by the Editorial Board
POLITICAL POWER IS WHAT IS FUNDAMENTAL IN MAOISM, we start here.
Maoism is the third and superior stage of Marxism, it is the current stage. The class struggle has produced the ideology of the international proletariat first as Marxism, then as Marxism-Leninism and today as Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. It has three component and integral parts. We list them in order: Marxist Philosophy, Marxist Political Economy, and Scientific Socialism. The ideology emerges with Marx and is subsequently developed by Lenin and Mao. We therefore conclude that 1) since it is a superior stage containing the former stages, and 2) that it is the current stage in which we are passing, it must be understood as principally Maoism which must be the commander and guide of the World Proletarian Revolution. It provokes rabid opposition because it is the great challenge to the current order of things.
This doctrine has had to fight for every step forward in the course of its life. Intensity of ruling class attacks on Marxism, today Maoism, exist in all areas of society from college campuses to the representative of the ruling class in government, and within the working class itself. This is only because of its rapid success in human history, since the emergence of Marxism in 1848 with the Manifesto of the Communist Party, it has been seized upon by the great masses in an attempt to throw off the oppressor, a fact which has intensified the attacks. Its success, and the fact that it is the only successful ideology in making revolution, means that it must be viciously attacked in all spheres.
Its success also lead to attacks arising from within and attacks cloaked in a false Maoism. Revisionism emerges from inside of the proletarian revolution and inside of proletarian revolutionary organizations. These internal attacks against Marxism present themselves as necessary revisions to the doctrine, claiming that new conditions made it necessary to remove or negate philosophy, political economy, and scientific socialism, to remove or negate the role of revolutionary violence and the masses from the process of making history. Hence forth this theory of needing to revise the fundamental principles has been called revisionism. It is nothing but a reflection of the class struggle inside the proletarian revolution. Revisionism expresses overcoming Marxism in the interests of capitalism while claiming Marxism themselves. This is the main danger because the attacks on Marxism are passed off as Marxism; it is a contradiction internal to the revolutionary movement, confusing and splitting it, preparing for it to be defeated from outside by either being conquered or by capitulation, or even coming to stand as the new capitalist class in charge, such as the case with China today.
Revolutionary violence cannot be removed from Marxism, because it is all powerful. As long as classes exist anywhere in the world there will exist one type of violence to maintain class society and another to overthrow it. Revolutionary violence is absolutely necessary to make revolution. Chairman Mao defines revolution as a violent act in which one class overthrows another, and in turn defends itself with violence. He established a law: political power grows from the barrel of a gun, and all Marxists must grasp this fact. Marx established that the workers will be the midwife to the new society and explained that they will offer no apology when the day comes to bring red terror to the capitalist class. Hence Marxism cannot be separated from the violent overthrow of the old society and the mode of production which creates it.
The question of violent class struggle is where Marxist Scientific Socialism breaks with Utopian Socialism. Marxism understands the historic process of social change through class struggle, ultimately violent class struggles bringing changes in great leaps. It was Chairman Mao who most clearly establishes the omnipotence of revolutionary violence; we are advocates of the omnipotence of revolutionary war, this is good, it is Marxist; the guns of communists create socialism; it is only through the power of the gun that the working class and laboring masses can defeat the armed enemy; everything grows from the barrel of the gun; only with guns in hand can the whole world be transformed. Chairman Gonzalo masterfully clarifies it: revolution establishes the sea of armed masses, and when all the masses are armed there will be no exploitation left on earth. We conclude that revolutionary violence will occur until the whole world enters the forever luminous communist society.
Fundamental in Maoism is political power, that is, political power for the proletariat, led by the Communist Party, conquered and defended by its armed forces through revolutionary violence. Everything without exception is done at this stage in human history with the goal of political power in mind, in furtherance of this necessary task. Maoists operate under no other motivation; power is everything—without it, all is illusory.
With this in mind we understand that, for Marxism, the class can come to power neither through coups nor elections. The class has to participate in the seizure of power; it has to smash the old state and replace it with the new. The state is the principal means of the oppressive rule of the minority of exploiters over the majority of laborers, and its main force preventing its overthrow are its armed repressive forces. The old state uses elections to legitimize its rule, to ensure that people consider it neutral and open to transformation from within. All states represent the organized and armed apparatus of class rule, the state of the exploiters must be destroyed and replaced with the New State, the state of the working people, the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is the many years of violent class struggle that forges the class to conquer power and defend it, to administer the entire society, seizing and developing the means of production.
