Learn From Chairman Gonzalo: Commemorating His 91st Birthday

December 3, 2025 marks the 91st anniversary of the year of Chairman Gonzalo’s birth. The Chairman of the Communist Party of Peru, leader of the undefeated People’s War, and leader of the World Proletarian Revolution’s great heart stopped beating on September 11, 2021, when he was assassinated by the reactionary Peruvian state in service of US imperialism. His death was a moral, political, and military victory for the international proletariat as he gave his life as a convicted and confessed Maoist, unbroken by decades of isolation, torture, and imprisonment, transforming his cell into the most shining trench of combat. In commemoration of his life, his all-powerful thought and Great Leadership, under the just and correct slogan: LEARN FROM CHAIRMAN GONZALO, UNITE UNDER MAOISM, the Editorial Board of The Worker issues a special editorial.

We are 15 Billion Years of Matter in Motion

“They say that this part of the cosmos structured itself as Earth over 15 billion years, billions of years in order to develop Communism.” – Chairman Gonzalo, For the New Flag, 9th Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Peru, June 7, 1979.

The Campaign LEARN FROM CHAIRMAN GONZALO, UNITE UNDER MAOISM relies on understanding the process in which all necessary leaps are accomplished. It stands in confrontation of ignoramus theorists who self-identify as masters of Marxism but who in real life suffer the creative manias of the pseudo-erudite trash of the bourgeoisie. By “the process” we mean ultimately the process of Communism becoming reality.

Chairman Gonzalo’s all powerful thought continues to illuminate this process, specifically the process in which Maoism unfolds as the third and superior stage of Marxism. It is in the interests of the ruling class and its international agents—the revisionists and the Right Opportunists—to first heap infamy on his thought, then to bury it under obscurity; it is in the interest of the proletariat to abolish these sinister dreams.

It is necessary for the class-conscious newspaper of the proletariat in the United States to continue working in the glorious advance of the Maoists in this country to raise Chairman Gonzalo’s thought aloft, and to brandish it to the banishment and exclusion of the Right. We take our post in this fight wholeheartedly, with full consciousness, and admonish every step taken in recoil from the correct definition, made by our Great Leader, of the ideology of the international proletariat. This is where the struggle for Maoism begins anew, with the definition furnished by the Chairman, who understood Chairman Mao better than any other; its antecedents are 15 billion years in the making.

It was by necessity that Maoism was to be defined, and it is by chance that it was no one but Chairman Gonzalo to define it. The class struggle produces revolutionaries and it will necessarily produce leaders, and atop of them, a Great Leader, but just who that is is determined by chance, by a set of specific conditions that come together at a particular place and time. In this way, the Great Leadership of Chairman Gonzalo was generated, first acknowledged by the Communist Party of Peru in 1979, when it was reconstituted. There is no such thing as a Great Leadership that does not base itself on a body of thought. Through defining Maoism, Chairman Gonzalo led the campaign for Maoism internationally, and he represents a great summit. All working people must seek out the truth for themselves and correctly appraise the value of the Chairman’s teachings in regard to the realization of the class’ great ambition on this front of the world revolution—the conquest and defense of political power for the proletariat in the socialist revolution.

On “Cults” and the “Cult of Personality”

The phony communist Nikita Khrushchev’s old spittle is still lapped up by the pathetic dog traitors to communism today by raising the specter of the “cult of personality.” Anywhere this criticism is made, one finds anti-communism; it is that simple. Behind it resides the attacks on the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Leninist conception of leadership specifically, and organizational discipline, all of which is an attempt to decapitate the Left and sever the Communists from the masses. The so-called “cult of personality” is a revisionist thesis; who has upheld it? Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Althusser, Gorbachev, and many others. Today in the US it falls from the feces-stained mouths of the Politically Degenerate Right Liquidationists and their disciples among the Liquidationists Inside Out, whose lofty pandering to the bourgeoisie is dressed up as Maoism. We base our views in the teachings of Chairman Gonzalo; understand this, in regard to the revolution:

“In our case, they seek to rob this process of leadership, and the reactionaries and those who serve them know very well why they do this, because it is not easy to generate great leaders, and Great Leadership. And a People’s War like the one in this country needs great leaders, and a Great Leadership, someone who represents the revolution and heads it, and a group capable of leading uncompromisingly. In sum, the cult of personality is a sinister revisionist formulation which has nothing to do with our concept of revolutionary leaders, which conforms with Leninism.”

Let all bastard attempts at coding their tell-tale sinister revisionism in new terms like “high control group” or “charismatic leader” be seen for what it is: decrepit and utterly stupid.

On Revolution and Revolutionary Violence

Basing himself firmly in Marxism, Chairman Gonzalo affirms the principle of revolutionary violence.

Lenin, in his struggle against the renegade Kautsky, defended Marx, specifying that Marx’s conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat implies revolutionary violence: “One cannot hide the fact that dictatorship presupposes and implies a ‘condition,’ one so disagreeable to renegades, of revolutionary violence of one class against another” and “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won by and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.”

