aimed at the concentric construction of the Fundamental Instruments of the Revolution. In the case of the backwards and oppressed countries there are necessarily three, the Communist Party, the People’s Army and the Revolutionary United Front, based on the worker-peasant alliance, which expresses the joint dictatorship of revolutionary classes, which becomes the Front/New State, whose core is the People’s Army and the leadership of the Communist Party.
In the case of the (imperialist) capitalist countries, the construction of the Three Fundamental Instruments of the revolution obeys the particularities of the reality in which it finds itself, specifying their application in the same concentric way, the Communist Party, the Proletarian or People’s Army and the Revolutionary United Front, which will develop as the embryo of the New Socialist State in construction, an expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The United Front is necessary to unite the popular masses that make up these societies, such as sectors or parts of the petit-bourgeoisie, the so-called liberal professionals, small-business owners and intellectuals in general. Furthermore, given that in these countries, due to the form of decomposition that imperialism takes, an unavoidable increase of the constant flow of immigrant workers from the oppressed countries is produced, and being that part of these contingents are semi-proletarians, intellectuals and small proprietors of services, the revolutionary proletariat must ally itself with them to bring the socialist revolution to victory. We must take the error committed by the Communist Party of Germany as early as the 1930s seriously, in that by not understanding the need to unite with the petit-bourgeoisie through the revolutionary united front, it let itself be dragged through Nazism. In addition, in many developed capitalist countries there continues to be a certain amount of small landowning peasants who must also be drawn into the proletarian camp.
The necessity of these strategies obligatorily implies, for the realization of the People’s War, well-established plans based on permanent investigation through mass-line revolutionary action guided by the ideology of Maoism in its fusion with the concrete revolution, the Program and the General Political Line which specifies and expresses it. The systematic monitoring of this in the course of its execution is also necessary, so that adjustments and rectifications can be carried out in due time. Political, military and construction plans must be combined and in unity. From its initiation, development, and culmination, the People’s War must follow Plans with immediate goals at each stage and substage which serve for the realization of the final objective.
The universal character of the People’s War is ultimately constituted and presented, in the face of imperialism’s tendency to war, not only as a predatory policy necessary for its existence, but as world imperialist war for the repartition of the world between monopolies and imperialist countries and for hegemony, as World People’s War for the thorough and complete sweeping-away of this whole system of exploitation and oppression and the establishment of socialism, for the triumph of the World Proletarian Revolution and for luminous Communism. This was set out very clearly by the CCP within the complex situation of the 1960s, when the social-imperialist USSR in collusion and struggle with Yankee imperialism threatened People’s China. On the occasion of celebrating the 20th anniversary (1965) of the victory over Nazi-fascism and the expulsion of the Japanese invaders, with the manifesto “Long Live the Victory of People’s War” they stated that “taking the world as a whole, the countries of the Third World are the countryside and the imperialist countries are the cities”. 38
Concerning Chairman Gonzalo’s contributions to the application of the universal truths of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to the concrete conditions of Peruvian reality and its fusion with the Peruvian Revolution through the People’s War, he synthesized the universality of Maoism as a new, third, and higher stage, while at the same time conforming the guiding thought of the Peruvian Revolution, Gonzalo Thought, as principal for the Peruvian Revolution. For the set of formulations that result from such a synthesis, People’s War is the furnace, crucible and factory where ideology, politics and organization are merged into the proletarian transformation of the destruction of the old and the establishment of the new, all the way until the whole world is united in luminous Communism.
The Problem of PPW in the Imperialist Countries and Its Particularities
The universal validity of People’s War, as already focused on above, in order to understand it, it is necessary to free oneself from a mechanistic and airtight evaluation of the Chinese experience. It is necessary to go deeper in synthesizing the experience of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as a whole and particularly with relation to the causes of its decline, avoiding the superficiality of incidental factors in order to see the extent and potentiality of People’s War as a conception of Proletarian Power in different stages and phases of the revolution and the transition to Communism. In addition to what has already been argued theoretically here, the practical elements of its realization in the (imperialist) capitalist countries present difficulties similar to those confronted in the backwards and oppressed countries, being in one and the other conditioned by the movement of the revolutionary situation, which develops unequally around the world and especially dependent on the ideologic-political, organic and military preparation of the Communist Party in each case.