Smashing the old state, conquering and defending political power, the establishment of the New State, etc.—all proceed through revolutionary violence carried out by the class and great masses. The masses must be mobilized and led to accomplish this; there is no other way and to remove the role of the masses is revisionism. For the oppressed to get real political power they must fight, and their fight will transform them from relatively weak against their overwhelming enemy, to relatively equal footing against their enemy, to relatively strong, and in fact unstoppable against their enemy. They can and must chew the enemy bite by bite, and not in one blow. The masses of the people carrying out such a military strategy is the greatest accomplishment of applied dialectical materialism—offered to us by Chairman Mao who establishes it as people’s war. People’s war is the military strategy of the proletariat; it is universal to all types of countries and all types of revolutions, be they new democratic or socialist. People’s war is the strategy for conquering and defending political power.
None of this is possible without the leadership of the Communist Party. Without the Communist Party nothing is possible. It is the axis of everything; it is a military formation—the “general staff” according to the great Lenin. So it is an armed Party. Following the law of contradiction, we understand that the Party is where the few converge and that it accumulates masses in leaps, in the leaps offered by people’s war. It becomes a mass Party only through this process and none other.
In all countries where the Party has been liquidated due to revisionism or dragged from its post in the revolution, it must be reconstituted. Anywhere it has never been established, it must be constituted. This must be very clear because it is the main task of all revolutionaries in such countries. Nothing comes above this task, and all work without exception must serve it. The main task, first and foremost, is the reconstitution of the Communist Party of the USA. Reconstitution is realized with the First National Congress of the Communist Party; it culminates in the initiation of people’s war. We have therefore established that: the Party must be reconstituted as the militarized Maoist party, built around the gun, a necessary step in conquering and defending power leading toward the sea of armed masses; it must therefore construct around itself the army and the united front—which develops into the New State. Or as the Communist Party of Peru correctly and masterfully delineated in 1988 (emphasis original):
“The three instruments. The problem of the construction of the instruments of the revolution presents the Party with the problem of understanding the interrelationship between the Party, the army and the united front; and to understand and correctly handle the interconnected construction of the three instruments in the midst of war or in the defense of the new State based on the power of the armed people, expressing in that way a just and correct task of leadership. Their construction is guided by the principle that a just and correct ideological line decides everything, and it is on this ideological-political basis that the organizational construction is simultaneously developed in the midst of the struggle between the proletarian line and the bourgeois line and within the storm of the class struggle, mainly in war, as the principal form of current or potential struggle.
“Regarding the Party, Chairman Mao starts from the necessity of the Communist Party, a new type of party, a party of the proletariat. Today, we would say a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Party: a party whose aim is to conquer political power and to defend it, and therefore it is inextricably bound to people’s war in order to initiate it, develop it, or wage it to defend itself. A party sustained by the masses of people, be it by way of people’s war which is a war of the masses, or by the united front which, being a front of classes, is based on the broad masses. The Party develops and changes itself according to the stages of the revolution and the periods that these stages may have. The driving of its development is the contradiction which materializes in its heart as the two-line struggle, the proletarian line and the bourgeois or in general non-proletarian line, which is in essence and mainly a struggle against revisionism. This leads to the decisive importance of ideology in the life of the party and to the development of rectification campaigns that serve a greater adjustment of all the systems of party organizations and the membership to the just and correct ideological and political lines, guaranteeing the predominance of the proletarian line and keeping the Party leadership in its iron grip. The Party serves the establishment of political power for the proletariat as the leading class of the New Democracy [in the US, socialism –Editors], and principally for the establishment, strengthening and development of the proletarian dictatorship, and through cultural revolutions the conquest of the great, final goal: Communism. Because of this, the Party must lead everything in an all-around way.”
Understanding the Party concept is critical at all times. The Party is the vessel by which the communist society is made reality. The soul of communism is internationalism, without which we would be bankrupt, reactionary, and soulless. The proletariat is an international class—strategically speaking it has no nation, and is the sole force capable of obtaining the liberation of all. Therefore, internationalism is necessary. The topic of internationalism in appearance seems to not be controversial, yet in essence there is real and phony internationalism. The great Lenin expressed that “It becomes the duty of the proletarian party all the more urgently, therefore, to clearly, precisely and definitely counterpoise internationalism in deed to internationalism in word.” He establishes internationalism not only as a principle, but as a practice. There is only one type of real internationalism and Lenin expresses it like this (emphasis original): “There is one, and only one, kind of real internationalism, and that is—working whole-heartedly for the development of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary struggle in one’s own country, and supporting (by propaganda, sympathy, and material aid) this struggle, this, and only this, line, in every country without exception.”
On the above principle Lenin transforms the imperialist war into a civil war, a revolution, a people’s war in its essence. He establishes two types of false internationalism: 1) the social chauvinism that supports its own country in an imperialist war; 2) the centrism that vacillates between social chauvinism and real internationalism. The first are real class enemies and the second are corrupted by routine—they become legalists, mired in electoralism, soft and flabby. The distinctive feature of real internationalism is its decisive break with social chauvinism and centrism. Internationalism cannot exist without first embracing the principle of revolutionary violence, the understanding in the imperialist countries that the main enemy is at home, and of course making revolution. This means confronting all forms of pacifism and “patriotism” that serve the imperialist ruling class.
Individuals are one thing, classes are another—certain politics belong to certain classes and internationalism can only be realized with proletarian politics in command. The great Lenin showed that, “The proletariat fights for the revolutionary overthrow of the imperialist bourgeoisie; the petty bourgeoisie fights for the reformist ‘improvement’ of imperialism, for adaptation to it, while submitting to it.”
As an international class with shared strategic interests, the proletarian revolution in any one country does not stand alone. It forms part of the World Proletarian Revolution. The soul of communism therefore means being part of and in service to the world proletarian revolution fighting on a specific front, making revolution in one’s own country and, today, in the US, this means to be an internationalist one must not only oppose imperialist crimes but fight for the reconstitution of the Communist Party of the USA, which is the center of revolutionary work and its absolute leadership. On this basis the communists the world over struggle against dispersal of forces, against revisionism in the International Communist Movement, and for the reconstitution of the Communist International.
A great leap in this process occurred on December 26, 2022 with the realization of the International Communist League, which represents the Left and guides all as the growing center. It is the duty of all those who seriously prosecute the socialist revolution at home to support this effort, the culmination of many years of hard two-line struggle, to cherish its unity, increasing its forces and deepening its work in propagation of its message.
Making revolution at home is applied internationalism; it is impossible without understanding the specific stage through which it must proceed. For the third world, which stands as the only center of the World Proletarian revolution, where the great masses are concentrated in overwhelming numbers, the task is to carry out the New Democratic revolution. To go against this task or attempt to replace it with other tasks falls into the lackeydom of imperialism and revisionism. Chairman Gonzalo put it like this:
“We hold that there are three fundamental contradictions in the overall situation that is unfolding. The first and main contradiction is between the oppressed nations on one side, and the imperialist superpowers and other imperialist powers on the other. Although it may be redundant, we prefer to list them this way for the sake of clarity. This contradiction is resolved through democratic revolution, through People’s War. A second fundamental contradiction is the one between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This is resolved through socialist revolutions and proletarian cultural revolutions, but also through People’s War, bearing in mind, I repeat, the type of revolution and the specific conditions of each country. A third contradiction is the inter-imperialist one, between the superpowers, between the imperialist superpowers and the imperialist powers, and among the imperialist powers themselves. These contradictions among them are resolved through aggression, and imperialist wars, and tend toward defining who will have world hegemony through a 3rd World War.”
While the most advanced revolutions will emerge in the oppressed nations, where the great masses are the most concentrated, the revolution is still historically necessary in the imperialist countries. The world revolutionary situation develops unevenly. All of the three contradictions listed by the Chairman indicate that revolution is the main trend of today, and that with the development of the three main contradictions, with the one between imperialism and oppressed nations being most important, conditions become more favorable for socialist revolution in the imperialist countries.
Socialist revolution means proletarian dictatorship, a new mode of production in which the working people own the means of production and the economy is planned in the interests of social well-being. In this society the class contradictions between the workers and the old-ruling class do not vanish but become more acute. This necessitates the continuation of the socialist revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, in repeated cultural revolutions, with which the gradual arming of the masses prevent the restoration of capitalism.
The socialist revolution is carried out under the leadership of the Communist Party and the working class—specifically the proletariat—is both the base force and the leading force. The Communist Party through the concentric construction of the three instruments mobilizes the masses to carry it out, with the Red Army carrying out the Party’s mass work, in which the masses are increasingly mobilized to carry out the Party Program.
Only in the socialist society can productivity accomplish leaps and the atrocities of the old society be defeated, blow by blow. It is the necessary precondition for the emancipation of all humanity realized in the elimination of class society, the golden and forever luminous communist society.