Chairman Mao Zedong expresses the universality of revolutionary violence in succinct and potent form: “Every Communist must grasp the truth; ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’.” This profound statement is taken further when he expressed: “Everything in Yenan has been created by having guns. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun. According to the Marxist theory of the state, the army is the chief component of state power. Whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army. Some people ridicule us as advocates of the ‘omnipotence of war’. Yes, we are advocates of the omnipotence of revolutionary war; that is good, not bad, it is Marxist.” This has profound implications for the entire conception of revolutionary organization and practical activity.

After the death of a great revolutionary, revisionists—those who seek to revise the revolutionary content of Marxism on the basis of new conditions—always rise up and make mischief. This was the case after the deaths of Marx and Engels, with Bernstein and Kautsky. After the death of Lenin, Trotsky attempted it, but was stopped by comrade Stalin. After the death of comrade Stalin it was Khrushchev, and after the death of Chairman Mao his revolutionary theory was attacked by Deng. In each case new leaders arise to defend Marxism’s revolutionary content against revisionism, and in the defense of Marxism Chairman Gonzalo fights ardently on this question of revolutionary violence, steeped in the ideology of the international proletariat and existing as a necessity at all stages in all countries:

“Revisionism is obviously a cancer,” said the Chairman, “a cancer that has to be ruthlessly eliminated. Otherwise we won’t be able to advance the revolution. Remembering what Lenin said, in a concise way, we must forge ahead on two questions, the question of revolutionary violence, and the relentless struggle against opportunism, against revisionism.”

“The problem of revolutionary violence,” he explained, “is an issue that is more and more being put on the table for discussion, and therefore we Communists and revolutionaries must reaffirm our principles. The problem of revolutionary violence is how to actually carry it out with People’s War. The way we see this question is that when Chairman Mao Zedong established the theory of People’s War and put it into practice, he provided the proletariat with its military line, a military theory and practice that is universally valid and therefore applicable everywhere in accordance with the concrete conditions.

“We see the problem of war this way; war has two aspects, destructive and constructive. Construction is the main aspect. Not to see it this way undermines the revolution—weakens it. On the other hand, from the moment the people take up arms to overthrow the old order, from that moment, the reaction seeks to crush, destroy and annihilate the struggle, and it uses all the means at its disposal, including genocide.”

The question of revolutionary violence, according to Marxism, is not a mirage always moving to a distant horizon which is never reached, but a necessary question of organization from start to finish. With this great perspective Chairman Gonzalo furnishes the conception of the Communist Party as the heroic fighter that leads its own building, the building of its army, and of the united front, concretely resolving the question of the Party’s construction around the gun and basing himself in Chairman Mao.

In contrast are all those wretched theories still sucking the air of Kautsky’s crypt, which pretend the Party is constructed around legal, above-ground educational activity. They reek of death; they are necrophiliac. Next to these are their shallow counterparts that pander to liberalism and speak only of passive defensive violence when there is absolutely “no other option”; these cannot be suffered, as the only options for those living in the imperialist system are to live under sinister violence, be crushed by it, or brandish revolutionary violence. Beware of the phony-communist who forgets to reaffirm the principles of revolutionary violence out of fear of retaliation—he is a charlatan hiding the truth from the masses to save his own dirty hide. “Damn the words of traitors. Everything was won in fact through revolutionary violence.”

On the Question of Fascism

Chairman Gonzalo called for careful study of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International against the vulgar Avakianite attempts at negating it, and in doing this affirms the struggle against fascism, clearly delineating it from the liberal and confused understandings and definitions. These all equate fascism with “dictatorship” and “violence.” This definition today is used to rally masses behind the corpse of the Democratic mafia.

He expressed that democratic principles of enlightenment are being abandoned by reactionaries worldwide: “the state is organized violence,” he explains, “all states use violence because they are dictatorships.” He continues, “we must understand that fascism means a more refined violence, and the development of terrorism, yes, but that is not the totality of it, but a component, it is fascism’s means of unfolding reactionary violence.” Since all bourgeois states undergo the process of decomposition and become increasingly reactionary, fascism is expressed with corporativism, the reorganization of society and the state along corporativist lines: “What do they want? They want the formation of corporations, that is to organize producers, and all members of society around corporativist lines.”

Fascism emerges in the world as necessary for the bourgeoisie to confront the threat of proletarian revolution. Where revolution unfolds, fascism emerges to confront it, and it is stopped by the organized armed force of the proletarian state mainly. When liberal forms are insufficient to contain revolution, the bourgeoisie can accept fascism with all its horrors and instabilities, and it takes on different forms everywhere.

No matter the slogans, be it “refuse Trump’s fascism” or prattling on about “fascistization” (whatever this means!), those that treat fascism in the US either as reality or as imminence tuck themselves into the soft blankets of the reactionary demo-liberal ruling class and are woefully unprepared to confront reaction as a result. Behind such positions we have seen arguments for voting for genocidal Joe Biden as well as hiding from the masses with one’s head in the sand, ostrich policies of false clandestinity. In order to confront revisionism, reaction, and imperialism implacably and inseparably, one must learn from Chairman Gonzalo on this question.