All the revisionist and reformist trash of “peaceful accumulation” and “democratic spaces” via parliamentary cretinism is the bureaucratic path of the comprador-bureaucrat grand bourgeoisie and latifundiarios who oppose the democratic path of the proletariat in the backwards and oppressed countries. It is no more than the protracted struggle for the strengthening of bourgeois institutionally, and it is the same distinctive cackle in both the backwards and oppressed countries as in the (imperialist) capitalist countries. The difference is that bourgeois democracy in (imperialist) capitalist countries has incorporated “civilizing” conquests at the subjective level of the whole society, which in backwards oppressed countries is nothing more than its phantasmagorical simulacrum. But even where bourgeois democracy has exercised all its potentialities (imperialist countries) it has also aged and can no longer be carried out, since with the advent of imperialism, democracy and national sovereignty have succumbed to the interests of monopoly capital and the adoption of elements of fascism in their legal frameworks is increasingly seen.
As a result, the great challenge for the proletarian revolution is to persist in the mass-line, to mobilize, politicize and organize the masses for every action, from smallest o largest, from the most elementary to the most complex, from lowest to highest, progressively arming them. The experience of the peoples’ resistance and the struggle of the proletariat has numerous demonstrations of possibilities for the organization of revolution. In this sense, it is of utmost importance to study such experiences, and in the specific case for People’s War in the (imperialist) capitalist countries, to take into account the armed struggles in the various countries of Europe throughout the 20th century, as well as in the present moment, in which the Palestinian people in Gaza, fight and give resistance, imposing heavy casualties on imperialism and its Zionist black boot. And with this we must consider that the masses do it without scientific ideology and direction, and what’s more, non-proletarian, petit-bourgeois or bourgeois ideology. Nothing is impossible in the world for those who dare to scale the heights. The slogan raised by Chairman Mao during the GPCR in the face of the possibility of combined aggression from the social-imperialism of the USSR and Yankee imperialism: “Dig tunnels deep, store grain and resources everywhere…”39 serves both to show with what spirit the revolution must fight, and what efforts and solutions the struggle demands on the technical level, particularly in the cities.
6. The Problem of Initiation and of Support Bases in the Current Conditions
These, among others, are two problems to be highlighted and which deserve study, examination, investigation and reflection, as two concrete practical problems whose difficulties in their execution can undoubtedly serve not only to hold back the revolutionary process, where People’s War has not yet been initiated or where it began and is facing difficulties in developing, as well as having the possibility to lead to deviations and the evasion of People’s War itself and with this the abandonment of Maoism. These are important challenges that the masses will able to solve if a true Communist Party increasingly wields Maoism in a more correct and incarnate way. The means of warfare are not superior to people, nor is unjust war superior to just war. The means of warfare and unjust war can only defeat the revolution temporarily, the proletariat cannot be definitively defeated.
The problem of initiation implies two factors: that of overcoming the inertia of moving from mainly unarmed forms of struggle to mainly armed forms of struggle, and the other, of focusing on learning to make war above-all in war. Of course, this is not a negation of the necessity of preparation, on the contrary one must take this problem seriously, but not to the point of absolutizing it, thus transforming it into an insurmountable obstacle and negation of its attainment. However, in addition we must pay attention to a practical and no less important factor, as Chairman Gonzalo warns, namely, to correctly choose the conjunctural moment to proceed to the Initiation. The most sensible and favorable moment is characterized by a certain level of crisis, instability and weakness of the government, within a certain revolutionary situation that develops unevenly across the world.
The problem of Support Bases in the current conditions, where there is mobility and accessibility practically to all corners of the Earth, and of the existence and employment of the most modern means of communication and of war which is highly destructive to land, water and air, only challenges and forces the People’s War to rely even more on the masses and on their soldiers to hide themselves more and more amongst them. Given this condition, the technical challenges are only a matter of time for the transformative creativity of the masses under the leadership and wielded by the scientific investigation which only the revolutionary party of the proletariat, the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, principally Maoist, Communist Party can provide.
Already in his time, when he was formulating the theory of People’s War, Chairman Mao defined the conditions for the establishment of Support Bases, as being at base, the combination of the existence of the organization of the Communist Party mobilizing, politicizing, organizing and arming the masses in a given territory and of an organized armed force having already a certain level of combat experience, which annihilated and swept away the enemy forces of that territory. The first condition demands ideologic-political organizational work, propaganda and education led by the communist over the course of a relatively long time, in the case of establishing the first bases. And the second is born of guerrilla actions which, in a planned manner, in a zone or several zones of a specific territory, will control it up until encircling it, constructing step-by-step new guerrilla units, which, gaining more and more combat experience and experience of different types of combat, build the necessary structures, from the militia, (elementarily preparing the masses politically and militarily in a continuous effort to be reserves for the local force and the principal force, and to carry out different support missions, without fundamentally withdrawing them from their social life in that territory).
“Chairman Mao expounded three reasons for the creation of Support Bases: To have armed forces, to defeat the enemy and to mobilize the masses. These were specified in our People’s War in 1982, by applying the Plan of Deployment of the guerrilla war in the part ‘Strike the enemy’, aiming at destroying the old feudal relations of production. Police posts were assaulted, selective annihilation of feudal landlord power was applied, and the police forces abandoned the countryside and were regrouped in the provincial capitals. The authorities of theold Power massively resigned which created a power vacuum, while tens of thousands were mobilized. It is in these conditions that the Support Bases emerged and were specified in the clandestine People’s Committees. Therefore, it is wrong to take the Chinese experience dogmatically since if the conditions were given and principles were in effect, we would have had sufficient reason to build the Support Bases. To agree upon this implied a struggle against Rightism which argued that we had not defeated large enemy forces, when the problem was that the enemy forces had abandoned the countryside as a consequence of the rout of their political and military plans. Chairman Gonzalo has established a system of Support Bases surrounded by guerrilla zones, operational zones and points of action taking into account the political and social conditions, the tradition of struggle, the geographical characteristics and the development of the Party, the Army and of the masses.” 40
In addition to what Chairman Mao has studied and defined, different types of Support Bases, both relative to the different levels of work, influence and political organization of the masses by the Party, and the geographical layout and types, whose territories cover different types of settlements, from small villages to small towns, as well as different types of terrain, such as mountain regions, plains and jungles. Objectively, in the case of (imperialist) capitalist countries, whose setting and principal theater of war are the cities, new challenges arise, forcing the construction work to progress to a dynamic which is extremely attuned to the development of economic, social and principally political crises of the given country. The problem of the relative instability of Support Bases since their first experiences have presented themselves as a fact, and mean that the Support Bases will also differentiate themselves by distinct levels according to relative instability or stability.
7. The Fundamental Question of People’s War is Power
It is still necessary to emphasize that the crucial question of People’s War is that of Power for the proletariat and the popular masses, Power, conquered and sustained by an armed force led by the Communist Party in the different types of revolution underway in the world today, namely the New-Democratic Revolution which continues uninterrupted onto socialism which encompasses the vast majority of countries, in other words the Third World today and the fact that it is home to the vast majority of the world’s popular masses; the socialist revolution in the (imperialist) developed capitalist countries and the successive proletarian cultural revolutions to build and sustain socialism, to ward off the danger of capitalist restoration and to transition the whole world towards luminous Communism. It is not possible to conceive nor speak of People’s War without talking about the question of Power, power for the proletariat and the popular masses being the immediate objective pursued and of conquering it bit-by-bit, the revolutionary Support Bases in the countryside are the first part, the expression of New Power, through the Popular Committees, open or closed, led by the Assemblies of People’s Power and the Front/New State of the People’s Republic in construction, with the Party as its leadership and the People’s Army as the backbone, developing in a long struggle, through twists and turns and leaps, until the conquest of Power throughout the entire country, preparing the general insurrection in the cities, the strongholds of the enemy, culminating in the encirclement of the cities by the countryside and general insurrection, in the case of the countries oppressed by imperialism. In the case of developed capitalist countries, imperialist countries, power is also an immediate objective pursued since the beginning of the armed struggle as People’s War, power to be conquered and built in the zones of organization and mobilization of the proletariat and the popular masses, through armed guerrilla units (detachments or militias) and principally in the secret forms of Proletarian Committees, the expression of New Power, a new State directed by the Party and having the People’s Army as its backbone preparing step-by-step the general insurrection for the establishment of the Socialist Republic already under construction.
Without Power as the principal objective and without its conquest throughout the entire country for the proletariat and the popular masses, there is no People’s War. Power for the proletariat in the New Democratic Revolution, in the Socialist Revolution and in the successive Proletarian Cultural Revolutions. Hence, as the fundamental question of Maoism is power for the proletariat and the People’s War as the way to conquer and defend it in transit to Communism, People’s War is, in addition to being the integral proletarian military theory and doctrine, its conception and politics of power. Power conquered and defended by the armed force led by the Communist Party. Thus, for Maoism, Power for the proletariat and People’s War are inseparable because they are parts of its very essence. Hence it must be synthesized in the slogan of People’s War until Communism!
8. Synthesis
In the epoch of imperialism, where the triumph of Proletarian Revolution has become not only inevitable but achievable, it takes the form of People’s War applied to the concrete reality of each country, of all countries without exception. This is what, strictly speaking, the science of Marxism asserts, and the historical experience of the Proletarian Revolution confirms it to us. In this sense, the World Proletarian Revolution is, generally speaking, the war of the masses led by the Communist Party, carried out by the People’s Army and supported by the Revolutionary United Front. It is the war of the proletariat for the conquest of power and its defense, in the New-Democratic Revolutions (including national-liberation wars) which continue uninterrupted onto socialism, in the Socialist Revolutions and in the successive Proletarian Cultural Revolutions, to transition to luminous Communism.
In a phrase, the World Proletarian Revolution is the Protracted People’s War, amidst and against predatory imperialist wars for the partition of the world and the plunder of the oppressed peoples and nations, through which the proletariat of the imperialist countries in armed struggle unites with the national-liberation movements and revolutionary wars of the colonial/semi-colonial semi-feudal countries, a process of uneven development, but in a single movement and in the form of waves that follow one another between advances and retreats, to the complete destruction of every imperialist system and of all reaction through the World People’s War against imperialist world war and the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat for socialist construction as a continuation of class struggle for the elimination of classes, as a necessary phase in the transition to Communism, our final goal. People’s War until Communism!
Therefore, People’s War is not only the integral and harmonious military doctrine or theory of the proletariat, it is more than this. It is the conception and politics of proletarian Power to destroy imperialism and all reaction, to construct socialism in a process of permanent revolution, of successive proletarian cultural revolutions, for the complete elimination of classes and all their vestiges, to transition the whole world to luminous Communism.
And finally, Maoism being, as Gonzalo Thought teaches us, “..the elevation of Marxism-Leninism to a new, third, and superior stage in the struggle for proletarian leadership of the democratic revolution, the development of the construction of socialism and the continuation of the revolution under the proletarian dictatorship as a proletarian cultural revolution; when imperialism deepens its decomposition and revolution has become the main tendency of history, amidst the most complex and largest wars seen to date and the implacable struggle against contemporary revisionism.” 38, and Power being the fundamental question of Maoism, power for the proletariat in New-Democratic Revolutions which continue uninterrupted onto socialism, Power for the proletariat in the Socialist Revolutions, and Power for the proletariat in the successive Proletarian Cultural Revolutions; Power for the proletariat conquered and defended through the armed force directed by the Communist Party, the People’s War is an essential and inseparable part of Maoism, third, new and higher stage in the development of Marxism at the time of the most advanced decomposition of imperialism, the time of the Proletarian Revolution, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, of Socialism and the Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the particular epoch of the most fierce class struggle in history to sweep imperialism and reaction off the face of the Earth, a single, necessary and unavoidable condition to unite the whole world in Communism.
– Communist Party of Brazil (Red Fraction) – PCB(FV), May 2014.
40 Footnotes