On National Liberation and the National Question

Chairman Gonzalo, basing himself firmly in Marxism, expresses that the type of revolution applicable to the oppressed nations is democratic revolution, specifically New Democratic revolution led by the proletariat and, at its head, its communist party. This is how national oppression is resolved and self-determination is accomplished—there is no other way.

He establishes that New Democratic Revolution must be followed by Socialist Revolution, and that the continuation of the socialist revolution must unfold under the dictatorship of the proletariat as Cultural Revolution. The national question cannot be separated from the land question; this is what he indicates.

Chairman Gonzalo rejects “dependency theory,” as the PCP wrote: “The term ‘neo-colony’ is used by revisionism in the 1960s, it is rejected. It was based on the conception that imperialism applies a softer form of domination and which led them to derive the characterization of ‘dependent country.’ Therefore, applying Chairman Mao’s thesis that a period of struggle was opening against the two superpowers that contend for the repartition of the world, one must specify who is the principal enemy of the moment.”

Basing himself in the revolutionary theory developed by Comrade Stalin which was recognized by the great Lenin, Chairman Gonzalo defended the position of Mariategui in regard to the national problem in Peru: in 1974 he delivered a speech at the conference organized by the teachers union of Huamanga, Ayacucho, in which he defines Peru as a nation oppressed by imperialism, semi-feudal and semi-colonial, outlining the historic process in which bureaucratic capitalism unfolded. It is important to study this, noting that the Chairman did not specify a multitude of nations inside of Peru; Quechua, Aymara, and so on. In 1990 he would express that those who treat the national problem on identitarian or cultural grounds represent rightist, revisionist, and opportunist bourgeois modalities that must be combated by Marxism.

The Chairman indicated and denounced the deformation of the national problem behind the so-called criteria of national identity, which leads to reducing the problem to a cultural issue. “These positions were supported by elements of the old revisionist gang…” It was these elements which “began to raise the problem of Quechua and Aymara nationalities, conceiving them of nations which have to develop by creating republics.”

Chairman Gonzalo is leaving no room for confusion on this issue: “…there is no national problem without the land question, as Comrade Stalin very well said.” He further elaborated that this problem would arise again in the 1960s “linked to the so-called new left that never took a position for Marxism.” This is incredibly insightful and salient to our experience in the US with the very same types, some of whom quote Stalin without understanding, and this means they traffic with Comrade Stalin in name-only while presenting the very same bourgeois criteria common to imperialism, revisionism, opportunism and the so-called “new left” that also made trouble for Marxism in this country.

Some of the old revisionist gang of “new leftists” that now call themselves “new communists” (Avakianites) once argued in spite of the end of sharecropping—which posed a specific land question in the US South by comprising the basis for the internal economic bond and shared economic life identified as national criteria by Stalin—that an oppressed nation still existed in the US South. Again the revisionist Avakian has decided to “rupture” or “break” with the so-called “mistakes” of the Communist International. Today the position has degenerated from this source, in the only way it can: into shallow bourgeois identity politics. Yet, it is dusted off by those who have more bourgeois ideas than Marxist theory, and it too is laden with all the trappings of reducing the problem to a cultural issue. For Avakian, the mode of production does not determine the society; he loses all class criteria and can therefore sever the national question from the land question and propose a freakish chimera which combines two different types of revolution into one.

These questions demand a proletarian class stand, unity under Maoism based firmly in learning from Chairman Gonzalo, in order to proceed further than the downward spiral indicated by Avakian.

December 3, 1934 Marks the Birth of Our Great Leader—September 11, 2021 Marks His Invincible Moral, Political, and Military Victory Over the Reaction

We must continue to struggle for the campaign Learn from Chairman Gonzalo, Unite Under Maoism, persisting without fear of death or fatigue in the only invincible path toward the reconstitution of the Communist Party of the USA and the end of all sinister sects.

Departing from us, Chairman Gonzalo directed us to make Maoism incarnate, as the sole commander and guide of the World Proletarian Revolution, of which our socialist revolution in the US is part of and in service to. He issued the call to constitute or reconstitute the Communist Parties so that they can initiate and guide people’s war, in each country, according to their conditions. We pledge to you Chairman Gonzalo, teacher of teachers, greatest among greats, the eagle of the International Communist Movement, that we will dedicate our lives, giving them when necessary and sparing no effort to carry out your final glorious directives.

LEARN FROM CHAIRMAN GONZALO, UNITE UNDER MAOISM!

---

The Worker is an entirely volunteer-run revolutionary newspaper free from and radically antagonistic to corporate influence. We rely on the support of our readers to sustain our editorial line in service of the working class and the reconstitution of its party, the Communist Party. Make a one-time or recurring donation to our newspaper today: