Thank you to everyone who provided suggestions, moral support, humor, and anything else that helped us keep this project going. We will not name names for fairly obvious reasons, but we genuinely appreciate your contributions. Without you all, the book would never be made or completed. We would also like to credit certain websites which have been gracious enough to have numerous resources for studying theory, history, etc., including BANNEDTHOUGHT.NET, Massline.org, Marxists Internet Archive, From Marx to Mao, Foreign Languages Press, Politics In Command—Proletarian Journal, ML-Theory, Communist International, DEM VOLKE DIENEN, Tjen Folket Media – News from the struggle | Media for revolution, and many more, as well as numerous members of writing platforms. If any webpages do not load, try to use the Wayback Machine; if that does not work, search for a quote from the page on your search engine, and hopefully a copy of the article appears.

There are too many issues in the status quo for us to remain content and silent, namely exploitation, pollution, climate change, disease, and many more. Recent findings have shown that these will lead to catastrophic results if not dealt with properly. Furthermore, we can’t expect to solve them with anything less than a full blown revolution. We, the American Communist Party (Maoist), seek to solve these issues, though that will not happen without dedicated struggle, through agitating, educating, and organizing the working (and schooling!) masses. America lacks a genuine communist party; we hope that with enough organization and growth, this can become a communist party, a party that serves and leads the people. Revolutionary practice can’t exist without theory, so before we do that, we must go over the history of revolutionary communism (Marxism-Leninism-Maoism), explain our positions on contemporary issues, and find ways for the masses to be involved with our struggle.

Book I: Revolutionary Communism’s Development

We will describe what revolutionary communism is and how it came about. Keep in mind that this should not substitute reading and studying Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory. It is just to introduce the reader to the elements of revolutionary communism and a description of its history; it will have quotes from theory that we recommend you read. This is done to provide the tools needed for the students and the people to use to liberate themselves, construct socialism, and take the road to communism!

Marxism: the Birth of a Revolutionary Worldview

Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is the modern development of Marxism-Leninism, which, in turn, was the development of Marxism in the 20th-century; all of these are the stages of revolutionary communism’s development. Marxism originated with the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; though they never called their ideas “Marxism”, they grouped them under “scientific socialism”, a term we use interchangeably with “Marxism”. It is an all-encompassing universal understanding of our world, but it can be summed up into three characteristics [Source]:

Dialectical and historical materialism
Political economy

Pre-capitalist modes of production
Capitalist relations of production

Scientific communism

Marx’s conception of the state

Dialectical and Historical Materialism

The philosophy of dialectical materialism is a combination of dialectics and materialism. (Of course it is!) But what is dialectics, and what is materialism?

In Chapter 11 of Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels, the co-founder of Marxism, said, “Dialectics, however, is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought” [Source]. It isn’t a religion or fringe metaphysical society. Dialectics is just the application of the laws of science to the philosophy of Marxists. Joseph Stalin, another Marxist leader and theoretician, wrote this in his guide titled “Dialectical and Historical Materialism”:

Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party. It is called dialectical materialism because its approach to the phenomena of nature, its method of studying and apprehending them, is dialectical, while its interpretation of the phenomena of nature, its conception of these phenomena, its theory, is materialistic. [Source]

Dialectics is the doctrine of how motion and change work in the universe. The most important principle of this doctrine is the law of contradictions within and between things. Within all objects, there exist pairs of aspects that form simultaneously and in unity. In mechanics, there exists a contradiction between action and reaction; in chemistry, there are combinations and dissociation of particles; in math, there are differentials and integrals; and, most importantly, in social science, there are contradictions between social classes^[1] in society. Contradictions may also exist within other contradictions; there are internal and external contradictions because internal contradictions are within objects, which are in contradiction with other objects. The aspects of a contradiction exist in unity, and they exist in struggle, too. Chairman Mao Zedong elaborated and developed this theory of contradictions, which we show in the chapter on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

It is also important that we understand that not all contradictions are antagonistic. Antagonistic contradictions cannot be resolved peacefully; non-antagonistic ones can have a peaceful result. An example of the former is between two countries at war; an example of the latter is between our biceps and trapezius as they work together to lift weights. Such contradictions exist in all forms of society, and they exist in all parts of the universe, whether force is used consciously. Again, Mao simplified and also progressed this theory.

Another law of dialectics is the law of quantitative and qualitative changes. When something changes, it first changes quantitatively, and then qualitatively. A qualitative change (or qualitative leap) is a large quantitative change, and a quantitative change is a very small qualitative change. We bring the example of boiling water: when heat is added to normal water, the water first changes mostly in quantity (quantity of temperature), and then, after a large amount of heat is added, the water changes qualitatively (into boiling water); the temperature change prior to the change in the water’s qualities is itself a qualitative change, albeit a smaller one (since the water will be hotter). Yet another example would be the growth of a plant: the plant starts as a seed, and initially it changes quantitatively (the number of cells it has increases), but then it starts to change qualitatively (the seed sprouts). The quantitative changes are also small qualitative changes; the seed has small changes to its characteristics, its qualities.

Materialism is the camp of philosophy asserting that there is a real, objective world outside of anyone’s consciousness. This is in contrast to philosophical idealism, which is the philosophy saying that the world around us is only found within our mental consciousness. Obviously, materialism is superior to idealism because it is scientifically correct. It is absurd to think that all of what happens in the world and the universe is just within one person’s head. Consciousness actually comes from matter; its origins lie in the material world. Neuroscience has proven that the mind is merely the highest product of matter. If you want to understand the absolute stupidity of idealism, think of idealism as someone saying this: “Everything is happening in the world because I am not thinking correctly and hard enough. If I just think really hard, good stuff will happen!”, or “this tree didn’t make a sound because I didn’t hear it fall”. Anyone with a lick of experience in the real world would know that material reality exists despite our consciousness, and even with the end of our consciousness, the real world will continue to exist.

Marxism applies the philosophy of dialectical materialism to everything, but it especially applies it to history, politics, political economy (“economics”), sociology, and all the social sciences. Dialectics explains everything within the universe. Its principles, such as the law of contradictions, are seen throughout all the material world. A dialectical materialist lens is essential to a proper understanding of society. They must look at society and understand that it has material conditions that exist regardless of one’s consciousness, that these conditions develop and interact with each other, that they are interconnected, and that they constantly change. Without this understanding, one cannot have an accurate, scientific understanding of our society and the universe, so they cannot truly understand history.

By understanding dialectical materialism, one can understand theory, and with theory, they can understand history; also with dialectical materialism, one can analyze their material conditions properly, and with that knowledge (combined with the knowledge of history), one knows how to act and practice properly. With the experience gained from practice, you can add to theory, and with new theory, you can engage in new practice. That is how dialectical materialism applies to organizing for revolution!

And what is historical materialism? In “Dialectical and Historical Materialism”, Stalin explains, “Historical materialism is the extension of the principles of dialectical materialism to the study of social life, an application of the principles of dialectical materialism to the phenomena of the life of society, to the study of society and of its history” [Source].

Dialectical materialism, specifically its application to history and society (to the social sciences), helps people understand their world entirely. Historical materialism is exactly that; it is the implementation of dialectical materialism within society and history. Historical materialism is particularly important to Marxists; dialectical materialism helps us understand the world as a whole, and historical materialism helps us understand how society formed and what will happen next. Because of historical materialism, Marxists can predict the formation of the communist society, or at least the basic aspects of it. Dialectical materialism is good for all science, and historical materialism is important for society. This is why we need both, as Marxists. Marxists are scientists, and they especially study society. Unlike the “hard” sciences, it is hard to conduct experiments in social sciences, so instead, Marxists use the philosophy of historical materialism to figure out how society can change.

The contradiction between classes in societies is the primary contradiction in society, and it is what pushes humanity forward; this is why historical materialism requires an understanding of political economy. History is made because of the conflict between the ruling class and the exploited class of all societies, whether those were slave societies (with slave-owners and slaves), feudal societies (with landlords and tenants), or capitalist societies (with capitalists and workers). As slave society fell from slave revolts, feudalism took its place; as feudalism fell from bourgeois revolutions, capitalism took its place.

There are other contradictions, like the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, as well, which is that after the productive forces are developed to a certain level within a mode of production, the existing relations of production hinder the further development of the productive forces. This is why slavery’s relations of production only developed the productive forces a little, feudal relations of production developed them a little more, and now capitalist relations of production develop them to a certain level; they promote expansion to benefit the ruling class, but they cannot have too much expansion, for too much would be bad for their desired mode of production. This is discussed more in the section on political economy.

Using a historical materialist view, people can understand what really caused the conditions that our world is in today. While idealists would like to focus on the ideals of “great men of history” and how individuals supposedly acted independently of class conflict, materialists are correct in seeing how the world changes due to material conditions and contradictions, principally the contradictions between classes. This is why we do not believe that “dictators” exist; only representatives of the ruling class exist, and their individual styles of leading may vary, but they must submit to the overall class they support. “Dictators” do not make history alone; class conflict and other conflicts from contradictions within all society cause history.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels lived in capitalist society, so they mainly analyzed the capitalist relations of production. We, too, live in capitalist society, so we must also analyze capitalist relations of production. To have a historical materialist view requires an understanding of economics and politics, or political economy. Thus, we proceed into that subject.

Political Economy

Now that we have the very basic elements of dialectical materialism explained, we will discuss what political economy is. Political economy, or specifically the study of it, is the subject that bourgeois (capitalist) academics call “economics” to hide the real political nature of this topic. Marxist political economy uses dialectical materialism to explain the nature of society. There are many contradictions within each economy, and these contradictions get resolved when the economic system (usually called mode of production) is overthrown and a new one is put in place. This is why systems change; primitive communism developed into slavery, slavery developed into feudalism, feudalism developed into capitalism, and capitalism will develop into communism.^[2] All of this can only happen because of the contradictions between the class system in place and the productive forces (both of which will be explained further in this section).

Again, Engels explains political economy in Anti-Dühring when he says, “Political economy, in the widest sense, is the science of the laws governing the production and exchange of the material means of subsistence in human society” [Source]. Political economy studies production, distribution, exchange, and more. Marxian political economy exposes the realities of all economic systems, while capitalist “economics” conceals more than it reveals.

Within any mode of production, there exist two characteristics that form the system: the productive forces and the productive relations; the forces of production and the relations of production. The productive forces are all things that are involved in making goods and providing services; this includes the means of production (non-human inputs in production: tools, machines, land, buildings, vehicles, etc.) and labor-power, the capacity to work. The productive relations are the social and economic (socio-economic) relationships within a society. They include the relationships between people and the means of production and the relationship between people themselves, such as people owning the means of production and people using the means of production.

A group of people with the same relations of production is a social class. Classless societies are those where everyone owns and uses the means of production, so naturally, class societies are those where different groups of people relate to means of production differently. Now, classlessness does not mean absolute equality. Class is not defined by one’s income, so if everyone owns and uses some means of production but otherwise has unequal incomes, they would still be part of the same class; conversely, people with the same income but different relations of production are not part of the same class. The contradictions between classes are primary in society, but the differences in income are mostly unimportant. We will define different classes in the subsections on modes of production.

All modes of production were and are ways to organize the creation of goods and services, or use values—things that satisfy people’s needs and desires. They contain use value, or usefulness; whether things have use value is based on the physical characteristics of them, so use value is only a qualitative measure, not a quantitative one. In primitive societies, people focused on getting and making things that satisfied their needs; they had few productive forces, but each development they made allowed them to spend more time continuing to advance them.

As people’s productivity rose—as more things were able to be made because of improvements in technology and because of the social division of labor^[3]—exchange developed. It started off in a primitive way, with barter taking place, but over time it took on a more advanced form. With surplus product being made, some products become commodities. The way to measure how to exchange commodities was by their value, their economic worth. Value, unlike use value, is not something based on the physical characteristics of commodities. In fact, it ignores all the physical characteristics of all commodities; thus, it is based on labor, or specifically socially necessary labor time^[4], the measure of a commodity’s value.

In Chapter One, Section One of Capital Volume I, Marx claims, “We see then that that which determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labor socially necessary, or the labor time socially necessary for its production” [Source]. With value, when commodities are exchanged, exchange value becomes a characteristic; that is why commodities have the contradiction between value and use-value as well as that between value and exchange-value. This is the ratio at which one type of commodity can be exchanged for another. Unlike value, which is measured in socially necessary labor hours, exchange value’s measuring units differ by the commodities being traded. Therefore, money became a universal commodity that would be used to exchange for any other commodity; the measure of money required to get a commodity is price, the money-form of exchange value, which is the form that value takes when different commodities are exchanged. Value and its forms were somewhat important in all systems, but they were and are very important in capitalism, so we will focus on that in the subsection on the capitalist mode of production.

Class relations determine how use values are produced and distributed. In primitive communal societies, there were no classes; everyone owned and used the means of production, and commodity exchange could not exist. Value did not exist, though use value did. Following the social division of labor, products of labor became commodities, so value did exist, and so did exchange-value; surplus production, from which commodities came about, was what allowed class distinctions to form, for ruling classes of property owners could exist without doing work while working classes (slaves, peasants, and proletarians) worked to sustain themselves and their exploitative masters. Different class relations modified the conditions under which products were made and distributed, changing the roles use value and economic value played in the system. We will go into detail in the subsections on modes of production, but that is a general outline.

With historical materialism, we can understand the relations between the economic base and societal superstructure. To put it simply, the economic base is the mode of production of a society. This includes its productive forces (the means of production and labor of society) and its relations of production (relationships between groups of people and means of production). The superstructure is the rest of society that develops from the economic base, including art, the state^[5], media, and ideology. That is why all class societies have had their own ideologies and cultures, and that is why new class societies have their own ideologies and cultures. Slavery had a superstructure defending slavery, feudalism had one for itself, and now capitalism has a capitalist superstructure. Marx describes the base and superstructure in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy; in its preface, he says (our emphasis):

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces[,] these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. [Source]

The base creates the superstructure, but that does not mean that the superstructure is nothing but a product of the base. The superstructure also modifies the base and slightly changes it while maintaining its fundamental characteristics; this is why in capitalist societies, culture may change to some degree or another (from hardline traditionalist culture to “woke, progressive” culture, for example) to slightly modify the economic base (prioritizing production of certain commodities over others) in order to maintain the mode of production. Viewing the relationship between the base and the superstructure as a one-way contradiction is a metaphysical way of looking at it; in a dialectical unity, the two aspects influence one-another, especially in a non-antagonistic contradiction (such as the contradiction between the capitalist base and the capitalist superstructure).

Understanding these basic theories of political economy, we can apply them as well as dialectical and historical materialism to the society we live in, which is capitalist society. Before that, we will explain how pre-capitalist modes of production worked, how they fell, and how capitalism was born; this may not be of interest to many people, but in the event that it interests some, we are providing it.

Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production

First, humans originated as a separate species from other animals as they created implements by modifying their surrounding materials, and these implements reduced the amount of labor they had to expend to survive. Humans were then able to devise other ways to improve their lives, including using different sources of food, utilizing fire to make it easier to get more energy out of food, making better means of production, etc. During the thousands of years of evolution that occurred with this, humans lived in primitive communist societies, for they all owned the means of production they had, and they all contributed to their collective as they could and took from it what they needed.

The superstructure barely existed; there was no education, media, state, etc. At most, there were customs and sets of beliefs that made up culture and ideology. Primitive communal superstructure was egalitarian in terms of class as well as gender; gender identity was not so important in terms of people’s ability to survive, so it could be fluid, and sexuality could also be fluid since family relations were not so important in primitive society; the whole community raised children, and the only resemblance of nuclear families were biological parents being important, but far from the only, caretakers of their children. Furthermore, so long as agricultural labor (which was very primitive at this time) was women's labor according to the natural division of labor, women were dominant in primitive clans, so there was matriarchy. The lack of class contradictions allowed this to be the case.

When agriculture became dominant as productive forces expanded, private property, the private ownership of means of production, developed as labor divided socially, not naturally; peasants and craftsmen came about, with peasants producing food and exchanging surplus food for crafts. The contradiction between productive forces and the relations of production ended with the establishment of new relations. Men, not women anymore, handled this property, and their offspring inherited this property by their connection with their father, not their mother. Thus began patriarchy, mens’ dominance in production. Patriarchy and sexism are not the same, for sexism can exist without patriarchy, but in the first societies with private property, patriarchy was how sexism manifested itself.^[6] The economic contradictions led to contradictions outside of class, especially in gender. Engels told us about the origins of patriarchy in Chapter 2 of The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State:

Thus, on the one hand, in proportion as wealth increased, it made the man’s position in the family more important than the woman’s, and on the other hand created an impulse to exploit this strengthened position in order to overthrow, in favor of his children, the traditional order of inheritance. This, however, was impossible so long as descent was reckoned according to mother-right. Mother-right, therefore, had to be overthrown, and overthrown it was. This was by no means so difficult as it looks to us today. For this revolution—one of the most decisive ever experienced by humanity—could take place without disturbing a single one of the living members of a gens. All could remain as they were. A simple decree sufficed that in the future the offspring of the male members should remain within the gens, but that of the female should be excluded by being transferred to the gens of their father. The reckoning of descent in the female line and the matriarchal law of inheritance were thereby overthrown, and the male line of descent and the paternal law of inheritance were substituted for them. [Source]

As private property was born from the division of labor, certain richer families emerged by taking large amounts of the formerly communal property and using it to produce more than poorer ones; these families could make prisoners of war as well as poor, indebted members of their community into slaves. The development and expansion of slavery created the first class society because of the existing productive forces. The classes were the large slave-owners, small producers, and slaves; they made up the slave mode of production. The textbook Political Economy details slavery in Chapter Two:

At first slavery bore a patriarchal or domestic character. There were comparatively few slaves. Slave labor was not yet the basis of production but played a subsidiary part in the economy. The aim of the economy remained the satisfaction of the demands of the large patriarchal family which had hardly any recourse to exchange. The master's power over his slaves was already unlimited but the sphere of application of slave labor was limited.

The further growth of productive forces, and the development of the social division of labor and of exchange, formed the basis of society's transition to the slave-owning system. …

With the division of production into two large basic branches, agriculture and handicraft, there arises production directly for exchange though still in an undeveloped form. The growth in productivity of labor led to an increase in the amount of the surplus product which, with private property in the means of production, afforded the opportunity for the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a minority of society, and on this basis for the subordination of the working majority to the exploiting minority, for the conversion of laborers into slaves.

Under conditions of slavery the economy was basically a natural one. A natural economy is one in which the products of labor are not exchanged but consumed within the economy where they were produced. At the same time, however, the development of exchange took place. At first craftsmen made their products to order and then for sale on the market. At the same time, many of them continued for long to have small plots of land and to cultivate them to satisfy their needs. In the main the peasants carried on a natural economy, but were compelled to sell a certain part of their produce on the market in order to be able to buy the craftsman's wares and to pay money taxes. Thus gradually part of the products of the craftsman's and peasant's labor became commodities. [Source]

Commodity production came about as well; though it existed only on a small scale, slave owners did sell some of their products according to the labor they took to be made, and they competed with small producers that remained from the initial division of labor. The need to organize commodity exchange created markets and eventually market systems; in markets, different producers exchange commodities as profitably as possible and compete with one-another to get as many commodities (and later as much money) as possible. With commodity production came capital, wealth used to get more wealth (means of production and labor-power). Capital is not merely money; money used to buy commodities for personal use is not capital, but money used to buy commodities used to create new commodities for sale is capital; productive forces used to generate more value are also capital. When slavery expanded via imperialism, merchants arose as the middlemen for trades, and they took advantage of different costs of production in different communities by buying goods for low prices and selling them for higher ones.^[7] This way, they accumulated capital:

Under the slave-owning system money had already become not only a means of buying and selling commodities; it had also come to serve as a means for the appropriation of the labor of others by means of trade and usury. Money expended with a view to appropriating surplus labor and its product becomes capital, that is, a means of exploitation. Merchants' and usurers' capital were historically the first forms of capital. Merchants' capital is capital engaged in the sphere of commodity exchange. Merchants buying up and reselling commodities appropriated a considerable part of the surplus product created by the slaves, small peasants and craftsmen. Usurers' capital is capital applied in the form of loans of money, means of production or objects of consumption for the appropriation of the peasants' and craftsmen's surplus labor by means of high interest rates. The usurers also granted money loans to the slave-owning aristocracy, thus sharing in the surplus product that the latter received. [Source]

Slave production also had the intensification of the contradiction between town and country. This contradiction gave birth to class society itself, and class society makes manufacture and agriculture more and more unequal in its growth. Under the slave mode of production, the slave-owners and other people that lived on slavery, as well as independent craftsmen, lived in towns, and they (except independent craftsmen) extracted surplus product from the predominantly-countryside slave labor and peasant labor. Thus, towns became centers of extracted wealth, and the countryside became relatively backward and impoverished. (Of course, slave owners also had domestic, construction, and handicraft slaves, but most of the slave population worked in the countryside.) As future modes of production developed, this division did not disappear, but it grew wider; only socialism and communism, as seen further on, would narrow and eventually eliminate this distinction.

Slavery led to the development of culture in slave societies, for on the backs of slave labor, owners could develop science, art, and more. The superstructure, therefore, developed due to slavery. And since it grew from slavery, it had to bear the “fruits” of slavery, including a disdain for manual labor from the ruling class; this is where the distinction between mental and manual labor was born, and that distinction manifested in different forms in different modes of production, only growing wider until socialism and communism come about. While primitive communal society required constant labor and therefore the glorification of hard work, slave society encouraged wealth accumulation from others’ labor; thus, slaves and independent peasants and craftsmen had to do all manual labor while slave society’s ruling class, intellectuals, etc. could engage in mental work. In addition, patriarchy developed as an important part of society; women were unable to control production as men could. These were all part of the superstructure. Racism also became a reality in slave society; ever since class society began, racism was often used to justify the oppression of certain members of the exploited class, starting with slaves of certain societies. Racism was not a necessity in slavery, as we saw slaves of all “races” in slave societies, but it could be helpful in justifying the brutal exploitation for free people who did not really benefit from it.

More broadly speaking, different philosophies and ideologies were born from slave society, and they reflected class interests. Conservative and reactionary ideologies were found among slave-owners, and progressive and revolutionary beliefs were found among slaves and small producers; within the slave-owners’ broad ideology, narrower strains were made due to the contradictions within their class, and among the small producers and slaves, there were similar contradictions, but these distinctions were non-antagonistic. This trend has continued to exist in all class societies, for it is the oppressed peoples that choose to move forward and the exploiters that choose to maintain the the systems they benefit from or go back to more-oppressive systems that benefit them even more. (We will cover the details of how this happens in capitalist society in that mode of production’s dedicated subsection.)

The most important aspect of slavery’s superstructure was the formation of states created to keep slavery’s relations of production in place; states are special bodies of armed people that keep society in order and allow the ruling class to exploit and oppress the laboring class of that society.^[8] States in slave societies helped slave-owners by waging wars to get slaves for them; they also worked to oppress slaves and to make sure that slave society stayed stable, crushing slave revolts, protecting the property of slave owners, making sure small producers stayed in their place. However, the militaries that fought these wars were made up of these small producers, and diverting labor away from crafts and small farming weakened slave-based economies when wars were lost and slave-owners did not get new slaves to exploit; on top of that, when a war was lost, the military’s members became dangerous as they could join revolts out of anger or injustice.

Moving quickly along, the decline of slave society occurred for many reasons. The society’s contradictions included the one between slaves and masters, between free peasants (small landowners) and planters (owners of plantations, or large farms), and between these relations of production and the productive forces. Slaves obviously disliked slavery, and small producers did not like having to fight in wars for slave-owners (and they struggled to compete with them). Though slavery developed the forces of production compared to primitive communism, slaves had no motivation to develop them; their life remained extremely poor, they remained oppressed, and they worked just as hard as they would have. Therefore, slaves sabotaged production as much as they could, discouraging owners from developing technology.

Eventually, with the large number of slave revolts—which small producers supported to weaken the large masters—and the inability of slave owners to continue paying for the large wars waged for slaves, slave society fell apart.^[9] In its place came feudalism, which was already in development in the slave mode of production; certain landowners replaced slavery with serfdom because serfs had incentives to develop the productive forces: they could lighten their workload, get more food for themselves, and own some means of production. After slaves were freed during the collapse of the mode of production, the former slaves became free peasants; over the next centuries, however, land again became more and more concentrated in the hands of fewer, more-exploitative hands, and those who fell into debt became tenant-peasants, with many becoming legally-bound serfs.^[10] Though serfs’ land was owned by the landlords, the lords let them use parts of the land as their own plots. Political Economy details this feudalization in Chapter Three:

The gradual conversion of peasant land into the property of feudal lords and the enserfment of the peasant masses (the process of feudalization) took place in Europe in the course of a number of centuries (from the fifth or sixth to the ninth or tenth centuries). The free peasantry was ruined by incessant military service, plunder and impositions. Turning for help to the large landowner, the peasants converted themselves into his dependents. Frequently the peasants were compelled to yield themselves into the "protection" of the feudal lord; otherwise it was impossible for a defenseless man to exist in conditions of ceaseless wars and bandit raids. In such cases property rights in the plot of land passed to the feudal lord, and the peasant could work his plot only on condition of fulfilling various duties for the lord. In other cases the royal lieutenants and officials, by means of deceit and force, appropriated the land of free peasants, making the latter acknowledge their power. [Source]

In feudalism, serfs paid their lords rent for their personal plots; this was still exploitation, but it was in certain ways better than slavery—in which slaves and their products are under masters’ total control—since serfs had some autonomy, ownership of some means of production, and the right to retain some of their labor’s products. There were three forms this rent took: labor-rent, rent-in-kind, and money rent. Labor rent was paid in days of working for the lord in farming and/or anywhere work is needed; this incentivised peasants to improve productivity for their own plots and not for the work they did for their lords. Rent-in-kind was paid for in the products of peasants’ labor; this incentivized peasants to be more productive when working for their lords. Money rent was paid for by peasants selling their crops to pay the rent to landlords, and money rent was the way capitalism began to develop out of feudalism; this form of rent was most common with legally-free tenant peasants (more on them later), and not so much with the serfs that existed in early feudalism. In addition to rent for land, landlords demanded taxes, payments to use certain means of production (rent for mills, smiths’ shops, etc.), and more, and the Church demanded tithes from harvests.

As feudalism developed, so did the productive forces in both crafts and agriculture, especially with money rent and the expansion of commodity production. Peasants and craftsmen produced more goods than they needed for their own communities, facilitating trade between communities and allowing towns of craftsmen to develop on lords’ lands; these craftsmen worked to maintain some independence from the lords and their rents, state oppression, etc., but once they did that, the towns flourished. To try and limit competition, craftsmen formed guilds; guilds had masters with full rights as well as exploited journeymen and apprentices. Guilds initially allowed craftsmen to develop their crafts better, but they eventually became hindrances to development [Source].

The contradiction between town and country grew even more severe. Since towns arose as centers of commodity production and exchange, they were where capitalist relations of production grew within the feudal mode of production; in contrast, feudal relations remained dominant in the countryside, with little opportunity for peasants to become capitalists. As a result, towns were centers of wealth and trade, though feudal lords remained wealthy and used the towns’ commerce to their advantage.

Feudalism brought about a feudal superstructure. Religion was used to justify serfdom and the ability of landlords to exploit their serfs; monarchs claimed that their right to rule came from God, and landlords—especially the Catholic Church, which also owned land—said the same thing about their right to own land and control serfs. Also, serfs used religion to “cope” with their exploitation; it gave them a way to take their oppression out of their minds; paradoxically religion gave them justifications for their liberation at times, planting the seeds of revolutionary ideology among the peasantry, but the official clergy condemned such ideas. Also in the superstructure was patriarchy, which still existed in feudalism; sons still inherited land from their fathers, and women were not involved in issues of production. Racism likely existed in feudalism too, but it was not really used to justify serfdom since, at least in Europe, serfs were white.

After enough time, though, feudal relations of production no longer promoted increasing production, but hindered it; this was just like how slave relations of production started to decline. Again, the class contradictions, the contradiction between the productive forces and relations, and more weakened feudalism and brought it down. The merchants we mentioned earlier became full-on capitalists; after constantly buying artisans’ products and reselling them to generate profits, the artisans became more and more dependent on them for means of production; guilds broke down, artisans became wage-workers, and this created the first capitalist relations of production. Guild masters became capitalists, and apprentices and journeymen (subordinate to masters) became proletarians. Even serfs were made into free tenant-peasants. “In England, serfdom had practically disappeared in the last part of the 14th century. The immense majority of the population consisted then, and to a still larger extent, in the 15th century, of free peasant proprietors…” [Source]. While their exploitation did not end, their legal oppression did, and they were thus more able to fight feudalism.

Feudal relations and the states that formed in feudalism hindered this capitalist development, so spreading capitalism would not be possible under them:

The divided condition of the country under feudalism was a great hindrance in the way of the development of commodity production. The feudal lords established at will dues on imported goods, exacted tribute for passage through their possessions, and thus created serious obstacles to the development of trade. The requirements of trade and the economic development of society in general evoked the necessity of abolishing feudal separatism. The growth of handicraft and agricultural production, the development of the social division of labor between town and country, led to the intensification of economic links between different districts within the country and to the formation of a national market. The formation of a national market created the economic preconditions for the centralisation of State power. The nascent town bourgeoisie was concerned to remove feudal obstacles and supported the creation of a centralized State. …

The transition from feudalism to capitalism in the countries of Western Europe took place through bourgeois revolutions. The struggle of the peasants against the landowners was used by the rising bourgeoisie in order to hasten the downfall of the feudal system, to replace serf exploitation by capitalist exploitation and take power into their own hands. The peasants formed the basic mass of those fighting against feudalism in the bourgeois revolutions. So it was in the first bourgeois revolution in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century. So it was in the English revolution of the seventeenth century. So it was in the bourgeois revolution in France at the end of the eighteenth century. [Source]

Capitalist relations were developing in feudalism, but feudal societies only turned capitalist after these revolutions, and only under bourgeois dictatorships could feudal relations turn capitalist (feudal lords became capitalist landlords, peasants were proletarianized, etc.); now that bourgeois states were put in place, capitalism could grow and expand. But in order for capitalism to expand, capital must accumulate; in order for capital to accumulate, a starting amount of capital must exist in the hands of people that make up the capitalist class—and conversely, capital cannot exist in the hands of the people that make up the working class. How did these people get this capital? The answer is primitive accumulation.

Chapter 26 of Volume I of Capital details how primitive accumulation took place following the destruction of feudalism:

In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this transformation itself can only take place under certain circumstances that centre in this, viz., that two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values they possess, by buying other people’s labour power; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own labour power, and therefore the sellers of labour. Free labourers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, &c., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. With this polarization of the market for commodities, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given. …

The immediate producer, the labourer, could only dispose of his own person after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondsman of another. To become a free seller of labour power, who carries his commodity wherever he finds a market, he must further have escaped from the regime of the guilds, their rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of their labour regulations. Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.

The industrial capitalists, these new potentates, had on their part not only to displace the guild masters of handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, the possessors of the sources of wealth. In this respect, their conquest of social power appears as the fruit of a victorious struggle both against feudal lordship and its revolting prerogatives, and against the guilds and the fetters they laid on the free development of production and the free exploitation of man by man. The chevaliers d’industrie, however, only succeeded in supplanting the chevaliers of the sword by making use of events of which they themselves were wholly innocent. They have risen by means as vile as those by which the Roman freedman once on a time made himself the master of his patronus. …

In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capital class in course of formation; but, above all, those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and “unattached” proletarians on the labour-market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. [Source]

Thus, the abolition of serfdom, the destruction of guilds, the overthrow of feudal lords, and the expropriation of poor and middle peasants’ land and means of production (including the common lands set aside for all peasants to use) are what allow capitalist production to expand; since manufacturers consumed and demanded more raw materials, landlords had an incentive to expropriate peasants’ common and private lands and grow those materials for their profit [Source]. Furthermore, landlords could lend their land to capitalist tenants, while peasants became wage-workers; remaining independent peasants struggled to compete with these new, capitalist farms and landlords’ enterprises.

Most importantly, industrial capital’s primitive accumulation took place with immense destruction and death for many peoples of the world. Merchant capitalists’ exploitation of artisans intensified after feudalism’s destruction, and colonialism in this mercantile era brought the wealth needed to develop capitalist production. Marx cites examples of this in Chapter 31 of Capital:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c.

The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power. [Source]

How does capitalism work, though? What do capitalists do with the capital they have accumulated from this robbery and destruction of the feudal order? We will answer that here.

Capitalist Mode of Production

In capitalism, the class of people that owns the means of production (constant capital) is the capitalist class, also known as the bourgeoisie; this class can either own the means of production individually, through partnerships, in corporations, or even through the state. The class of people that uses the means of production is the working class, which is also called the proletariat; this class does not own the means of production it uses. Every type of worker, from the least-skilled manual laborer to the most-educated professional, is a proletarian so long as they earn their income by selling their labor-power. The bourgeoisie purchases workers’ labor-power (variable capital); this is different from slavery, when the owner buys slaves, and feudalism, when the landlord purchases land and has serfs tied to it or tenants who must pay rent to use it. There are also small business owners that make up a middle class called the petty (or petite) bourgeoisie; these people employ few or no workers. This class shrinks as capitalism develops, but it does not disappear completely, for it can grow in early periods of economic prosperity.

How do capitalists live without working with their means of production? How does a capitalist buy commodities, modify them, and sell new commodities of higher value? Labor is the answer. Capitalists buy workers’ labor-power and expend it, and the value created by this labor is more than the value of the labor-power behind it. That extra value is surplus value. The ratio between surplus value and variable capital is the rate of exploitation, also called the rate of surplus value, and capitalists seek to increase the rate of exploitation of their workers to maximize profits. That is why capitalists generally do not support paying for costs to improve workers’ lives, like healthcare, education, etc.; they want to give the workers as little as possible while keeping them in a condition that lets them work and produce surplus value.

Workers have no choice but to accept this exploitative relationship. They must sell their labor-power to get the things they need; they need to sell it at the lowest price they can afford, lest they fall into the reserve army of labor, the section of the working class that is unemployed and willing to work, or the lumpenproletariat, the people who survive in illegal ways (crime, prostitution, etc.). This is why the relationship is sometimes called wage-slavery; workers are legally free, but they are economically bound to selling their labor-power, and the capitalists who own their labor-power can control what they do, much like slaves are bound to their owners and are fully controlled by them.

Surplus-value is not just a feature of industrial capitalism; agricultural and service^[11] workers also produce surplus-value in their work, for they must sell their labor-power for less than what their labor produces, simply put. Capitalists that rent land share part of the surplus-value with landlords, and most capitalists must share another part with bankers that loan them capital and demand repayment with interest.^[12] Marx talked about the distribution of surplus value among different capitalists in Chapter 23 of Volume I of Capital:

The capitalist who produces surplus-value—i.e., who extracts unpaid labor directly from the laborers, and fixes it in commodities, is, indeed, the first appropriator, but by no means the ultimate owner, of this surplus-value. He has to share it with capitalists, with landowners, &c., who fulfill other functions in the complex of social production. Surplus-value, therefore, splits up into various parts. Its fragments fall to various categories of persons, and take various forms, independent the one of the other, such as profit, interest, merchants’ profit, rent, &c. [Source]

This sort of landlords’ exploitation is characteristically different from when feudal lords exploit serfs and/or tenant peasants. First of all, many capitalist farmers are landowners and thus do not use tenants to get their income. Second, the capitalists that are tenants exploit wage-laborers to cover rent costs and whatever interest they may need to pay; in contrast, tenant peasants must produce the products needed to pay their rent, and so their lords’ incomes are not portions of surplus-value like they are in capitalism. The Textbook on Political Economy describes this difference in Chapter 14:

Capitalist tenant farmers pay to the owner of the land at definite intervals, e.g., every year, a rent laid down in the tenancy agreement, i.e., a sum of money in return for permission to apply their capital to the piece of land in question. The principal part of the rent is the ground-rent.

Rent includes other elements in addition to ground-rent. Thus, if capital has previously been invested in a piece of land which is being leased (e.g., in the form of farm buildings or irrigation works), then the tenant must pay the landowner, besides the ground-rent, also an annual interest on this capital. In practice capitalist tenant-farmers often meet part of their rent by lowering the wages of their workers.

Capitalist ground-rent expresses the relations between three classes in bourgeois society: wage-workers, capitalists and owners of land. The surplus-value created by the labor of the wage-workers falls first of all into the hands of the capitalist tenant-farmer. Part of the surplus-value remains with the tenant in the form of average profit on capital. Another part, being the excess over the average profit, the tenant is obliged to hand over to the landowner as ground-rent. Capitalist ground-rent is that part of the surplus-value which remains after deduction of the average rate of profit on the capital invested in the farm, and which is paid to the owner of the land. …

A very large number of small peasants rent little plots of land from large landowners on extortionate terms. The agricultural bourgeoisie takes leases of land in order to produce goods for the market and obtain profit. This is entrepreneur tenancy. The small peasant tenant is compelled to take a lease of a fragment of land in order to live. This is so-called food or hunger tenancy. The rent per acre paid for tenancy is usually much larger in the case of small plots of land than in that of large ones. A small peasant's rent often absorbs not only all his surplus labor but also part of his necessary labor. Tenancy relations are here interwoven with survivals of serfdom. The most widespread survival of feudalism under capitalist conditions is share-cropping, under which the peasant-leaseholder pays in kind up to half or more of the crops he harvests as rent for his holding. [Source]

Landlords have two types of ground-rent: absolute rent and differential rent. Agricultural capitalists that rent out land have to pay absolute rent at least for any quality of land, even the worst land that can produce any crop. They pay differential rent for land that gives them advantages in productivity, giving them an above-average rate of profit (ratio between surplus-value and capital investment); these advantages can come from either differences in fertility—composing differential rent I—or differences in (both constant and variable) capital investment—composing differential rent II. Of course, the advantages in productivity can only be realized when labor is done to produce commodities with the special land, so it is workers who produce the section of the surplus-value needed to pay for differential rent; it is neither land by itself nor capitalists’ investments that make rent possible, but it is the surplus labor of the agricultural proletariat that does so.

Landlords that lease housing exploit workers more directly by forcing them to pay for housing without owning it. Marx explained how house-rent works in Chapter 46 of Capital Volume III; it comes from ground-rent:

One part of society thus exacts tribute from another for the permission to inhabit the earth, as landed property in general assigns the landlord the privilege of exploiting the terrestrial body, the bowels of the earth, the air, and thereby the maintenance and development of life. Not only the population increase and with it the growing demand for shelter, but also the development of fixed capital, which is either incorporated in land, or takes root in it and is based upon it, such as all industrial buildings, railways, warehouses, factory buildings, docks, etc., necessarily increase the building rent. A confusion of house-rent, in so far as it constitutes interest and amortization on capital invested in a house, and rent for the mere land, is not possible in this case, even with all the goodwill of a person like Carey, particularly when landlord and building speculator are different persons, as is true in England. Two elements should be considered here: on the one hand, the exploitation of the earth for the purpose of reproduction or extraction; on the other hand, the space required as an element of all production and all human activity. And property in land demands its tribute in both senses. The demand for building sites raises the value of land as space and foundation, while thereby the demand for elements of the terrestrial body serving as building material grows simultaneously. [Source]

Workers get screwed over in all these ways: they produce profits for their employers, interest for bankers and creditors, rents for their landlords, and taxes for the capitalist state that oppresses them and maintains this system of parasitism.^[13] They may get exploited less when they fight for better wages, welfare programs, and the like, but so long as capitalism is the mode of production, exploitation is unavoidable. Even if workers’ real wages (the wages as defined by what they could buy, not just by the amount of money they have) rise, their relative wages (reciprocals of rates of exploitation, so wages divided by surplus value) fall. Marx wrote this in Chapter Six of Wage Labor and Capital:

Real wages may remain the same, they may even rise, nevertheless the relative wages may fall. Let us suppose, for instance, that all means of subsistence have fallen 2/3rds in price, while the day's wages have fallen but 1/3rd—for example, from three to two shillings. Although the worker can now get a greater amount of commodities with these two shillings than he formerly did with three shillings, yet his wages have decreased in proportion to the gain of the capitalist. The profit of the capitalist—the manufacturer's for instance—has increased one shilling, which means that for a smaller amount of exchange values, which he pays to the worker, the latter must produce a greater amount of exchange values than before. The share of capitals in proportion to the share of labor has risen. The distribution of social wealth between capital and labor has become still more unequal. The capitalist commands a greater amount of labor with the same capital. The power of the capitalist class over the working class has grown, the social position of the worker has become worse, has been forced down still another degree below that of the capitalist. [Source]

As previously stated, capitalists use profits by buying more labor-power and means of production. Generally speaking, capitalists get more means of production. This may lead to higher profits in the short term. When some capitalists invest more capital than the average, they can enjoy superprofits since the socially necessary labor time for each of their products is the same while they produce far above the social average number of products; this lowers the societal average rate of profit, but their individual enterprises’ rates temporarily stay high. (This is how increased capital investments lead to higher profits in agriculture, too, thus increasing the differential rent discussed above.) Such successful businesses buy up less-successful ones (contributing to the centralization of capital, as explained below), or those competitors catch up to them, and the average rate of profit decreases and equalizes.

To have this happen, capitalists must invest a lot into constant capital, and their surplus value increases at a slower rate than the volume of their constant capital; as these practices become more common in an industry or even a whole economy, the societal rate of profit lowers. This is the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Marx showed how this happens in Chapter Eight of Wage Labor and Capital:

If, now, by a greater division of labor, by the application and improvement of new machines, by a more advantageous exploitation of the forces of nature on a larger scale, a capitalist has found the means of producing with the same amount of labor (whether it be direct or accumulated labor) a larger amount of products of commodities than his competitors—if, for instance, he can produce a whole yard of linen in the same labor-time in which his competitors weave half-a-yard—how will this capitalist act?

He could keep on selling half-a-yard of linen at old market price; but this would not have the effect of driving his opponents from the field and enlarging his own market. But his need of a market has increased in the same measure in which his productive power has extended. The more powerful and costly means of production that he has called into existence enable him, it is true, to sell his wares more cheaply, but they compel him at the same time to sell more wares, to get control of a very much greater market for his commodities; consequently, this capitalist will sell his half-yard of linen more cheaply than his competitors.

But the capitalist will not sell the whole yard so cheaply as his competitors sell the half-yard, although the production of the whole yard costs him no more than does that of the half-yard to the others. Otherwise, he would make no extra profit, and would get back in exchange only the cost of production. He might obtain a greater income from having set in motion a larger capital, but not from having made a greater profit on his capital than the others. Moreover, he attains the object he is aiming at if he prices his goods only a small percentage lower than his competitors. He drives them off the field, he wrests from them at least part of their market, by underselling them. …

But the privilege of our capitalist is not of long duration. Other competing capitalists introduce the same machines, the same division of labor, and introduce them upon the same or even upon a greater scale. And finally this introduction becomes so universal that the price of the linen is lowered not only below its old, but even below its new cost of production.

The capitalists therefore find themselves, in their mutual relations, in the same situation in which they were before the introduction of the new means of production; and if they are by these means enabled to offer double the product at the old price, they are now forced to furnish double the product for less than the old price. Having arrived at the new point, the new cost of production, the battle for supremacy in the market has to be fought out anew. Given more division of labor and more machinery, and there results a greater scale upon which division of labor and machinery are exploited. And competition again brings the same reaction against this result. [Source]

There are exceptions to this trend. Increasing productivity only decreases socially necessary labor time for commodities if the intensity of labor required does not increase; if work becomes more intense, then more labor is done per unit of time, and this increase in labor-power expended cancels out the decrease in time taken for production. “More intensive labor embodies itself in a greater quantity of products and creates a greater value in a given unit of time, as compared with less intensive labor” [Source]. Since more value is made with more intense labor, more surplus value is made, so the rate of profit may not necessarily fall. Furthermore, advanced means of production can divide labor-power further, creating a “purely technical” division of labor; this means that workers’ tasks are simplified and specialized within workplaces (and not just between economic sectors, like the social division of labor) [Source]. This results in the cheapening of wages as each worker’s labor-power is easier to produce and therefore each worker is easily replaceable; since the total value these workers produce is the same (it is simply divided among the workers), the workers’ rate of exploitation increases, and the rate of profit may remain the same or even rise.

Still, the overall trend is for the average rate of profit to fall as productivity rises, forcing businesses with less technology to dissolve and get bought up by successful companies, and forcing the surviving enterprises to adopt the same production techniques, eliminating the superprofits of dominant businesses. This is the centralization and concentration of capital; centralization is when many small businesses are replaced by few big ones, and concentration is when these big companies accumulate large amounts of capital, of wealth producing more wealth.

Enterprises with low rates of profit (compared to the average, that is), no profit at all, or losses that keep getting outcompeted by successful businesses get bought up, concentrating capital into fewer hands and creating oligopolies and monopolies. The formation of corporations (in which multiple capitalists’ capitals are invested together) helps speed this up. That is why the petty-bourgeoisie shrinks in capitalist development, with most petty-bourgeois falling into the proletariat and with some rising. This centralization results in further capital accumulation, which causes the rate of profit to continue to fall. As banks invest into big companies, this trend only accelerates, and they must demand lower interest rates to be able to invest so much, leading to lower rates of profit for banks. Thus, overproduction encourages overspeculation, which causes further overproduction, driving the rate of profit close to zero.

The rate of profit can never reach zero, though; if it did, that would mean value ceases to exist as labor is not needed for production, eliminating the basis of capitalism. Once the rate of profit gets too low, excess products and means of production get destroyed or exported, reducing the volume of capital available and therefore allowing the rate of profit to increase again. Banks withdraw their large investments, forcing capitalists to take drastic measures to cut spending; businesses that fail must sell what they have and stop buying labor-power. In extreme cases, warfare destroys productive forces, and that lowers the amount of capital available for investment, raising the rate of profit. After this destruction of capital, the rate gets back to a safe for capitalists to start operations again, bringing recovery because of the opportunities to get high rates of profit; small businesses start up again, only to get thrown out of business in the next recession or depression (long-lasting recession).

This cycle of booms and busts, or growths and recessions, characterizes capitalism, and capitalism cannot exist without it. This inherent instability in capitalism is due to its market economics; as goods’ supplies increase irrationally relative to demand (causing overproduction), rates of profit fall, so investors withdraw capital and destroy it, causing recession and even economic depression.

It is in times of recession—with their layoffs of thousands, decreases of wages for other proletarians, wasteful destruction of means of production, deindustrialization, etc.—that workers get particularly agitated and often strike for better wages, fight for employment, and, if organized and educated properly, revolt and seize power.^[14] Without the masses engaging in organized action to attack capitalism, all spontaneous actions will fail to impact the system in the long term, and given enough time, the capitalist economy will “spring back to life” (not in any planned way, of course). It is possible to prepare for revolution when the capitalist economy is growing, but class consciousness^[15] only spreads when big capitalists become extremely rich, nearly all small business owners are proletarianized, jobs become scarce thanks to increased automation from the investments in constant capital, and the rate of profit is in decline.

There is also the fact that town and country become immensely unequal under capitalism. While their distinction originates from commodity production and the development of class society, towns become cities and get much more capital investment than the countryside; industry’s rate of profit tends to drop compared to agriculture’s rate of profit, too. The Textbook on Political Economy explains this:

Agriculture under capitalism lags behind industry, first and foremost in the level of the productive forces. Technique develops in agriculture slower than in industry. Machinery is used only on the large-scale farms; the petty commodity production of the peasantry is not in a position to use it. And the capitalist use of machinery leads to intensified exploitation and ruin of the small producers. An obstacle to the extensive use of machinery in agriculture is the cheapness of labor-power, which is caused by rural overpopulation. …

The economic basis of the antithesis between town and country under capitalism is the exploitation of the country by the town, the expropriation of the peasantry and the ruining of the majority of the rural population by the entire course of development of capitalist industry, trade and credit. The urban bourgeoisie together with the capitalist farmers and landlords exploit the many millions of peasants. The forms assumed by this exploitation are various; the industrial bourgeoisie and the merchants exploit the countryside through high prices for manufactured commodities and relatively low prices for agricultural commodities; the banks and usurers exploit it through extortionate terms of credit; the bourgeois State exploits it by means of all sorts of taxes.

The huge sums appropriated by large landowners through rent-charges and the sale of land, and also the resources collected by the banks as interest on mortgage loans etc., are diverted from the country to the town to serve the parasitic consumption of the exploiting classes.

Thus the causes of the lagging of agriculture behind industry and the deepening and sharpening of the antithesis between town and country are inherent in the very system of capitalism itself. [Source]

The capitalist mode of production is full of many such internal contradictions. These contradictions intensify as capitalism develops, so that when they must resolve, the system is destroyed. This will be discussed later.

Moving from the economic base, the capitalist superstructure exists in a way that attempts to maintain the mode of production. Capitalist ideology is commonly called liberalism. Liberalism nominally supports legal equality, liberty, and more, but these idealist concepts are hampered by the material conditions of capitalist society; liberty only really exists for the capitalist class, and the same is true for equality of opportunity (equal chance of being successful in exploiting labor, that is). The contradictions within the capitalist class led to new ideologies being created within liberalism, like “classical liberalism”, “social (or modern) liberalism”, conservatism, “progressivism” (which limits itself to supporting welfare programs for workers, not actually ending exploitation), etc. That is why in capitalist education systems, we are only taught of ideologies as being “more conservative” and “more liberal”: the capitalist class wants the proletariat to not uphold its own working-class ideology, socialism and communism, so it confuses and misleads them, saying that workers must choose within the bourgeois scope of ideology.^[16]

Capitalism actually destroys patriarchy^[17]—contrary to the beliefs of many “feminists” of today—but it maintains chauvinism^[18] in other ways to keep the proletariat distracted from issues of class. This is why chauvinism of all types exists in capitalist society; this is why capitalists do as much as they can to divide the workers and conquer them. Sexism and racism remain problems in capitalism just as they were in slavery and feudalism, though they exist in different forms. Even if certain capitalists claim to support women's rights, rights of the oppressed nations, etc., they only do this to profit from the movements, not to support them. In times of strife, capitalists try to lie to workers and channel their anger toward other workers, but many workers can and do recognize their lies and understand who their enemies are, and that is what makes revolution a possibility. This requires ideological education and effective leadership; the vanguard party takes on these roles, and we talk about it within the chapter on Marxism-Leninism.

We must remember the state’s role in capitalism. The state allows capitalist relations to exist and develop. It suppresses workers when they strike and uses laws to force them to comply; it brainwashes them with its “education systems”, media, and more; and it keeps capitalists “in line” to ensure the perpetuation of the system, punishing “rowdy” ones but keeping the richest of them happy. It may even take parts or all of the means of production for that purpose. Just as slave-owners’ states were dictatorships of slave-owners and feudal states were dictatorships of the feudal aristocracy, capitalists’ states are, well, dictatorships of the capitalist class. Capitalist states tend to be “democratic” (which is why we call them “bourgeois-democratic”) compared to feudal or slave-owning states, but democracy in any mode of production is limited to the ruling class, and capitalism is no exception; even with the “multiplicity” of parties—of which only two tend to dominate, anyway—to choose from in the most democratic capitalist countries, workers are never truly free, for they can only choose among capitalists, not workers’ leaders, and the bourgeois army, police, etc. uses armed force to ensure that this remains the case.

The contradictions of the capitalist system, most importantly the contradiction between workers and capitalists, allow for revolution to occur and for socialism and communism to develop. Capitalists’ exploitation of labor, their economic crises immiserating workers, and their bourgeois state crushing the masses necessarily generates anger among the working people, and that allows revolution to happen, destroying capitalism.

Scientific Socialism and Communism (Politics of Marxism)

Finally, we will describe Marxism’s socialist/communist ideology.^[19] Above all, Marxists seek to create a communist society, a society in which there is no state, no class, and no money. Marxism is the worldview of the working class, and the workers’ class interests are in overthrowing capitalism and having communist society. This society has not existed yet, but because of capitalism’s inherent contradictions, communism is inevitable. Unlike other communists, however, Marxists support communism based on the previous two characteristics of Marxism (that being dialectical and historical materialism). According to us Marxists, communism will develop because of capitalism’s characteristics.

Workers’ actions begin with demanding better pay for their work, i.e. higher prices for their labor-power. As capitalism tries to isolate and individualize workers to make them more vulnerable and thus lower their pay, workers then try to counteract that pressure with organization. These organizations primarily include some form of labor unions, or trade unions (or simply unions). Workers make unions to get together and coordinate action in such a way that they can force their capitalists to concede better conditions for them: higher pay, fewer hours, more safety regulations, etc. Unions can be organized by specific types of jobs (making them craft unions), specific sectors (industrial unions), specific interests, or for the overall working class (general unions). Smaller unions such as craft unions were the first types of unions to form as they dealt with smaller capitalists, but the concentration of capital eventually made workers organize bigger unions, namely industrial and general unions. Even with these unions, though, workers’ fight against capitalism remains narrow and purely economic.

To quote Marx from Value, Price, and Profit:

Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system. [Source]

As workers realize unions and strikes are not enough by themselves, they begin political struggles as well, for the state (as we explain in the upcoming subsection) is a tool for class struggle. They realize that they must organize a political party that advocates for their interests, a workers’ party. In particular, when they realize that capitalism as a society must be overthrown, they form a communist party, a party whose goal is to build communism. This party is revolutionary, and it works to educate and agitate workers. During a revolutionary situation, workers arm themselves and organize into a revolutionary army led by the communist party to seize the means of production and state power. Then, they will start the transition to communism; they will set up workers’ states, instituting workers’ democracy, suppressing counterrevolutionaries, and so on. They then use this democracy to put in place the economic policies needed to liberate themselves: expropriating capitalists and landlords, centralizing finances, providing programs to improve working and living conditions, and developing the productive forces to get rid of private property once and for all. You can read Section 18 of Engels’s Principles of Communism or Chapter Two of Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party for examples of specific policies a workers’ state would need to enact to defeat capitalism.

When private property is abolished, society progresses toward communism. The transitional period from capitalism and communism has since been defined as socialism.^[20] Under socialism, the production is planned instead of relying on the market, and the products of labor are distributed according to people’s work contributions. In Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx describes how the goods and services of society must be distributed in this earlier period. In Part I, it states:

Let us take, first of all, the words “proceeds of labor” in the sense of the product of labor; then the co-operative proceeds of labor are the total social product.

From this must now be deducted: First, cover for replacement of the means of production used up. Second, additional portions for expansion of production. Third, reserve or insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc.

These deductions from the “undiminished” proceeds of labor are an economic necessity, and their magnitude is to be determined according to available means and forces, and partly by computation of probabilities, but they are in no way calculable by equity.

There remains the other part of the total product, intended to serve as means of consumption. Before this is divided among the individuals, there has to be deducted again, from it: First, the general costs of administration not belonging to production. This part will, from the outset, be very considerably restricted in comparison with present-day society, and it diminishes in proportion as the new society develops. Second, that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc. From the outset, this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in proportion as the new society develops. Third, funds for those unable to work, etc., in short, for what is included under so-called official poor relief today.

Only now do we come to the “distribution” which the program, under Lassallean influence, alone has in view in its narrow fashion—namely, to that part of the means of consumption which is divided among the individual producers of the co-operative society. [Source]

What Marx is saying here is that the goods and services of this society are distributed by work, but a portion of them must be used to pay for a variety of necessities of society. They cannot fully be given to individual workers; obviously parts of the product must be used to replace existing means of production, get more means of production, and pay to ensure economic security from disasters and bad conditions. Parts must also pay for administration, social needs, and welfare programs for those who cannot work. This is why socialist countries have made sure to retain surplus product of labor; while the surplus product did not have the same social character as surplus value (which does not exist in socialism), it still existed in the form of “work for society” [Source].^[21] Eventually, when socialism spreads to the whole world and capitalism is fully defeated, socialist states can wither away, and their administrative functions can be passed to the people as a whole. We shall go into greater detail on how socialism transforms into communism in the section on Marxism-Leninism, namely in the topic on socialist relations of production.

Since socialism does away with the contradictions inherent to capitalism, communism lacks them. This obviously includes class contradictions, as everyone becomes part of the working people that own the means of production, but it includes other contradictions stemming from that. They include the contradiction between town and country, between industry and agriculture. Engels wrote this in Chapter 25 of Anti-Duhring, “Production”:

While water-power is necessarily rural, steam-power is by no means necessarily urban. It is capitalist utilisation which concentrates it mainly in the towns and changes factory villages into factory towns. But in so doing it at the same time undermines the conditions under which it operates. The first requirement of the steam-engine, and a main requirement of almost all branches of production in modern industry, is relatively pure water. But the factory town transforms all water into stinking manure. However much therefore urban concentration is a basic condition of capitalist production, each individual industrial capitalist is constantly striving to get away from the large towns necessarily created by this production, and to transfer his plant to the countryside. This process can be studied in detail in the textile industry districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire; modern capitalist industry is constantly bringing new large towns into being there by constant flight from the towns into the country. The situation is similar in the metal-working districts where, in part, other causes produce the same effects.

Once more, only the abolition of the capitalist character of modern industry can bring us out of this new vicious circle, can resolve this contradiction in modern industry, which is constantly reproducing itself. Only a society which makes it possible for its productive forces to dovetail harmoniously into each other on the basis of one single vast plan can allow industry to be distributed over the whole country in the way best adapted to its own development, and to the maintenance and development of the other elements of production.

Accordingly, abolition of the antithesis between town and country is not merely possible. It has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself, just as it has become a necessity of agricultural production and, besides, of public health. The present poisoning of the air, water and land can be put an end to only by the fusion of town and country; and only such fusion will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of for the production of disease. [Source]

The division of labor itself, which was born with class society, goes away in communism. Engels says this in Principles of Communism:

The division of society into different, mutually hostile classes will then become unnecessary. Indeed, it will be not only unnecessary but intolerable in the new social order. The existence of classes originated in the division of labor, and the division of labor, as it has been known up to the present, will completely disappear. For mechanical and chemical processes are not enough to bring industrial and agricultural production up to the level we have described; the capacities of the men who make use of these processes must undergo a corresponding development. …

The form of the division of labor which makes one a peasant, another a cobbler, a third a factory worker, a fourth a stock-market operator, has already been undermined by machinery and will completely disappear. Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves with the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in response to the needs of society or their own inclinations. It will, therefore, free them from the one-sided character which the present-day division of labor impresses upon every individual. Communist society will, in this way, make it possible for its members to put their comprehensively developed faculties to full use. But, when this happens, classes will necessarily disappear. It follows that society organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the existence of classes on the one hand, and that the very building of such a society provides the means of abolishing class differences on the other. [Source]

Again, this shall be discussed more when explaining Leninist theories on socialist relations of production. This section is based on the theory Marx and Engels had; the one under Leninism has not just future theorists’ theories, but the historical experiences of workers in socialist states.

When capitalists are defeated all around the world, and when all social injustices and oppressions have been eliminated, the workers’ states can wither away, and full communism can form, resolving many contradictions. All revolution are difficult, but proletarian revolutions are particularly difficult because they work against all exploitation and because they build socialist and communist economies only after their success; by studying the history of slave, feudal, and capitalist societies, we saw that feudalism emerged from within slavery and capitalism emerged within feudalism, but this is not the case for socialism/communism because capitalism’s characteristics force enterprises to be run on a capitalist basis to survive.

In communism, people take what they need and desire (for free) from a common pool since production and distribution would not require much labor (it would be very automated) and since all labor would be enjoyable (labor and leisure would exist as one activity rather than two separate actions); people would work according to their abilities and take according to their needs. Communist society is classless, but it will have other types of contradictions; it will not generate a new class society, but it could change its nature when its internal contradictions resolve themselves in some way.

Is it possible for communism to not come about after capitalism? The only way this can happen is if the capitalists find some way to ruin both the workers and themselves. As Marx said in the Communist Manifesto, “... oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on… a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” This could come about if climate change gets so bad that most people die from extreme weather, famine, etc., or it could happen due to nuclear war that capitalists cause in their chase for new markets and more profits. Nonetheless, if humanity does not go extinct, it will enter full communism due to the internal contradictions of capitalism.

Anti-communists like to claim that socialism and communism are “unfeasible” because they “do not incentivize work” and they therefore fall as people don’t get what they need, causing death and destruction. Socialism and communism do provide incentives for workers to be more productive, as we outlined; this refutes the all-too-common claim that they do not incentivize production, creating laziness. Distribution under socialism is absolutely based on work contributions. Those who innovate get better pay rates. Communism allows people to take what they need if they work according to their abilities, but it does not lead to complete equality (which is fine since absolute equality is not our goal); indeed, when people are guaranteed what they need, they have the spare time and the mental health to contribute to society in whatever way they can.

Connected to the previous idea is the notion that socialism and communism simply “do not work” or “always fail” because of “human nature”. This myth falls apart when people are naturally egalitarian, only becoming “selfish” due to social cues; the need to hoard resources simply cannot exist in communism, when goods and services are no longer commodities and so having surpluses for one’s self becomes pointless. What differentiates Marxism from other communist ideologies is that it is firmly based on a scientific, dialectical materialist philosophy and perspective of the world. It justifies the formation of communist society with the analysis of history, capitalist economics, and society as a whole, not with idealist defenses of beliefs and “rationality”. Marxist communism cannot be considered too Utopian. In Part II of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels showed that modern (Marxist) socialism is scientific:

The [Utopian] Socialism of earlier days certainly criticized the existing capitalistic mode of production and its consequences. But it could not explain them, and, therefore, could not get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad. The more strongly this earlier Socialism denounced the exploitations of the working-class, inevitable under Capitalism, the less able was it clearly to show in what this exploitation consisted and how it arose, but for this it was necessary—

to present the capitalistic mode of production in its historical connection and its inevitableness during a particular historical period, and therefore, also, to present its inevitable downfall; and

to lay bare its essential character, which was still a secret. This was done by the discovery of surplus-value.

It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labor power of his laborer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis, this surplus-value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes. The genesis of capitalist production and the production of capital were both explained.

These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, Socialism became a science. [Source]

Engels continued to show socialism’s scientific character in Part III of the book:

The present situation of society — this is now pretty generally conceded — is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. … Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces, evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie, developed with a rapidity and in a degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in its complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the capitalist mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on. Modern Socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class. [Source]

Now, to bring about communism requires class struggle, and one aspect of the class struggle is the state; we shall go over why states exist (something we briefly mentioned previously) and how workers can and must use state power to bring about communism, which is stateless.

Marxist Theories on the State

Marx and Engels wrote about the role of the state in class society. In short, the state protects the ruling class and suppresses its class enemies. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Friedrich Engels, it states:

The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it “the reality of the ethical idea”, “the image and reality of reason”, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of “order”; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state. [Source]

What Engels is saying is that the state is not simply some “abstract idea” simply thought of, as idealists would say, but that it is a material phenomenon that comes from other material phenomena. Specifically, the state develops out of class contradiction; this is evident since primitive societies with no class system have no state forces while states arose simultaneously with class conflict. The ruling class of a society constructs a state that helps maintain its power, hence why every single state is biased to the ruling class. Slave societies had states that slave-owners controlled, feudal societies had states that landowners controlled, and capitalist societies have states that capitalists control. Even if the state is nominally a multi-class state or even officially “not a state”, in practice, it is a state if it supports the interests of a powerful class against other classes.

In Part Three, Chapter Two of Anti-Duhring, Engels stated:

Society thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the state, that is, of an organization of the particular class, which was pro tempore the exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labor). The state was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But it was this only in so far as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords; in our own time, the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. [Source]

Because we are scientific socialists, we do not call for abolishing the state because it is “bad”. We see that when the proletariat fights the bourgeoisie in class struggle, it will require its own state force, one which the proletariat makes and uses for its gains, and one that will wither away. That is the dictatorship of the proletariat. As bad and scary as this name sounds, this is not a total tyranny over the people. Rather, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the democratic (and republican, since us communists are opposed to monarchy and favor a government run by representatives of the people) organization of the working-class that is used to suppress enemy classes (the capitalist class).

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a “dictatorship” in the sense that it is an authority that is in practice not limited by any laws or regulations. Capitalist states are really dictatorships of the capitalist class(es) since they can quite easily become complete tyrannies, as has happened in the past, like in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the workers’ own state and government. It allows workers to elect officials and make decisions regarding politics, economics, and society, and it allows them to resolve the internal class contradictions in their countries and the external contradictions between their state and the capitalist states near them. It lets the proletariat use its arms to deal with enemies, and it lets them control the professional army it creates to defend the state.

When Karl Marx was still alive, there was the short-lived Paris Commune; it was formed in March 1871 and destroyed in May of that year. The reason it even formed was because the working class of Paris had seized arms and rose up against the capitalist class; after overthrowing the Parisian government, they set up a dictatorship of the proletariat. However, this experiment died two months later because the dictatorship of the proletariat that did form was weak and extremely unorganized, something that anarchists^[22] would love but us communists realize it is dangerous for the working people. In “On Authority”, he states (with our emphasis):

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon—authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough? [Source]

In Part III, Chapter 2 of Anti-Dühring, he says:

The proletariat seizes from state power and turns the means of production into state property to begin with. But thereby it abolishes itself as the proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, and abolishes also the state as state. Society thus far, operating amid class antagonisms, needed the state, that is, an organization of the particular exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the conditions of oppression determined by the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom or bondage, wage-labor). … As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon the present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be held in subjection—nothing necessitating a special coercive force, a state. The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society—the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society—is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It withers away. [Source]

As we can see, Marx and Engels supported the dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary component of socialism.

Marxism-Leninism: a Qualitative Leap in Marxism

Marxism’s original development was great, but it met some challenges as capitalism developed. It also had to explain certain changes within the capitalist system, and it had to answer questions that Karl Marx did not answer a whole lot when he was alive. There were also many revisionists^[23], people who revised Marxist theories incorrectly (these revisions either lead to a failure for workers to seize power or the return to capitalism), who were posing as Marxists while holding completely wrong opinions (like certain “Marxists” who claimed that workers could peacefully develop socialism by voting).

The Marxists responsible for defending genuine revolutionary Marxism and adding on to it were Vladimir Lenin and his colleagues. Lenin was a leader of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP)^[24], and he sought to apply Marxism to the Russian Empire. Within the RSDLP, there were many internal divisions and factions. Lenin and his faction, the Bolsheviks (“the majority”), held the correct positions and opinions while the Mensheviks (“minority”) held wrong ideas. Lenin’s thoughts, ideas, and contributions are commonly referred to as “Leninism”, and Leninism synthesized (combined) with Marxism is what makes Marxism-Leninism. It was Joseph Stalin who synthesized Marxism-Leninism.

Leninism consists of the following ideas:

The conception of capitalist-imperialism as a stage of capitalism

The concept of the labor aristocracy

Theories on the state
Theorization of the vanguard party

Democratic Centralism

Defense of revolution against the rising trend of “reformists” who wanted capitalism to be “reformed” into “socialism”
Support of national self-determination
Marxist-Leninist conception of fascism
Two-stage revolution

People’s Democracy
New Economic Policy, State capitalism

Theorization of socialist relations of production

Socialism in One Country

Here, we will describe these ideas.

The Development of Capitalist-Imperialism

Marxism’s description of capitalism was, and still is, impressive. Karl Marx explained how free competition capitalism functioned, from the workplace and its relations all the way to the relations between entire enterprises within and between countries. However, around the time Marx died, which was in 1883, capitalism was starting to develop into a new stage. Rather than being free competition capitalism, it was becoming monopoly capitalism; the difference is that the former had many enterprises within each sector of the economy while the latter had few, if any, competing businesses in each sector. The dominating businesses were trusts and corporations that could easily get rid of smaller competitors; they could resolve the contradictions between big and small businesses by eliminating the small ones.

Monopoly capitalism was only part of this new stage of capitalism, though. Vladimir Lenin analyzed this in his book, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. As capitalism developed, capitalist countries were taking over new lands and exploiting their resources and labor to get higher profits. This was colonialism. The dominating countries became de facto empires, and when they finished taking over all of the world (i.e. when they each had a share of the world, and together they ruled the world), imperialism (capitalist-imperialism, as it is also called to distinguish it from other “imperialisms” of the past) had developed. In Chapter Six of Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin said:

Colonial policy and imperialism existed before the latest stage of capitalism, and even before capitalism. Rome, founded on slavery, pursued a colonial policy and practiced imperialism. But “general” disquisitions on imperialism, which ignore, or put into the background, the fundamental difference between socio-economic formations, inevitably turn into the most vapid banality or bragging, like the comparison: “Greater Rome and Greater Britain.” Even the capitalist colonial policy of previous stages of capitalism is essentially different from the colonial policy of finance capital.

The principal feature of the latest stage of capitalism is the domination of monopolist associations of big employers. These monopolies are most firmly established when all the sources of raw materials are captured by one group, and we have seen with what zeal the international capitalist associations exert every effort to deprive their rivals of all opportunity of competing, to buy up, for example, ironfields, oilfields, etc. Colonial possession alone gives the monopolies complete guarantee against all contingencies in the struggle against competitors, including the case of the adversary wanting to be protected by a law establishing a state monopoly. The more capitalism is developed, the more strongly the shortage of raw materials is felt, the more intense the competition and the hunt for sources of raw materials throughout the whole world, the more desperate the struggle for the acquisition of colonies. [Source]

Lenin summarizes imperialism’s definition in Chapter Seven:

We must now try to sum up, to draw together the threads of what has been said above on the subject of imperialism. Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist-imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly. Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system.

If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Such a definition would include what is most important, for, on the one hand, finance capital is the bank capital of a few very big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist associations of industrialists; and, on the other hand, the division of the world is the transition from a colonial policy which has extended without hindrance to territories unseized by any capitalist power, to a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been completely divided up.

But very brief definitions, although convenient, for they sum up the main points, are nevertheless inadequate, since we have to deduce from them some especially important features of the phenomenon that has to be defined. And so, without forgetting the conditional and relative value of all definitions in general, which can never embrace all the concatenations of a phenomenon in its full development, we must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features:

(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed. [Source]

During the stage of imperialism, the dominant companies of each imperialist country export excess capital to the poorer regions and countries that they control. This is done to extract profits since, under capitalism, higher rates of profit attract investments, and poorer countries have higher rates of profit due to their lack of existing capital. Labor laws are weak in poorer nations, meaning that there can be even higher profits extracted from labor. In fact, it is this imperialism that weakens revolutionary potential in the first world. Because imperialism allows capitalists to extract superprofits, they can use some of these extra profits to pay for welfare programs and other concessions that the working class fights for. That is why labor’s actions in class struggle are often reduced to strikes and joining labor unions in the imperialist countries while imperialized countries experience more intense class struggle.^[25] Those workers are more agitated and ready for revolution.

Capitalist-imperialism is the inevitable consequence and development of capitalism. Since market economies in general (and capitalist economies especially) lead to the development of oligopolies and monopolies, capitalism by definition has oligopolies the longer it lasts. Capitalism, like all economic systems, also constantly develops the productive forces, provided that its relations of production give enough “space” for them to expand, and it necessarily leads to the overproduction of goods and services during economic booms; therefore, capitalists need to export their excess commodities and capital to poorer nations. This drive causes violent conflicts between capitalists, and the proletariat and peasantry are most often the people recruited to fight these wars that do not materially benefit them in any meaningful way. (We explain this idea a little later in this section.)

Capitalists also look for higher profits, and this is why they buy raw materials and semi-finished goods from poor countries and sell finished goods back to them. That is one of the many ways that they exploit the third world (which is all countries oppressed by imperialism; the first world is the imperialist superpowers (i.e. the US), and the second is the junior imperialist countries that are themselves subject to first-world dominance, such as West Europe, China, Russia, Canada, and Japan); they buy cheap goods and sell more expensive ones, putting the third-world people into debt; even as some semi-colonies have industry, the capital needed for this industry remains in the imperial core, and the profits from its use mainly benefit the imperial core. This is another reason that the people of the third world are much more agitated and likely to revolt against their governments and their existing systems.

One way imperialism developed was through a shift in trade relations. This involves the contradiction between protectionism and free trade. Protectionism is the policy of protecting domestic capital with tariffs, or taxes on imports, and other policies reducing foreign trade; free trade is the policy of deregulating trade allowing great amounts of imports. The era of mercantilism (the transition from feudalism to capitalism) saw countries use tariffs to remain independent from dominant powers: “In England protective duties were of great significance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when competition from the more developed manufactories of the Netherlands threatened her” [Source].

In Britain’s case, industrial capital developed so much that its policy shifted from protectionism to free trade. Tariffs made British capital a sort of monopoly in Britain’s market, but free trade would also allow certain capitalists to arise as monopolists:

Britain differs from other countries where protective tariffs facilitate the formation of cartels in that monopolist manufacturers’ associations, cartels and trusts arise in the majority of cases only when the number of the chief competing enterprises has been reduced to “a couple of dozen or so.” “Here the influence of concentration on the formation of large industrial monopolies in a whole sphere of industry stands out with crystal clarity.” …

The facts show that differences between capitalist countries, e.g., in the matter of protection or free trade, only give rise to insignificant variations in the form of monopolies or in the moment of their appearance; and that the rise of monopolies, as the result of the concentration of production, is a general and fundamental law of the present stage of development of capitalism.” [Source]

Otherwise, imperialists may use tariffs not just to protect their economies from rival imperialists, but to inflate prices domestically (taking advantage of their monopoly status that way) and to super-exploit weaker countries by extracting said higher prices. Of course, these same imperialists never advocate for dependent countries to use tariffs; tariffs are a “right” exclusive to big capital alone, and small countries must accept imperialists’ growing sales of commodities and capital to them:

The fiscal policy of the bourgeois States serves as an important instrument of monopoly inflation of prices. In the epoch of free competition it was predominantly the weaker countries, whose industries needed protection from foreign competition, that resorted to high customs duties. In the epoch of imperialism, on the contrary, high tariffs serve the monopolies as a means of attack, of struggle for fresh markets. High tariffs help to keep up monopoly prices within the country.^[26]

For the purpose of conquering new markets abroad the monopolies make extensive use of dumping—the sale of goods in foreign markets at knockout prices, considerably less than the prices charged in the home market and often even below the cost of production. Expansion of external outlets by means of dumping helps to keep prices high inside the country itself without reducing production, while the losses caused by dumping are covered by charging these enhanced prices on the home market. After the external market in question has been conquered and consolidated by the monopolies, they go over to selling their goods there at high monopoly prices. [Source]

Capitalists also take advantage of semi-feudalism by developing limited industry in these systems while also exploiting the high rate of profit in agriculture (since tenant peasants and agrarian laborers do most work, and since there is little constant capital that could reduce the profit rate); this way, they hinder the development of native agricultural capitalism, hurting the native owner peasants.^[27] “Developing” countries are really underdeveloped countries that are forced to only have small amounts of industry; they exist to keep the rate of profit high. As a result, they are the most revolutionary areas in the world. In “Cuba: Historical Exception or Vanguard in the Anticolonial Struggle?”, Che Guevara declares (with our emphasis):

A dwarf with an enormous head and a swollen chest is “underdeveloped” inasmuch as his weak legs or short arms do not match the rest of his anatomy. He is the product of an abnormal formation distorting his development. In reality that is what we are—we, politely referred to as “underdeveloped,” in truth are colonial, semicolonial or dependent countries. We are countries whose economies have been distorted by imperialism, which has abnormally developed those branches of industry or agriculture needed to complement its complex economy. “Underdevelopment,” or distorted development, brings a dangerous specialization in raw materials, inherent in which is the threat of hunger for all our peoples. We, the “underdeveloped,” are also those with the single crop, the single product, the single market. A single product whose uncertain sale depends on a single market imposing and fixing conditions. That is the great formula for imperialist economic domination. [Source]

Imperialism created bureaucratic-comprador capitalism in its colonies. This is a system of capitalism born in a semi-feudal context; it exists to allow imperialists to extract superprofits, and in return, the enablers of this parasitism—the comprador bourgeoisie^[28]—enjoy privileges and profits for their “services”. It also allows feudal landlords to adopt capitalist methods to avoid being overthrown in a bourgeois-democratic revolution; therefore, it makes the interests of the feudal aristocracy and the comprador bourgeoisie the same, keeping the internal contradiction passive, not antagonistic. In “Notes on Bureaucratic-Comprador Capitalism”, the authors state:

… [B]ureaucratic-comprador capitalism is a capitalism born to two sick parents: imperialism and a backward native economic base (typically semi-feudalism). Bureaucratic-comprador capitalism arose in the world through imperialist investment into backward economic systems, leading to the development of productive forces tied completely to both imperialism and native reactionary relations of production—for example, the investment by a US imperialist bank into the landlord economy in Peru, producing companies of a comprador (foreign-dependent) and feudal (landlordist) type. The feudal landlord retains their landed titles and at the same time becomes the manager of the local branch of an imperialist enterprise. …

Bureaucratic-comprador capitalism consists of two distinct, but interrelated, sets of relations of production, which both share the same preconditions and each produce one of the two factions of the big bourgeoisie in the third-world countries.

Comprador capitalism generally appears first, as the result of imperialist investment into the non-State economy of a backward country, giving rise to a comprador bourgeoisie. …

… this comprador capital merges with the power of the landlord State, becomes bureaucratic capital (which is State-monopolistic capital) and a bureaucratic bourgeoisie emerges as the other faction of the big bourgeoisie. The class character of the old State thus changes to be a joint dictatorship of the landlord class and the big bourgeoisie, under imperialist colonial or semi-colonial domination. [Source]

This is why when communists lead revolution in the third world, they start with a democratic revolution, a revolution that does what bourgeois revolutions did in the first capitalist countries; however, instead of the bourgeoisie leading these newer democratic revolutions, the proletariat leads the way, albeit with support from the peasantry, petite bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie^[29]. In imperialized countries, the main contradiction is not between the bourgeoisie (as a whole) and the proletariat, but it is between the proletariat and its allies and the ruling classes, namely the feudal lords and the bureaucratic-comprador capitalists; this is because ever since the development of capitalist-imperialism, the principal contradiction in the world has been between the oppressed masses and the finance capitalists that use imperialism.^[30]

Imperialism led to many crimes against humanity in its innumerable wars and conflicts; this is not due to finance capitalists’ “moral failings”, but their material interests. Imperialism leads to the uneven development of countries’ productive forces; just as capitalist enterprises have always had uneven rates of development (they have unequal rates of profit, for instance), rising powers have faster levels of development while decaying ones have too much capital and must therefore try and export it, causing a chase for colonies and semi-colonies. When rising imperial powers try to seize “trophies” (subjugated nations) from existing ones, that causes inter-imperialist conflict. Lenin elaborates on all of this in Chapter Four of Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism:

Typical of the old capitalism, when free competition held undivided sway, was the export of goods. Typical of the latest stage of capitalism, when monopolies rule, is the export of capital.

Capitalism is commodity production at its highest stage of development, when labor-power itself becomes a commodity. The growth of internal exchange, and, particularly, of international exchange, is a characteristic feature of capitalism. The uneven and spasmodic development of individual enterprises, individual branches of industry and individual countries is inevitable under the capitalist system. England became a capitalist country before any other, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, having adopted free trade, claimed to be the “workshop of the world,” the supplier of manufactured goods to all countries, which in exchange were to keep her provided with raw materials. But in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this monopoly was already undermined; for other countries, sheltering themselves with “protective” tariffs, developed into independent capitalist states. On the threshold of the twentieth century we see the formation of a new type of monopoly: firstly, monopolist associations of capitalists in all capitalistically developed countries; secondly, the monopolist position of a few very rich countries, in which the accumulation of capital has reached gigantic proportions. An enormous “surplus of capital” has arisen in the advanced countries.

It goes without saying that if capitalism could develop agriculture, which today is everywhere lagging terribly behind industry, if it could raise the living standards of the masses, who in spite of the amazing technical progress are everywhere still half-starved and poverty-stricken, there could be no question of a surplus of capital. This “argument” is very often advanced by the petty-bourgeois critics of capitalism. But if capitalism did these things it would not be capitalism; for both uneven development and a semi-starvation level of existence of the masses are fundamental and inevitable conditions and constitute premises of this mode of production. As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will be utilized not for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists, but for the purpose of increasing profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries. In these backward countries profits are usually high, for capital is scarce, the price of land is relatively low, wages are low, raw materials are cheap. The export of capital is made possible by a number of backward countries having already been drawn into world capitalist intercourse; main railways have either been or are being built in those countries, elementary conditions for industrial development have been created, etc. The need to export capital arises from the fact that in a few countries capitalism has become “overripe” and (owing to the backward state of agriculture and the poverty of the masses) capital cannot find a field for “profitable” investment. [Source]

Lenin also explains how imperialism causes warfare in the Chapters, “Imperialism as a Special Stage of Capitalism” and “Critique of Imperialism” (Seven and Nine)):

… [W]hat means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for finance capital on the other? [Source]

Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, producing alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one and the same basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics. [Source]

The most powerful imperialist power of our time is the United States of America. American imperialism led to the US “intervening” to secure the profits of monopolies, no matter what excuses American capitalists gave. In his “Letter to American Workers”, Lenin attacked all of the imperialists that waged World War 1, including the American imperialists, for they caused the deaths and suffering of millions of workers and peasants, and they wanted Soviet Russia to rejoin the war (Russia left the imperialist war after the Bolshevik Revolution):

The four years of the imperialist slaughter of nations, however, have not passed in vain. The deception of the people by the scoundrels of both robber groups, the British and the German, has been utterly exposed by indisputable and obvious facts. The results of the four years of war have revealed the general law of capitalism as applied to war between robbers for the division of spoils: the richest and strongest profited and grabbed most, while the weakest were utterly robbed, tormented, crushed and strangled. …

The American multimillionaires were, perhaps, richest of all, and geographically the most secure. They have profited more than all the rest. They have converted all, even the richest, countries into their tributaries. They have grabbed hundreds of billions of dollars. And every dollar is sullied with filth: the filth of the secret treaties between Britain and her “allies”, between Germany and her vassals, treaties for the division of the spoils, treaties of mutual “aid” for oppressing the workers and persecuting the internationalist socialists. Every dollar is sullied with the filth of “profitable” war contracts, which in every country made the rich richer and the poor poorer. And every dollar is stained with blood—from that ocean of blood that has been shed by the ten million killed and twenty million maimed in the great, noble, liberating and holy war to decide whether the British or the German robbers are to get most of the spoils, whether the British or the German thugs are to be foremost in throttling the weak nations all over the world.

While the German robbers broke all records in war atrocities, the British have broken all records not only in the number of colonies they have grabbed, but also in the subtlety of their disgusting hypocrisy. This very day, the Anglo-French and American bourgeois newspapers are spreading, in millions and millions of copies, lies and slander about Russia, and are hypocritically justifying their predatory expedition against her on the plea that they want to “protect” Russia from the Germans! …

The Anglo-French and American imperialist vultures “accuse” us of concluding an “agreement” with German imperialism. What hypocrites, what scoundrels they are to slander the workers’ government while trembling because of the sympathy displayed towards us by the workers of “their own” countries! But their hypocrisy will be exposed. They pretend not to see the difference between an agreement entered into by “socialists” with the bourgeoisie (their own or foreign) against the workers, against the working people, and an agreement entered into for the protection of the workers who have defeated their bourgeoisie, with the bourgeoisie of one national color against the bourgeoisie of another color in order that the proletariat may take advantage of the antagonisms between the different groups of bourgeoisie. [Source]

American imperialism led to the genocide of Native Americans, and it caused the illegal occupations of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and other islands whose people have been exploited for the profits of monopolist and oligopolist capitalists. It has continued its attacks on the people of the world well through the 20th and now 21st centuries, including the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and more; tens, if not hundreds, of millions of innocent peasant and proletarian lives were needlessly lost in their conquests, and only a handful of parasites running the system benefited from them. While American finance capitalists have justified all of their conquests with “protecting freedom and democracy” and/or “combatting dictatorship and terror”, the people of the world know that America only protects the freedom of its ruling class and its compradors, and it promotes its dictatorship over the masses. If not workers from home, American capitalist-imperialists financed puppet groups, staffed with workers and peasants from other countries, to shed blood for money. As communists, we oppose imperialist wars and expansion, especially that of the US, and we understand that it does not benefit the workers or peasants of any country; it only benefits the biggest financial capitalists!

Today, we see that America and China are the principal imperialist countries, the first world; China claims to be socialist, but it is not anymore, and we cover this in later sections. In addition to those two imperialist states, there are smaller imperialist states, like Russia, Canada, West European countries, and Japan; these make up the second world. The other countries are imperialized, the third world; though some may be expansionist^[31], they are forced to submit to imperialists, and they are too underdeveloped and dependent to be imperialist. Of the imperialist powers, America is the strongest, and we oppose American imperialism in particular, but we cannot forget about the crimes of other capitalist-imperialist countries.

One must not make “third-worldist”^[32] errors regarding imperialism [Source]. Though it is probably true that the third world will have revolutions before the first world (it already does!), to assume that the first world absolutely cannot have revolution until the exploitation of the third world is over is incorrect. All of the world’s existing revolutionary movements—which include the revolutions in India, the Philippines, Peru, and Turkey—are in the third world, but that does not mean revolution can not happen in the first world. What the first-world revolutionaries must do is form revolutionary parties and organizations, prepare for the initiation and carrying out of the revolution (by acquiring funds, weapons, and support from the masses), and then wage an actual revolution.

And contrary to the third-worldists’ assumptions, these tasks can be completed by revolutionaries in the first world. As the article cited above says:

Even with a superficial knowledge of the US, it is obvious that there are many tens of millions of poor proletarians in the country. If you include all the forms of gross oppression – the oppression of nations, racism, sexism, chauvinism, and so on – then there are incredibly many people in the US who have a great and direct need for a new society. There are millions that have such a strong need that it has to do with their lives and health and the lives and health of their families. Are ten million «significant» as a revolutionary social base? Is it 20, 30, or 50? Or 100? Well – if it were «only» ten million, then it would make an enormous difference if a large portion of them were organized as a revolutionary movement! To place disproportionate focus on dollars per day, the way Third Worldists have a tendency to do, is nonetheless very one-sided. The revolutionary potential among the people cannot be measured exclusively in dollars. …

There exist large and acute contradictions to take hold of already, and there does not exist any other way to the dictatorship of the proletariat than to seize, develop, and maintain power through protracted people’s war. No revolutions have started with a majority immediately standing behind its banners, but all have started with somebody lifting it and fighting for it. This is our task, even here in the imperialist countries. [Source]

Third-worldists are also incorrect because they believe in supporting compradors of rival imperialist powers against the US. This is interesting because they claim to support revolution in the third world as that is where revolution is possible, but in their deeds, “supporting revolution” means supporting any movement that is ostensibly against imperialism, including movements that are simply against the current dominant imperial powers (the US firstly, but also second-world powers like the West European states). According to them, these states can “encircle” the imperialist countries and weaken them.

For example, many third-worldists support the Islamic Republic of Iran, a reactionary country that often works with Russian imperialism—it has backed pro-Russian forces in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. Russia is actually an imperialist country [Source], and continually serving it makes Iran a comprador of Russia. Russian imperialism is often against America, but that does not make it deserving of our support. We should oppose all imperialism and all reactionary states. That is why we oppose China’s expansion into Africa, Russia’s involvement in Syria, and now Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; we recognize the role of American and its allied imperialists in provoking Chinese and Russian reactions, but that does not make any of them justified.

In addition to tailing reactionary regimes and rival imperialists, third-worldists refuse to support revolutionaries in the first world because they assume the proletariat does not exist here. We shall talk about that in the subsection below.

Labor Aristocracy

Imperialism brings in superprofits for capitalists. What do capitalists use this for? They use it for many things, all of which maintain their desired mode of production. One thing they do is increase the cost of some workers’ labor-power, making them an aristocracy of labor, a labor aristocracy. These labor aristocrats are still workers, but their particularly privileged position allows them to rise to the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie or even big bourgeoisie. In “Parasitism and Decay of Capitalism”, a chapter in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin wrote (with our bolding of important text):

It must be observed that in Great Britain the tendency of imperialism to split the workers, to strengthen opportunism^[33] among them and to cause temporary decay in the working-class movement, revealed itself much earlier than the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; for two important distinguishing features of imperialism were already observed in Great Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century—vast colonial possessions and a monopolist position in the world market. Marx and Engels traced this connection between opportunism in the working-class movement and the imperialist features of British capitalism systematically, during the course of several decades. For example, on October 7, 1858, Engels wrote to Marx: “The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.” Almost a quarter of a century later, in a letter dated August 11, 1881, Engels speaks of the “worst English trade unions which allow themselves to be led by men sold to, or at least paid by, the middle class”. In a letter to Kautsky, dated September 12, 1882, Engels wrote: “You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.” (Engels expressed similar ideas in the press in his preface to the second edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, which appeared in 1892.) [Source]

In “Harry Quelch”, Lenin said (with our bolding of important text):

The historical conditions for the activities of the British Social-Democrats, whose leader Quelch was, are of a very particular kind. In the most advanced land of capitalism and political liberty, the British bourgeoisie (who as far back as the seventeenth century settled accounts with the absolute monarchy in a rather democratic way) managed in the nineteenth century to split the British working-class movement. In the middle of the nineteenth century Britain enjoyed an almost complete monopoly in the world market. Thanks to this monopoly the profits acquired by British capital were extraordinarily high, so that it was possible for some crumbs of these profits to be thrown to the aristocracy of labor, the skilled factory workers.

This aristocracy of labor, which at that time earned tolerably good wages, boxed itself up in narrow, self-interested craft unions, and isolated itself from the mass of the proletariat, while in politics it supported the liberal bourgeoisie. And to this very day perhaps nowhere in the world are there so many liberals among the advanced workers as in Britain. [Source]

The labor aristocracy is the section of the proletariat with these characteristics:

Status as skilled or professional workers: labor aristocrats have more-expensive labor-power that can be used to create more value; this includes skilled manufacturing labor, professional labor, intellectual labor, administrative/official labor, etc.^[34]
Presence in the imperial core: labor aristocrats are in countries that exploit other countries, allowing them to get even better pay; they are exploited far less
Membership of certain groups, like craft unions or guilds: this makes labor aristocrats far too self-interested, and it isolates them from the rest of the proletariat
In countries with significant racial distinctions, labor aristocrats are predominantly of the dominant “race”, i.e. the colonizing race (the white race, usually)

While the labor aristocracy often holds the ideology of the bourgeoisie, and though its members can become petty-bourgeois or even bourgeois with relative ease, it is still materially proletarian. The proletariat is the class of wage-laborers, wage slaves, sellers of labor-power; labor aristocrats primarily sell their labor-power to capitalists to earn their wages, however high they may be. So long as an employee’s wage is lower than the value they produce, they are proletarian. That is why even highly-paid workers like doctors are still workers while many Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and other higher-level managers, administrators, officials, etc. who are parasites are not proletarian, but bourgeois.

That is why the position of (some) “third-worldists” is incorrect; they assume that revolution in the imperial core is impossible until imperialist exploitation ends because, in their eyes, the labor aristocracy is petty-bourgeois or even bourgeois rather than proletarian. The labor aristocracy is proletarian, even if it is privileged relative to most proletarians. However, we recognize that radicalizing these workers is especially difficult, so we direct most of our organizing efforts to the more down-trodden proletarians. The labor aristocracy is also the minority of workers, even in the first world; it is only the very-best paid workers, especially workers who are part of craft unions.

As socialism spreads in the third world (the existing revolutions right now are in the third world), imperialists will extract less superprofits, so they will be unable to have a labor aristocracy, making the first world proletariat even stronger and more agitated for revolution. In the meantime, we will work with the lower and middle levels of the proletariat primarily, and with the labor aristocracy secondarily. To move on, we will discuss the questions of national self-determination and anti-imperialism.

The National Question (National Self-Determination)

Imperialism allows for the capitalists of the richest nations to dominate and exploit the people of poorer nations. Capitalists of the dominant nation seek to extract superprofits from poorer nations by exploiting the proletariat and peasantry and by outcompeting the local bourgeoisie and landlords and/or bribing them into being compradors. As a result, part of the anti-imperialist struggle involves the support of nations in semi-feudal areas fighting against imperialist control and the advocacy for all nations’ self-determination (self control, self rule).

Marxism-Leninism has a definition of a nation. In Marxism and the National Question, Joseph Stalin stated, "A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture” [Source]. Nations came about as capitalist relations of production evolved out of feudalism; as Stalin said in Section two of his work:

A nation is not merely a historical category but a historical category belonging to a definite epoch, the epoch of rising capitalism. The process of elimination of feudalism and development of capitalism is at the same time a process of the constitution of people into nations. Such, for instance, was the case in Western Europe. The British, French, Germans, Italians and others were formed into nations at the time of the victorious advance of capitalism and its triumph over feudal disunity.

But the formation of nations in those instances at the same time signified their conversion into independent national states. The British, French and other nations are at the same time British, etc., states. Ireland, which did not participate in this process, does not alter the general picture.

Matters proceeded somewhat differently in Eastern Europe. Whereas in the West nations developed into states, in the East multinational states were formed, states consisting of several nationalities^[35]. Such are Austria-Hungary and Russia. In Austria, the Germans proved to be politically the most developed, and they took it upon themselves to unite the Austrian nationalities into a state. In Hungary, the most adapted for state organization were the Magyars—the core of the Hungarian nationalities—and it was they who united Hungary. In Russia, the uniting of the nationalities was undertaken by the Great Russians, who were headed by a historically formed, powerful and well-organized aristocratic military bureaucracy. …

The struggle began and flared up, to be sure, not between nations as a whole, but between the ruling classes of the dominant nations and of those that had been pushed into the background. The struggle is usually conducted by the urban petty bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation against the big bourgeoisie of the dominant nation (Czechs and Germans), or by the rural bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation against the landlords of the dominant nation (Ukrainians in Poland), or by the whole "national" bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations against the ruling nobility of the dominant nation (Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine in Russia). [Source]

Each nation has a right to construct its own socialist state, according to us Marxists, but besides forming their own states, workers support “regional autonomy, autonomy for such crystallized units” that gives self-government to “definite population[s] inhabiting… definite territor[ies]” in matters that do not go against the central government [Source]. This means that “regions having special economic and social conditions, a distinct national composition of the population, and so forth” require self-government, even if they remain within a larger state; though those regions cannot go against the central government on decisions, they retain the right to secede [Source]. There is also the right to have federalism, or the arrangement in which subdivisions share power with the central government; for the national question, this would mean forming territories on a national basis, and then allowing them to have equal power to the central government within the same state. This, to Marxists, is a transitional demand that must inevitably lead either to simple autonomy or separation. Stalin wrote this in “Against Federalism”:

… [I]n America, as well as in Canada and Switzerland, the development was from independent regions, through their federation, to a unitary state [a state in which subdivisions only have autonomy]; that the trend of development is not in favour of federation, but against it. Federation is a transitional form.

This is not fortuitous, because the development of capitalism in its higher forms, with the concomitant expansion of the economic territory, and its trend towards centralization, demands not a federal, but a unitary form of state.

We cannot ignore this trend, unless, of course, we try to turn back the wheel of history. [Source]

Since federalism hinders the consolidation of nation-states, Marxists do not see it as appropriated for such states in the long run. Nevertheless, nations have the right to form federations if they please, and to Marxists, federations are useful as “a transitional form to the complete unity of the working people of the various nations” [Source]. The working class does not demand nations to form their own nation-states, and as we explain later, the working class’s interests supersede the interests of individual nations; since federations keep separate nations together and usually develop into unitary states (or split into independent nation-states that are unitary), they allow the working class to be united and to organize against capitalism at large, and they allow capitalism to develop to create a broad working class in those states.

Supporting the right of nations to self-determination, regardless of what each nation determines for itself as its fate, is an important tool against imperialism. Capitalist-imperialism violates nations’ rights to self-determination. The British Empire violated the rights of the many nations in its colonies, including the hundreds of nations in the Indian subcontinent; America violates the rights of Indigenous peoples, African-Americans, and Chicanos; and Israel violates the rights of the Palestinian nation. Therefore, the fight for self-determination is supported by Marxists. Stalin showed why the proletariat of all nations needed (and needs today) to support national movements and lead them to success:

Restriction of freedom of movement, disfranchisement, repression of language, closing of schools, and other forms of persecution affect the workers no less, if not more, than the bourgeoisie. Such a state of affairs can only serve to retard the free development of the intellectual forces of the proletariat of subject nations. One cannot speak seriously of a full development of the intellectual faculties of the Tatar or Jewish worker if he is not allowed to use his native language at meetings and lectures, and if his schools are closed down.

But the policy of nationalist^[36] persecution is dangerous to the cause of the proletariat also on another account. It diverts the attention of large strata from social questions, questions of the class struggle, to national questions, questions "common" to the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. And this creates a favorable soil for lying propaganda about "harmony of interests," for glossing over the class interests of the proletariat and for the intellectual enslavement of the workers.

This creates a serious obstacle to the cause of uniting the workers of all nationalities. …

But the policy of persecution does not stop there. It [is] not infrequently passed from a "system" of oppression to a "system" of inciting nations against each other, to a "system" of massacres and pogroms. …

But the workers are interested in the complete amalgamation of all their fellow-workers into a single international army, in their speedy and final emancipation from intellectual bondage to the bourgeoisie, and in the full and free development of the intellectual forces of their brothers, whatever nation they may belong to.

The workers therefore combat and will continue to combat the policy of national oppression in all its forms, from the most subtle to the most crude, as well as the policy of inciting nations against each other in all its forms.. [Source]

Lenin said this in Chapter 10 of The Right of Nations to Self-Determination:

As far as the theory of Marxism in general is concerned, the question of the right to self-determination presents no difficulty. No one can seriously question the London resolution of 1896, or the fact that self-determination implies only the right to secede, or that the formation of independent national states is the tendency in all bourgeois-democratic revolutions.

A difficulty is to some extent created by the fact that in Russia the proletariat of both the oppressed and oppressor nations are fighting, and must fight, side by side. The task is to preserve the unity of the proletariat’s class struggle for socialism, and to resist all bourgeois and Black-Hundred nationalist influences. Where the oppressed nations are concerned, the separate organization of the proletariat as an independent party sometimes leads to such a bitter struggle against local nationalism that the perspective becomes distorted and the nationalism of the oppressor nation is lost sight of. …

There can be no doubt that however natural the point of view of certain Marxists belonging to the oppressed nations (whose “misfortune” is sometimes that the masses of the population are blinded by the idea of their “own” national liberation) may appear at times, in reality the objective alignment of class forces in Russia snakes refusal to advocate the right to self-determination tantamount to the worst opportunism…

Even now, and probably for a fairly long time to come, proletarian democracy must reckon with the nationalism of the Great-Russian peasants (not with the object of making concessions to it, but in order to combat it). The awakening of nationalism among the oppressed nations, which became so pronounced after 1905 (let us recall, say, the group of “Federalist-Autonomists” in the First Duma, the growth of the Ukrainian movement, of the Moslem movement, etc.), will inevitably lead to greater nationalism among the Great-Russian petty bourgeoisie in town and countryside. The slower the democratization of Russia, the more persistent, brutal and bitter will be the national persecution and bickering among the bourgeoisie of the various nations. The particularly reactionary nature of the Russian Purishkeviches will simultaneously give rise to (and strengthen) “separatist” tendencies among the various oppressed nationalities, which sometimes enjoy far greater freedom in neighboring states.

In this situation, the proletariat, of Russia is faced with a twofold or, rather, a two-sided task: to combat nationalism of every kind, above all, Great-Russian nationalism; to recognise, not only fully equal rights, for all nations in general, but also equality of rights as regards polity, i.e., the right of nations to self-determination, to secession. And at the same time, it is their task, in the interests of a successful struggle against all and every kind, of nationalism among all nations, to preserve the unity of the proletarian struggle and the proletarian organizations, amalgamating these organizations into a close-knit international association, despite bourgeois strivings for national exclusiveness.

Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers. [Source]

The program of national self-determination is specifically a bourgeois-democratic one; within the two-stage revolution (something we cover a little later in this chapter) that semi-feudal and/or semi-colonial countries go through, establishing self-determination happens in the first stage. That is why it is foolish to support self-determination within fully-developed capitalist countries (except for internal colonies, which exist in the United States and Canada with the African-American, indigenous, and Chicano nations); they are nationally uniform already, and any nations that existed within their borders have formed their own states. If not that, they experienced proper national equality with their neighbors and thus assimilated into a multi-national state, a historical inevitability of capitalism that “manifests itself more and more powerfully with every passing decade, and is one of the greatest driving forces transforming capitalism into socialism” [Source].^[37] This is why “It is ridiculous to seek an answer to non-existent questions in the programmes of Western Europe,” with the exception of certain oppressed nations (such as Catalonia, Basque, etc.) [Source].

Oppressed nations’ nationalism is progressive while oppressor nations’ nationalism is reactionary; while the proletariat is internationalist and not nationalist, bourgeois nationalism has these two opposing sides, and the proletariat critically supports one side and not the other; the national bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation becomes an ally of the proletariat, something we discuss in the section on People’s Democracy and later New Democracy, and the oppressed nation’s demand for self-determination is both legitimate and aligned with the proletariat’s overall interests. But when a nation is no longer oppressed, either since it forms its own nation-state or it exists in proper equality with other nations in a multi-national state, its nationalism is no longer progressive whatsoever. One must keep this distinction in mind, and it is wrong to equate the two forms of nationalism, whether one does so by condemning both equally or supporting both as “valid”—or worse, calling for the proletariat to uphold one or both of them!

Marxists support the right of oppressed nations’ self-determination in semi-feudal and semi-colonial states, and we certainly support their rights in the long-term, even if we oppose the actions of the state currently. That is why Marxists support Kosovo; we oppose the current comprador-bourgeois regime in Kosovo, but we do not oppose Kosovo’s self-determination in the long term. If Kosovar people want to be a part of Serbia, Albania, or their own country (which they seem to want right now), that is up to them to decide. At the same time, though, we do not always encourage separatism; autonomy often satisfies the needs of nationalities. Since the program of national self-determination is subordinate to the interests of the international proletariat, we support what benefits the proletariat of the world even if that means not supporting a certain demand for separatism:

Does recognition of the right of nations to self-determination really imply support of any demand of every nation for self-determination? After all, the fact that we recognise the right of all citizens to form free associations does not at all commit us, Social-Democrats, to supporting the formation of any new association; nor does it prevent us from opposing and campaigning against the formation of a given association as an inexpedient and unwise step. …

The Russian Social-Democrats have never advised anything of the sort; on the contrary, they themselves fight, and call upon the whole Russian proletariat to fight, against all manifestations of national oppression in Russia; they include in their programme not only complete equality of status for all languages, nationalities, etc., but also recognition of every nation’s right to determine its own destiny. Recognising this right, we subordinate to the interests of the proletarian struggle our support of the demand for national independence, and only a chauvinist can interpret our position as an expression of a Russian s mistrust of a non-Russian, for in reality this position necessarily follows from the class-conscious proletarian’s distrust of the bourgeoisie. [Source]

That being said, recognize that we need to support national movements even if they are not for proletarian or even bourgeois democracy. If they truly work to weaken imperialism, they open up the space for proletarian-led revolutions, making their interests aligned with the international proletariat’s. In Chapter Six of Foundations of Leninism, “The National Question”, by Joseph Stalin, it states:

This does not mean, of course, that the proletariat must support every national movement, everywhere and always, in every individual concrete case. It means that support must be given to such national movements as tend to weaken, to overthrow imperialism, and not to strengthen and preserve it. Cases occur when the national movements in certain oppressed countries came into conflict with the interests of the development of the proletarian movement. In such cases support is, of course, entirely out of the question. The question of the rights of nations is not an isolated, self-sufficient question; it is a part of the general problem of the proletarian revolution, subordinate to the whole, and must be considered from the point of view of the whole. …

“The various demands of democracy,” writes Lenin: "including self-determination, are not an absolute, but a small part of the general democratic (now: general socialist) world movement. In individual concrete cases, the part may contradict the whole, if so, it must be rejected” [From “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up”]

This is the position in regard to the question of particular national movements, of the possible reactionary character of these movements-if, of course, they are appraised not from the formal point of view, not from the point of view of abstract rights, but concretely, from the point of view of the interests of the revolutionary movement.

The same must be said of the revolutionary character of national movements in general. The unquestionably revolutionary character of the vast majority of national movements is as relative and peculiar as is the possible revolutionary character of certain particular national movements. The revolutionary character of a national movement under the conditions of imperialist oppression does not necessarily presuppose the existence of proletarian elements in the movement, the existence of a revolutionary or a republican programme of the movement, the existence of a democratic basis of the movement. … There is no need to mention the national movement in other, larger, colonial and dependent countries, such as India and China, every step of which along the road to liberation, even if it runs counter to the demands of formal democracy, is a steam-hammer blow at imperialism, i.e., is undoubtedly a revolutionary step. [Source]

Stalin’s position is correct. We must primarily oppose imperialism, even if the alternative at the moment is a reactionary, undemocratic, and even non-republican force. By supporting the weakening of imperialism, the working class and its party can take leadership of the anti-imperialist movement to wage a democratic and socialist revolution, further pushing imperialism out of the country and fully liberating the nation. We cannot oppose national self-determination, for if we do, we take the side of imperialism.

These facts are important to consider when reading what Lenin said regarding non-proletarian fights against imperialism. He said “We will not support a struggle of the reactionary classes against imperialism; we will not support an uprising of the reactionary classes against imperialism and capitalism,” a quote “left”-opportunists use to justify their support for imperialism and to denounce all national-liberation wars as “reactionary” [Source]. They ignore that Lenin subsequently says, “once the author admits the need to support an uprising of an oppressed nation (“actively resisting” suppression means supporting the uprising), he also admits that a national uprising is progressive, that the establishment of a separate and new state, of new frontiers, etc., resulting from a successful uprising, is progressive,” meaning that an uprising for the formation of a nation-state, even if it is led by feudal lords, can be progressive and must therefore align with the international proletariat [Source].

Lenin on the State

Lenin also helped analyze and define the state as a tool that the ruling class of a society uses to dominate over other classes. The state has both organs of administration and of force, and it can have additional organs that can pretend to be democratic so that the dominated class(es) can feel that they are represented and have political power. The state is used by the ruling class to maintain the existing mode of production (particularly the relations of production within this system). Without the state, the ruling class would lose their means of production; therefore, they use force to defend their right to own means of production and exploit labor. Lenin popularized all of these ideas, though they were in Marx’s writings. In Chapter One of The State and Revolution, Lenin states:

The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable. [Source]

This means that the state is an inevitable consequence of class conflict and the antagonism between social classes of any society. That is why all societies after primitive communism have had states; they have had classes that had the exact opposite interests with one another, and the only way to keep society relatively stable was, and still is, to have the state. This was the position of Marx and Engels, and Lenin upheld this in defense of them.

Lenin discussed the state that the proletariat would have to construct once it seized power. After a class overthrows another one, the new ruling class needs to destroy the old state and construct a new one. Lenin declared that the proletariat would smash the bourgeois state, which, as stated before, is designed to preserve bourgeois relations of production, and construct a proletarian state—a state that is democratic, at least for the workers and their allies. This state would be controlled by the workers, their allies (e.g. the peasantry, petite bourgeoisie), and their representatives; its bodies, such as the military, the government, and more, would be democratically elected or at least controlled by democratically-elected workers’ representatives. The workers’ socialist state would be responsible for economic planning.

In his “Report on the Economic Condition of Petrograd Workers and the Tasks of the Working Class”, Lenin said, “The proletariat should become the ruling class in the sense of being the leader of all who work; it should be the ruling class politically” [Source]. In Chapter One of The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, he stated, “The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws” [Source].

In Chapter Four of The State and Revolution, Lenin said this:

And the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence. [Source]

Lenin was correct here; the dictatorship of the proletariat means freedom for the oppressed and oppression for the oppressors. The privileged classes, the enemies, etc. will face the total wrath of proletarian rule, the workers’ revolutionary reign of terror, the fight for political, economic, and social power. We will not apologize for it, no matter how concentrated it may be, for the bourgeoisie has ruled over us with terror for many decades. Workers that read this have nothing to fear, for we, the proletariat, will finally be free from the capitalist oppression and exploitation we have experienced for hundreds of years!

Marx already discussed the importance of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But what Lenin did was defend this important Marxist principle, expand on it (e.g. how it must have democratic centralism, which is discussed in sections below), and put it into practice when he founded the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) in 1917, after the October Revolution (a revolution he led against semi-capitalist Russia); this Russian state was a dictatorship of the proletariat, and the Soviet Union (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR), which was formed five years later, was also a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Socialism has class conflict. The former landlords and capitalists, as well as any existing ones that run their operations illegally, would still oppose the socialist system and seek to return to the old, exploitative systems that they ruled in. Furthermore, the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry would be at best hesitant allies of the revolution, meaning that there is a non-antagonistic contradiction between the peasantry and the proletariat in socialism. Lenin wrote this in “Theses For A Report On The Tactics Of The Russian Communist Party” during the Comintern’s^[38] Third Congress:

The dictatorship of the proletariat does not signify a cessation of the class struggle, but its continuation in a new form and with new weapons. This dictatorship is essential as long as classes exist, as long as the bourgeoisie, overthrown in one country, intensifies tenfold its attacks on socialism on an international scale. In the transition period, the small farmer class is bound to experience certain vacillations. The difficulties of transition, and the influence of the bourgeoisie, inevitably cause the mood of this mass to change from time to time. Upon the proletariat, enfeebled and to a certain extent declassed by the destruction of the large-scale machine industry, which is its vital foundation, devolves the very difficult but paramount historic task of holding out in spite of these vacillations, and of carrying to victory its cause of emancipating labor from the yoke of capital. [Source]

Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat is absolutely necessary in the preservation of the socialist transition to communism. Without the dictatorship of the proletariat, the old ruling class(es) would retake the means of production they previously owned, and they would ruthlessly punish the working class.

Conception of Fascism

What is fascism? To those who studied exclusively in bourgeois social studies, fascism is an authoritarian, nationalist, and chauvinist ideology. While this definition is not technically wrong, it is incomplete. It leaves out the fact that fascism is an inherently capitalist system. Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov exposed the class character of fascism in “The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism”:

Comrades, fascism in power was correctly described by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital. …

Fascism is not a form of state power "standing above both classes—the proletariat and the bourgeoisie," as Otto Bauer, for instance, has asserted. It is not "the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state," as the British Socialist Brailsford declares. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.

This, the true character of fascism, must be particularly stressed because in a number of countries, under cover of social demagogy, fascism has managed to gain the following of the mass of the petty bourgeoisie that has been dislocated by the crisis, and even of certain sections of the most backward strata of the proletariat. These would never have supported fascism if they had understood its real character and its true nature. [Source]

While this definition is correct for the most part, it does not show all of the characteristics of fascism (which is the problem with most basic definitions of important Marxist terms). In “A Short Introduction to the MLM Conception of Fascism” by Scott Harrison, the author writes:

… [T]here are important aspects of fascism that are not brought out in this definition [the definition quoted earlier], and also aspects of the definition as given here that may not fully apply to fascism as it has developed in some countries other than Italy and Germany. For example, if fascism is the dictatorship of the “most imperialist elements of finance capital”, does that mean that fascism can only exist in imperialist countries? Does it mean that there can be no fascism in a country without a developed financial bourgeoisie?

No, it doesn’t really mean those things. Those two specific things are characteristics only of fascism in an advanced capitalist (imperialist) country. In 1933 there were two primary fascist countries to focus on: Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. There were other fascist or fascist-like regimes in Eastern Europe, Japan and elsewhere, but it was German and Italian fascism that primarily served to represent the entire phenomenon. So as might be expected, there tended to be a bit too much generalization from the cases of Germany and Italy in defining what fascism is. [Source]

As we can see from the passage above, the definition of fascism previously laid out is partly correct, and it does apply to the most famous fascist countries (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy), but it leaves out some characteristics of fascism, and it also fails to include underdeveloped capitalist countries that were fascist, namely various puppet states and countries allied to the Axis Powers in Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as countries after World War Two that were brutally authoritarian and capitalist (like many Latin American military dictatorships backed by the US—which some “Marxists” differentiate from fascist states, but which were and are very similar to fascist states in their nationalism, suspension of bourgeois democracy, and rise during periods of crisis).

Fascism has these characteristics, according to the Marxist-Leninist (Maoist) conception of it:

Opposite of bourgeois democracy, another form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; bourgeois democracy allows limited dissent, and it lets the bourgeoisie have many parties, while fascism opposes party divisions and instead has a firm dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
A qualitatively more direct form of dictatorship: while even the most democratic bourgeois-democratic republics are class dictatorships, fascism represents a very violent, to-the-point form of dictatorship that openly suppresses opposition
More suppression of revolutionaries and their organizations: bourgeois democracies provide workers limited free speech while fascist dictatorships ban all proletarian organizations and arrest workers who go against the capitalist system
The role of terrorism: state terrorism is always used by the bourgeoisie as long as it is the ruling class, but fascism’s terror is especially brutal and visible. This is because fascism comes about due to the rise of revolutionary movements, workers’ class consciousness, and dissatisfaction with the capitalist system
Extreme or archetype of bourgeois dictatorship: a country could become qualitatively more bourgeois-democratic or fascist, depending on its policies and actions; a purely fascist or purely bourgeois-democratic system cannot exist, as the bourgeoisie needs both to survive

Arguably the principal aspect of fascism is that it outright replaces bourgeois democracy. Instead of being an “authoritarian” form of bourgeois democracy, it substitutes that form of state power with a new form. That is why it differs from the far-right populism^[39] that currently rules a number of bourgeois democracies [Source].^[40] At the same time, “authoritarian” leaders in bourgeois democracies do pave the way for fascism; it was president Paul Von Hindenberg, a conservative leader in a bourgeois-democratic Germany, that empowered Hitler and allowed him to replace the old state with a new fascist one. Georgi Dimitrov says such:

The accession to power of fascism is not an ordinary succession of one bourgeois government by another, but a substitution of one state form of class domination of the bourgeoisie—bourgeois democracy—by another form—open terrorist dictatorship. It would be a serious mistake to ignore this distinction, a mistake liable to prevent the revolutionary proletariat from mobilizing the widest strata of the working people of town and country for the struggle against the menace of the seizure of power by the fascists, and from taking advantage of the contradictions which exist in the camp of the bourgeoisie itself. But it is a mistake, no less serious and dangerous, to underrate the importance, for the establishment of fascist dictatorship, of the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie at present increasingly developing in bourgeois-democratic countries—measures which suppress the democratic liberties of the working people, falsify and curtail the rights of parliament and intensify the repression of the revolutionary movement.

Comrades, the accession to power of fascism must not be conceived of in so simplified and smooth a form, as though some committee or other of finance capital decided on a certain date to set up a fascist dictatorship. In reality, fascism usually comes to power in the course of a mutual, and at times severe, struggle against the old bourgeois parties, or a definite section of these parties, in the course of a struggle even within the fascist camp itself -- a struggle which at times leads to armed clashes, as we have witnessed in the case of Germany, Austria and other countries. All this, however, does not make less important the fact that, before the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bourgeois governments usually pass through a number of preliminary stages and adopt a number of reactionary measures which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism. Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory. [Source]

Bourgeois academics make all sorts of wild claims about fascism. Right-leaning propagandists say that fascism is actually “non-communist socialism” (an idea that cannot exist, according to Marxism, because socialism is by definition the transitional period toward communism), and “centrist” (really rightist, albeit not as extreme) academics correctly say that fascism is an anti-socialist ideology, but they fail to include the fact that it is the more-extreme and violent dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and they fail to explain how fascism is capitalist by definition.

Social democracy, an ideology that advocates for “welfare capitalism” and reforms within capitalism rather than socialism (and one that we explain later on in this book), is a milder form of fascism. Social-democratic leaders in capitalist states tend to support imperialism and are woefully inadequate against fascist movements; even when their parties create and support trade-union movements, these leaders tend to capitulate to the bourgeoisie, especially when that class’s power faces threats from the proletariat. Social-democratic countries do tend to have bourgeois-democratic laws in place, but they also maintain the rule of the bourgeoisie by suppressing communism and proletarian actions. Stalin called social democracy a moderate form of fascism in “Concerning the International Situation”:

Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organization of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy. There is just as little ground for thinking that Social-Democracy can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of the fighting organization of the bourgeoisie. These organizations do not negate, but supplement each other. They are not antipodes, they are twins.^[41] [Source]

Fascism is can lead to workers revolting and destroying the capitalist system; workers would be very agitated when the state would crack down on them, suppress their rights, exploit them, and protect the interests of their class enemies, the capitalists.^[42] That is why many people say that “Fascism is capitalism in decay.” (That quote has been falsely attributed to Vladimir Lenin; it is unknown who really said this.) Fascism comes around to defend the capitalist class in a society that is close to collapse from the class conflict between workers and capitalists. The workers may win, and if they do, they construct socialism, which may or may not include a form of capitalism under the proletariat’s guidance and oversight.

Vanguard Party

The working class is a large class; in capitalism, it makes up the majority of the population. As a result, it has many ideological divisions and differences. There are reactionary workers who defend capitalists and oppose working class unity; there are intermediates or “centrists”, who are partially progressive, but not revolutionary; and there are revolutionaries, who believe in class struggle. Therefore, there needs to be a party for the working class, by the working class, and of the working class. This party must lead and educate the broad masses, especially the proletariat. It must convince reactionaries and intermediates to join the revolutionary cause. The vanguard party should consist of mainly class-conscious workers, but also members of other progressive classes, and even any revolutionaries who may betray their enemy class background, as revolutionaries in the past often did. What matters is the class perspective these people have; people betraying the bourgeoisie with a proletarian perspective are fit to join the vanguard party, while workers stuck with bourgeois are not.

The workers’ spontaneous actions can be progressive and even revolutionary, but they seldom lead to any real change. The party guides that revolutionary energy toward actual goals, allowing for meaningful change—including revolution—to take place. The masses know their problems, and they may even know that the problems are systemic, but they are deliberately blocked from a theoretical understanding of their conditions; workers are overworked, made tired, and distracted with bourgeois media and ideology. Therefore, there must be a party to guide the workers, teach them, and also learn from them. Not all workers are fit to be party members; many of them are not ideologically advanced enough to lead the workers.

The masses are not stupid, and many of them see solutions to the daily problems they face. However, some members of the masses understand the systemic issues we face as well as the systemic solutions to them better than other people. These advanced people form the vanguard party, and by both taking ideas from the masses as well as using theory and their own understandings, they can come to the correct solutions so that the people can truly make progress!

As to the structure and composition of the Party itself, Lenin considered that it should consist of two parts: a) a close circle of regular cadres of leading Party workers, chiefly professional revolutionaries, that is, Party workers free from all occupation except Party work and possessing the necessary minimum of theoretical knowledge, political experience, organizational practice and the art of combating the tsarist police and of eluding them; and b) a broad network of local Party organizations and a large number of Party members enjoying the sympathy and support of hundreds of thousands of working people. [Source]

That is why we do not support the Menshevik position which supports a wide party membership; the party leads the workers, but it is not made of every worker. Rather, the party should have a good support base from the working class, and the workers should use the party for revolution; it should also unite with non-proletarian progressive organizations when possible, such as peasants’ groups, but it must maintain a proletarian ideological outlook. It should use ideas from the workers, but it should also have centralism to ensure that action takes place. Stalin explained the Bolshevik position on the vanguard party in Chapter Eight of Foundations of Leninism, “The Party”:

The conception of the Party as an organized whole is embodied in Lenin's well-known formulation of the first paragraph of our Party Rules, in which the Party is regarded as the sum total of its organizations, and the Party member as a member of one of the organizations of the Party. The Mensheviks, who objected to this formulation as early as 1903, proposed to substitute for it a “system” of self-enrolment in the Party, a “system” of conferring the “title” of Party member upon every “professor” and “high-school student,” upon every “sympathizer” and “striker” who supported the Party in one way or another, but who did not join and did not want to join any one of the Party organizations. It scarcely needs proof that had this singular “system” become entrenched in our Party it would inevitably have led to our Party becoming inundated with professors and high-school students and to its degeneration into a loose, amorphous, disorganized “formation,” lost in a sea of “sympathizers,” that would have obliterated the dividing line between the Party and the class and would have upset the Party's task of raising the unorganized masses to the level of the advanced detachment. Needless to say, under such an opportunist “system” our Party would have been unable to fulfill the role of the organizing core of the working class in the course of our revolution. [Source]

The working class (the proletariat) is generally spontaneous, so having a wide party membership will lead to disunity and a lack of action. Lenin discussed the workers’ spontaneity and how a party should lead revolutionary workers in his work, What is to be Done? In Chapter Two, “The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the Social-Democrats”, he explained:

Strikes occurred in Russia in the seventies and sixties (and even in the first half of the nineteenth century), and they were accompanied by the “spontaneous” destruction of machinery, etc. Compared with these “revolts”, the strikes of the nineties might even be described as “conscious”, to such an extent do they mark the progress which the working-class movement made in that period. This shows that the “spontaneous element”, in essence, represents nothing more nor less than. consciousness in an embryonic form. Even the primitive revolts expressed the awakening of consciousness to a certain extent. The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began… to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle. … The revolts were simply the resistance of the oppressed, whereas the systematic strikes represented the class struggle in embryo, but only in embryo. Taken by themselves, these strikes were simply trade union struggles, not yet Social Democratic struggles. They marked the awakening antagonisms between workers and employers; but the workers were not, and could not be, conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system, i.e., theirs was not yet Social-Democratic consciousness. In this sense, the strikes of the nineties, despite the enormous progress they represented as compared with the “revolts”, remained a purely spontaneous movement. [Source]

In Chapter Three, “Trade-Unionist Politics And Social-Democratic Politics”, he further wrote:

In our time only a party that will organize really nation-wide exposures can become the vanguard of the revolutionary forces. The word “nation-wide” has a very profound meaning. The overwhelming majority of the non-working- class exposers (be it remembered that in order to become the vanguard, we must attract other classes) are sober politicians and level-headed men of affairs. They know perfectly well how dangerous it is to “complain” even against a minor official, let alone against the “omnipotent” Russian Government. And they will come to us with their complaints only when they see that these complaints can really have an effect, and that we represent a political force. In order to become such a force in the eyes of outsiders, much persistent and stubborn work is required to raise our own consciousness, initiative, and energy.. To accomplish this it is not enough to attach a “vanguard” label to rearguard theory and practice.

But if we have to undertake the organization of a really nationwide exposure of the government, in what way will then the class character of our movement be expressed?—the overzealous advocate of “close organic contact with the proletarian struggle” will ask us, as indeed he does. The reply is manifold: we Social-Democrats will organize these nation-wide exposures; all questions raised by the agitation will he explained in a consistently Social-Democratic spirit, without any concessions to deliberate or undeliberate distortions of Marxism; the all-round political agitation will be conducted by a party which unites into one inseparable whole the assault on the government in the name of the entire people, the revolutionary training of the proletariat, and the safeguarding of its political independence, the guidance of the economic struggle of the working class, and the utilization of all its spontaneous conflicts with its exploiters which rouse and bring into our camp increasing numbers of the proletariat. [Source]

It is important to note that Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party’s structure, organization, secretive nature, etc. originate with the conditions of Tsarist autocracy in Russia at the time. As Lenin had said in his book, “Only an incorrigible utopian would have a broad organisation of workers, with elections, reports, universal suffrage, etc., under the autocracy” [Source]. Nonetheless, this theory is universal: even in bourgeois democracies, the principles of party organization being disciplined and stable remain important, as the workers in those countries still need their vanguard to educate them on class relations and class struggle, and they require such a party to unite their broad working-class movement for revolution. Since revolution is illegal no matter how “democratic” a capitalist state is, Leninist principles of party secrecy do apply, even if not to the same degree as in Tsarist Russia.

In Chapter Four, he distinguished between trade union organizations—which are still important in class struggle, but not organizations capable of bringing revolution—and revolutionary ones. A revolutionary vanguard leads and works with trade unions; the former is narrow and consists of the most advanced workers while the latter includes as many workers as possible.

The political struggle of Social-Democracy is far more extensive and complex than the economic struggle of the workers against the employers and the government. Similarly (indeed for that reason), the organization of the revolutionary Social-Democratic Party must inevitably be of a kind different from the organization of the workers designed for this struggle. The workers’ organization must in the first place be a trade union organization; secondly, it must be as broad as possible; and thirdly, it must be as public as conditions will allow (here, and further on, of course, I refer only to absolutist Russia). On the other hand, the organization of the revolutionaries must consist first and foremost of people who make revolutionary activity their profession (for which reason I speak of the organization of revolutionaries, meaning revolutionary Social-Democrats). In view of this common characteristic of the members of such an organization, all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals, not to speak of distinctions of trade and profession, in both categories, must be effaced. Such an organization must perforce not be very extensive and must be as secret as possible. Let us examine this threefold distinction. …

The workers’ organizations for the economic struggle should be trade union organizations. Every Social-Democratic worker should as far as possible assist and actively work in these organizations. But, while this is true, it is certainly not in our interest to demand that only Social-Democrats should be eligible for membership in the “trade” unions, since that would only narrow the scope of our influence upon the masses. Let every worker who understands the need to unite for the struggle against the employers and the government join the trade unions. The very aim of the trade unions would be impossible of achievement, if they did not unite all who have attained at least this elementary degree of understanding, if they were not very broad organizations. The broader these organizations, the broader will be our influence over them—an influence due, not only to the “spontaneous” development of the economic struggle, but to the direct and conscious effort of the socialist trade union members to influence their comrades. But a broad organization cannot apply methods of strict secrecy (since this demands far greater training than is required for the economic struggle). [Source]

Lenin explained the vanguard party’s adaptability in “Where to Begin?”:

… [T]he kind of organization we need… is sufficiently large to embrace the whole country; sufficiently broad and many-sided to effect a strict and detailed division of labor; sufficiently well tempered to be able to conduct steadily its own work under any circumstances, at all “sudden turns”, and in face of all contingencies; sufficiently flexible to be able, on the one hand, to avoid an open battle against an overwhelming enemy, when the enemy has concentrated all his forces at one spot, and yet, on the other, to take advantage of his unwieldiness and to attack him when and where he least expects it. Today we are faced with the relatively easy task of supporting student demonstrations in the streets of big cities; tomorrow we may, perhaps, have the more difficult task of supporting, for example, the unemployed movement in some particular area, and the day after to be at our posts in order to play a revolutionary part in a peasant uprising. [Source]

The vanguard party is specifically a communist party. While it is therefore the workers’ vanguard party, it may not be the only workers’ party in a capitalist country. In bourgeois democracies, communist parties must work with existing labor parties, or they must create them if they do not exist (such as in the United States). What are these parties, and what do they do? These labor parties represent “the trade union movement[s]” and “fight in the unions for amalgamation, for industrial unionism, for a more militant unionism” in their respective countries [Source]. They are mass parties, so they are larger than the vanguard parties of the workers, the communist parties.^[43] Thus, they cannot lead the proletariat like the vanguard parties do; they do not have the revolutionary qualities of vanguards, and they can have problems of spontaneity or disunity. Marx expressed the special role of communist parties in Chapter Two of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (our emphasis):

In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. [Source]

Once the dictatorship of the proletariat exists in a country, its labor party dissolves, for the trade unions join the socialist state. In contrast, the vanguard party leads the country in socialism.^[44] Its rule means the rule of the workers. Lenin described how the Communist Party ruled the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic:

In Russia today, the connection between leaders, party, class and masses, as well as the attitude of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its party to the trade unions, are concretely as follows: the dictatorship is exercised by the proletariat organised in the Soviets; the proletariat is guided by the Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which, according to the figures of the latest Party Congress (April 1920), has a membership of 611,000. The membership varied greatly both before and after the October Revolution, and used to be much smaller, even in 1918 and 1919. We are apprehensive of an excessive growth of the Party, because careerists and charlatans, who deserve only to be shot, inevitably do all they can to insinuate themselves into the ranks of the ruling party. … The Party, which holds annual congresses (the most recent on the basis of one delegate per 1,000 members), is directed by a Centrxal Committee of nineteen elected at the Congress, while the current work in Moscow has to be carried on by still smaller bodies, known as the Organising Bureau and the Political Bureau, which are elected at plenary meetings of the Central Committee, five members of the Central Committee to each bureau. [Source]

While capitalism may have multiple parties, this is only because the capitalist class is divided. The working class is very united, and its divisions can be within one party, a workers’ communist party. In “On the Relationship Between the Working Class and its Party Under Socialism” by Fred Engst, it says:

We know that internally, within a capitalist organization, such as a company or an enterprise, or those that serve the interest of capitalism as a whole, such as a standing army, there is no multiparty system. This is because the maximization of self-interest is the intrinsic nature of capitalism. Other than internally suppressing the resistance of the working class and externally engaging in imperialist expansions, there is no overriding interest among capitalists. Nonetheless, there must be a system which establishes the rules of the game for the competition between capitalists, and this system must be accepted by all. The formulation of this set of rules is the fundamental task of capitalist democracy. The whole point of a multiparty parliamentary system within capitalism is to set up a mechanism or platform for developing a set of acceptable rules of the game for the system as a whole in order to mediate between and among diverse interests, so as to avoid a life and death struggle between different capitalists, a struggle that could potentially bury the whole system. Furthermore, under capitalism there is a distinction between the so-called “public” and “private” domains.

Capitalists treat both their personal life and their control over capital as activities within the sphere of a “private” domain. Thus, according to the logic of capitalism, while political activities are within the “public” domain, economic activities (such as the operations of business enterprises and companies) belong to the “private” domain. As a result, the organizational forms of the two types are diametrically opposed. In the so-called “private” domain, i.e., within a company or enterprise, the capitalist is the king with strict dictatorial rules, while within the so-called “public” domain, i.e., the political institutions that serve capitalism and coordinate and mediate between diverse interests among capitalists, the dominant organizational form is often a multiparty parliamentary system.

Since capitalists compete with one another over markets and power, their interests are not consistent with each other. Thus, the core principle of bourgeois democracy under capitalism (under what is actually the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) is to maintain the fundamental characteristics of shareholding—that is, the principle of “one-dollar-one-vote,” in which lesser money is ruled by greater money. The parliamentary system is thus in reality a mutually restraining kind of “democracy of the dollar.” The independence between the capital interest groups determines their political independence. This is the economic foundation of the multiparty parliamentary system.

Contrary to the logic of the capitalist, the pursuit of maximization of personal interest cannot free the working class. Only through the liberation of humankind, only by destroying the system of oppression of some people over others, can the working class finally achieve its own emancipation. Thus… there is no fundamental conflict of interest within the working class.

For those concerned with the interests of the working class as a whole, the debates and arguments within the working class center around the nature of the overriding general interest of the class, not the rules of the games that allow individuals to achieve personal interest maximization. For example, during Mao’s era in China, the debates centered around the prioritization of developments between heavy industry (such as machine building), light industry (consumer products) and agriculture, or the priority on the improvement of educational standards versus popular education, and so on. In the future, on the premise of pursuing and maximizing the overall interests of the working class and broad masses as a whole, there will still be debates, such as over the safety of genetically modified food. Only by “letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend” can members of the working class achieve a clear understanding of what exactly represents the overall interests and goals for the class as a whole, and through this process the class may reach a consensus of opinions on specific questions.

Therefore, in socialism, under the state of working class rule, both political activities and all economic activities that involve mutual cooperation and coordination outside of the private life of individuals are part of the so-called “public” domain. Thus, there is no longer the need for diametrically opposite forms of organization as between political and economic activities. [Source]

The vanguard party has two roles: to lead the workers, and to educate the masses. The party must be careful in leading the workers, for it must not command them undemocratically, and it also must not hold back the workers’ revolutionary potential by refusing to guide them when they are agitated. When it educates people, it must do so by discussing peacefully and patiently. It must provide sources and theory for the masses, and it must work with the masses to develop new theories. It must also allow and welcome mass criticism of party members, lower members’ and leaders’ criticisms of higher leaders, proposals and votes from the people on who to allow into the party, etc. so that the party truly remains the vanguard of the working class.

To retain a proletarian line, the party’s method of organizing itself is democratic centralism.

Democratic Centralism

The vanguard party and other important organizations need to be organized in such a fashion that allows for debates and struggles that do not interrupt its work. This organization of the party is democratic centralism, a combination of, well, democracy and centralism [Source]. With this, the members of the organization may elect bodies with leaders, and they may vote on issues within it, but once the votes and elections end, the decisions made must be accepted. There must not be sabotage and work against the party. Criticism after the implementation of policies and after decisions have been tested is acceptable, but criticism while the policy is being implemented weakens organizational work.

Democratic elements of this include the right to debate/discuss on certain issues, to vote on these issues, to choose the representatives of lower bodies to send to higher ones, etc. Centralist elements include the mandatory support of a decision by the party once the decision is made, the opposition to rebellious factionalism, the support of an ideological line (the “party line” in a vanguard party), etc. These happen simultaneously (as in within the same longer period of time; obviously they cannot be implemented in the same second or minute). The reason for democracy is to give the proletariat power; the reason for centralism is to make sure the proletariat’s power is protected from bourgeois deviations and sabotage. Lenin upheld the necessity of centralism in Chapter Four of What is to be Done?:

We can never give a mass organization that degree of secrecy without which there can be no question of persistent and continuous struggle against the government. To concentrate all secret functions in the hands of as small a number of professional revolutionaries as possible does not mean that the latter will “do the thinking for all” and that the rank and file will not take an active part in the movement. On the contrary, the membership will promote increasing numbers of the professional revolutionaries from its ranks; for it will know that it is not enough for a few students and for a few working men waging the economic struggle to gather in order to form a “committee”, but that it takes years to train oneself to be a professional revolutionary; and the rank and file will “think”, not only of amateurish methods, but of such training. Centralisation of the secret functions of the organization by no means implies centralisation of all the functions of the movement. … The active and widespread participation of the masses will not suffer; on the contrary, it will benefit by the fact that a “dozen” experienced revolutionaries, trained professionally no less than the police, will centralize all the secret aspects of the work—the drawing up of leaflets, the working out of approximate plans; and the appointing of bodies of leaders for each urban district, for each institution, etc. [Source]

The system of democratic centralism allows the proletariat to wage line struggle. Line struggle is the conflict between the bourgeois (rightist or ultra-leftist, which is rightist in essence) and proletarian (leftist) lines within the proletariat’s organizations, principally the party; it is an expression of class struggle that surrounds ideology. In the vanguard party, there will be opportunists who go against Marxism (now Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) and go in favor of bourgeois deviations, “left” or right; opportunism is bourgeois ideology masked as Marxism, and opportunists serve the bourgeoisie by acting “Marxist” while either veering to the right of genuine Marxism—e.g. discouraging revolution, supporting imperialist warfare, etc.—or to the left—e.g. encouraging violent “revolutionary” acts when they are inappropriate, supporting policies that are too advanced for material conditions, etc. (There is a whole section of this book on opportunism and refuting its errors, and the section on revolutionary communism’s history includes a lot on the matter of what opportunism is, how it works against the proletariat, and how workers fight it.) Line struggle is usually resolved with either rectifying these errors^[45], purging the bourgeois line’s proponents, or a combination of both. The proletarian line is determined by democratic decision-making, and then the party imposes that line; those that uphold the bourgeois line must either be won over or forced to accept the decision, and that is the centralist aspect.

Because different sections of the proletariat have different views, and because of the bourgeoisie’s use of opportunists to hinder the proletariat’s movement from within, factions inevitably form within the communist party, with each faction representing a class or a stratum of a class. (Usually, it is the petty bourgeoisie that promotes factionalism.) Though this is not ideal, it is an inevitable result of the contradictions among the proletariat and among the general masses. The solution to factions’ existence is to allow them within the democratic centralist framework: let them exist during the democratic decision-making process (including during line struggle) while making all factions submit to existing rules and decisions, thereby de facto eliminating them with centralism. Here is what Lenin said on the question of factions:

A faction is an organization within a party, united, not by its place of work, language or other objective conditions, but by a particular platform of views on party questions. … Every faction is convinced that its platform and its policy are the best means of abolishing factions, for no one regards the existence of factions as ideal. The only difference is that factions with clear, consistent, integral platforms openly defend their platforms, while unprincipled factions hide behind cheap shouts about their virtue, about their non-factionalism.

What is the reason for the existence of factions in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party? They exist as the continuation of the split of 1903–05. They are the result of the weakness of the local organizations which are powerless to prevent the transformation of literary groups that express new trends, big and small, into new “factions”, i.e., into organizations in which internal discipline takes first place. How can the abolition of factions really be guaranteed? Only by completely healing the split, which dates from the time of the revolution (and this will be brought about only by ridding the two main factions of liquidationism and otzovism), and by creating a proletarian organization strong enough to force the minority to submit to the majority. As long as no such organization exists, the only thing that might accelerate the process of their disappearance is an agreement by all the factions. [Source]

Mao also made similar points about the inevitability of factions and how they are fine within the framework of democratic centralism:

Another limit is the prohibition on organizing secret factions. We are not afraid of open opposition groups, we are only afraid of secret opposition groups. Such people do not speak the truth to your face; what they say to your face is all falsehood and deceit. They do not express their real aims. But as long as they do not break discipline, as long as they are not carrying on any secret factional activities, we should always allow them to speak and even if they should say the wrong things we should not punish them. If people say the wrong things they can be criticized, but we should use reason to convince them. What should we do if we persuade them and they are not convinced? We can let them reserve their opinions. As long as they obey resolutions and obey decisions taken by the majority, the minority can be allowed to reserve their various opinions. Both within and outside the Party there is advantage in allowing the minority to reserve their opinions. If they have incorrect opinions they can reserve them temporarily and they will change their minds in future. Very often the ideas of the minority will prove to be correct. History abounds with such instances. In the beginning truth is not in the hands of the majority of people, but in the hands of a minority. Marx and Engels held the truth in their hands, but in the beginning they were in the minority. Lenin for a very long period was also in the minority. We had this kind of experience within our own Party. [Source]

While factions are usually allowed, factionalism is not allowed. Also known as sectarianism, factionalism is the tendency to produce factions or sects within a communist party and to treat contradictions among the proletariat and its allies as antagonistic ones; in other words, it makes different factions become belligerents toward each other, disrupting democratic centralism. The Bolshevik Party banned factionalism in 1921, and the Chinese communists discouraged factionalism even as factions’ existence was tolerated [Source].^[46] Stalin exposed the class nature of factionalism in Chapter Eight of Foundations of Leninism (our bolding):

In one way or another, all these petty-bourgeois groups penetrate into the Party and introduce into it the spirit of hesitancy and opportunism, the spirit of demoralization and uncertainty. It is they, principally, that constitute the source of factionalism and disintegration, the source of disorganisation and disruption of the Party from within. To fight imperialism with such "allies" in one's rear means to put oneself in the position of being caught between two fires, from the front and from the rear. Therefore, ruthless struggle against such elements, their expulsion from the Party, is a prerequisite for the successful struggle against imperialism. [Source]

In this way, democratic centralism is the only way to have real democracy. If there is sabotage against the decisions made by the majority, there is sabotage against democracy. Therefore, there needs to be centralism to protect the democratic elements of the system. To prevent the centralist aspect from becoming undemocratic and overly-bureaucratic, there is the democratic aspect of the system. This way, the two aspects exist alongside each other. Lenin displayed the dialectical nature of democratic centralism in Chapter Three of The State and Revolution when he stated this, which shows that it is democratic and centralist:

Now if the proletariat and the poor peasants take state power into their own hands, organize themselves quite freely in communes, and unite the action of all the communes in striking at capital, in crushing the resistance of the capitalists, and in transferring the privately-owned railways, factories, land and so on to the entire nation, to the whole of society, won't that be centralism? Won't that be the most consistent democratic centralism and, moreover, proletarian centralism? [Source]

In “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”, Mao Tse-Tung (now romanized as Mao Zedong) said this on democratic centralism:

What applies among the people is democratic centralism. Our Constitution lays it down that citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession, demonstration, religious belief, and so on. Our Constitution also provides that the organs of state must practice democratic centralism, that they must rely on the masses and that their personnel must serve the people. Our socialist democracy is the broadest kind of democracy, such as is not to be found in any bourgeois state. Our dictatorship is the People's Democratic Dictatorship led by the working class and based on the worker-peasant alliance. That is to say, democracy operates within the ranks of the people, while the working class, uniting with all others enjoying civil rights, and in the first place with the peasantry, enforces dictatorship over the reactionary classes and elements and all those who resist socialist transformation and oppose socialist construction. By civil rights, we mean, politically, the rights of freedom and democracy. …

Within the ranks of the people, democracy is correlative with centralism and freedom with discipline. They are the two opposites of a single entity, contradictory as well as united, and we should not one-sidedly emphasize one to the denial of the other. Within the ranks of the people, we cannot do without freedom, nor can we do without discipline; we cannot do without democracy, nor can we do without centralism. This unity of democracy and centralism, of freedom and discipline, constitutes our democratic centralism. Under this system, the people enjoy extensive democracy and freedom, but at the same time they have to keep within the bounds of socialist discipline. [Source]

What Chairman Mao said here is that the people need to have freedom in discussion and in creating ideas, and then they must be able to support or at least not oppose what the democratic processes support. Sabotaging centralism in this case is sabotaging democracy; by opposing what the majority chooses, that is opposing democracy, the rule of the majority. Therefore, to have real democracy, there must be centralism.

Is it possible for the vanguard party to make mistakes with democratic centralism? Yes, of course it is possible. The party’s line may be wrong, for the majority of the party can be wrong. This is usually not an issue, for the party should conduct adequate investigation and mass work before making decisions, but demanding perfection is idealist, not materialist. Lenin showed the need to correct such mistakes while admitting their possibility in “On Party Unity”:

It is essential that every party organization be very strict in seeing to it that the unquestionably necessary criticism of party short-comings, that all analyses of the general party line, or stocktaking of practical experience results, that verification of the fulfillment of party decisions and of ways for correcting mistakes, etc., not be submitted for discussion by groups formed on the basis of some 'platform' or other, but that they be submitted for discussion by all party members. For this purpose, the Congress directs that 'Discussion Pamphlets' and special anthologies be published on a more regular basis. Every person who voices criticism must be mindful of the party's situation, in the midst of enemy encirclement, and must also, through direct participation in Soviet and party work, strive in practice to correct the party's mistakes. [Source]

Having detailed the way workers’ organizations make decisions and carry them out, we can discuss Lenin’s defense of revolutionary politics.

In Defense of Revolution

During Lenin’s time, there were many “Marxists” who believed that capitalism could simply be reformed into socialism; Mensheviks were among these reformists. They thought that there could be elections that put socialists into power and allowed them to implement socialism from above. This was an incorrect idea; the capitalist state would suppress any socialists before, during, and after elections. Even people who call themselves “socialists” (like Bernie Sanders) who are not even genuinely socialist fail in any presidential election and cannot take power because the capitalist state limits their audience. Even if self-proclaimed socialists manage to take power, they will either have to make their policies less radical or will face threats of being overthrown.

“Democratic socialists” are a modern example of reformist “socialists”. They want socialism, or whatever they assume socialism is, but they believe it can be established by electing socialists and having reforms that weaken capitalists’ power, nationalize the means of production, and/or improve workers’ democracy. Though their belief in bourgeois “democracy” is foolish, as we shall prove in this section, we can give them “credit” for supporting socialism.

Social democracy, however, is to the right of that. It is the worst ideology coming from reformist “socialism”. (Remember that we are not referring to the RSDLP that Lenin was part of; the party was a Marxist one, but it called itself “social-democrat” to face less suppression from the Tsarist state.) Social-democrats go so far as to deny the need for us to have socialism, claiming that capitalism with welfare programs is more than enough. They will even go so far as to oppose or at least criticize “democratic socialists” for supporting, though only on paper, going beyond capitalism. They tend to believe lies against socialism, so even though they recognize capitalism’s problems for the workers, they think that the solution is some sort of “golden mean” between socialism and capitalism. Obviously, this narrative is crucial for capitalists to use to “moderate” workers’ class consciousness, so as communists, we need to refute it and promote revolutionary politics.

“Welfare capitalist” countries tend to implement their programs only during periods of heightened class struggle; when workers strike via their unions, support candidates representing their class interests, or rebel with force, capitalists use two tactics: forceful suppression (as is seen in fascism) and bribery (as is seen with “welfare capitalism” in social democracy). Thus, communists cannot support welfare capitalism as any sort of goal, especially a final goal. Remember, “social-democrats” oppose overthrowing bourgeois rule, so they are fine with the bourgeois state and its suppression of the workers, so when in power, they are not afraid to shed workers’ blood to protect capital.

In addition, “social democracies” in the imperial core rely on the imperialist superexploitation of the third world. That is why Scandinavian countries collaborate with the US’s imperialism [Source]. They steal the wealth of underdeveloped countries to keep capitalists’ profits high; it is true that capitalist-imperialists would expand into the third world regardless of their need to pay for welfare, but it does not change the fact that “social democracy” only maintains this exploitation and does not attack it.

Unions are not enough, either; they are good places to build revolutionary bases of support, but they cannot properly lead a revolution. The workers’ vanguard party must lead the revolution, and it can do so with the help of revolutionary labor unions and workers’ councils, but it cannot be put behind them. Many unions are reactionary, and their workers should be brought to the communist cause. Unions themselves often limit their actions to strikes, and those only bring concessions to the workers—concessions that can be reversed pretty easily.

Like unions, workers’ cooperatives—though “better” than traditional enterprises—cannot produce revolutionary change. That is why syndicalism is incorrect. Syndicalism is the movement believing that workers’ unions alone are enough for workers to use to take the means of production via strikes and workers seizing and directly controlling enterprises in cooperatives. This is economist^[47] and essentially reformist, even though “revolutionary syndicalism in many countries was a direct and inevitable result of opportunism, reformism, and parliamentary cretinism” [Source]. (Nationalist variants of syndicalism influenced fascist ideology, which supports the creation of “unions” between classes.) Rosa Luxemburg, a great Marxist revolutionary who was killed in 1919 by social-democrats and their fascist goons for her leadership of the German revolution attempt, criticized relying on unions and cooperatives (and thus basically refuting syndicalism) in Chapter Seven, “Co-operatives, Unions, Democracy”, of Reform or Revolution (author’s emphasis):

Bernstein’s socialism offers to the workers the prospect of sharing in the wealth of society. The poor are to become rich. How will this socialism be brought about? His article in the Neue Zeit (Problems of Socialism) contains only vague allusions to this question. Adequate information, however, can be found in his book.

Bernstein’s socialism is to be realized with the aid of these two instruments: labor unions—or as Bernstein himself characterizes them, economic democracy—and co-operatives. The first will suppress industrial profit; the second will do away with commercial profit.

Co-operatives—especially co-operatives in the field of production constitute a hybrid form in the midst of capitalism. They can be described as small units of socialized production within capitalist exchange.

But in capitalist economy exchanges dominate production. As a result of competition, the complete domination of the process of production by the interests of capital—that is, pitiless exploitation—becomes a condition for the survival of each enterprise. The domination of capital over the process of production expresses itself in the following ways. Labour is intensified. The work day is lengthened or shortened, according to the situation of the market. And, depending on the requirements of the market, labor is either employed or thrown back into the street. In other words, use is made of all methods that enable an enterprise to stand up against its competitors in the market. The workers forming a co-operative in the field of production are thus faced with the contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism. They are obliged to take toward themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur—a contradiction that accounts for the usual failure of production co-operatives which either become pure capitalist enterprises or, if the workers’ interests continue to predominate, end by dissolving. …

Producers’ cooperatives can survive within capitalist economy only if they manage to suppress, by means of some detour, the capitalist controlled contradictions between the mode of production and the mode of exchange. And they can accomplish this only by removing themselves artificially from the influence of the laws of free competition. And they can succeed in doing the last only when they assure themselves beforehand of a constant circle of consumers, that is, when they assure themselves of a constant market.

It is the consumers’ co-operative that can offer this service to its brother in the field of production. Here—and not in Oppenheimer’s distinction between cooperatives that produce and co-operatives that sell—is the secret sought by Bernstein: the explanation for the invariable failure of producers’ cooperatives functioning independently and their survival when they are backed by consumers’ organizations. [Source]

This is why revolution is needed. The working class must take up arms and, with the guidance of its party, it must seize state power, smash the capitalist system, and construct socialism. The working class and its vanguard party will inevitably fight the capitalist class and construct a socialist society. Now, there may be short-term compromises with the capitalists (to ensure the survival of the revolution), but any long-term settlement with these compromises will damage the workers’ movement.

Rosa Luxemburg said: “In this hour, socialism is the only salvation for humanity. The words of the Communist Manifesto flare like a fiery menetekel above the crumbling bastions of capitalist society: Socialism or Barbarism!” [Source] This inherently means that the working people of the world only have two choices: socialism or barbaric capitalism. Nowadays, with the rise of right-wing dictatorships and with the ongoing crises of opioid epidemics, the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and more, the workers do not even have that choice. They can only either choose socialism or extinction! Therefore, they must fight for political power, and they can seldom use electoral means for that purpose. Chapter Eight, “Conquest of Political Power”, Luxemburg wrote:

Does the reciprocal role of legislative reform and revolution apply only to the class struggle of the past? Is it possible that now, as a result of the development of the bourgeois juridical system, the function of moving society from one historic phase to another belongs to legislative reform and that the conquest of State power by the proletariat has really become “an empty phrase,” as Bernstein puts it?

The very opposite is true. What distinguishes bourgeois society from other class societies—from ancient society and from the social order of the Middle Ages? Precisely the fact that class domination does not rest on “acquired rights” but on real economic relations—the fact that wage labor is not a juridical relation, but purely an economic relation. In our juridical system there is not a single legal formula for the class domination of today. The few remaining traces of such formulae of class domination are (as that concerning servants), survivals of feudal society. …

In the field of political relations, the development of democracy brings—in the measure that it finds a favorable soil—the participation of all popular strata in political life and, consequently, some sort of “people’s State.” But this participation takes the form of bourgeois parliamentarism, in which class antagonisms and class domination are not done away with, but are, on the contrary, displayed in the open. Exactly because capitalist development moves through these contradictions, it is necessary to extract the kernel of socialist society from its capitalist shell. Exactly for this reason must the proletariat seize political power and suppress completely the capitalist system. [Source]

Lenin said in “Marxism and Reformism” that, “Reformism is bourgeois deception of the workers, who, despite individual improvements, will always remain wage-slaves, as long as there is the domination of capital” [Source]. In “Materials Relating to the Revision of the Party Programme”, he said, “Only a proletarian socialist revolution can lead humanity out of the impasse which imperialism and imperialist wars have created. Whatever difficulties the revolution may have to encounter, whatever possible temporary setbacks or waves of counter-revolution it may have to contend with, the final victory of the proletariat is inevitable” [Source].

That is why anyone who tries to abandon the revolutionary struggle and attempts to construct socialism by collaborating with the bourgeoisie is either foolish, a collaborator of the bourgeoisie, or both. Good comrades should combat reformist tendencies by criticizing them and exposing their bourgeoisie nature. We must vehemently oppose all opportunist attempts to sabotage the revolution, whether it be bourgeoisie forefronts like the DSA (“Democratic Socialists” of America, a reformist organization) or dogmatic tendencies within our own party.

Two-Stage Revolution

The two stages of revolution are the bourgeois-democratic revolution, also called the national democratic^[48] revolution, and the socialist revolution. The concept of a bourgeois-democratic revolution was not a new one from Lenin; it is simply the revolution that the bourgeoisie wages against the feudal ruling class to establish capitalism, and it is “democratic” because it abolishes the aristocratic or monarchic governments of feudalism. It is bourgeois democracy that gives the proletariat the greatest opportunity for revolution. As Stalin said, “the conditions under which it is obliged to wage the struggle: under a feudal autocracy (Russia), a constitutional monarchy (Germany), a big-bourgeois republic (France), or under a democratic republic (which Russian Social-Democracy is demanding), are not a matter of indifference to the proletariat. Political freedom is best and most fully ensured in a democratic republic, that is, of course, in so far as it can be ensured under capitalism at all” [Source].

What was new was Lenin’s idea of how underdeveloped capitalist countries would have the bourgeois-democratic revolution. In short, the proletariat—which is pretty small in underdeveloped countries, but still existent and expanding—would wage a revolution that would do what the bourgeois-democratic revolution is supposed to do. Only the workers’ leadership can bring the democratic republic needed for a socialist revolution.

With the support of the peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, and, in specific cases (see the later subsection on People’s Democracy), the national bourgeoisie, the proletariat would overthrow feudalism and allow limited capitalist development under a proletarian dictatorship with peasant, petite-bourgeois, and (possibly) national bourgeois backing. When the democratic revolution’s job is completed, the socialist revolution begins. However, because the proletariat maintains leadership in the democratic revolution, the new state that comes from it is a proletarian dictatorship; there may be two states that exist side-by-side, as there were in Russia until late-1917 (explained below), with one being proletarian and the other bourgeois, but it is important for the proletariat to take the leading role when possible.

Lenin referred to the new system as the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry; such a system sort of existed after the February Revolution^[49]. In “The Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry”, he wrote:

Indeed, is it not clear that as far as the proletariat is concerned the struggle for the republic is inconceivable without an alliance with the petty-bourgeois masses? Is it not clear that without the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry there is not a shadow of hope for the success of this struggle? … If we, the revolutionary people, viz., the proletariat and the peasantry, want to “fight together” against the autocracy, we must fight against it together to the last, finish it off together, and stand together in repelling the inevitable attempts to restore it! (It should be said again, to avoid possible misunderstanding, that by the republic we understand not only and not so much a form of government as the sum-total of democratic changes envisaged in our minimum programme.) One must have a schoolboy’s conception of history to imagine the thing without “leaps”, to see it as something in the shape of a straight line moving slowly and steadily upwards: first, it will be the turn of the liberal big bourgeoisie—minor concessions from the autocracy; then of the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie—the democratic republic; and finally of the proletariat—the socialist revolution. That picture, by and large, is correct, correct d la longue, as the French say—spread over a century or so (in France, for instance, from 1789 to 1905); but one must be a virtuoso of philistinism to take this as a pattern for one’s plan of action in a revolutionary epoch. If the Russian autocracy, even at this stage, fails to find a way out by buying itself off with a meager constitution, if it is not only shaken but actually overthrown, then, obviously, a tremendous exertion of revolutionary energy on the part of all progressive classes will be called for to defend this gain. This “defense”, however, is nothing else than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry! The more we gain now and the more vigorously we defend the gains, the less will the inevitable future reaction be able to reappropriate afterwards, the shorter the intervals of reaction will be, and the easier the task will be for the proletarian fighters who will come after us. [Source]

He also had a similar system in the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the early 1920s. We discuss the NEP after this subsection on the concept of People’s Democracy.

This being said, the class a government represents may not be the same as the class that the state represents. Stalin explained the distinction well: “Our state is the organisation of the proletarian class as the state power, whose function it is to crush the resistance of the exploiters, to organise a socialist economy, to abolish classes, etc. Our government, however, is the top section of this state organisation, its top leadership” [Source]. In the case of the USSR, the government was a workers’ and peasants’ government, while the state was a workers’ state, a dictatorship of the proletariat. This is different from the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry described above; in that dictatorship, the workers and peasants share state power, and while workers lead the peasants, the peasants also have a direct say in the state. In the latter, the state is purely a workers’ state, but the government does not antagonize the peasants; instead, it leads the peasants and acts in their interests, with a focus on the poor and middle peasants who are allies of the workers and not on the rich peasants who exploit workers. Thus, in a bourgeois-democratic revolution, multiple classes temporarily hold power together; however, as states work for one class alone, one class ends up exercising dictatorship, though it may (and probably does) assist other classes in the interest of stability.

There is a form of bourgeois-democratic revolution that develops in countries where not only the workers and peasants, but the petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie share state power for a period of time. This revolution is the People’s Democratic revolution.

People’s Democracy

People's Democracy was developed not by Vladimir Lenin, but by Joseph Stalin and other Marxist-Leninists in this period. People's Democracy and the democratic revolution that Russia had are not entirely the same, for People's Democracy needs alliance with the bourgeoisie; the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry in Russia did not ally with the bourgeoisie, and this was because the Russian bourgeoisie had a specific interest in maintaining the feudal Tsarist system. In contrast, the People's Democracies formed due to the revolutionary character of their bourgeoisie.

Not all countries have the proper conditions for a socialist revolution. Many countries are oppressed by imperialism to varying degrees, and they have feudal remnants, even those in which “Capitalist relations predominate” [Source]. Countries oppressed by fascism need wide anti-fascist coalitions (popular fronts, as described in the section titled “Three Weapons”) to defeat fascism. Therefore, the proletariat must work with a section of the bourgeoisie against the most reactionary elements of society, the feudal elements and the compradors of imperialism (and the fascists they empower). In the past, to get rid of feudalism, the national bourgeoisie revolted; today, the proletariat must lead this democratic revolution (we also talk about this in the section on New Democracy, in the section on Maoism). When this anti-fascist liberation struggle succeeds, a People’s Democracy is formed, as it empowers the working class, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and the anti-fascist bourgeoisie, with the working class leading this democracy.

In particular, People’s Democracy is the appropriate state form for countries with developing bourgeois-democratic movements. Lenin separated “Eastern Europe: Austria, the Balkans and particularly Russia… [where] the twentieth century… developed the bourgeois-democratic national movements and intensified the national struggle” from “the semi-colonial countries, like China, Persia, Turkey, and all the colonies, which have a combined population amounting to a billion… and in which bourgeois-democratic movements have either hardly begun, or are far from having been completed” [Source]. The former category of countries largely include those which developed People’s Democracy after their defeat of fascism and imperialist control; China and certain colonies eventually developed New Democracy. Thus, as we discuss in the section on that system, the theory of New Democracy is the successor of the theory of People’s Democracy, and it developed for usage in semi-colonies and colonies in particular.

Either way, People’s Democracy and New Democracy are not an opposition to any proletarian dictatorship; People's Democracy is simply proletarian dictatorship with the support of the national bourgeoisie, petite bourgeoisie, and peasantry. In “Communist Platform: The European People’s Democracies of the 20th Century: A Specific Form of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, the authors confirm this:

The emergence of the People's Democracies as new State forms of the proletarian dictatorship, socialist states in the first phase of their development, that have run through various stages and applied different measures in order to destroy the bourgeois relations of production, has a great historical and present importance.

The study of the forms in which are embodied the historical necessity and inevitability of the political rule of proletariat, in alliance with and at the head of the laboring masses for the transition to classless society is essential for today’s communists. Our task is to win over the vanguard of the proletariat and to lead the masses to the seizure of power, applying the principles of Marxism-Leninism and finding the specific forms of approach to the proletarian revolution and socialism, in accordance with the historical conditions and characteristics of each country. [Source]

People's Democracy, also called national democracy or New Democracy (there is another section in this book dedicated to that concept, which is Maoist), is the dictatorship of the proletariat with the support of the revolutionary, democratic, but also non-proletarian classes, specifically including the national bourgeoisie. People's Democracy is eventually replaced with socialist democracy (soviet democracy), which is purely a dictatorship of the proletariat with no concessions to capitalists.

New Economic Policy, State-Capitalism

The New Economic Policy in the RSFSR and USSR was a policy that allowed peasants to sell their grain and small businessmen to sell their products. We consider this to be a theoretical contribution of Marxism-Leninism because it confirms the fact that socialism cannot be built without a minimum level of developed productive forces and relations of production. Without a decently-developed agriculture and an adequate proletariat, farms cannot be collectivized and the means of production cannot be socialized. Furthermore, the USSR’s economy was absolutely in shambles because it had just won the Russian Civil War. Having to face 14 invading countries, over 20 secessionist movements, anarchists, social-democrats, “socialists”, the Bolsheviks mobilized the workers and peasants to save their state and their nations; this worked, but at a heavy cost for the economy. Hence, the Soviet government allowed peasants and even capitalists (both national and foreign) to create productive forces.

Lenin asserts this in “The New Economic Policy and the Tasks of the Political Education Departments”:

The New Economic Policy means substituting a tax for the requisitioning of food; it means reverting to capitalism to a considerable extent—to what extent we do not know. Concessions to foreign capitalists (true, only very few have been accepted, especially when compared with the number we have offered) and leasing enterprises to private capitalists definitely mean restoring capitalism, and this is part and parcel of the New Economic Policy; for the abolition of the surplus-food appropriation system means allowing the peasants to trade freely in their surplus agricultural produce, in whatever is left over after the tax is collected—and the tax—takes only a small share of that produce. The peasants constitute a huge section of our population and of our entire economy, and that is why capitalism must grow out of this soil of free trading. [Source]

Now, right-opportunists assume that as long as this system of state-capitalism^[50] develops the productive forces, it should be retained and not changed. While, in the steps toward communism, we may need to move back to a system like this when there are bad material conditions (e.g. reconstruction after war, extremely bad weather, etc.), we must try to move forward to communism as much as possible. Revisionists do not understand that, and they take the short-term achievement of high profits rather than the long-term benefit of the economic stability of socialism and the transitions to communism.

Conversely, “left”-opportunists fail to realize that the New Economic Policy and state-capitalism are necessary for socialist construction in poor, underdeveloped, and/or war-torn countries. They assume that despite the level of the productive forces, the relations of production can be advanced as much as one needs to get to communism. Of course, advanced relations of production can advance the productive forces, but only if the people can and want to implement those relations of production and if the productive forces are developed enough to sustain them.

Temporary state capitalism is only necessary for underdeveloped socialist countries. For socialism that develops in imperialist countries, it is largely unnecessary; there may be some “moderate” period where small businesses are tolerated, but full-on capitalism will never be allowed under proletarian dictatorship in industrialized countries. The NEP was needed for some development; industrialized countries have plenty of industry, and they have the wealth to create the industry that was lost due to deindustrialization, the process of exporting industrial capital from an area and replacing it with financial capital.

State-capitalist periods will take on new forms in different material conditions; more-developed countries can have more restrictions on capitalism than less-developed ones. However, the point of capitalist development is clear: to expand the industrial proletariat, create more use values, and develop industry. The proletarian dictatorship makes sure that “profitable” goods that are borderline-useless do not get prioritized over “less-profitable” but useful goods. Following this, socialism can continue developing, and we will describe its characteristics in this next section.

Socialist Relations of Production

In socialism—the transitional period between capitalism and communism—the working class becomes the owning class. The workers eventually completely own means of production, though that takes some time to achieve. The capitalist class’s means of production are taken, and the remaining former capitalists are proletarianized; in reality, there will likely be issues of illegal capitalist enterprises and people within the socialist economy attempting to exploit labor and extract surplus value covertly (issues we will discuss in the Cultural Revolution subsection, in the section on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism), but the proletarian state can deal with that by suppressing them and making their operations economically unfeasible.

Socialist economies start with two types of ownership of means of production: collective ownership and social ownership. Collective ownership is the relation that cooperatives have with means of production; these are mainly collective farms, but industrial cooperatives may exist as well when small capitalists combine their means of production into those organizations. In the USSR, cooperatives were limited to owning smaller means of production and the products of their labor, with large means of production being socially owned. Social ownership is how the state’s enterprises own means of production; since the state is a workers’ state, the entire working class owns those means of production and controls them via democratic centralism; the state may transfer certain instruments between enterprises via product exchange or even exchange for money or credit (for accounting purposes at most)—or it may simply distribute state property as needed without the hassle of moving money or products around in exchange—, but the state remains the owner of these means of production. Over time, collectively-owned enterprises merge with the state-owned ones, but that requires considerable developments in the productive forces, gradual changes in relations of production, and cultural revolutions in the societal superstructure (as we describe in the Cultural Revolution subsection).

Socialism has economic planning, not a market economy. This means that the production and distribution of goods are set by plans that are created according to data about the country’s economy. Production and distribution occur based on societal needs and the availability of resources; all sectors of the economy work together (including the state enterprises and the collective/cooperative ones), not against each other, meeting the production demands of each other and of the people. Economic planning is not perfect, but with the advancement of productive forces and relations of production, it constantly improves. Fundamentals of Political Economy (the “Shanghai Textbook”) has information on economic planning in socialism; the specific edition we cite is Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Communism^[51], Chapter Six (“The Socialist Economy is a Planned Economy”):

With the replacement of the capitalist system by the socialist system, economic conditions are fundamentally changed. Socialist production is based on a system of public ownership of the means of production, and its aim is to satisfy the needs of the socialist state and the laboring people as a whole. … Thus, the socialist state, which represents the interests of the proletariat and the laboring people as a whole, can allocate labor power and the means of production among the various sectors of the national economy—under a unified plan in accordance with the needs of the state and the people. This enables the various sectors of the national economy to develop in a balanced and proportionate manner. It is exactly these economic conditions underlying socialist production that eliminate the law of competition and the anarchy of production from the historical stage. These conditions also give rise to a new economic law, namely, the law of planned development of the national economy, which regulates social production and the development of the whole national economy. …

In socialist society, the system of public ownership of the means of production has been realized; the laboring people have become masters of society. They control their own fate and consciously begin to make use of objective law to make their own history. This conscious activity, this conscious making of history, is manifested in the process of practice as the step-by-step identification of objective laws, the formulation of plans, based on objective laws, to transform nature and society, and the achievement of anticipated results through organized activity. …

Balance is only temporary and relative, whereas imbalance is permanent and absolute. In the developmental process of the socialist economy, owing to the obstruction and disruption of bourgeois and revisionist lines, owing to the ever-changing conditions as between the advanced and the backward among various enterprises, various sectors, and various regions, owing to changes in natural conditions, and owing to the limits of people's understanding of objective things, there will still regularly arise situations in which balance and proportionate relations are upset. But, in socialist society, this kind of imbalance in the various sectors of production can be continually overcome through people's conscious activities and through regulation by the socialist state plan. …

The socialist economy requires people to regulate the various, mutually-dependent sectors of the national economy with plans so as to ensure proportionate development. [Source]

Socialist economic planning is centralized or unified planning that takes local initiatives and conditions into account. It is democratic and centralist; it has both centralized and decentralized elements in it. Ordinary working people are able to contribute to planning through local initiatives while they remain united under the centralized system led by their party. That is why all anti-communist myths about centralized planning “not working” because of the “inability to plan everything” are refuted both theoretically and in practice. The Soviet textbook on Political Economy affirms this in Chapter 30 (“The Law of Planned Proportional Development of the National Economy”):

In the planned development of socialist economy, centralized planned management of the economy, achieved by fixing the basic planning indices centrally, has to be combined with affording local bodies the necessary independence and initiative in planning production. In the work of planning it is [of] extremely great importance to take into account local conditions and specific local features. A stereotyped approach planning which ignores these specific features also ignores the requirements of the law of the planned development of the national economy. Excessive centralisation of planned management, and attempts to plan everything from the center down to the last detail, without sufficient knowledge and consideration of local conditions and possibilities lead to mistakes in planning, fetter local initiative and prevent the full utilization of local resources and of the tremendous reserves which can be found in different branches of socialist economy and in different enterprises. [Source]

Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Communism states this in Chapter Six:

To do a good job in planning work, in addition to using the basic method of overall balance, it is also necessary to observe some basic principles derived from the practical experience of planning work.

Planning work must give full play to both central and local initiative and must combine centralized and unified leadership with local initiative.

To formulate and implement a unified national economic plan, it is necessary to have a highly centralized and unified leadership. In national economic planning work, there can be no unified national economic plan if there is no centralized and unified leadership; the viewpoint of the whole situation must be promoted and excessive decentralization, under which every local unit can make its own plans, must be opposed. However, socialist centralized leadership is built on a wide foundation of democracy. Centralized leadership must be combined with local initiative. In formulating a national economic plan, the central departments concerned must find out what local opinion is, consult with local units, and formulate plans with local units. In implementing the plan, it is also necessary to allow exceptions for local conditions. These exceptions are not excuses for creating independent kingdoms but are necessary allowances that suit the interests of the whole, permit full tapping of production potentialities according to local conditions, and better facilitate the fulfillment of the national economic plan. As for the system of planning work, it is necessary to implement a system combining unified planning with level-to-level administration. [Source]

Workers’ democracy thus controls the economy. This democracy goes from controlling the state that designs economic plans down to managing the workplace democratically. This is most developed thanks to Mao’s theory of the mass line, and so most content on this topic shall be in that section, but we can quote from Chapter Three of Soviet Democracy to start it off:

No worker in a Soviet factory can go long without becoming aware of the existence of what is known as the “Triangle,” and he will find that decisions of the Triangle are made on all kinds of matters which, under capitalism, would lie within the realm of the employer and manager and nobody else. What is this “Triangle”? …

In the Soviet factory the body which discusses all questions affecting the interests of the workers is the Triangle; consisting of the manager, appointed by a [workers’] State department and responsible to it; the representative of the trade union, elected by the workers in the factory, and responsible to them; and a representative of the “Party”—that is, of the organization in the factory of the Bolshevik or Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. [Source]

Because a socialist economy relies on planning and not on market laws, profitability is not the main concern, not in the short run. Only markets with their falling rates of profit, fluctuating supply-and-demand ratios, speculating and over speculating, etc. need to worry about maximizing rates of profit and withdrawing and destroying capital in less-profitable and “unprofitable” sectors. Value still exists in socialism but it is not the primary measure used when calculating production in a socialist planned economy, so the “rate of profit” cannot govern production; prices of goods are determined by their value, but economic planning works so that deliberate increases in supply lower necessities’ prices, and luxuries’ prices are inflated with lower supplies to subsidize this production. Thus, value is simply used for accounting purposes. Instead, use value and necessity are the guidelines used in planning; whatever maximizes use value and satisfies the most needs is prioritized. Stalin explained this in Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR; in Chapter Three, he stated:

Totally incorrect, too, is the assertion that under our present economic system, in the first phase of development of communist society, the law of value regulates the "proportions" of labor distributed among the various branches of production.

If this were true, it would be incomprehensible why our light industries, which are the most profitable, are not being developed to the utmost, and why preference is given to our heavy industries, which are often less profitable, and some-times altogether unprofitable.

If this were true, it would be incomprehensible why a number of our heavy industry plants which arc still unprofitable and where the labor of the worker does not yield the "proper returns," are not closed down, and why new light industry plants, which would certainly be profitable and where the labor of the workers might yield "big returns," are not opened.

If this were true, it would be incomprehensible why workers are not transferred from plants that are less profitable, but very necessary to our national economy, to plants which are more profitable - in accordance with the law of value, which supposedly regulates the "proportions" of labor distributed among the branches of production. …

These comrades forget that the law of value can be a regulator of production only under capitalism, with private ownership of the means of production, and competition, anarchy of production, and crises of overproduction. They forget that in our country the sphere of operation of the law of value is limited by the social ownership of the means of production, and by the law of balanced development of the national economy, and is consequently also limited by our yearly and five-yearly plans, which are an approximate reflection of the requirements of this law. [Source]

Economic planning allows for the proper development of different spheres of the economy. That is how the difference between town and country narrows, as Chapter 30 of the Textbook on Political Economy says:

Fixing correct proportions between industry and agriculture is of major importance for planned development of the national economy. The proportions in the development of industry and agriculture must ensure, on the One hand, the leading position of industry, which equips agriculture with advanced technique and supplies manufactured goods to the countryside, and on the other hand, the further growth of State farm and collective farm production, so as to supply the urban population with food and industry with raw materials. …

Industry and agriculture are closely interdependent, as are, in their turn, the separate branches of industry and agriculture. Because of this, the uninterrupted development of production is possible only if there are correct proportions between the separate branches within industry—for instance, between extractive and processing industry—and within agriculture, as well as between industry and agriculture as a whole. For example, the lag in livestock farming over a long period has held up the further development of the light and food industries, and in turn the growth of livestock farming was retarded by insufficient fodder supplies, by the lag in grain farming. The Soviet State is getting rid of this disparity by a decisive improvement in livestock farming, in its sources of fodder supplies and in grain farming. [Source]

Chapter 40 goes on to show how the differences between town and country (industry and agriculture) disappear in communism; this shows the results of socialist efforts to have proper proportions in economic development:

The growth of the productive forces of socialist society will give rise to the necessity for changes in relations of production also. In the higher phase of communism relations of production will be based on uniform public or communist property in the means of production. The transition to uniform communist property requires all-round strengthening and further development of State (public) and co-operative collective farm property, and also the gradual raising of collective farm and co-operative property, in the future, to the level of public property. On the basis of uniform communist property the essential distinction between town and country will disappear. …

The abolition of the essential distinction between town and country does not in any way mean a reduction in the role of the great towns. The planned location of industry throughout the country, and the setting of industrial enterprises closer to the sources of raw materials, are accompanied by the founding of new towns. As centers of the highest development of material and spiritual culture, as centers of large-scale industry, the towns will facilitate the leveling-up of living conditions in town and country. The progressive role of the socialist town as the standard-bearer and pioneer of the latest modern scientific and cultural achievements is constantly increasing. Meanwhile the appearance of the old towns is being fundamentally changed. The purpose of the socialist reconstruction of the towns is to eliminate overcrowding and improve the health conditions of urban life by providing green belts and utilizing every modern municipal development.

Transport, too, has to play an important part in abolishing the essential distinction between town and country. Transport binds the industrial centers and agricultural districts into a single whole. The development of rail, road, water and air transport, the transmission of electric power over great distances, the improvement and widespread extension of radio and television, are all important ways of bringing town and country, economically and culturally, closer together. Thanks to these scientific and technical achievements, the rural population acquires the same opportunities for enjoying all the advantages of culture as that of the towns. [Source]

The principle of distribution in socialism is, “From each according to their work, to each according to their work,” or “contributions.” Therefore, wages are no longer prices of labor-power, but they are financial incentives and rewards for work. More skilled, intense, necessary, etc. work gets paid higher wages, and workers in general would be paid according to the quantity and quality of their output; as time goes on, the differences between skilled and unskilled work would go away (as is explained later). Workers do not receive the entire product of their labor directly, but the remaining product (the surplus product) would be used to keep the enterprises running, expand production by hiring more people and creating more means of production, and pay for healthcare, education, infrastructure, and other societal needs. In Chapter 33 of the USSR’s Political Economy book, it says:

Wages in socialist economy are by their very nature quite different from wages under capitalism. Since labor-power has ceased to be a commodity in socialist society, wages are no longer the price of labor-power. They express, not the relation between the exploiter and the exploited, but the relation between society as a whole, in the shape of the Socialist State, and the individual worker who is working for himself and for his society. …

The basic economic law of socialism necessitates the maximum satisfaction of the constantly growing material and cultural requirements of the whole of society. The emancipation of wages from the limitations of capitalism enables them to be extended “to that volume of consumption, which is permitted on the one hand, by the existing productivity of society. . . and on the other hand, required by the full development of his (the worker’s) individuality”. (Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Kerr edition, p. 1,021.) Real wages constantly rise in accord with the growth and perfecting of socialist production. The requirements of the basic economic law of socialism with regard to stimulating production and raising the well-being of the working people are given effect through the law of distribution according to work. In accordance with this law, each worker’s share in the social product is determined by the quantity and quality of his work.

Wages are one of the most important economic instruments through which each worker in socialist society is given a personal material interest in the results of his work: he who works more and better also receives more. Consequently, wages are a powerful factor in the growth of labor productivity, enabling the personal material interests of the worker to be correctly combined with State (national) interests. …

Thus, wages in socialist economy are the monetary expression of the worker’s share in that portion of the social product which is paid out by the State to workers by hand or brain in accordance with the quantity and quality of each worker’s labor.

The money wages of each worker by hand or brain are his individual wages. The source of the individual wages of the workers engaged in socialist production is the product created for themselves, and distributed according to work. However, the standard of life of the workers by hand or brain in socialist society is not determined by individual money wages alone. In addition to individual wages, large funds are allotted by the State and social organizations for the social and cultural needs of the working people, out of the product created by labor for society.

In conformity with the requirements of the basic economic law of socialism and the law of distribution according to work, the Socialist State plans the wage fund and the wage level for different categories of workers for each period of development. [Source]

In socialist society, many types of wages are used, most of which are used in capitalist society. There are piece-rate systems and time-rate systems; the former pay workers by the number of goods they produce, and the latter pay workers by the amount of productive labor time (time where they work) they contribute. Piece-rate systems are generally used in less-skilled labor that directly produces or distributes goods and services while time-rate systems are usually there for technical, engineering, managerial, administrative, and other professional labor. In socialism, individual and group contributions are recognized and appreciated with material and monetary bonuses given to those who over-fulfill production quotas, produce more efficiently, or do anything else extraordinary in their work. This makes the socialist distribution of goods and services based on the work contributions of workers.^[52]

The wages that workers get do increase as goods’ prices fall, meaning that workers’ quality of life improves as socialism develops. In Rethinking Socialism by Pao-yu Ching and Deng-Yuan Hsu, it mentions this:

State ownership and political intervention made it possible for managers of state enterprises to dissociate themselves from being the agents of capital, and thus it was a step taken in the direction of phasing out wage labor. Workers in state enterprises had permanent employment status, an eight-hour day, and an eight-grade wage scale. They received medical benefits; subsidized food, housing^[53] and child care. Workers were also entitled to paid maternity and sick leaves, pension and other benefits for retirement. [Source]

There are low or no taxes in socialist society. In “No Personal Income Tax in China”, an article in the Peking Review (an Chinese English-language magazine reflecting the CPC’s views, which were the masses’ views when China was truly socialist), it says:

In socialist countries under the dictatorship of the proletariat, state power is in the hands of the working people. The revenue depends mainly on the growth of socialist production, taxes in these countries do not affect the income of the working people. Because they are used to develop socialist economy and culture, they promote the welfare for the working people and serve to consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat. …

A distinctive feature of China's tax system is that no personal income tax has ever been levied since liberation. Working people in both the cities and the countryside do not pay taxes on their wages or other income from labor. Most of the Chinese youth do not know that it is necessary to pay “income tax.” Naturally they are surprised to learn that workers in many countries of the world have to pay taxes after they receive their wages. …

The founding of New China has changed the nature of the state power; the nature of taxation has also fundamentally changed. In accordance with Chairman Mao's instruction “Lighten the burdens” of the people, New China has first of all abolished the exorbitant taxes and miscellaneous levies instituted by the Kuomintang^[54] reactionaries, established a nationally unified new tax system and particularly abolished the personal income tax. Workers' wage income… [is] placed entirely at their own disposal. Even writers, actors or actresses and others who receive relatively high wages do not pay personal income tax. This is inconceivable to the people living in the capitalist countries. [Source]

An Outline of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania says:

In the structure and application of its whole policy of taxation on the population, the Party of Labour of Albania has always been aware that taxation is a temporary historical category. Therefore, step by step and with great care, it prepared the necessary conditions for eliminating it. On November 8, 1969, a measure of great importance was taken for the total abolition of the system of direct taxation on the population.

This measure is connected with the extension of the sphere of the establishment of socialist relations in production and with the rapid development of the productive forces of the country. Thus the specific weight of taxes and levies from the population in the total income of the state budget during the 1945–46 financial year (the first year after liberation) was 92 per cent; in 1950 it fell to 12.6 per cent; in 1960 it fell to 2.7 per cent and in 1969 to 0.1 per cent. [Source]

Socialism slowly eliminates material incentives for work, especially as the division of labor fades away; the divides between mental and manual labor, city and countryside, etc. go away as commodity production is replaced with products-exchange (exchanging products without the medium of money)^[55] and then production solely for use value (in which case there would be no exchange of products necessarily, but each commune would be able to produce or freely obtain all that it needs). In addition, the superstructure develops and changes, so people’s mentalities change; moral incentives, therefore, are used more and more. These changes happen gradually as well as in qualitative leaps, like in cultural revolutions. Further, as goods’ prices fall with the advance of the socialist transition and with the development of productive forces, the differences in pay scales become more obsolete. Eventually, when communism can fully be established, payments themselves will no longer be needed, and goods will be distributed by need. The reason we cannot maintain “to each according to their work” indefinitely is that we seek to eliminate bourgeois right^[56]. Marx wrote about this in Critique of the Gotha Program; he said:

[In socialism, the lower stage of communism]… the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is [the] exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

Hence, equal right here is still in principle–bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case.

In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. … Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. [Source]

Socialism leads to the fading away of classes as a whole, and so communism can form. Communism is classless, so everyone has the same relations of production. It is stateless, too, since the state is a tool that the ruling class uses to suppress other classes. It has no money, because commodity production is eliminated; people produce things for use, not exchange; production and distribution are also very efficient and require little labor. The division of labor itself fades away, ending the contradiction between mental and manual labor. Since more and more goods get subsidized by people’s labor, eventually, all goods and services would be available for people to freely take.

All this theory is about what will exist when the proletariat finally wins against capital, when the class contradiction from capitalism is resolved, and thus when the class system itself ends. But what happens when the proletariat’s struggle has just begun, when it has conquered state power in one country? That is what this subsection will explain.

Socialism in One Country

Socialism in one country is a concept that Lenin formulated. (Marx and Engels even hinted at it^[57], but it was Lenin and Stalin that solidified the theory against “left”-opportunist deviations.) Socialism can be constructed in one country, contrary to the idea that the revolution must be spread to the whole world before socialism is actually constructed and its relations of productions are established. While many Marxists believed in the second idea, it soon proved to be incorrect; revolutions in the European countries—including in Germany and Hungary—had failed because of bourgeois reaction toward them and due to errors in practice, so the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and other nearby soviet republics were by themselves. Trying to force socialism into other countries through military intervention would lead to a united bourgeois attack on the USSR. Here is what Lenin said in his text, “On the Slogan for a United States of Europe”, which focused on how divisions between imperialists prevented them from unifying to plunder the world:

A United States of the World (not of Europe alone) is the state form of the unification and freedom of nations which we associate with socialism—about the total disappearance of the state, including the democratic. As a separate slogan, however, the slogan of a United States of the World would hardly be a correct one, first, because it merges with socialism; second, because it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others.

Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organizing their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world—the capitalist world—attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even armed force against the exploiting classes and their states. The political form of a society wherein the proletariat is victorious in overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be a democratic republic, which will more and more concentrate the forces of the proletariat of a given nation or nations, in the struggle against states that have not yet gone over to socialism. The abolition of classes is impossible without a dictatorship of the oppressed class, of the proletariat. A free union of nations in socialism is impossible without a more or less prolonged and stubborn struggle of the socialist republics against the backward states. [Source]

Leon Trotsky^[58] opposed Stalin’s plans. Despite initially opposing the New Economic Policy and wanting to collectivize agriculture as fast as possible, he soon opposed Stalin’s plan to collectivize agriculture and begin socialist industrialization, claiming that it was impossible without foreign support from any richer socialist state (such as what Germany would have been if its revolution succeeded). Stalin, and the USSR’s proletariat and peasantry, proved Trotsky wrong; they industrialized and developed the Soviet economy in 10 years, becoming a powerhouse only behind the capitalist-imperialist US, albeit at big economic and human costs that we explain in the section called “Experiences of Marxism-Leninism”. Chapter Three of Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend says:

Moreover, affirming that socialism could be achieved in one (large) country, Stalin gave new dignity and identity to the Russian nation, thus overcoming the frightening crisis—ideological but also economic—suffered after the defeat and chaos of the First World War, to find historical continuity at last. But for that very reason his adversaries denounced him for “treason”, while for Stalin and his supporters the traitors were those who, with their adventurism^[59], facilitated the intervention of foreign powers, and in the last analysis, put in danger the survival of the Russian nation that was at this time the vanguard of the revolutionary cause. [Source]

In Chapter Three of Foundations of Leninism, Stalin said:

Formerly, the victory of the revolution in one country was considered impossible, on the assumption that it would require the combined action of the proletarians of all or at least of a majority of the advanced countries to achieve victory over the bourgeoisie. Now this point of view no longer fits in with the facts. Now we must proceed from the possibility of such a victory, for the uneven and spasmodic character of the development of the various capitalist countries under the conditions of imperialism, the development within imperialism of catastrophic contradictions leading to inevitable wars, the growth of the revolutionary movement in all countries of the world-all this leads, not only to the possibility, but also to the necessity of the victory of the proletariat in individual countries. The history of the revolution in Russia is direct proof of this. At the same time, however, it must be borne in mind that the overthrow of the bourgeoisie can be successfully accomplished only when certain absolutely necessary conditions exist, in the absence of which there can be even no question of the proletariat taking power. …

But the overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and establishment of the power of the proletariat in one country does not yet mean that the complete victory of socialism has been ensured. After consolidating its power and leading the peasantry in its wake the proletariat of the victorious country can and must build a socialist society. But does this mean that it will thereby achieve the complete and final victory of socialism, i.e., does it mean that with the forces of only one country it can finally consolidate socialism and fully guarantee that country against intervention and, consequently, also against restoration? No, it does not. For this the victory of the revolution in at least several countries is needed. Therefore, the development and support of the revolution in other countries is an essential task of the victorious revolution. Therefore, the revolution which has been victorious in one country must regard itself not as a self-sufficient entity, but as an aid, as a means for hastening the victory of the proletariat in other countries. [Source]

In The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists, he stated:

It goes without saying that for the complete victory of socialism, for a complete guarantee against the restoration of the old order, the united efforts of the proletarians of several countries are necessary. It goes without saying that, without the support given to our revolution by the proletariat of Europe, the proletariat of Russia could not have held out against the general onslaught, just as without the support given by the revolution in Russia to the revolutionary movement in the West the latter could not have developed at the pace at which it has begun to develop since the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia. It goes without saying that we need support. But what does support of our revolution by the West-European proletariat imply? Is not the sympathy of the European workers for our revolution, their readiness to thwart the imperialists' plans of intervention—is not all this support, real assistance? Unquestionably it is. Without such support, without such assistance, not only from the European workers but also from the colonial and dependent countries, the proletarian dictatorship in Russia would have been hard pressed. Up to now, has this sympathy and this assistance, coupled with the might of our Red Army and the readiness of the workers and peasants of Russia to defend their socialist fatherland to the last—has all this been sufficient to beat off the attacks of the imperialists and to win us the necessary conditions for the serious work of construction? Yes, it has been sufficient. Is this sympathy growing stronger, or is it waning? Unquestionably, it is growing stronger. Hence, have we favorable conditions, not only for pushing on with the organizing of socialist economy, but also, in our turn, for giving support to the West-European workers and to the oppressed peoples of the East? Yes, we have. This is eloquently proved by the seven years history of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia. Can it be denied that a mighty wave of labor enthusiasm has already risen in our country? No, it cannot be denied. [Source]

As we can see, Stalin’s goal was not to hinder the revolution, but promote it. The USSR would eventually come to spread socialism in other countries because that is what socialist countries seek to do in the long run (even if at first they refuse to do so because they cannot). However, the country did not try to force socialism on others; it aided people’s existing struggles for socialism, ensuring that it would only develop in the proper material conditions. We can learn from this, for when a new socialist state forms, it will probably have to build socialism at home before it spreads the revolution.

Of course, since socialism in one country is not ideal at all, we must briefly explain the theoretical challenges that arose with building socialism in the USSR. As explained in the section above in a footnote, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin did not initially view socialism as having commodity production, the production of goods and services for exchange (usually exchange for money), because commodity production inevitably develops into capitalism even as it itself is not necessarily capitalist. They saw that after the workers’ state forms, it must make the changes needed to get rid of capitalist relations of production, and these included money relations and commodity production. At the same time, they knew historical materialism, so they understood that commodity production was a historical inevitability in countries like Russia at the time; they hoped that revolutions in Europe would succeed to provide economic aid so that, after their brief phase of state-capitalism, they could go into socialism without commodity production. Once the revolutions failed, and the USSR stood alone, what could it do? As a workers’ state, it had to mobilize the working class and build socialism in its basic form alone; it did so well for its time, for it developed the relations of production socialism has, and it maintained a proletarian dictatorship for decades. That historical experience proves that socialism can exist in one country, and it refutes the theoretical “attacks” on this fact.

Now we can go into Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the highest development of Marxism, for we have covered all of the most important theories of Marxism-Leninism. As we will later see, Marxist-Leninist socialist states and parties faced problems in theory and in practice, so Marxism-Leninism-Maoism was developed to solve them using the ideas of Mao Zedong, summed up as Mao Zedong Thought (Marxism-Leninism applied to China).

Marxism-Leninism-Maoism: the Highest Development of Communism

Just as “original” Marxism was great in its time, “original” Marxism-Leninism was important in its time. It liberated the workers and peasants within the Russian Empire, semi-feudal China, and Albania. However, like Marxism, Marxism-Leninism had to develop as the world pushed forward. Mao Zedong’s theories were tried outside of China, namely in the Philippines (by the Communist Party of the Philippines, CPP), India (by the Communist Party of India (Maoist), CPI (Maoist)), Turkey (Communist Party of Turkey/Marxist-Leninist (TKP/ML) and Maoist Communist Party (MKP)), and Peru (by the Communist Party of Peru, PCP). It was the Peruvian communists who synthesized Marxism-Leninism-Maoism after confirming the fact that the theories of Marxism-leninism-Mao Zedong Thought are universal and made a qualitative leap to advance Marxism-Leninism; these communists also added in their own theories based on their revolutionary experiences. Chairman Gonzalo, born as Abimael Guzmán, was the creator of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. (Prior to the Peruvian revolution, Indian, Philippine, and Turkish communists upheld and applied Mao Zedong Thought to their conditions, adding on to Mao’s contributions being universal.)

Marxism-Leninism-Maoism has these components:

Contributions in dialectical materialism
Mass Line

Mass Supervision of the Party and Government

People’s War

Arming the Masses in Socialism

The Three Weapons
New Democracy

People's Democratic Dictatorship

Modern conception of socialism
Cultural Revolution
Gonzalo’s new contributions

Guiding Thought
Great Leadership
Concentric Construction of the Revolutionary Movement
Militarization of the Party and Unitary People’s War

Mao’s Contributions to Philosophy

Marx and Engels combined dialectics and materialism. Mao helped simplify Marx’s philosophy. This made it easier to teach the Chinese masses about dialectical materialism. In the beginning of “On Contradiction”, he said:

The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics. Lenin said [in “Conspectus of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy”], “Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradiction in the very essence of objects.” Lenin often called this law the essence of dialectics; he also called it the kernel of dialectics. In studying this law, therefore, we cannot but touch upon a variety of questions, upon a number of philosophical problems. If we can become clear on all these problems, we shall arrive at a fundamental understanding of materialist dialectics. The problems are: the two world outlooks, the universality of contradiction, the particularity of contradiction, the principal contradiction and the principal aspect of a contradiction, the identity and struggle of the aspects of a contradiction, and the place of antagonism in contradiction. [Source]

This is the very basic starting point for understanding dialectical materialism. Dialectics, as stated above, is the study of contradictions within and between all things in the universe. This is in contrast to metaphysics and idealism. Mao explained how to analyze things with materialist dialectics (our emphasis):

As opposed to the metaphysical world outlook, the world outlook of materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and in its relations with other things; in other words, the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and interacts on the things around it. The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes. Thus materialist dialectics effectively combats the theory of external causes, or of an external motive force, advanced by metaphysical mechanical materialism and vulgar evolutionism. [Source]

Mao dealt with the issues of universality and particularity of contradictions. With the philosophy of dialectical materialism, we can understand that contradictions exist within and between everything. As Mao said, “The universality or absoluteness of contradiction… is that contradiction exists in the process of development of all things, and… that in the process of development of each thing a movement of opposites exists from beginning to end” [Source]. As he said a little later, “There is nothing that does not contain contradiction; without contradiction nothing would exist” [Source]. Everything has internal contradictions, and everything deals with external contradictions, so contradiction is universal.

Now, the particularity of contradictions is more complicated. While different objects all have certain contradictions and aspects of contradictions that are universal among them, each one is qualitatively different because of particular contradictions in them; that is why it is important to understand the particularity of each contradiction. Mao discusses this:

In order to reveal the particularity of the contradictions in any process in the development of a thing, in their totality or interconnections, that is, in order to reveal the essence of the process, it is necessary to reveal the particularity of the two aspects of each of the contradictions in that process; otherwise it will be impossible to discover the essence of the process. This likewise requires the utmost attention in our study.

Because the range of things is vast and there is no limit to their development, what is universal in one context becomes particular in another. Conversely, what is particular in one context becomes universal in another. …

Since the particular is united with the universal and since the universality as well as the particularity of contradiction is inherent in everything, universality residing in particularity, we should, when studying an object, try to discover both the particular and the universal and their interconnection, to discover both particularity and universality and also their interconnection within the object itself, and to discover the interconnections of this object with the many objects outside it. [Source]

Of the particular contradictions in anything, there is a fundamental contradiction. “[It] and the essence of the process determined by [it] will not disappear until the process is completed…” [Source]. There is also a principal (or primary) contradiction. Its “existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions” [Source]. The principal contradiction can become a secondary one and vice versa. Mao explained all this (our emphasis):

There are many contradictions in the process of development of a complex thing, and one of them is necessarily the principal contradiction whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions. …

When imperialism launches a war of aggression against such a country, all its various classes, except for some traitors, can temporarily unite in a national war against imperialism. At such a time, the contradiction between imperialism and the country concerned becomes the principal contradiction, while all the contradictions among the various classes within the country (including what was the principal contradiction, between the feudal system and the great masses of the people) are temporarily relegated to a secondary and subordinate position. …

When imperialism carries on its oppression not by war, but by milder means—political, economic and cultural—the ruling classes in semi-colonial countries capitulate to imperialism, and the two form an alliance for the joint oppression of the masses of the people. At such a time, the masses often resort to civil war against the alliance of imperialism and the feudal classes, while imperialism often employs indirect methods rather than direct action in helping the reactionaries in the semi-colonial countries to oppress the people, and thus the internal contradictions become particularly sharp. [Source]

Now, the fundamental contradiction and principal contradiction may or may not be the same thing. They usually are because the way things evolve is usually driven by the contradiction that defines them, such as class society evolving with the contradiction between classes. However, in times when a contradiction not fundamental to the system becomes the most important one—such as an imperialist country waging war on a semi-colony—, that contradiction is principal but not fundamental. To make this analysis simpler and clearer, the PCP said that processes can have multiple fundamental contradictions but one principal contradiction (with that principal contradiction changing with circumstances within that process) [Source].

In the era of capitalist-imperialism, the principal contradiction in the world is between imperialists and the oppressed people, as we said in the subsection on capitalist-imperialism. There are other contradictions fundamental to it, like the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of all countries and the contradiction between feudalism and the masses, but these are not principal on the global level. In specific countries, the principal contradiction may manifest in multiple ways. It is the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in imperialist countries, but in colonized and semi-colonized ones, that contradiction is different since the national bourgeoisie is generally against imperialism, so the principal contradiction is the proletariat and its allies against comprador capitalists and landlords (except in the case of direct imperialist intervention, in which the principal contradiction is between the oppressed country and the imperialists). In long-colonized countries like the US and Canada, the contradiction between settlers and oppressed nations is a fundamental contradiction, but not principal, since it is the essence of these countries’ formation, but revolution will not primarily occur to resolve that contradiction (instead it will occur for socialism, which, when established, can actually resolve this contradiction).

Principal contradictions are usually antagonistic, especially in the fields of politics, economics, and the like. That makes it all the more necessary to accurately determine a country’s principal, secondary, etc. contradictions. That is why the contradiction between the proletariat and the national bourgeoisie is non-antagonistic in the third world. Principal aspects of contradictions are just as important; the relative importance of each aspect determines the nature of the whole contradiction. Again we cite Mao:

As we have said, one must not treat all the contradictions in a process as being equal but must distinguish between the principal and the secondary contradictions, and pay special attention to grasping the principal one. But, in any given contradiction, whether principal or secondary, should the two contradictory aspects be treated as equal? Again, no. In any contradiction the development of the contradictory aspects is uneven. Sometimes they seem to be in equilibrium, which is however only temporary and relative, while unevenness is basic. Of the two contradictory aspects, one must be principal and the other secondary. The principal aspect is the one playing the leading role in the contradiction. The nature of a thing is determined mainly by the principal aspect of a contradiction, the aspect which has gained the dominant position.

But this situation is not static; the principal and the non-principal aspects of a contradiction transform themselves into each other and the nature of the thing changes accordingly. In a given process or at a given stage in the development of a contradiction, A is the principal aspect and B is the non-principal aspect; at another stage or in another process the roles are reversed—a change determined by the extent of the increase or decrease in the force of each aspect in its struggle against the other in the course of the development of a thing. [Source]

Mao applied dialectical materialism to understand how people gain knowledge; he understood the dialectical and cyclical relationship between theory and practice, and he understood that the two were in a unity of opposites. In “On Practice”, Mao states this when talking about practice and its relation to learning:

Marxists hold that in human society activity in production develops step by step from a lower to a higher level and that consequently man's knowledge, whether of nature or of society, also develops step by step from a lower to a higher level, that is, from the shallower to the deeper, from the one-sided to the many-sided. For a very long period in history, men were necessarily confined to a one-sided understanding of the history of society because, for one thing, the bias of the exploiting classes always distorted history and, for another, the small scale of production limited man's outlook. It was not until the modern proletariat emerged along with immense forces of production (large-scale industry) that man was able to acquire a comprehensive, historical understanding of the development of society and turn this knowledge into a science, the science of Marxism.

Marxists hold that man's social practice alone is the criterion of the truth of his knowledge of the external world. What actually happens is that man's knowledge is verified only when he achieves the anticipated results in the process of social practice (material production, class struggle or scientific experiment). If a man wants to succeed in his work, that is, to achieve the anticipated results, he must bring his ideas into correspondence with the laws of the objective external world; if they do not correspond, he will fail in his practice. After he fails, he draws his lessons, corrects his ideas to make them correspond to the laws of the external world, and can thus turn failure into success; this is what is meant by "failure is the mother of success" and "a fall into the pit, a gain in your wit". The dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge places practice in the primary position, holding that human knowledge can in no way be separated from practice and repudiating all the erroneous theories which deny the importance of practice or separate knowledge from practice. Thus Lenin said, "Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality." …

As social practice continues, things that give rise to man's sense perceptions and impressions in the course of his practice are repeated many times; then a sudden change (leap) takes place in the brain in the process of cognition, and concepts are formed. Concepts are no longer the phenomena, the separate aspects and the external relations of things; they grasp the essence, the totality and the internal relations of things. Between concepts and sense perceptions there is not only a quantitative but also a qualitative difference. Proceeding further, by means of judgment and inference one is able to draw logical conclusions. [Source]

Usually, in the contradiction between theory and practice, practice is the principal aspect; communists can only theorize after investigating, analyzing, experimenting, etc. This is not always the case because theory is needed for further practice (making it the principal aspect in certain cases), but generally we see practice as more important. That is why we emphasize studying theory as well as practicing the theory we study!

Unlike the bourgeois philosophers of his time, Mao had to explain these theories in simple language. This is why we encourage studying Mao’s works when people wish to learn about Marxist philosophy. Mao made important contributions to dialectical materialism this way. He also applied it to leading the people, hence he theorized the method of leadership known as the “mass line” method; this is our next topic.

Mass Line

When the workers’ vanguard party in a country is leading the workers, as it always should do, it needs to base its actions and policies on what the masses need and desire. Therefore, it should take the masses’ unsystematic ideas, concentrate and study them, and bring them back to the masses for trial in practice [Source]. This method of leadership is called the mass line. The mass line is related to democratic centralism in that the masses suggest the ideas in a democratic way, and then the party centralizes these ideas and implements them. The mass line and democratic centralism go hand in hand. Comrade Scott Harrison said in Chapter 43 (“Conclusion”) of The Mass Line and the American Revolutionary Movement:

The mass line is the primary method of revolutionary leadership of the masses, which is employed by the most conscious and best organized section of the masses, the proletarian party. It is a reiterative method, applied over and over again, which step-by-step advances the interests of the masses, and in particular their central interest within bourgeois society, namely, advancing towards proletarian revolution. Each iteration may be viewed as a three step process: 1) gathering the diverse ideas of the masses; 2) processing or concentrating these ideas from the perspective of revolutionary Marxism, in light of the long-term, ultimate interests of the masses (which the masses themselves may sometimes only dimly perceive), and in light of a scientific analysis of the objective situation; and 3) returning these concentrated ideas to the masses in the form of a political line which will actually advance the mass struggle toward revolution. Because the mass line starts with the diverse ideas of the masses, and returns the concentrated ideas to the masses, it is also known as the method of ‘from the masses, to the masses’. Though implicit in Marxism from the beginning, the mass line was raised to the level of conscious theory primarily by Mao Tse-Tung. [Source]

The mass line is the only truly democratic method of leadership. All other methods of leadership are not as democratic as it; even in systems where leaders are elected, the leader could force their ideas onto the masses, making the system highly undemocratic. That is an error that “vanguard parties” may commit, and it is called commandism. Conversely, the leaders could simply follow the masses rather than lead them; while it may seem like they are doing what the masses want, they are only doing it after the masses advocate for certain policies, not while they do so. That error is called tailism. Mao criticized both in “On Coalition Government”; in Part V, he states:

Commandism is wrong in any type of work, because in overstepping the level of political consciousness of the masses and violating the principle of voluntary mass action it reflects the disease of impetuosity. Our comrades must not assume that everything they themselves understand is understood by the masses. Whether the masses understand it and are ready to take action can be discovered only by going into their midst and making investigations. If we do so, we can avoid commandism. Tailism in any type of work is also wrong, because in falling below the level of political consciousness of the masses and violating the principle of leading the masses forward it reflects the disease of dilatoriness. Our comrades must not assume that the masses have no understanding of what they themselves do not yet understand. It often happens that the masses outstrip us and are eager to advance a step when our comrades are still tailing behind certain backward elements, for instead of acting as leaders of the masses such comrades reflect the views of these backward elements and, moreover, mistake them for those of the broad masses. In a word, every comrade must be brought to understand that the supreme test of the words and deeds of a Communist is whether they conform with the highest interests and enjoy the support of the overwhelming majority of the people. Every comrade must be helped to understand that as long as we rely on the people, believe firmly in the inexhaustible creative power of the masses and hence trust and identify ourselves with them, no enemy can crush us while we can crush every enemy and overcome every difficulty. [Source]

In “Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership”, Mao explained the mass line method of leadership and education, despite him not giving it that name per se:

4. In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily "from the masses, to the masses". This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through. And so on, over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer each time. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge. …

In the process of concentrating ideas and persevering in them, it is necessary to use the method of combining the general call with particular guidance, and this is a component part of the basic method. Formulate general ideas (general calls) out of the particular guidance given in a number of cases, and put them to the test in many different units (not only doing so yourself, but by telling others to do the same); then concentrate the new experience (sum it up) and draw up new directives for the guidance of the masses generally. Comrades should do this in the present rectification movement, and also in every other kind of work. Better leadership comes with greater skill in doing this. [Source]

The mass line method must constantly be used. The vanguard party and the government must use it to help carry out actions before, during, and after the revolution. In socialism, it must be used to help with economic planning. The workers’ input, combined with statistics from bureaucrats, ideological goals from party militants, etc. must determine the production goal for the next economic plan. In “Industrial Management in China”, Ma Wen-kuei wrote:

Democratic centralism is fundamental in the administration both of our state and of our socialist state-owned industrial enterprises. Comrade Liu Shao-chi^[60] has pointed out: “The system adopted in managing our enterprises is a system which combines a high degree of centralization with a high degree of democracy. All enterprises must abide by the unified leadership and planning of the [Communist] Party and the state, and, by observing strict labor discipline, ensure unity of will and action among the masses. At the same time, they should bring into full play the initiative and creativeness of the workers, develop the supervisory role of the masses, and get them to take part in the management of their enterprises.”

All management in our enterprises must conform to the spirit of democratic centralism. This fully suits the socialist nature of our industrial enterprises and the objective demands of modern industrial production. Both the nature of ownership by the whole people of the enterprises and the highly socialized nature of modern industrial production call for a highly centralized and unified leadership. Failing this, socialized production cannot be carried out in a normal way, nor can the principles, policies and plans of the Communist Party and the state be implemented thoroughly. But the centralized leadership of socialist industrial enterprises, in which staff and workers are also masters and enjoy the right to participate in management, is fundamentally different from the arbitrary dictatorship existing in capitalist enterprises. It should and can be combined with extensive democracy. Our system of democratic centralism is centralism based on democracy, and democracy under centralized guidance. …

Collective leadership is the basic principle and consistent tradition of our Party in given leadership. In his article “On Strengthening the Party Committee System,” Comrade Mao Tse-tung gave a comprehensive summary of the successful experience gained by our Party in carrying out collective leadership. He pointed out that “all important problems (of course, not the unimportant, trivial problems, or problems whose solutions have already been decided after discussion at meetings and need only be carried out) must be submitted to the committee for discussion, and the committee members present should express their views fully and reach definite decisions which should then be carried out by the members concerned.” …

The staff and workers’ representatives conference is an important means of broadening democracy and getting the masses of staff and workers to take part in management and to supervise the work of the administration. Comrade Teng Hsiao-ping^[61] has said: “The staff and workers’ representatives conference under the leadership of the Communist Party committee is a good means of broadening democracy in the enterprises, of recruiting workers and staff to take part in the management and of overcoming bureaucracy. It is an effective method of correctly handling contradictions among the people.” The conference helps integrate centralized leadership with the bringing into play of the initiative of the masses of staff and workers, thus simultaneously strengthening the centralized leadership from top to bottom and providing supervision by the masses from below. This results in continuously improving administrative work and ensuring the overall fulfillment of state plans. [Source]

In Rethinking Socialism, the authors explain:

Whether the cadres^[62] had followed the mass line or not could be tested in mass movements. Mass movements provided an open forum where the masses could voice their opinions and express their discontent, criticizing party members for any wrongdoing and abuses of power. Participation in mass movements raised the consciousness of workers and peasants and generated new ideology. Major policies implemented during the socialist transition were accompanied by mass movements where new ideas were propagated and important issues debated. If such policies indeed promoted the interests of the masses, the masses would eventually adopt them. Mass movements in the past provided the opportunity for the government to seek the validation of its policies by the masses. Policies so validated had better chances to succeed. Mass movements also aroused the enthusiasm of the masses and empowered those who were in favor of the policy. [Source]

In The Rise of the Chinese People's Communes^[63]—and Six Years After, Anna Louise Strong writes this to show how China’s socialism was democratic and relied on the mass line method of leadership:

All local resources of nature and man were thus unified, and under democratic control. For the highest organization was the “congress of the commune,” made up of elected representatives from all production brigades and all sections of the people, such as women’s organizations, youth, old people, educational workers, personnel of industrial enterprises. This congress, elected on a functional basis, then elected a “management committee” and a “supervisory committee” for checking and inspection. The management committee set up departments for different tasks: agriculture, forestry, water control, livestock, fishery, industry, finance, trade, culture and education, armed defense and the like. All these had force of government at township level. …

The full daring and originality of this new organization becomes clear from careful study of the constitution. The citizens of the local area, usually of township size, assumed ownership and management of all local natural resources, land, minerals, livestock, industries, subject only to normal taxes to the state. They were to manage these properties democratically, and expand them, and take responsibility for caring for all children and disabled, for paying steadily-increasing wages to all workers, for developing education and health services, roads, communications, irrigation works from their own resources and suitable to their needs. [Source]

The mass line is a democratic-centralist method of leadership. Democratic centralism and the mass line must be used to plan, manage, and lead the economy and society as a whole. The masses must have a say in the economic planning of their workplace, and they must make sure their representatives work toward meeting their needs and desires. The representatives must take the masses ideas, study them and implement policies based on those ideas, uniting the opposites of democracy and centralism.

The mass line method of leadership is also the way to gain knowledge. It is a dialectical materialist approach to knowledge. It starts with party members and cadres gaining knowledge of material conditions and objective realities by talking with the masses and working with them. Following this, they study theory and history, and they also experiment with new ideas; then, the party and the masses test these ideas and learn from them in practice, and in doing so, they add to revolutionary theory. This way, knowledge accumulates through taking existing knowledge and adding on to it. The way to do this is by working with and leading the masses via the mass line.

Focusing on either aspect of this system will lead to opportunism and capitalism; extreme centralism, or commandism, will lead to the formation of a powerful clique who can easily turn capitalist (and it can damage the party’s reputation enough to encourage capitalist takeover), and extreme “democracy”, or tailism, will lead to the party supporting reactionary ideas and policies, making it fundamentally capitalist. To combat such deviationism, we discuss the masses’ supervision of the party in this subsection.

Mass Supervision of the Party and Government

Sometimes, the mass line is not enough for the party to remain that of the working people. There may be times in which capitalist-roaders (people who work against the construction of socialism) may dominate the party’s activities. During these times, the masses must form their own armed revolutionary committees that exist to seize power from corrupt government representatives and party members and cadres. The people need to watch over the actions of their representatives to make sure that they remain on the communist road.

The USSR had examples of this in its revolutionary era; under Lenin, during the “Red Terror”^[64], the people worked with the secret police and other organs of the state to suppress capitalists. The Great Purge^[65] also had something like this; workers were able to expose corrupt government and party officials in this era. The masses could vote to retain or remove party members and leaders:

Sir Walter called it “spying” if every worker watched his comrade in the Party to see that his words and actions were never hostile to the interests of the working class! And yet what could be more in the interests of the working people, and of democracy for the working people, than that every member of the Party which professed to represent them should be subject to such supervision, and to public criticism if he did not fulfil all the conditions generally considered necessary to a member of the “organised vanguard”? It is this particular relationship between the Party in the U.S.S.R. and the people which causes the people to look upon the Party members, in general, as their best representatives. For they themselves play a part in seeing that only their best representatives shall be members of the Party! Under such conditions it is not surprising that, more often than not, at elections to the Soviets, to the committees of trade unions, and to the boards of management of collective farms, members of the Party are elected! It is in this way, and in this way only, that the Bolshevik Party dominates the Soviet Union at the present time. But, since it has the status of the recognised leadership of the whole people, the Bolshevik Party dominates the policy of the country. [Source]

China had the most democratic, mass-involved implementation of the suppression of counter revolutionaries and the supervision of the state, particularly during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (described in the subsection on cultural revolution). China’s Red Guards and other independent and semi-independent revolutionary groups were directly involved with defending the dictatorship of the proletariat. In “On the Relationship Between the Working Class and its Party under Socialism”, it says:

In addition, it is necessary to put into practice the formation of semi-independent, spontaneous mass organizations, such as those that emerged during the Cultural Revolution in China, as the main method of democratic supervision exercised by the working class masses over their leaders. To accomplish the latter, the working class needs to correctly handle factionalism within its rank in daily practices, and it needs to correctly delineate boundaries on both the local party’s leadership role and the rights of rank and file worker’s oversight role in terms of organizational structure.

…Lenin emphasized the role of trade unions as a conveyor belt between the Party and the masses. At that time, the question of the effectiveness of putting checks on and supervision over the Party was not yet on the agenda of the working class revolution. Similarly, after the revolution in China, mass organizations such as the trade unions, the women’s federations and others were basically under the leadership of party committees. It was impossible for them to effectively check and supervise their own leaders.

The emergence of capitalist-roaders raised the question of the masses’ supervision and check of those in power onto an indispensable theoretical level for all revolutionaries to consider under socialism.

What we need to explain here is why the masses’ democratic supervision and checks over those in authority are essential under a state of working class rule. If the political party of the working class is divorced from the masses before it takes over state power, the revolution will fail. But once in power, the danger of the Party separating itself from the masses is not so obvious. Once in power through a working class-led revolution, if the system is such that the Party cadres are responsible only to their superiors—without an equal accountability to their subordinates, as well as being compelled to hear and consider the criticisms from and supervision by the masses—then it becomes all too easy for the Party cadres to “sour,” degenerate and evolve toward their opposite, changing into capitalist-roaders. [Source]

This means that when the party turns revisionist and capitalist-roader, the masses must work with their representatives—the proletarian leaders within and without the party—as well as their own organizations to get rid of such capitalist-roaders. Without the masses’ supervision of the party, capitalist-roaders can infiltrate, corrupt, and reverse the goals of it. Later in the same text, it states:

The relationship between the leading role of the Party and the supervision by the masses is like waves with alternating primary and secondary roles for each. Sometimes the leading role of the Party should be stressed, while at other times the supervision by the masses should be stressed. That is why we need to have mass movements from time to time to get rid of the bad leaders, and yet we can’t remain in mass movements all of the time. Even elections in the West are only periodic.

This contradiction within socialism between the leadership of the party and the supervision by the masses is one of the most telling examples of the contractions among the people. This contradiction within a socialist society can only be overcome once classes have dissolved, after the withering away of the state. All other attempts to emphasize only one side in order to overcome this contradiction are futile. If one stresses only the leading role of the Party and resists or opposes mass supervision, then the Party will deteriorate and slide into its opposite. If one stresses only the supervision by the masses and resists or denies the leading role of the Party, then the mass movement will go astray, be manipulated by devious elements, and erupt in factional battles that will lead to the demise of a state of working class rule. …

The capitalist system’s separation of the three branches of governmental power (the multiparty parliamentary or legislative branch, the centralized and unified executive branch, and the independent judiciary branch) is predicated on a fundamental conflict of interest between capitalists; therefore, this organizational form does not apply to the need of supervision in a situation where there is a fundamental consistency of interests within the working class. Thus, although we cannot simply copy the form of capitalist democracy, there are lessons to draw from it. The most important of these lessons is how to create a check on those in power.

The reason for the relative independence of the mass organizations under a state of working class rule originated not from the mutual independence of interests among the people, but rather from the need of effective supervision. People are still amazed at how effective this Cultural Revolution “style” of check on the powers of the bureaucracy. Without the relative independence of the mass organizations, this kind of check is inconceivable. It cannot be accomplished simply by “big character posters” or individual freedom of speech by themselves. The dispersion of the strength of individuals cannot be compared to the strength of the organized and aroused masses. [Source]

In short, without the masses’ guidance for and supervision of the communist party, the party will inevitably grow into a capitalist clique, a revisionist gang, etc. By ensuring that the masses have the power to supervise the party, we ensure our loyalty to the communist cause. We need to maintain proletarian dictatorship, though, and groups that go against the proletarian dictatorship will face its wrath. As the essay states:

The “semi-independent” mass organizations that sprung-up during the Cultural Revolution were spontaneous mass organizations that emerged within enterprises, work units, or within the various provinces, municipalities and regions. The reason I say these mass organizations were "semi independent" is because, at all levels, they had only a relative independence, not an absolute independence. First, funding for their activities was arranged by the state; otherwise, their office space and staff could not have been sustained. Second, although the spontaneous mass organizations at each level of society were not obligated to follow the leadership of the party committees at their same social level in terms of how they were organized, they were nevertheless subject to the permission of the superior party committees; otherwise, they could have been outlawed. For example, Red Guards and rebel mass organizations in schools and factories did not have to obey the leadership of the party committees at the factory or school level in terms of their organization, yet they were subject to approval by the provincial, municipal or other superior party committees. Likewise, municipal and provincial rebel organizations were subject to approval by the central authority before they could be considered legitimate.

These mass organizations differed from political parties in that they had neither full independence nor were they national in scale. Nationwide mass organizations challenging the central authority of the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution were not allowed, and they were strictly banned, reflecting the hold on the state by the working class. [Source]

This is simply a part of democratic centralism. By allowing democracy within the framework of communist ideology, there is both democracy and centralism. As we have discussed earlier, focusing on the democratic aspect will lead to weakening the dictatorship of the proletariat, and what will that do? It will simply lead to capitalist restoration. Focusing on the centralist aspect will allow for “bureaucratic centralism”, as some call it, and that can also lead to capitalist restoration; by allowing a clique of unaccountable individuals to control the state, there is a very easy way for capitalist-roaders to take control of the state, ending proletarian dictatorship and therefore ending socialism.

People’s War

The strategy of protracted people’s war (or “popular protracted war”, as it is sometimes called) is a strategy that helped the Chinese communists win the Chinese Civil War, the PCP control most of Peru during its height, the Communist Party of the Philippines have a presence on most islands of their country, and the Communist Party of India (Maoist) hold onto certain regions of India. Mao discussed people’s war in his work, “Problems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War”. He said:

To abandon small-scale guerrilla warfare and “concentrate every single rifle in the Red Army”, as advocated by the Li Li-san line, has long since been proved wrong. Considering the revolutionary war as a whole, the operations of the people's guerrillas and those of the main forces of the Red Army complement each other like a man's right arm and left arm, and if we had only the main forces of the Red Army without the people's guerrillas, we would be like a warrior with only one arm. In concrete terms, and especially with regard to military operations, when we talk of the people in the base area as a factor, we mean that we have an armed people. That is the main reason why the enemy is afraid to approach our base area. [Source]

People’s war is the revolutionary war of the people, as the name suggests. It is based on the armed struggle of the masses and their organizations, particularly the army and the communist party. Without the people, there can be no revolutionary war of the people, and the existing ruling classes will remain in power; in particular, without the working class leading these people, and without their party leading this class, the people cannot fight their war. Furthermore, people’s war contains guerrilla war; the techniques and tactics that the people’s army uses must be with the support of the people and the ideas of the people, and these cannot include the conventional tactics of the enemy. This is especially true in the earlier stages of the people’s war. In his book, On Guerrilla Warfare, in Chapter One, Chairman Mao stated:

In a war of revolutionary character, guerrilla operations are a necessary part. This is particularly true in war waged for the emancipation of a people who inhabit a vast nation. China is such a nation, a nation whose techniques are undeveloped and whose communications are poor. She finds herself confronted with a strong and victorious Japanese imperialism. Under these circumstances, the development of the type of guerrilla warfare characterized by the quality of mass is both necessary and natural. This warfare must be developed to an unprecedented degree and it must coordinate with the operations of our regular armies. If we fail to do this, we will find it difficult to defeat the enemy.

These guerrilla operations must not be considered as an independent form of warfare. They are but one step in the total war, one aspect of the revolutionary struggle. They are the inevitable result of the clash between oppressor and oppressed when the latter reach the limits of their endurance. In our case, these hostilities began at a time when the people were unable to endure any more from the Japanese imperialists. Lenin, in People and Revolution, said: 'A people's insurrection and a people's revolution are not only natural but inevitable.' We consider guerrilla operations as but one aspect of our total or mass war because they, lacking the quality of independence, are of themselves incapable of providing a solution to the struggle.

Guerrilla warfare has qualities and objectives peculiar to itself. It is a weapon that a nation inferior in arms and military equipment may employ against a more powerful aggressor nation. When the invader pierces deep into the heart of the weaker country and occupies her territory in a cruel and oppressive manner, there is no doubt that conditions of terrain, climate, and society in general offer obstacles to his progress and may be used to advantage by those who oppose him. In guerrilla warfare we turn these advantages to the purpose of resisting and defeating the enemy. [Source]

The reason we refer to the revolutionary war of the people as a protracted people’s war is because it is a long war. In “On Protracted War”, a series of lectures by Mao, he professed:

… [I]t can be seen that Japan has great military, economic and political-organizational power, but that her war is reactionary and barbarous, her manpower and material resources are inadequate, and she is in an unfavorable position internationally. China, on the contrary, has less military, economic and political-organizational power, but she is in her era of progress, her war is progressive and just, she is moreover a big country, a factor which enables her to sustain a protracted war, and she will be supported by most countries. The above are the basic, mutually contradictory characteristics of the Sino-Japanese war. They have determined and are determining all the political policies and military strategies and tactics of the two sides; they have determined and are determining the protracted character of the war and its outcome, namely, that the final victory will go to China and not to Japan. The war is a contest between these characteristics. They will change in the course of the war, each according to its own nature; and from this everything else will follow. These characteristics exist objectively and are not invented to deceive people; they constitute all the basic elements of the war, and are not incomplete fragments; they permeate all major and minor problems on both sides and all stages of the war, and they are not matters of no consequence. [Source]

The people's war requires dedication to revolution even without the technology that the enemy has; quick wars and quick victories require lots of technology, weaponry, and soldiers, but not necessarily the support of the people. In contrast, a people’s army needs to wage a long-lasting war to weaken the supplies of the enemy and maintain the support of the people. By extending supply lines, draining the enemy’s resources, and making the enemy oppress the people, the revolutionary forces can take power and defeat the enemy. That is why the war lasts a long time, why it is protracted.

Since this is a protracted war, the people’s war consists of three stages: the strategic defensive, strategic equilibrium (or strategic stalemate), and strategic offensive. In the strategic defensive, the revolutionaries are weaker while the state is stronger; in the strategic equilibrium, both the new state (formed during the people’s war) and the old are roughly equal in power; and in the strategic offensive, the people are much stronger than the enemy, and they focus on finishing the enemy off and fully conquering state power, and destroying the remnants of the old, parasitic, rotting state. In the first stage, the primary mode of warfare is mobile warfare, which uses hit-and-run tactics; in the second, the primary mode is guerrilla warfare, relying on sabotage within enemy territory; and in the third, it is mainly mobile warfare, with positional warfare being the second important mode. Mao explained these stages in “On Protracted War” (with our emphasis on important pieces of text):

… [The] protracted war will pass through three stages. The first stage covers the period of the enemy's strategic offensive and our strategic defensive. The second stage will be the period of the enemy's strategic consolidation and our preparation for the counter-offensive. The third stage will be the period of our strategic counter-offensive and the enemy's strategic retreat. It is impossible to predict the concrete situation in the three stages, but certain main trends in the war may be pointed out in the light of present conditions.

… In [the first] stage the form of fighting we should adopt is primarily mobile warfare, supplemented by guerrilla and positional warfare. … On the enemy side, there are already signs of flagging morale, and his army's momentum of attack is less in the middle phase of this stage than it was in the initial phase, and it will diminish still further in the concluding phase. Signs of exhaustion are beginning to appear in his finances and economy; war-weariness is beginning to set in among his people and troops and within the clique at the helm of the war, "war frustrations" are beginning to manifest themselves and pessimism about the prospects of the war is growing.

The second stage may be termed one of strategic stalemate. At the tail end of the first stage, the enemy will be forced to fix certain terminal points to his strategic offensive owing to his shortage of troops and our firm resistance, and upon reaching them he will stop his strategic offensive and enter the stage of safeguarding his occupied areas. In the second stage, the enemy will attempt to safeguard the occupied areas and to make them his own by the fraudulent method of setting up puppet governments… but again he will be confronted with stubborn guerrilla warfare. Taking advantage of the fact that the enemy's rear is unguarded, our guerrilla warfare will develop extensively in the first stage, and many base areas will be established, seriously threatening the enemy's consolidation of the occupied areas, and so in the second stage there will still be widespread fighting. In this stage, our form of fighting will be primarily guerrilla warfare, supplemented by mobile warfare. …

The third stage will be the stage of the counter-offensive to recover our lost territories. … In the third stage, our war will no longer be one of strategic defensive, but will turn into a strategic counter-offensive manifesting itself in strategic offensives; and it will no longer be fought on strategically interior lines, but will shift gradually to strategically exterior lines. … Our primary form of fighting will still be mobile warfare, but positional warfare will rise to importance. While positional defense cannot be regarded as important in the first stage because of the prevailing circumstances, positional attack will become quite important in the third stage because of the changed conditions and the requirements of the task. In the third stage guerrilla warfare will again provide strategic support by supplementing mobile and positional warfare, but it will not be the primary form as in the second stage. [Source]

In China’s case, and the case of semi-feudal countries in general, people’s war was theorized as a rural-based war. “Take small and medium cities and extensive rural areas first; take big cities later,” Mao instructed [Source]. This is the strategy most people’s wars have applied, but it is simply a specific application of people’s war, and even in this application, urban work was not ignored, for cities and towns were the home of the proletariat, which had to lead the Communist Party and its war. In the General Political Line of the Communist Party of Peru, the party asserts that “People’s War in Peru must be developed as a unified whole in both the countryside as well as in the city, with the countryside being the principal theater of armed actions, following the road of surrounding the cities from the countryside,” [Source]. Just as PCP could wage people’s war in the city while focusing on the countryside, communists in other countries may apply people’s war in an urban-focused or almost urban-exclusive fashion, depending on the class composition of urban and rural areas and the benefits of each strategy.

With that in mind, Chairman Gonzalo explained that people’s war is a universal strategy; the strategy of protracted people’s war is applicable to every country, with specific adaptations to the country. In his interview with El Diario, he stated:

People's war is universally applicable, in accordance with the character of the revolution and adapted to the specific conditions of each country. Otherwise, it cannot be carried out. In our case, the particularities are very dear. …

We have already spoken to the countryside and city, to how to carry out the war, to the army, to how the New Power arose; and the militarization of the Party itself is another particularity. These are specific things that correspond to our reality, to the application of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, of Chairman Mao's theory on people's war, to the conditions in our country. Does this make us different from other struggles? Yes. [Source]

In the General Political Line of the Communist Party of Peru, in Chapter 4, “Military Line”, it says:

Chairman Gonzalo, reaffirming himself on the universal law of revolutionary violence, takes up the highest military theory of the proletariat established by Chairman Mao: People’s war, which is universally validity and is applicable in all types of countries, in accordance with the conditions of each revolution. The world people’s war is the principal form of struggle that the proletariat and the oppressed peoples of the world should launch to oppose imperialist world war. His point of departure is that people’s war is a war of the masses and can only be accomplished by mobilizing the masses and relying on them. He says: “The masses give us everything, from the crusts of bread that are taken from their own mouths to their precious blood which stirs jointly with that of the combatants and militants, which nourishes the road of the People’s War for the New Power.” The masses should be organized with arms into the People’s Guerrilla Army. [Source]

Critics of the idea that protracted people’s war is a universal strategy of revolution do not understand what people’s war really is. All it is is a mass-based communist revolutionary war with three stages: strategic defense, strategic equilibrium, and strategic offense. While its specific forms have all been principally rural and secondarily urban, this is not needed for all people’s wars. (Actually, it would be really damaging in imperialist, developed countries with large farmers dominating rural areas; the only chance for a base area starting there would be through mobilizing the rural proletariat, i.e. hired farmworkers, and in imperialist countries they are not very numerous.) The form that protracted people’s war takes in a country depends on the development of capitalism in; so far, all revolutions and people’s wars have taken place in underdeveloped countries, hence the reliance of the communist parties on the peasantry for support, but in a revolutionary situation in the imperial core, the proletariat’s struggles in urban areas would be dominant. The PCP defended the universality of people’s war in Section Four of “On Marxism-Leninism-Maoism”, one of the documents from the First Congress:

A key and decisive question in understanding the universality of people's war is understanding its universal validity and consequently applicability, taking into account the different types of revolutions and the specific conditions of each revolution. To understand this key question it is helpful to keep in mind the fact that since the Petrograd insurrection this model has not been repeated, and to consider the antifascist resistance and guerrilla wars in Europe during World War II, as well as the armed struggles being waged in Europe today, and to see that in the end, the October Revolution was not only an insurrection but a revolutionary war that lasted several years. Consequently, in the imperialist countries the revolution can only be conceived of as revolutionary war and today this can only mean people's war. [Source]

Some Maoists deny the universality of people’s war. Indeed, this is a deviation from Marxism-Leninism-Maoism:

Let us examine a specific issue, the theory of People's War. Even while Mao Tsetung Thought was upheld, for a long period, the dominant trend was to see this as something specific, relevant and applicable solely to the semi-feudal, semi-colonial countries. Shades of this continue to exist among Maoist parties, even today. Yet, the founder leaders of the new Marxist-Leninist parties in the 1960's were quite clear about the universality of People's War. The writings of Comrade Charu Mazumdar are an example. So how can we explain the emergence of the mistaken view that restricts People's War to oppressed nations? This was a deviation. It was not challenged till the forceful presentation of Maoism as the new stage of Marxism-Leninism and the universality of People's War by the PCP.

The Revolutionary Internationalist Movement^[66] (RIM) and its participant parties accept that “Mao Tsetung comprehensively developed the military science of the proletariat through his theory and practice of People's War.” and that this is “… universally applicable in all countries, although this must be applied to the concrete conditions in each country…”. Evidently, this is one of the issues where "a still incomplete understanding" of the new stage attained through Mao's contributions was rectified through the adoption of Maoism. But was this merely restating what was said in the 1960s? No, it reflected a deeper, fuller grasp. And it was based, at that time, on the lessons of the advanced experience gained through the People's War in Peru, which in turn were guided by an advanced grasp of Mao's contributions, and more specifically, the theory of People's War. This grasp has been further enriched through the People's War in Nepal, particularly in its integration of armed insurrection tactics, such as political intervention at the central level, with the protracted People's War. Today, to speak of accepting the universality of People's War while refusing to recognize and take lessons from this advanced grasp is meaningless. To adopt Maoism and deny the contributions in understanding made by these People's Wars would be an incomplete understanding of the universality of Maoism. [Source]

[MTBA]

People’s war can become a strategy to defend a socialist state from reactionary and even imperialist attack. We will discuss this in the upcoming subsection.

People’s War and the Armed Masses in Socialism

Under socialism, a dictatorship of the proletariat similar to the people’s war will exist; arming, organizing, and mobilizing the people for the class struggle, for the defense of the dictatorship of the proletariat, for cultural revolution, and more will occur as a necessity for exercising proletarian power. This armament and militarization of the masses takes place through both a country-wide militia, such as China’s People’s Militia, and through arming the masses generally, at least with the training needed for war. In an issue of Peking Review published on June 30, 1972, in the article titled, “The Militia—PLA's [People’s Liberation Army’s^[67]] Auxiliary And Reserve” the authors say:

Lenin pointed out: “So long as there are oppressed and exploited people in the world, we must strive, not for disarmament, but for the arming of the whole people.” Chairman Mao said: “The revolutionary war is a war of the masses; it can be waged only by mobilizing the masses and relying on them.” Following these Marxist-Leninist principles, our Party helped the masses to get organized and arm themselves in the protracted revolutionary wars, carried out a people's war, defeated the Japanese imperialists and the Kuomintang reactionaries and was finally victorious.

Inheriting and carrying forward the fine revolutionary tradition, the Chinese people have further strengthened militia building since liberation in 1949. Experience gained over the past decades has taught them to deeply understand that Chairman Mao's concept of people's war is the most effective weapon for defeating the imperialists and their lackeys and is invincible. No matter what kind of war the imperialists may unleash, no matter how highly developed modern weapons and technical equipment may be and however complicated the methods of modern warfare, the law of people's war and the truth that “the army and the people are the foundation of victory” will never change. It is people, not things, that decide the outcome of a war. [Source]

“Hold Aloft the Great Red Banner of Chairman Mao's Thinking on People's War and Strengthen the Building Of the Militia”, an article in the Peking Review issue published on February 6, 1970, it says:

An armed mass organization founded by our great leader Chairman Mao himself, China's militia is an important component part of the revolutionary armed forces led by our Party. Putting into practice the system of combining the three military formations, i.e., the regular forces, the local forces and the militia is Chairman Mao's consistent strategic thinking and the quintessence of his theory on people's war. In leading the Chinese people in the great revolutionary wars, Chairman Mao comprehensively and systematically put forward the theory, line, principle and policies concerning mobilizing the people, arming them, making everyone a soldier and waging a people's war. With genius, he thus creatively developed Marxist-Leninist theory on revolutionary armed struggle, pointing out the correct road for the people of China and the whole world to defeat the imperialists and all reactionaries. [Source]

While capitalist-roaders during this period advocated for the disarmament and pacification of the masses and a utilization of an elite military as the primary tool for state power, the revolutionary communists supported arming the masses, expanding the army, and more mass-based armed politics. Professional armed bodies like the military, police force (to some extent), secret police (to an even less extent), special forces, national guard, etc. are certainly required for the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, they can easily fall into capitalist-roaders’ hands, as had happened in both the USSR and China when revisionists seized power. This is why a national militia, Red Guards, and other semi-independent and independent armed bodies, as well as the armed masses outside of organizations, must be created and widespread in a socialist society; an unarmed working class cannot stop the revisionists, the capitalist-roaders, and the bourgeoisie [Source].

The national militia of a socialist society, as well as all other semi-independent armed bodies in socialism, will wage a revolutionary people’s war, if needed, against any and all capitalist-roaders in power. They will work with the masses to defeat capitalist vermin in all parts of society, including in the economy (in agriculture, industry, services, etc.), in politics (in the state, the party, etc.), and in culture. They can only do this with arms and training. The great leader of socialist Albania, Enver Hoxha, said:

At all times, but especially in the situations we are living through, our country consistently has enhanced and will enhance its unity and vigilance. To this end, as always, we have taken ideological, political, economic and military measures. All our people are armed in the full meaning of the word. Every Albanian city-dweller or villager, has his weapon at home. Our army itself, the army of a soldier people, is ready at any moment to strike at any enemy or coalition of enemies. The youth, too, have risen to their feet. Combat readiness does not in any way interfere with our work of socialist construction. On the contrary, it has given a greater boost to the development of the economy and culture in our country. [Source]

One of the reasons that the revisionists failed to take power in Albania for a long time was that the people were ready to fight them and keep socialism in place. In fact, on Nikita Khrushchev’s^[68] tour in Albania, a funny interaction took place when talking about the people’s arms and their relation to the proletarian state (our bolding):

Our delegation asked comrades at various levels about the number of people armed in Albania and the role of the Army. Of course, we understood on the level of theory that the only defense of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the armed proletariat—literally armed in all aspects including militarily and that it is not just a matter of a standing army. But we got the answer to our question when we found that everyone in Socialist Albania is given military training and the proletariat is armed. All the workers in the factories and other productive enterprises and in mining and transportation and communications as well as the cooperativist peasantry are armed. The people's intelligentsia are also given military training and are armed. The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be defended by a standing army alone. … Wherever we went, one of the stories commonly told as an anecdote in Albania is that when Khrushchov visited Albania in 1959, he saw a peasant working in the field carrying something. He inquired from Comrade Enver what the peasant was carrying. Comrade Enver replied: “A gun.” Khrushchov was shocked. “A gun!”, he said. “In our country we do not give guns to the people. What if the people, one day, turn these guns against you?” To this Comrade Enver replied: “Yes, the people have every right to turn their guns against us if we do not do our job well.” This is the dictatorship of the proletariat in Albania in the concrete. [Source]

Unfortunately, the state did hold quite a bit of power over the people, and when revisionists won in Albania after Hoxha died, they did not have to fight much to hold power; they could then suppress the power of the people. This will be explained in our section on the history of communism.

If there is ever to be an invasion or a capitalist coup within a socialist country, the people must wage people’s war against that situation and against the capitalist enemies. This is crucial to not only wage the revolution, but to defend it from imperialist aggression and capitalist restoration.

Three Weapons

The three weapons are the vanguard party, the people’s army, and the united front. In “Introducing the Communist” by Chairman Mao, it says:

Therefore the united front, armed struggle and Party building are the three fundamental questions for our Party in the Chinese revolution. Having a correct grasp of these three questions and their interrelations is tantamount to giving correct leadership to the whole Chinese revolution. We are now able to draw correct conclusions concerning these three questions by virtue of our abundant experience in the eighteen years of our Party's history, our rich and profound experience of failures and successes, retreats and advances, contraction and expansion. This means that we are now able to handle the questions of the united front, of armed struggle and of Party building in a correct way. It also means that our eighteen years of experience have taught us that the united front, armed struggle and Party building are the Chinese Communist Party's three “magic weapons”, its three principal magic weapons for defeating the enemy in the Chinese revolution. This is a great achievement of the Chinese Communist Party and of the Chinese revolution. [Source]

The vanguard party is quite obviously the party that leads the revolution. The people’s army is the primary armed body; it is what wages revolution, with the people’s support, and it takes on different forms as a revolution progresses (namely people’s guerrilla army, people’s army, and/or red army).^[69] The party leads the army, and the army chooses politically advanced members to join the party. The united front is the entire people, all of their mass organizations, the government in socialism (and its foundational cells formed before socialism is established, namely workers’ councils and other organs of proletarian power), etc. Workers’ mass organizations include “trade unions, co-operatives, factory organisations, parliamentary groups, non-Party women's associations, the press, cultural and educational organisations, youth leagues, revolutionary fighting organisations [i.e. militias] (in times of open revolutionary action), Soviets of deputies as the form of state organisation (if the proletariat is in power), etc.”, and peasants also may have their own unions, cooperatives, press, etc.; all these organizations need to be united in a revolutionary movement [Source].

This united front gives information to the party and people’s army and gets directives and policies from the party and army. This is a dialectical system, a democratic-centralist system, and a system based on the mass line method of leadership; we discuss this more in the section on the concentric construction of the concentric construction of the movement. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had an early form of this idea as they showed the need for the vanguard party as well as the trade-union movement and its associated mass organizations, but Mao added to it the people’s army.

The people’s army (and other armed bodies of the masses, like people’s militias and self-defense units) has communist party leadership to ensure that it serves the people rather than exploiting them. Bourgeois and feudal warlord armies have the issue of acting as burdens on the masses, and they treat both civilians of their country and those of areas they occupy with impunity; in contrast, people’s armies avoid burdening the people, and they do this by subjecting themselves to proletarian leadership and the mass line. In China’s case, the Communist Party had the Central Military Commission—formerly the Revolutionary Military Commission of the Central Committee during the war—, allowing it to exercise direct leadership of their people’s army; the party exercised the mass line and democratic centralism as well, meaning that the military was subject to that too.

The Party committee system is an important Party institution for ensuring collective leadership and preventing any individual from monopolizing the conduct of affairs. … From now on, a sound system of Party committee meetings must be instituted in all leading bodies, from the bureaus of the Central Committee to the prefectural Party committees; from the Party committees of the fronts to the Party committees of brigades and military areas (sub-commissions of the Revolutionary Military Commission or leading groups); and the leading Party members’ groups in government bodies, people’s organizations, the news agency and the newspaper offices. All important problems (of course, not the unimportant, trivial problems, or problems whose solutions have already been decided after discussion at meetings and need only be carried out) must be submitted to the committee for discussion, and the committee members present should express their views fully and reach definite decisions which should then be carried out by the members concerned. [Source]

People’s armies seek to be self-reliant by engaging in economic activities to sustain themselves; this means that they should produce as much as they can for themselves, and work to pay for whatever they need from external allies. This does not mean total self-sufficiency, which is the ability to satisfy one’s needs with zero external aid or exchange; self-sufficiency can be achieved for certain goods, but an army should use self-reliance generally (total self-sufficiency is impossible without restricting their needs). Even if standing armies use taxes on the people, these taxes must be kept at a minimum. Mao explained this matter in “On Production by the Army for Its Own Support and on the Importance of the Great Movements for Rectification and for Production” (our emphasis):

In our circumstances, production by the army for its own support, though backward or retrogressive in form, is progressive in substance and of great historic significance. Formally speaking, we are violating the principle of division of labour. However, in our circumstances—the poverty and disunity of the country (resulting from the crimes of the chief ruling clique of the Kuomintang), and the protracted and dispersed people's guerrilla war—what we are doing is progressive. … Because we have adopted what seems to be a "backward" and "retrogressive" method, our troops are able to overcome shortages in the means of livelihood and improve their living conditions, so that every soldier is robust and strong; as a result, we are able to ease the tax burden on the people who are also in difficulties, thus winning their support, and we are able to keep up the protracted war and expand our armed forces, thus extending the Liberated Areas, reducing the enemy-occupied areas and attaining our objective of final victory over the aggressor and the liberation of the whole of China. Is this not of great historic significance? …

What we now have is neither the old mercenary system nor universal military service, but a third system, the system of mobilizing volunteers. It is better than the mercenary system since it does not produce so many loafers, but it is not so good as universal military service. Nevertheless, our present conditions only allow us to adopt the system of mobilizing volunteers, and not that of universal military service. The mobilized soldiers have to lead an army life for a long time, which may impair their attitude to labour and so turn some of them into loafers or taint them with certain bad habits characteristic of the warlord armies. But since the army began to produce for its own support, the attitude to labour has improved and loafer ways have been overcome. …

Once the army engages in production, the need for government and other organizations to do likewise becomes more obvious, and they do so more energetically; also, the need for a universal campaign of the whole people to increase production naturally becomes more obvious, and this too is carried on more energetically. [Source]

The united front takes on different forms depending on the country it is in and the principal contradiction in that country. In capitalist countries, it is usually a proletarian united front, consisting of the trade union movement and labor/workers’ parties (such as the Workers’ Party of America, which acted as the legal organization for the Communist Party of America, the predecessor of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA)) operating legally; but in semi-feudal and semi-colonial ones, the united front is an anti-imperialist one that includes all forces opposed to feudalism and imperialism, including the petty bourgeoisie and even the middle (national) bourgeoisie. In the struggle against fascism the proletarian united front may form the core of a wider popular front or people’s front, and this would include the petty-bourgeoisie, making it similar to the anti-imperialist united fronts of the colonized and semi-colonized countries; in the United States, the Farmer-Labor Party took on this role. In such conditions, it is not correct to neglect the formation of either the united front or the popular front. Georgi Dimitrov said this in “Unity of the Working Class against Fascism”:

For it cannot be seriously supposed that it is possible to establish a genuine anti-fascist Popular Front without securing the unity of action of the working class itself, the leading force of this anti-fascist Popular Front. At the same time, the further development of the united proletarian front depends, to a considerable degree, upon its transformation into a Popular Front against fascism. …

Of course, we must strive everywhere for a wide Popular Front of struggle against fascism. But in a number of countries we shall not get beyond general talk about the Popular Front unless we succeed in mobilizing the masses of the workers for the purpose of breaking down the resistance of the reactionary section of Social Democracy to the proletarian united front of struggle. Primarily this is how the matter stands in Great Britain, where the working class comprises the majority of the population and where the bulk of the working class follows the lead of the trade unions and the Labour Party. That is how matters stand in Belgium and in the Scandinavian countries, where the numerically small Communist Parties must face strong mass trade unions and numerically large Social Democratic Parties.

In these countries the Communists would commit a very serious political mistake if they shirked the struggle to establish a united proletarian front, under cover of general talk about the Popular Front, which cannot be formed without the participation of the mass working class organizations. In order to bring about a genuine Popular Front in these countries, the Communists must carry out an enormous amount of political and organizational work among the masses of the workers. They must overcome the preconceived ideas of these masses, who regard their large reformist organizations as already the embodiment of proletarian unity. …

The problem is different in countries like Poland, where a strong peasant movement is developing alongside the labor movement, where the peasant masses have their own organizations, which are becoming radicalized as a result of the agrarian crisis, and where national oppression evokes indignation among the national minorities. Here the development of the Popular Front of struggle will proceed parallel with the development of the united proletarian front, and at times in this type of country the movement for a general Popular Front may even outstrip the movement for a working-class front. …

Thus, Comrades, in attacking the problem of the proletarian front and the Popular Front, there can be no general panacea suitable for all cases, all countries, all peoples. In this matter universalism, the application of one and the same recipe to all countries, is equivalent, if, you will allow me to say so, to ignorance, and ignorance should be flogged, even when it stalks about, nay, particularly when it stalks about in the cloak of universal cut-and-dried schemes. [Source]

Proletarian united fronts in capitalist countries will include labor parties. As explained in the section on Marxism-Leninism, specifically in the subsection on the vanguard party, mass labor parties in each country represent the trade union movement, so communist parties must work with them (or form them, if they do not previously exist). These may include non-communist “socialist parties”, so long as these parties do not hinder communist work and do not claim to be vanguard parties themselves. William Z. Foster, a leader of the CPUSA, said such in his work, “The New Political Bases for a Labor Party in the United States” (our bolding):

From the outset we must stress the point that the Communist Party is the only consistent proletarian party which the working class has. It is the vanguard which the working class of the U.S.A. began to bring forward immediately after the war. The working class can have only one such party. To transform it into a powerful mass Bolshevik Party is the basic condition for the liberation of the working class. Therefore when the Communists raise the question of a labor party they do not think of an organization to compete with or to replace the Communist Party, but of a broad mass workers’ party, established on the basis of the united front between the Communists and all other workers, who accept the policy of the class struggle for their direct interests and who therefore break with the capitalist parties. …

It is a fact that mass parties of the workers first grew in those European countries where the bourgeois revolution either largely or wholly failed to give democratic rights to the workers. In such countries, notably Germany, Austria, Russia, etc., the workers, being acutely aware of their burning political grievances, early organized Socialist Parties to fight, in first line, for the democratic rights which they, the workers, so evidently lacked. In England and France, on the other hand, where the workers had more democratic rights, the mass parties of the proletariat were consequently much longer delayed in taking shape and strength.

It was in the United States, more than all other major countries, that the working class had the most extensive bourgeois democratic rights and illusions. This is the basic reason why they did not develop class consciousness and a workers’ mass party. Possessing in some measure the formal rights of free press, free speech, free assembly, the right to vote and to bold every political office, the legal right to organize unions and to strike, as well as a theoretical social equality with all other citizens, consequently, the American workers became saturated with bourgeois democratic illusions in spite of the fact that in America, as well as in other capitalist countries, these bourgeois democratic rights were used against the workers. Unlike the workers of Russia and Germany (and even of England and France), they did not feel the necessity for having a political party of their own to fight for immediate political demands. And, of course, they felt an even lesser urge to form such a party for the purpose of ultimately overthrowing capitalism. Therefore, until very recently, the Communist Party remained a small organization without wide mass influence. …

And during this whole period the masses themselves did not develop outside the framework of the A. F. of L. legislative program any additional major political demands, nor could the Socialist Party succeed in creating a popular mass political program that the workers would fight for, although it tried diligently for many years to do so; the Communist Party failed likewise. [Source]

Despite tactically allowing “socialist” parties in a proletarian united front, it would be best for a proper labor party to be part of the united front in the communist party’s long term strategy. While claiming to represent workers, most “socialist” parties end up being petty- or big-bourgeois “leftist” parties undesirable in a workers’ united front (and from there they may even be undesirable in a broad popular front, for they may be ineffective against fascism!). Any socialist party that successfully represents trade unions would be an appropriate labor party, but it must accept communist party leadership to work properly, and it must remain focused on labor as a whole and not narrow sectors of the proletariat.

Without these organizations and groups, the revolution is impossible. Without the united front (or the popular front, if it is needed), the revolution cannot occur, for the people’s army needs the masses’ support, and the party needs their input. Without the people’s army, the revolution will not happen; the party will not have an organization that fights the bourgeois state. Without the party, the masses will not have the necessary theoretical and political leadership and education they need, and the people’s army will not have a guided political ideology that represents the proletariat. These organizations must communicate with each other, too; they must not be isolated, but connected.

Communists must build proper relations between these organizations. Neither tailism nor commandism are appropriate; in particular, the communist goal of having the vanguard party lead the army and united front may lead to the erroneous policy of imposing communist decisions on non-communist, yet still progressive people; indeed, the only way for the masses to take communist decisions seriously is for communists to do proper, painstaking work among the people. Dimitrov said it best in his speech, “The The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism” (author’s bolding):

"The Communists act like dictators, they want to prescribe and dictate everything to us." No. We prescribe nothing and dictate nothing. We only put forward our proposals, being convinced that if realized they will meet the interests of the working people. This is not only the right but the duty of all those acting in the name of the workers. You are afraid of the 'dictatorship' of the Communists? Let us jointly submit to the workers all proposals, both yours and ours, jointly discuss them together with all the workers, and choose those proposals which are most useful to the cause of the working class. [Source]

The proletariat does need to exercise leadership in its deeds, of course; their communist party must allow them to exercise their leadership, particularly in conditions needing anti-imperialist united fronts or anti-fascist popular fronts. Mao explained how the proletariat does this in “The Tasks of the Chinese Communist Party in the Period of Resistance to Japan”:

How does the proletariat give political leadership through its party to all the revolutionary classes in the country? First, by putting forward basic political slogans that accord with the course of historical development and by putting forward slogans of action for each stage of development and each major turn of events in order to translate these political slogans into reality. For instance, we have put forward the basic slogans for "an anti-Japanese national united front" and for "a unified democratic republic", but we have also put forward the slogans, "end the civil war", "fight for democracy" and "carry out armed resistance", as specific objectives for concerted action by the entire nation; without such specific objectives political leadership is out of the question. Second, the proletariat, and especially its vanguard the Communist Party, should set an example through its boundless enthusiasm and loyalty in achieving the specific objectives when the whole country goes into action for them. In the fight to fulfil all the tasks of the anti-Japanese national united front and the democratic republic, Communists should be the most far-sighted, the most self-sacrificing, the most resolute, and the least prejudiced in sizing up situations, and should rely on the majority of the masses and win their support. Third, the Communist Party should establish proper relations with its allies and develop and consolidate its alliance with them, while adhering to the principle of never relinquishing its defined political objectives. Fourth, it should expand the ranks of the Communist Party and maintain its ideological unity and strict discipline; It is by doing all these things that the Communist Party gives effect to its political leadership of the people throughout China. They constitute the foundation for guaranteeing our political leadership and for ensuring that the revolution will win complete victory and not be disrupted by the vacillations of our allies. [Source]

The united front does not necessarily imply “left unity”; it may include rightist forces, as the Chinese united front did during the war against Japanese imperialism; the Chinese communists worked with the KMT, meaning that they collaborated with right-wingers against imperialist forces. It may also exclude “leftist” forces because of their collaboration with the main enemy in a given conflict, such as Chinese Trotskyites cooperating with Japan [Source]. As Lenin wrote in “Unity”, published on April 12, 1924: “Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism” [Source]. The PCP described the united front in “On Marxism-Leninism-Maoism” (our emphasis):

A united front based on the worker-peasant alliance and guaranteeing the proletariat's hegemony in the revolution; a united front of classes led by the proletariat, represented by its party, in sum a united front under the leadership of the Communist Party; a united front for people's war, for the revolution, for the seizure of power in the service of the proletariat and the masses. Concretely, therefore, the united front is the unity of the revolutionary forces against counter-revolutionary forces in order to wage the struggle between revolution and counter-revolution, principally through people's war, arms in hand. Obviously the united front is not the same at every stage of the revolution, and moreover, it has its specific characteristics depending on the different periods of each stage; likewise the united front in a specific revolution is not the same as on a world scale, though both follow the same general laws. [Source]

We support having different views and thoughts among the masses; this means that we support all organizations that are genuinely people’s organizations, mass organizations, groups that work for and with the people and their war. The united front, in that sense, is a genuine left unity in the sense that the left fights for the proletariat and its allies—that is, we fight for revolution and eventually communism. Mao said, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, and let a hundred schools of thought contend,” so we should be willing to have many different ideas for revolution, socialism, and communism. There are numerous progressive and revolutionary people’s organizations, and these people and groups can be part of the revolutionary united front, led by a communist party.

That being said, unprincipled unity with “all leftists” actually hinders the progress of the workers’ movement. To provide a concrete example of that, unionization efforts often face the roadblock of commandist “leftists” avoiding mass organization and preferring to “organize themselves first”, and these people do not support workers’ spontaneous efforts at fighting capitalists. As “The leftwing deadbeat”—an article by the syndicalist magazine “Organizing Work”—says: “leftists often use their politics to argue for why they shouldn’t join the union” [Source]. While the article in question incorrectly attacks vanguardism as a whole, it does correctly attack errors in applying a vanguardist strategy and failures to apply the mass line. To have a successful mass movement, communists need to organize the people, meet them where they are at, and unite with them on an anti-capitalist basis in all their struggles.

With the vanguard party, the people’s army, and the united front, the proletariat can take state power and, in underdeveloped countries, build New Democracy, which we will describe in the next section.

New Democracy

Chairman Mao described the system of New Democracy. This is similar to, if not the same as, the classical Marxist-Leninist concept of People’s Democracy, though People’s Democracies in Europe came from anti-fascist struggles and not always from general anti-imperialist wars.^[70] New Democracy is the structure of states that emerge out revolutions against semi-colonialism and/or semi-feudalism, and Mao is the leader that theorized about it the most. As the Soviet Textbook Political Economy states: “… [T]he fact that [the Chinese revolution] has opened the road of development towards socialism before a huge country … in which semi-feudal and semi-colonial forms of economy predominated… is the principal peculiarity… as compared with the European people's democracies” [Source]. This means that we can say that New Democracy, or Mao’s development of it, is theory and practice of applying People’s Democracy to a country with a weak bourgeois-democratic movement prior to the proletariat’s involvement.^[71]

The reason Chairman Mao called it “New Democracy” was that he pointed out that the path toward a democratic system in the third world has been and will be different from the paths in the first world and in the USSR; while the first world took the path of bourgeois democracy and the USSR took that of soviet democracy (proletarian democracy), the third world had to (and still has to) take a path of democratic revolution that was/is proletarian-led. While Mao specifically focused on China, the New-Democratic revolution is something that will occur in all underdeveloped countries. It will take on different forms depending on the country. In his essay, “On New Democracy”, he stated:

… [T]he Chinese bourgeois-democratic revolution came within the old category of the bourgeois-democratic world revolution, of which it was a part.

Since these events, the Chinese bourgeois-democratic revolution has changed, it has come within the new category of bourgeois-democratic revolutions and, as far as the alignment of revolutionary forces is concerned, forms part of the proletarian-socialist world revolution.

Why? Because the first imperialist world war and the first victorious socialist revolution, the October Revolution, have changed the whole course of world history and ushered in a new era.

It is an era in which the world capitalist front has collapsed in one part of the globe (one-sixth of the world) and has fully revealed its decadence everywhere else, in which the remaining capitalist parts cannot survive without relying more than ever on the colonies and Semi-colonies, in which a socialist state has been established and has proclaimed its readiness to give active support to the liberation movement of all colonies and semi-colonies, and in which the proletariat of the capitalist countries is steadily freeing itself from the social-imperialist influence of the social-democratic parties and has proclaimed its support for the liberation movement in the colonies and semi-colonies. In this era, any revolution in a colony or semi-colony that is directed against imperialism, i.e., against the international bourgeoisie or international capitalism, no longer comes within the old category of the bourgeois-democratic world revolution, but within the new category. It is no longer part of the old bourgeois, or capitalist, world revolution, but is part of the new world revolution, the proletarian-socialist world revolution. Such revolutionary colonies and semi-colonies can no longer be regarded as allies of the counter revolutionary front of world capitalism; they have become allies of the revolutionary front of world socialism.

Although such a revolution in a colonial and semi-colonial country is still fundamentally bourgeois-democratic in its social character during its first stage or first step, and although its objective mission is to clear the path for the development of capitalism, it is no longer a revolution of the old type led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat with the aim, in the first stage, of establishing a New-Democratic society and a state under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes. Thus this revolution actually serves the purpose of clearing a still wider path for the development of socialism. In the course of its progress, there may be a number of further sub-stages, because of changes on the enemy's side and within the ranks of our allies, but the fundamental character of the revolution remains unchanged.

Such a revolution attacks imperialism at its very roots, and is therefore not tolerated but opposed by imperialism. However, it is favored by socialism and supported by the land of socialism and the socialist international proletariat.

Therefore, such a revolution inevitably becomes part of the proletarian-socialist world revolution. [Source]

New Democracy is not universal. Like People's Democracy, New Democracy advocates for democratic revolution. This is unnecessary for developed capitalist countries, which have developed capitalism into capitalist-imperialism; the contradictions that make New Democracy necessary in imperialized countries simply do not exist in the imperial core. That is why comrades in the first world countries do not advocate for a democratic revolution, but a socialist one; the tasks of the former, which include basic development of the productive forces and the expansion of the proletariat, have already been completed and exceeded for those in the imperial core. New Democracy and People's Democracy are applicable to all underdeveloped countries, i.e. all colonies and semi-colonies. These countries need more productive forces and even need more of a proletariat, so they must have a proletarian dictatorship that allows capitalist activities [Source]. Consequently, the New-Democratic revolution must take place.

Mao wrote of a similar concept to New Democracy, that being the People's Democratic Dictatorship; that is what this upcoming subsection is on.

People's Democratic Dictatorship

Like the previous concept, New Democracy, and like People's Democracy, there is the People's Democratic Dictatorship. This is basically the same as the other two concepts, but it names the actual state type in those systems. Mao said in his text, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship” (our bolding):

Who are the people? At the present stage in China, they are the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. These classes, led by the working class and the Communist Party, unite to form their own state and elect their own government; they enforce their dictatorship over the running dogs of imperialism—the landlord class and bureaucrat-bourgeoisie, as well as the representatives of those classes, the Kuomintang reactionaries and their accomplices—suppress them, allow them only to behave themselves and not to be unruly in word or deed. If they speak or act in an unruly way, they will be promptly stopped and punished. Democracy is practiced within the ranks of the people, who enjoy the rights of freedom of speech, assembly, association and so on. The right to vote belongs only to the people, not to the reactionaries. The combination of these two aspects, democracy for the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries, is the People's Democratic Dictatorship. …

“Don't you want to abolish state power?” Yes, we do, but not right now; we cannot do it yet. Why? Because imperialism still exists, because domestic reaction still exists, because classes still exist in our country. Our present task is to strengthen the people's state apparatus—mainly the people's army, the people's police and the people's courts—in order to consolidate national defense and protect the people's interests. Given this condition, China can develop steadily, under the leadership of the working class and the Communist Party, from an agricultural into an industrial country and from a New-Democratic into a socialist and communist society, can abolish classes and realize the Great Harmony. …

Here, the method we employ is democratic, the method of persuasion, not of compulsion. When anyone among the people breaks the law, he too should be punished, imprisoned or even sentenced to death; but this is a matter of a few individual cases, and it differs in principle from the dictatorship exercised over the reactionaries as a class.

As for the members of the reactionary classes and individual reactionaries, so long as they do not rebel, sabotage or create trouble after their political power has been overthrown, land and work will be given to them as well in order to allow them to live and remold themselves through labor into new people. If they are not willing to work, the people's state will compel them to work. Propaganda and educational work will be done among them too and will be done, moreover, with as much care and thoroughness as among the captured army officers in the past. …

The so-called democratic system in modern states is usually monopolized by the bourgeoisie and has become simply an instrument for oppressing the common people. On the other hand, the Kuomintang's Principle of Democracy means a democratic system shared by all the common people and not privately owned by the few.

Apart from the question of who leads whom, the Principle of Democracy stated above corresponds as a general political programme to what we call People's Democracy or New Democracy. A state system which is shared only by the common people and which the bourgeoisie is not allowed to own privately—add to this the leadership of the working class, and we have the state system of the People's Democratic Dictatorship. …

Revolutionary dictatorship and counter-revolutionary dictatorship are by nature opposites, but the former was learned from the latter. Such learning is very important. If the revolutionary people do not master this method of ruling over the counter-revolutionary classes, they will not be able to maintain their state power, domestic and foreign reaction will overthrow that power and restore its own rule over China, and disaster will befall the revolutionary people.

The People's Democratic Dictatorship is based on the alliance of the working class, the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie, and mainly on the alliance of the workers and the peasants, because these two classes comprise 80 to 90 percent of China's population. These two classes are the main force in overthrowing imperialism and the Kuomintang reactionaries. The transition from New Democracy to socialism also depends mainly upon their alliance.

The People's Democratic Dictatorship needs the leadership of the working class. For it is only the working class that is most farsighted, most selfless and most thoroughly revolutionary. The entire history of revolution proves that without the leadership of the working class revolution fails and that with the leadership of the working class revolution triumphs. In the epoch of imperialism, in no country can any other class lead any genuine revolution to victory. This is clearly proved by the fact that the many revolutions led by China's petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie all failed. [Source]

The People's Democratic Dictatorship is the proletariat’s dictatorship over the enemy and alliance with the other sections of the people; while the petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, and perhaps even the national bourgeoisie enjoy an alliance with the proletariat, the former compradors, imperialists, and landlords get ruthlessly punished. This transforms into the proletarian dictatorship when the national bourgeoisie is not needed anymore; when the proletariat is strong enough, and when the productive forces are developed enough, it can take the national bourgeoisie’s property, proletarianizing it.

New Democracy, People’s Democracy, etc. are parts of socialism; they are not different from socialism. We discuss this in the next section.

Modern Conception of the Meaning of Socialism

Socialism is the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the proletariat is socialism. This is because socialism is the transitory period between capitalism and communism; the only way for communism to be achieved is if the proletariat enforces its will on the bourgeoisie, eliminates all class distinctions across all of society, and destroys the remnants, or “birthmarks”, of capitalist society.

What is different about this meaning of socialism? Well, unlike previous definitions of socialism (which are now economist in nature), this new definition is much more broad, and it includes any economies which have workers holding political power and regulating capitalist enterprises; in other words, it includes proletarian state-capitalist countries, and it includes the state-capitalist system as a part of the socialist transition period, rather than it being separate from socialism. It is hard, if not totally impossible, to very clearly distinguish between the state-capitalist and the “more economically socialist” phases; the New Economic Policy in the USSR only officially ended in 1936, and China’s state-capitalist phase only officially ended in 1958! In contrast, many people say the USSR turned socialist in 1927, and China in 1953–56. It is incorrect to base this on arbitrary numbers and whatnot, so we base our definition of socialism on its qualities.

Of course, one must oppose the revisionist assumption which states that countries like modern China are socialist because of this. Revisionists claim that China is a dictatorship of the proletariat, and therefore it is socialist. On the contrary, China is no longer a dictatorship of the proletariat. Its bourgeoisie has held political power for more than 40 years, and the economy has been transitioning away from communism. Therefore, China is capitalist. A similar situation has taken place in most modern countries that claim to be socialist, with a national or comprador bourgeoisie holding political power. Nonetheless, we should observe state-capitalist policies within a socialist goal as part of a socialist transition. In Rethinking Socialism, it claims:

Socialist transition is the period of time that transforms a non-communist society to a communist society. During the socialist transition there is no…predetermined path by which policies and events can be judged to determine whether this path is being followed. Instead, the analysis of socialist transition depends on the general direction of the transition. Therefore, one single and isolated event cannot determine whether the transition is socialist or capitalist. We have no predetermined path in mind and, thus, have no specific yardsticks to measure our evaluation. …

For our analysis of the transition period between capitalism and communism, making the distinction between the legal transfer of ownership of the means of production to the state and the beginning of socialist transition is very important to clarify the question of revisionism. In many countries, China included, the Communist Party claimed and continues to claim that it practiced (s) socialism because the majority of their industries were (are) still state owned, when in fact the transition was already reversed from socialist to capitalist. At the current time, the Chinese Communist Party uses state ownership as an indicator of practicing socialism in order to legitimize its rule. As we explained earlier, state ownership exists in both capitalist system and during the period of transition, thus state ownership does not in any way indicate or express the relations of production.

Marx distinguished judicial change from real change in the relations of production. Marx criticized M. Proudhon, because Proudhon considered the legal aspect, not the real form, as the relations of production. For the same reason, we differ from the traditional Chinese use of the term. After the Communist Party overthrew the Nationalists and established the peoples' government in 1949, the new government confiscated all bureaucratic capital and foreign capital. It nationalized all major assets in transportation, communication, and manufacturing. Then, in 1952 it completed the land reform. After 1952, the government took several steps to nationalize the remaining private capital and it also took several steps in the cooperative movements in agriculture. By 1956, it completed both the nationalization of industry and the collectivization of agriculture. The government legally transferred the ownership of the means of production to the state and to the collectives. China called (and still calls) the period between 1952 to 1956 the transition to socialism, and the period since 1956 socialism. According to our analysis, during the period of 1949–1978 the state instituted policies that clearly indicated the direction of transition was toward communism, therefore, the transition was socialist. [Source]

In the Peking Review issue of April 11, 1975, in their article, “Socialism is the Class Dictatorship of the Proletarian”, Po Ching states (author’s italics):

Revolutionary storms swept the continent of Europe in the late forties of the last century. The proletariat militantly began taking the stage of history. In June 1848, the Paris proletariat staged an uprising, a great fight between the two major opposing classes—the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850, Marx summed up the revolutionary experience of that period and elaborated the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He pointed out explicitly: “This Socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.” This wise conclusion of Marx is a scientific, profound exposition of the indispensability and the great historical tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat. [Source]

In Chapter Five, Section Two of On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat^[72], it says:

What I have just outlined in a very general manner can be explained in another way, by starting out from the simple but very topical question: what is 'socialism'?

It is nowadays common to define socialism in terms of a combination of the 'collective property of the means of production' and the 'political power of the working people'. But this definition is insufficient. Or worse: it is false, because, by ignoring the question of the class struggle, of the place of socialism in the history of the class struggle and of the forms taken by the class struggle after the socialist revolution, it leaves room for enormous ambiguities. It does not allow us to distinguish clearly between proletarian socialism and bourgeois or petty-bourgeois 'socialism', which really does exist in the ideological and political field. The mistake becomes even more serious when socialism is defined in terms of planning, economic rationality, social justice, the 'logic of needs', etc.

Let us first therefore say a word about what socialism cannot be, from the Marxist standpoint: socialism cannot be a classless society. And, since it is not a society without classes, it cannot be a society without exploitation, a society from which every form of exploitation has disappeared. Socialism can only be a society in which every form of exploitation is on the way to disappearing, to the extent that its material foundations are disappearing.

Lenin explained this very clearly, in 1919, in a remarkable text, entitled Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, whose formulations can be usefully compared with those of the article 'Left-Wing' Communism: an Infantile Disorder (1920) and with those, among others, of his Report on the NEP presented to the Eleventh Congress of the RCP (B) in 1922. Lenin writes:

“Theoretically, there can be no doubt that between capitalism and communism there lies a definite transition period which must combine the features and properties of both these forms of social economy. This transition period has to be a period of struggle between dying capitalism and nascent communism—or, in other words, between capitalism which has been defeated but not destroyed and communism which has been born but is still very feeble.”

Let us pause here for a moment, in order to look more closely at these remarkable formulations: this inevitable transition period, which takes a whole historical epoch (even if, in 1919, Lenin and the Bolsheviks underestimated its length), is socialism itself. This means that socialism is not an independent economic and social formation, and even less is it an independent historical mode of production. There is no socialist mode of production in the sense that there is a capitalist mode of production or a communist mode of production, contrary to what mechanistic Marxists like Kautsky or Plekhanov believed (they were always trying to work out the degree of its 'maturity'), and contrary to what a certain number of Communists believe today. To imagine that there can be an independent socialist mode of production, distinct both from the capitalist mode of production and from communism is either to imagine, in a utopian manner, that it is possible to move immediately from capitalism to the classless society, or to imagine that classes can exist without class struggle, that class relations can exist without being antagonistic. And the common root of these utopian ideas is generally the confusion between relations of production, in the Marxist sense of the term, which are relations of men to one another and of men to the material means of production in productive labor, with simple legal property relations, or again with relations of income distribution, of the distribution of the social product between individuals and classes, as regulated by the law. [Source]

Therefore, the socialist system is a transitional one defined by only a few general guidelines, not rigid, unchanging policies. It includes the dictatorship of the proletariat and the overall transition to communism. This understanding of socialism began in China, and it remains correct today.

This being said, this is specifically in reference to the “historical stage of socialism” and “completed socialism”. To quote the Fundamentals of Political Economy textbook, “After the establishment of socialist public ownership, the issue of the ownership system has still not been completely resolved. There still exist the two possibilities of advancing toward socialism or retreating back to capitalism [Source].” This means that even after the state nationalizes most means of production and collective enterprises control the rest, complete socialism (complete, “proper” lower phase of communism) has not been achieved. Socialism has many phases of development, and while the proletarian dictatorship’s existence shows that it has begun, that is different from saying it has completed its construction.

Something important that Mao understood was that class struggle would continue in socialism. Stalin incorrectly thought that class conflict was only outside the socialist state, that capitalists only attacked from other countries and not by growing within the USSR. In contrast, Mao recognized that there would be class struggle in all parts of socialist society, including the economy, the state, culture, and more. This was especially true for China, which had a New-Democratic period of revolution and therefore initially relied on the national bourgeoisie; while Mao attempted to proletarianize the national bourgeoisie peacefully, it turned into an enemy of the workers’ state when they tried to weaken socialism, particularly doing so in China’s superstructure; thus, Mao called for cultural revolution.

Cultural Revolution

Socialism is the transitional period between capitalism and communism. Therefore, there will be changes within all of society to get to communism. Obviously, the base would change to be closer to communism; however, the superstructure must also change. The revolutionary changes in the superstructure are the cultural revolutions that will occur under socialism. Cultural revolutions obviously advance culture, but they also advance the state, for the state is the main part of society’s superstructure; in a workers’ state, cultural revolutions remove agents from the bourgeoisie, who represent the old bourgeoisie and its ideas as well as a new bourgeoisie that arises in socialism.

In socialist economies in which multiple types of property still exist, the contradictions between them get resolved during these qualitative leaps. Under proletarian rule, the state cannot force cooperatives into the state; rather, via these changes in the masses’ ideology, they can come to accept merging cooperatives into the state to create a unified socialist economy. Furthermore, commodity production and the various divisions of labor fade away when the superstructure changes. Disdain for manual labor, as we discussed earlier, comes from class society and the birth of the parasitic ruling class that exploits labor; that is why as classes are abolished, that disdain for manual labor must go as well, so mental laborers also do manual work and vice-versa. This is what happens in cultural revolutions, and it happened during China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as students and engineers used their knowledge to help manual workers and peasants while the latter received education to gain technical skills. (Most of the actual history of this movement is covered in the section on socialism in Asia.)

Cultural revolutions are part of the overall line struggle that occurs. It is one form that line struggle takes; specifically, it is based on the entire working population attacking the bourgeois line, be it in the vanguard party, people’s army, state, and entire society. So long as the superstructure of the old society remained, this struggle was inevitable; the proletariat had to get rid of it and replace it with a new, proletarian superstructure.^[73] Mao already knew that class struggle would continue in all spheres of socialist society back in the 1950’s; in “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”, he said:

The superstructure, comprising the state system and laws of the people's democratic dictatorship and the socialist ideology guided by Marxism-Leninism, plays a positive role in facilitating the victory of socialist transformation and the socialist way of organizing labor; it is in correspondence with the socialist economic base, that is, with socialist relations of production. But the existence of bourgeois ideology, a certain bureaucratic style of work in our state organs and defects in some of the links in our state institutions are in contradiction with the socialist economic base. We must continue to resolve all such contradictions in the light of our specific conditions. Of course, new problems will emerge as these contradictions are resolved. And further efforts will be required to resolve the new contradictions. …

In China, although socialist transformation has in the main been completed as regards the system of ownership, and although the large-scale, turbulent class struggles of the masses characteristic of times of revolution have in the main come to an end, there are still remnants of the overthrown landlord and comprador classes, there is still a bourgeoisie, and the remolding of the petty bourgeoisie has only just started. Class struggle is by no means over. The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the class struggle between the various political forces, and the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in the ideological field will still be protracted and tortuous and at times even very sharp. The proletariat seeks to transform the world according to its own world outlook, and so does the bourgeoisie. In this respect, the question of which will win out, socialism or capitalism, is not really settled yet. [Source]

Even as the bourgeoisie ceases to exploit labor, ex-capitalists do continue to try to restore capitalist relations in a combination of ideological influence on society, imposing capitalist economic reforms that weaken socialist construction, and seizing political power from the proletariat. Ex-capitalists materially work like proletarians, but they cease to let go of their wishes to restore capitalism; furthermore, new capitalists arise as they try to exploit the socialist relations of production, particularly when commodity production still exists. Fundaentals of Political Economy discusses this matter in Chapter 14, specifically in the section called, “Socialist Interrelations Still Possess Class Overtones”:

In socialist society, although the exploiting class has lost its means of production, it still exists as a class. After the socialist revolution of the ownership of the means of production is basically realized, the existence of classes will rest on the people’s economic relations prior to socialist reform and their political positions in the struggle between socialism and capitalism. In addition, the existence of classes is related to capitalist traditions and influences that still remain in socialist society, to the remaining disparities between the worker and the peasant, the urban and rural areas, and mental and physical labor, and to the bourgeois legal rights that reflect them. In fact, in addition to the continuing existence of the landlord and the bourgeoisie, new bourgeois elements will continue to emerge. From among the educated, bourgeois rightists may still emerge. Agents of the bourgeoisie may even appear inside the Communist Party. …

Although some people concede that there are still exploitative classes in socialist society, they refuse to admit that these classes survive in socialist production relations. They think that these classes exist only in that part of society which is divorced from socialist production relations. … To think that socialist production relations do not manifest relations in which the working class and the laboring people rule and transform the exploitative class will lead to the harmful conclusion that socialist production relations are independent of classes. Some people think that since we all earn our living through labor everyone is the same. Therefore, classes no longer exist. This erroneous concept is closely related to the theoretical negation of the class nature of socialist production relations. In socialist production, the laboring people, occupying a dominant position, are the masters in socialist production relations. …

Through continuous resolute and energetic struggle, the working class and the poor and lower-middle peasants will gradually transform the majority of these two exploitative classes [the landlords and the bourgeoisie in China’s conditions] into self-supporting laborers after a long period of labor. [Source]

In “Hold High the Great Red Banner of Mao Tse-tung’s Thinking; Actively Participate in the Great Socialist Cultural Revolution”, an article in Issue 18 of Volume 9 of Peking Review, the authors say:

The struggle to uphold the proletarian ideology and to eradicate the bourgeois ideology on the cultural front is an important aspect of the class struggle between two classes (the proletariat and the bourgeoisie), between two roads (the socialist road and the capitalist road) and between two ideologies (the proletarian ideology and the bourgeois ideology). The proletariat seeks to change the world according to its world outlook, and so does the bourgeoisie. Socialist culture should serve the workers, peasants and soldiers, should serve proletarian politics, should serve the consolidation and development of the socialist system and its gradual transition to communism. Bourgeois and revisionist culture serves the bourgeoisie, landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements and Rightists, to prepare the way for the return of capitalism. If the proletariat does not occupy the cultural position, it is bound to be occupied by the bourgeoisie. This is a sharp class struggle. [Source]

Indeed, the bourgeoisie is most powerful when it infiltrates the ruling Communist Party. While it ceases to own the means of production directly in socialism, it attempts to seize state power and own the means of production from there, working to restore capitalism from within. “The Inner-Party Bourgeoisie in The Socialist Period” by Qin Zhengxian explains this:

Since the first day of the establishment of the Communist Party, within the party, there have been opportunists and revisionists who have acted as the agents of the bourgeoisie in the Communist Party. Chen Duxiu in China, Plekhanov in Russia, and Bernstein and Kautsky in German are all figures of this sort. However, before the proletariat seize the power, the agents of the bourgeoisie who sneak into the proletariat’s party, when compared to the entire bourgeoisie, are not its core power, but merely its vassals. …

After the proletariat’s seizure of power, the Communist Party becomes the ruling party, and as class relations change, the inner-party bourgeoisie no longer appears as the vassals of a bourgeoisie that exists outside the Communist Party. However, for a period of time after the proletariat’s seizure of power, the bourgeoisie outside the party owns the means of production and maintains some power for rallying people around it. It can still organize its own headquarter and promote its own head figures to fight with the proletariat. At this time, the inner-party bourgeoisie still does not appear within the Communist Party as the core force of the entire bourgeoisie, but rather collude with the bourgeoisie outside the party, acting as their reinforcement. As the socialist revolution deepens, the bourgeoisie outside the party loses the means of production and is defeated politically again and again, resulting in an ignominious reputation and a gradual decline in power. From this point onward, the inner-party bourgeoisie then emerges as the core force of the entire bourgeoisie. …

In the period of Lenin and Stalin’s leadership, the bourgeoisie outside the party colluded with fourteen countries to invade the Soviet Republic by force, and Hitler initiated an all around invasion of the Soviet Union, but all of them were defeated. However, not long after the innerparty bourgeoisie represented by Khrushchev and Brezhnev usurped the highest power in the party and in the country, the red flag fell on the ground, the party turned revisionist, and the country changed its colors. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the seizure [of only] partial power by the inner-party bourgeoisie , and the start of activities for capitalist restoration have a far greater effect than that brought about by the bourgeoisie outside the party. [Source]

“From Bourgeois Democrats to Capitalist-Roaders” illustrates how China’s initial reliance on the national bourgeoisie made it predisposed to having revisionists infiltrate the Communist Party:

The New-Democratic revolution and the socialist revolution led by the Chinese Communist Party are two revolutionary stages whose character, targets and tasks are essentially different. The former took place in the old China of semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. The principal contradiction it aimed to resolve was the contradiction between the masses of the people including, workers, peasants, the petty and national bourgeoisie on one side and imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism on the other. Therefore, it was anti-imperialist and anti-feudal bourgeois democratic revolution in character. Its task was to strive under the leadership of the proletariat to overthrow the rule of imperialism, the feudal landlord class and the bureaucrat-comprador bourgeoisie in China, and to lead the revolution to socialism.

With the victory of the new-democratic revolution, the character and principal contradiction of the Chinese society changed. The contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie became the principal contradiction in our country. This contradiction not only exists in society at large but is also reflected in the Party. The socialist revolution we are carrying out is a revolution waged by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes. The spearhead of the revolution is directed mainly against the bourgeoisie and against Party persons in power taking the capitalist road. Its task is to replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the dictatorship of the proletariat, use socialism to defeat capitalism, and through protracted class struggle gradually create conditions in which it will be impossible for the bourgeoisie to exist, or for a new bourgeoisie to arise, and finally eliminate classes and realize communism. The founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 marked the beginning of the socialist revolutionary stage.

If one’s ideology still remains at the old stage and views and treats the socialist revolution from the stand and world outlook of bourgeois democrats, one will become a representative of the bourgeoisie, a capitalist-roader and a target of the socialist revolution. [Source]

The “Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” summarized the tasks of China’s Cultural Revolution:

Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavor to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do the exact opposite: it must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. At present, our objective is to struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities” and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure not in correspondence with the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system. …

In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution a most important task is to transform the old educational system and the old principles and methods of teaching.

In this Great Cultural Revolution, the phenomenon of our schools being dominated by bourgeois intellectuals must be completely changed. …

In the course of the mass movement of the Cultural Revolution, the criticism of bourgeois and feudal ideology should be well combined with the dissemination of the proletarian world outlook and of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tse-tung’s thought.

Criticism should be organized of typical bourgeois representatives who have wormed their way into the Party and typical reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities,” and this should include criticism of various kinds of reactionary views in philosophy, history, political economy and education, in works and theories of literature and art, in theories of natural science, and in other fields. [Source]

The “Circular of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” outlined how the bourgeoisie infiltrated the proletarian state, threatening to overthrow it and make it bourgeois; this revelation caused the masses to take action in defense of their proletarian democracy:

The whole party must follow Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s instructions, hold high the great banner of the proletarian Cultural Revolution, thoroughly expose the reactionary bourgeois stand of those so-called ‘academic authorities’ who oppose the party and socialism, thoroughly criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois ideas in the sphere of academic work, education, journalism, literature and art, and publishing, and seize the leadership in these cultural spheres. To achieve this, it is necessary at the same time to criticize and repudiate those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the party, the government, the army, and all spheres of culture, to clear them out or transfer some of them to other positions. Above all, we must not entrust these people with the work of leading the Cultural Revolution. In fact many of them have done and are still doing such work, and this is extremely dangerous.

Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the party, the government, the army, and various cultural circles are a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists. Once conditions are ripe, they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Some of them we have already seen thorough, others we have not. Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors, persons like Khrushchev, for example, who are still nestling beside us. Party committees at all levels must pay full attention to this matter.

This circular is to be sent, together with the erroneous document issued by the Central Committee on 12 February 1960, down to the level of county party committees, party committees in the cultural organizations, and party committees at regimental level in the army. These committees are asked to discuss which of the two documents is wrong and which is correct, their understanding of these documents, and their achievements and mistakes. [Source]

During China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the working masses not only fought reactionary and revisionist cultures and ideologies, but they also fought corrupt party elites, bureaucrats, etc. and the bureaucratic privileges^[74] that they had. These corrupt officials wanted to return to capitalism (either consciously or unconsciously; either they knew they were capitalist, or they advocated for policies that they did not know would lead to capitalist restoration). “On the Relationship Between the Working Class and Its Party Under Socialism” covers this in great detail.

To eliminate this material basis which breeds capitalist roaders, we must strictly distinguish between bureaucratic privileges and bourgeois rights; we must create a distributional system that decouples one’s political and economic standing so as to prevent the formation of bourgeois interest groups within bureaucracies built on the basis of bureaucratic privileges. …

Thus, the fundamental problem is not whether or not there is a bureaucracy. Instead, the root of the problem is whether this bureaucracy becomes a bourgeois interest group. Therefore, the terms “cadre class” or “bureaucratic class” are inaccurate. “Bureaucrats” and “capitalist roaders” are quite different concepts. Capitalist roaders were the disguised capitalists within the Party during the period of socialism in China; they were an interest group. Mao later defined those disguised capitalists within the Party as “capitalist roaders.” This is a more scientific definition because it requires that we know whether an interest group exists. …

In economically underdeveloped countries that have pursued a socialist road under states of working class rule, bureaucratic privileges enjoyed by the party and government officials have manifested themselves in all aspect of daily life, such as privileges in food, clothing, housing, transportation, as well as in healthcare and children’s education, and so on. Yet these bureaucratic privileges and perks have an essential difference from those other inevitable legacies of privilege from the old society originating in bourgeois rights, such as the three great differences between workers and peasants, cities and countryside, and mental and manual labor, as well as income distribution according to technical level, seniority, work performed, etc. …

These privileges linked pay scale and individual living standards of party and government officials to their rank within the leadership hierarchy. This system of privileges “mixed-up” what was needed for the officials’ work and what was needed for their personal lives. In other words, such privileges blurred the line between what was in fact necessary for the officials to carry-out their duties under conditions of material shortages (such as housing, transportation, communications, security, health care, etc.) based on their levels of responsibility and needs of work on the one hand, and individual pay and family accommodation according to rank within the leadership hierarchy on the other hand. Differences in living conditions according to the rank within leadership hierarchy, however, did not merely reflect a concession. Rather it indicates that the fundamental worldviews among some people within the ruling party were essentially capitalistic. [Source]

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution provides many lessons for the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist-Maoists of the world. We can still uphold it and take from it what worked, and we can criticize what failed during this period.

Universal Parts of Gonzalo Thought

So far, all of what has been described has been about Mao Tse-Tung’s contributions to the theories of Marxism. However, Mao’s adaptation of Marxism-Leninism to China was not a leap in the development of Marxism as a science; Mao Zedong Thought, as it was called, was still Marxism-Leninism, but there were additional theories added to it to make it more applicable. Chairman Gonzalo then took Mao Zedong Thought and synthesized Maoism, making the qualitative leap in Marxism’s development (from Marxism-Leninism to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism). Just as Mao applied Marxism-Leninism, Gonzalo had to apply Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to his conditions, the conditions of Peru. Therefore, Gonzalo Thought was synthesized. Gonzalo Thought includes these concepts which are relevant everywhere.

(A lot of the information in this section came from an essay called “Important Ideas of Presidente Gonzalo” [Source] by “Queer Bolshevik”, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist writer on Medium, an online publishing forum. Therefore, the authors feel indebted to this comrade for their work. Thank you, comrade, for the information that you so effectively conveyed.)

Guiding Thought

As we materialists know, no two countries’ material conditions are the same. In a given country, there are material conditions and realities that must be dealt with in the application of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. That is why Chairman Gonzalo named the idea of the “Guiding Thought”, the summation of theories that exist due to the communist party’s application of Marxism to their country for its revolution. This concept existed previously; Mao Zedong Thought was China’s guiding thought/path, its implementation of Marxism-Leninism. However, the idea of “guiding thought” was only named and determined by Chairman Gonzalo, which is why it is one of his contributions to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

The Peruvian communists’ guiding thought was, and still is, Gonzalo Thought; some other countries’ parties claim to support this path as the guiding path in their countries, too, which is not bad; after all, there were two “Maoist” rebellions (one in India and one in the Philippines) that started before Peru’s, and this meant that they used China’s guiding thought (Mao Zedong thought) in their countries. They later updated their philosophy to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and they have their own (presumably unnamed) guiding thoughts.

Guiding thoughts are not static; like everything in the universe, they experience quantitative and qualitative changes. While this does not always happen, guiding thoughts may develop beyond merely being unnamed particular implementations of Marxism. In “On Gonzalo Thought”, one of the Fundamental Documents from the first congress of the PCP, the authors say this on guiding thoughts in general and how their thought improved over time:

Every revolution, in the course of its development, due to the struggle of the proletariat as the leading class and, above all, of the Communist Party which unwaveringly upholds the proletariat's class interests, brings forth a group of leaders and principally one who comes to represent and lead it, a leader of recognised authority and influence. In our situation, because of historical necessity and for historical reasons, this has meant concretely Chairman Gonzalo, leader of the Party and of the revolution.

But, further, and this is the basis of all leadership, revolutions bring forth a thought that guides them, a product of the application of the universal truth of the ideology of the international proletariat to the concrete conditions of each revolution, a guiding thought indispensable to achieve victory and seize power, and further, to continue the revolution and always advance towards the only truly great goal, communism. This guiding thought, having made a qualitative leap of crucial importance for the revolutionary process, becomes identified with the name of the person who forged it in theory and in practice. In our situation this phenomenon took specific form first as guiding thought, then as the guiding thought of Chairman Gonzalo, and finally as Gonzalo Thought; for it is the Chairman who, creatively applying Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to the concrete conditions of Peruvian reality, has developed it, thus providing the Party and the revolution with an indispensable weapon which is the guarantee of victory. [Source]

In other words, a guiding thought starts off unnamed, for the masses and their communist party apply proletarian ideology to their particularities; as it proves itself in practical experience, and as its leader grows in importance, the guiding thought is specifically named with them; eventually, once it becomes “the highest expression of the fusion of the universal ideology with the concrete practice of” revolution in a given country, it is simply named as that person’s thought [Source]. The last stage is not one that all guiding thoughts reach, but once such a thought reaches a stage, it is possible for other parties to try to take it and apply it in their own conditions, eventually proving its own universality; if enough theories are synthesized to make it advance proletarian ideology its three components, it can become a new stage of said ideology, a new “ism”.

Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is universal; if it was not, then there would not be four different Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutions going on right now; there would not be many other Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties in other countries. Still, the application of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism requires the creation of new ideas that can help it better fit in one’s country, in one’s material reality. The guiding thoughts that come about from Marxism-Leninism-Maoism’s applications take particularities into account in order to properly implement the universal ideology.

Great Leadership (Jefatura)

In the vanguard party, it is inevitable that great leaders come about to represent the interests of their class. In the October Revolution, there was Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and more; in China, there was Mao Tse-Tung, Jiang Qing (Mao’s wife), and other revolutionaries; in Albania, there was Enver Hoxha and his allies; and in the People's Democracies there were certain leaders who arose to represent the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but sadly it was the latter who had held power after the Khrushchevite takeover of the USSR and its allies.

The Great Leadership (Jefatura, as it is known in Spanish) forms because all classes in all societies are spearheaded by a smaller group of leaders; these people are generally the most capable of the class they represent. For the proletariat, the leaders of the revolutionary vanguard party become this Jefatura. These leaders are chosen by the lower members of the party, can be criticized by the masses, removed by the party members (if they choose to do so), and have their leadership legitimized by the people. The Great Leadership of the party and government is democratically elected by the lower ranks, democratically decides on policies that affect the entire party and its supporters, and implements them in a centralized way; this is democratic centralism. This group also implements the mass line, the democratic-centralist method of leadership, by taking ideas from the masses (and through the lower party members), studying and concentrating them, and implementing them onto the masses. This is how the Great leadership is, contrary to what the revisionists say, a democratic leadership.

People frequently criticize the concept of Great Leadership as a “cult of personality”. This is a revisionist notion; we need not have a personality cult to recognize someone as a leader of the proletarian movement. We should be able to choose certain people to lead and guide the revolution while also criticizing any mistakes they make. There should not be any dogmatic appraisal of leaders, but there should be support for them; they are the most class-conscious, well-read, experienced revolutionaries, even though they are not perfect. In the interview of Chairman Gonzalo by El Diario, Gonzalo says:

Here we must remember how Lenin saw the relationship between the masses, classes, the Party and leaders. We believe that the revolution, the Party, our class, generate leaders, a group of leaders. It has been like this in every revolution. If we think, for instance, about the October Revolution, we have Lenin, Stalin, Sverdlov and a few others, a small group. Similarly, in the Chinese revolution there's also a small group of leaders: Chairman Mao Tsetung, and his comrades Kang Sheng, Chiang Ching [Jiang Qing], Chang Chun-chiao, among others. All revolutions are that way, including our own. We could not be an exception. Here it's not true that there is an exception to every rule because what we're talking about here is the operation of certain laws. All such processes have leaders, but they also have a leader who stands out above the rest or who leads the rest, in accordance with the conditions. Not all leaders can be viewed in exactly the same way. Marx is Marx, Lenin is Lenin, Chairman Mao is Chairman Mao. Each is unique, and no one is going to be just like them.

In our Party, revolution, and people's war, the proletariat, by a combination of necessity and historical chance, has brought forth a group of leaders. In Engels' view, it is necessity that generates leaders, and a top 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, in our case too, a Great Leadership has been generated. This was first acknowledged in the Party at the Expanded National Conference of 1979. But this question involves another basic question that can't be overlooked and needs to be emphasized: there is no Great Leadership that does not base itself on a body of thought, no matter what its level of development may be. The reason that a certain person has come to speak as the Leader of the Party and the revolution, as the resolutions state, has to do with necessity and historical chance and, obviously, with Gonzalo Thought. None of us knows what the revolution and the Party will call on us to do, and when a specific task arises the only thing to do is assume the responsibility. [Source]

The Great Leadership is, in a sense, the vanguard of the vanguard party. It is a consequence of democratic centralism, which is not necessarily bad; democratic centralism is the only way to have true democracy and freedom for the workers while also maintaining order and stability. During the revolution, the Great Leadership leads the vanguard party, which controls the people’s army, which is the fighting part of the united front, which leads and represents the masses in the people’s war. In socialism, the Great Leadership leads the party, which controls the government that governs the proletariat. The Jefatura is, therefore, the leadership of the proletariat and a necessary component of the communist party.

The leaders are not infallible, of course. That is why they must rely on the mass line for leadership and democratic centralism in decision-making. However, the mass line creates leaders that can effectively guide the masses in the right direction, and that is how the Jefatura forms.

Concentric Construction of the Revolutionary Movement

There is a certain way to organize the revolutionary movement that has been observed in all people’s wars. This is the Concentric^[75] Construction of the Three Weapons. As we have discussed, the three weapons are the vanguard party, people’s army, and united front; what Chairman Gonzalo contributed to this idea was that these organizations form concentric rings around the Jefatura; the outer organizations are the broadest reach of the masses, and the inner ones are more politically-educated. Why is this done? Well, it is done for two reasons:

Security is important; by having careful examinations and vettings of people in the united front (which is the most widespread of the organizations), we can carefully select people to be in the people’s army; with vetting there, we can have certain people be in the vanguard party; and with vetting there, we can have a group of important leaders of the revolution. Without this much vetting, we could have dangerous people get into high ranks in the party and eventually the socialist government, threatening its integrity and making fascist takeover and capitalist restoration much more likely.
It is the inevitable consequence of democratic centralism and the mass line. In order to have democratic centralism, there must be a wide mass base with hundreds of ideas and schools of thought (the united front), a broad people’s army which consists of the people dedicated to the revolution, and a party which has the most class-conscious working masses who lead the revolution; all of these organizations democratically make decisions and centrally enforce and follow them. To have the mass line, the party must listen to the people’s army, who must listen to the united front (the ordinary masses), and they all must make decisions based on what their subordinates need, want, and think is necessary.

The entire revolutionary movement is like a castle or fortress with multiple walls, with the outer walls listening to the inner sections and the inner sections taking information from the outer ones. This is really how all successful revolutionary movements have been, to one degree or another, but the importance of Chairman Gonzalo’s thinking is that he discovered the specific form of these movements; he saw how in impactful revolutions, the united front, people’s army, and vanguard party formed concentric “rings” around the leaders, allowing them all to exchange ideas and for the outer “rings” to defend the inner ones. Not having this means that the united front, people’s army, and/or vanguard party can be corrupted by commandism or even total revisionism and fascist destruction.

The PCP described this in the General Political Line of the Communist party of Peru. In the chapter, “Line of Construction of the Three Instruments of the Revolution”, it states:

Chairman Gonzalo expounds the militarization of the Communist Parties and the concentric construction of the three instruments. The militarization of the Communist Parties is the political directive with a strategic content, since it is “the set of transformations, changes and readjustments it needs to lead the People’s War as the principal form of struggle that will generate the new State.” Therefore, the militarization of the Communist Parties is key for the democratic revolution, the socialist revolution and the cultural revolutions.

He defines the principle of construction: “On the ideological-political base, to simultaneously build the organizational forms in the midst of the class struggle and the two-line struggle, all of these within and as a function of the armed struggle for the conquest of Power.”

In addition, he links the entire process of construction with the fluidity of people’s war, starting from Chairman Mao’s thesis that “the mobility of military operations and the variability of our territory provide all works of construction with . . . a variable character.”

The militarization of the Communist Party and concentric construction. Chairman Gonzalo expounded the thesis that the Communist Parties of the world should militarize themselves for three reasons:

First, because we are in the strategic offensive of the world revolution, we live during the sweeping away of imperialism and reaction from the face of the Earth within the next 50 to 100 years, a time marked by violence in which all kinds of wars take place. We see how reaction is militarizing itself more and more, militarizing the old States, their economies, developing wars of aggression, trafficking with the struggles of the peoples and aiming toward a world war, but since revolution is the principal tendency in the world, the task of the Communist Parties is to uphold revolution shaping the principal form of struggle: People’s war to oppose the world counter revolutionary war with world revolutionary war.

Second, because capitalist restoration must be prevented. When the bourgeoisie loses Power, it introduces itself inside the Party, uses the army and seeks to usurp Power and destroy the dictatorship of the proletariat to restore capitalism. Therefore, the Communist Parties must militarize themselves and exercise the all-round dictatorship of the three instruments, forging themselves in people’s war and empower the armed organization of the masses, the people’s militia, so as to engulf the army. For this reason, Chairman Gonzalo tells us to “forge all militants as Communists, first and foremost, as fighters and as administrators”; for that reason every militant is forged in the People’s War and remains alert against any attempt at capitalist restoration.

Third, because we march toward a militarized society. By militarizing the Party, we complete a step toward the militarization of society which is the strategic perspective to guarantee the dictatorship of the proletariat. The militarized society is the sea of armed masses which Marx and Engels spoke of, that guards the conquest of power and defends it once conquered. We take the experience of the Chinese Revolution, of the anti-Japanese base at Yenan, which was a militarized society where everything grew out of the barrels of guns: Party, Army, State, new politics, new economics, new culture. And in that way we develop war communism. [Source]

This section that we quoted transitions nicely into the next concept from Gonzalo and the PCP, which is the militarization of the communist party and unitary people’s war.

Militarization of the Party and Unitary People’s War

The vanguard party must be militarized. It is at the heart of the people’s army, and it leads them. The party is simultaneously political and militarized. The only way for the party to lead the construction of the dictatorship of the proletariat is through being both a political and military leader and educator of the working people. Without the party being firmly within and in control of the people’s army, it cannot be a democratic-centralist organization. The party must be with the people; it leads the people, and it is not above the people, for it is the most class-conscious proletarians. This is shown in the interview with Chairman Gonzalo (with our emphasis):

First, and most important, the work leading up to the people's war helped us to come to understand Maoism as a new, third, and higher stage of Marxism. It has helped us develop the militarization of the Party and its concentric construction. Through the people's war, a People's Guerrilla Army has been forged. It was formed not long ago, in 1983.

The People's Guerrilla Army is important. It is the principal form of organization corresponding to the people's war which is the principal form of struggle. The People's Guerrilla Army which we have founded and which is developing vigorously, is being built based on Chairman Mao Tsetung's theories, and on a very important thesis of Lenin's concerning the people's militia. Lenin, concerned that the army could be usurped and used to bring about a restoration, held that a people's militia should assume the functions of the army, police and administration. This is an important thesis and the fact that Lenin was not able to put it into practice due to historical circumstances does not make it any less important and valid. It is so important that Chairman Mao himself paid a lot of attention to the task of developing a people's militia. So our army has these features and it was formed by taking those experiences into account. But, at the same time, it has its own specific features. We have a structure composed of three forces: a main force, a local force and a base force. We have no independent militia, because it exists in the ranks of the Army itself, which was formed according to this criteria. It was the above-mentioned principles which guided us, but we also think it's correct to say that the People's Guerrilla Army could not have been built in any other way given our concrete conditions. This army, all the same, has been able to act in every situation and can be readjusted and reorganized as necessary in the future. …

Other changes have to do with the forging of cadre. Obviously war forges in a different way. It steels people, permits us to imbue ourselves more deeply with our ideology, and forge iron-like cadres who dare to challenge death, to snatch the laurels of victory from the clutches of death. Another change in the Party that we could point to, but on a different plane, has to do with the world revolution. The people's war has enabled the Party to demonstrate clearly how, by grasping Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, we can develop a people's war without being subordinate to any power, be it a superpower or any other power—how it's possible to rely on our own strength to carry forward people's war. All this has given the Party prestige on an international level that it never had before, and this is not vanity, far from it, it's just a simple fact, and it has also allowed us to serve the development of the world revolution as never before. In this way the Party, through the people's war, is fulfilling its role as the Communist Party of Peru. …

… [W]e could say of the plans that we've learned how to direct the war with a single strategic plan, applying the principle of centralized strategy and decentralized tactics. We direct the war by means of a single plan with different parts, through campaigns, with strategic-operative plans, tactical plans and concrete plans for each action. But the key to all this is the single strategic plan which allows us to direct the war in a unified way, and that is key in leading a people's war. I think that is what I have to say about it. [Source]

It is also shown in the General Political Line of the party, specifically in the “Military Line”:

The People’s War developed in the region of Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and Apur´ımac and was expanded to Pasco, Hu´anuco and San Mart´ın, covering an area from the department of Cajamarca, on the border with Ecuador in the northwest, to Puno on the border with Bolivia in the Southeast of the country, striking and shaking-up the cities, especially in the capital. The People’s War fundamentally occurs in the Sierra, the historical axis of Peruvian society and its most backward and poorest part, by transforming it into the grand theater of the revolutionary war. It advanced to the edge of the Jungle and to the headlands of the Coast. Thus, the People’s War was not conceived in a single region but was developed simultaneously in several regions, although in unequal form, with a principal area that can vary as necessary. All this is within a strategically centralized and a tactically decentralized plan. [Source]

Politics must be put in command, and this is especially true with war, specifically people’s war. If the party is separated from the people’s army, the army lacks political guidance, and violence is waged without any sort of political, class-based goal. Now, with the party leading the people’s war, there can be decentralized tactics and a centralized strategy; this is unitary people’s war. By having a united war against the enemy, with the same overall strategy being applied with different tactics, the people’s war can be successfully waged, leading to the victory of the proletariat. And by applying unitary people’s war, a revolutionary movement can make wins in both cities and the countryside, applying both guerrilla warfare in rural areas and potentially insurrections or urban guerrilla tactics in urban ones.

Book II: History of Revolutionary Communism

Classical Marxism’s Applications

Classical Marxism did not lead to the construction of a socialist state. However, it led to the development of a socialist tradition still around today. Marx and Engels helped found the Communist League, the first international workers’ group; they wrote its manifesto, hence the Communist Manifesto. The League organized workers in any groups they could join, and it faced legal repression wherever it would operate. Engels covered this and more in “On the History of the Communist League”:

The League soon had several communities, or, as they were then still called, “lodges”, in London. The same obvious tactics were followed in Switzerland and elsewhere. Where workers’ associations could be founded, they were utilized in like manner. Where this was forbidden by law, one joined choral societies, athletic clubs, and the like. Connections were to a large extent maintained by members who were continually traveling back and forth; they also, when required, served as emissaries. In both respects the League obtained lively support through the wisdom of the governments which, by resorting to deportation, converted any objectionable worker—and in nine cases out of ten he was a member of the League—into an emissary. …

After the center of gravity had shifted from Paris to London, a new feature grew conspicuous: from being German, the League gradually became international. In the workers’ society there were to be found, besides German and Swiss, also members of all those nationalities for whom German served as the chief means of communication with foreigners, notably, therefore, Scandinavians, Dutch, Hungarians, Czechs, Southern Slavs, and also Russians and Alsatians. …

All these circumstances contributed to the quiet revolution that was taking place in the League, and especially among the leaders in London. The inadequacy of the previous conception of Communism, both the simple French egalitarian Communism and that of Weitling, became more and more clear to them. … As against the untenability of the previous theoretical views, and as against the practical aberrations resulting therefrom, it was realized more and more in London that Marx and I were right in our new theory. This understanding was undoubtedly promoted by the fact that among the London leaders there were now two men who were considerably superior. [Source]

The Communist League was dissolved in 1852 after many communists were arrested in Germany. The International Workingmen’s Association, the First International, was founded in 1864 after the immense amount of work that Marx, Engels, and other communists put in. The debate between Marxists and anarchists basically began in the International, which had an important anarchist faction led by Mikhail Bakunin. It is unnecessary to refute anarchist positions here, for we have already done so in previous sections, but we will share a quote by Marx criticizing Bakunin: “Anarchy, then, is the great war horse of their master Bakunin, who has taken nothing from the socialist systems except a set of slogans” [Source].

Marxism and the First International partly inspired the Paris Commune, the attempt at proletarian dictatorship in France in 1871. More specifically, many communists at the time who were part of the Paris Commune supported Marx’s ideas. The experiment proved the importance of violence and force in revolution, the need to destroy the bourgeois state, and the inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat in a proletarian revolution. In Chapter Five of The Civil War in France, Marx writes:

The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature—organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor—originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class [bourgeois] society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies, and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th century swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France. …

Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman’s wage. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune. …

If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national government, it was, at the same time, as a working men’s government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labor, emphatically international. Within sight of that Prussian army that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world. [Source]

The Commune did sadly fail in two months, as we stated in the section on Marxist theories of the state. It did not use authority to the extent needed to defend itself from external threats, allowing the French bourgeois army to regroup itself and bombard the Commune, killing it. The errors mainly had to do with a lack of centralism, for the Communards failed to create a functioning state machine; they attempted to organize an election during their state of being at war, and this cost the time that could have been used to create an organized, disciplined armed body controlled by the proletariat. Marx and other contemporaries learned from this, and they drew what was good from it and criticized what went wrong.

After the Paris Commune revolution, no major attempts at proletarian seizure of power were made for a while. The Second International succeeded the first one in 1889 (after the first one was dissolved in 1876 following the anarchist-Marxist splits), but it had a lot of reformist “social-democrats” and anarchists (especially syndicalists). During World War One, many of the international’s members exposed their imperialist characters by supporting their own bourgeois governments, but Lenin’s RSDLP led the proletarian line within the group and maintained opposition to all capitalists in the war. The Second International itself failed, and the revolutionaries of it united in support of proletarian revolution, especially the October Revolution.

Experiences of Marxism-Leninism

This is by no means a complete history of Marxism-Leninism; this section is already very long, but despite the volume of text, it does not cover all of Marxism-Leninism’s history, all of its parties, etc. However, we will cover what we think is important; that may force us to leave out certain details, but it will give the correct general understanding of what happened.

USSR, Eastern Europe

There have been Marxist-Leninist revolutions and countries around the world. However, we should go back to the foundations of the Bolshevik Party.^[76] As we said before, the Bolsheviks were the revolutionary faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which was founded in 1898. Stalin elucidates the party’s history in his book, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. In the first chapter, he writes this (our emphasis):

In 1895 Lenin united all the Marxist workers’ circles in St. Petersburg (there were already about twenty of them) into a single League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class.

Lenin put before the League of Struggle the task of forming closer connections with the mass working-class movement and of giving it political leadership. Lenin proposed to pass from the propaganda of Marxism among the few politically advanced workers who gathered in the propaganda circles to political agitation among the broad masses of the working class on issues of the day. This turn towards mass agitation was of profound importance for the subsequent development of the working-class movement in Russia. …

In 1898 several of the Leagues of Struggle—those of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Ekaterinoslav—together with the Bund made the first attempt to unite and form a Social-Democratic party. For this purpose they summoned the First Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), which was held in Minsk in March 1898. …

But although the First Congress had been held, in reality no Marxist Social-Democratic Party was as yet formed in Russia. The congress did not succeed in uniting the separate Marxist circles and organizations and welding them together organizationally. There was still no common line of action in the work of the local organizations, nor was there a party program, party rules or a single leading center. [Source]

Lenin led a struggle against opportunists in his struggle to found a workers’ party in Russia. Marxists had to refute all sorts of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois organizations’ “theories” and practices, and even many “Marxists” capitulated to the bourgeoisie and the feudal lords with their opportunism. Most important of these was the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, which Stalin writes on in Chapter Two. He shows how they opposed proletarian dictatorship; despised the vanguard party’s role in agitating, educating, organizing, and leading the masses; opposed proletarian action overall, calling for capitulation to the bourgeoisie; and held other revisionist views that were unacceptable to the proletariat:

The most important item on the agenda was the adoption of the Party program. The chief point which, during the discussion of the program, aroused the objections of the opportunist section of the congress was the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat. There were a number of other items in the program on which the opportunists did not agree with the revolutionary section of the congress. But they decided to put up the main fight on the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the plea that the programs of a number of foreign Social-Democratic parties contained no clause on the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that therefore the program of the Russian Social-Democratic Party could dispense with it too. …

The adoption of the program had gone through comparatively smoothly, but fierce disputes arose at the congress over the Party Rules. The sharpest differences arose over the formulation of the first paragraph of the rules, dealing with Party membership. Who could be a member of the Party, what was to be the composition of the Party, what was to be the organizational nature of the Party, an organized whole or something amorphous?—such were the questions that arose in connection with the first paragraph of the rules. Two different formulations contested the ground: Lenin’s formulation, which was supported by Plekhanov and the firm Iskra-ists; and Martov’s formulation, which was supported by Axelrod, Zasulich, the unstable Iskra-ists, Trotsky, and all the avowed opportunists at the congress. …

Summing up his analysis of the differences, and defining the position of the Mensheviks as “opportunism in matters of organization,” Lenin considered that one of the gravest sins of Menshevism lay in its underestimation of the importance of party organization as a weapon of the proletariat in the struggle for its emancipation. The Mensheviks held that the party organization of the proletariat was of no great importance for the victory of the revolution. Contrary to the Mensheviks, Lenin held that the ideological unity of the proletariat alone was not enough for victory; if victory was to be won, ideological unity would have to be “consolidated “ by the “material unity of organization “ of the proletariat. Only on this condition, Lenin considered, could the proletariat become an invincible force. [Source]

In early 1905, the working class of Saint Petersburg (the capital of the Russian Empire) started strikes due to the unemployment of their fellow workers and because they realized bourgeois-democratic rights, such as “freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of association for the workers, the convocation of a Constituent Assembly for the purpose of changing the political system of Russia, equality of all before the law, separation of church from the state, termination of the war, an 8-hour working day, and the handing over of the land to the peasants” were necessary [Source]. While their spontaneous energy got them to support petitions, the Bolsheviks told them that only revolution could secure those rights; even though their strikes and protests were unarmed, the Tsarist autocracy murdered them in cold blood, proving the Bolsheviks’ point. Thus began the 1905 bourgeois revolution, a movement with Bolshevik leadership and the participation of other “socialist” and liberal parties.

Workers’ strikes, peasants’ uprisings, soldiers’ and sailors’ mutinies, national movements, anti-war protests (against the ongoing Russo-Japanese war that was going poorly for Russia), and other disruptions of Tsarist society characterized 1905’s attempt at a bourgeois-democratic revolution. Non-Bolshevik elements took these struggles in bad directions, but the masses fought hard and sacrificed their lives, radicalizing more and more of the people. The Bolsheviks became more popular, and this concerned the feudal state and the liberal bourgeoisie. The latter did want “democracy” of some sort, but they had no interest in joining the revolution because they benefited from Russia’s military-feudal imperialism; they also did not need any liberation of nations in the empire since they were predominantly Russian and benefited from the exploitation of other nations as well as their own workers and peasants. That is why they supported some “democratic” reforms like forming a parliament, and it is also why it supported provocations of pogroms and massacres of ethnicities.

When the Tsar proposed creating a “parliament” (the Duma, which the Tsar basically had control over), the Mensheviks attempted to work with this “legislature” while the Bolsheviks boycotted it. The Mensheviks supported the bourgeois line of reforming the Tsarist state; the Bolsheviks only sought to use elections to prove their uselessness and to support armed struggle. As Lenin explains in Chapter Four (“The Struggle Against Which Enemies Within the Working-Class Movement Helped Bolshevism Develop, Gain Strength, and Become Steeled”) of “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, this was a correct action to take:

When, in August 1905, the tsar proclaimed the convocation of a consultative “parliament”, the Bolsheviks called for its boycott, in the teeth of all the opposition parties and the Mensheviks, and the “parliament” was in fact swept away by the revolution of October 1905. The boycott proved correct at the time, not because nonparticipation in reactionary parliaments is correct in general, but because we accurately appraised the objective situation, which was leading to the rapid development of the mass strikes first into a political strike, then into a revolutionary strike, and finally into an uprising. Moreover, the struggle centered at that time on the question of whether the convocation of the first representative assembly should be left to the tsar, or an attempt should be made to wrest its convocation from the old regime. [Source]

Eventually, the revolution ended after an attempted armed uprising in many Russian cities and in oppressed nations’ territories was crushed. Mensheviks tried to support reformist capitulation with that failure, but the Bolsheviks continued their work of preparing for revolution. That work became really effective in the years before World War One, when the Russian imperialists clearly prepared for war while the masses sought an improvement of their conditions and not a war that would cause further suffering.

Russia’s imperialist ambitions required the expenditure of workers and peasants as they were recruited to fight fellow workers and peasants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The use of troops from oppressed nations also caused disloyalty among them, and the war effort caused shortages of basic materials and goods for civilians and soldiers alike. On top of that, in the face of revisionists’ social-chauvinism (socialism in name, chauvinism in deeds), the Bolsheviks maintained their position of anti-imperialism and self-determination for all oppressed nations; they also supported land reform for peasants, proletarian seizure of industry, and putting political power in soviets of workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ deputies.

Following protests from women and striking workers, the February Revolution (March 8–16, 1917; February 23 to March 3 in the Julian Calendar, the calendar of old Russia) commenced, and the bourgeoisie seized power, ending the Tsar’s absolute monarchy; this was the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia. This provisional government’s parliament was controlled by the “Socialist-Revolutionaries”^[77] and various liberal parties, and the Mensheviks also got involved in elections. The Bolsheviks remained radical and did not participate in the capitalist state; instead, they worked to develop dual power via the Petrograd Soviet and other soviets. While the proletariat and peasantry were not the ruling class yet, they were able to set up soviets, and in these soviets the Bolsheviks became leaders. This began the construction of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.

The new bourgeois republic failed to withdraw Russia from World War One. It also failed to meaningfully democratize Russia, and it refused to give self-determination to oppressed nations. Because they failed to carry out the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and because of the development of proletarian and peasant power, the Bolsheviks were able to execute the October Revolution (November 7th–13th, 1917, or October 25th–31st in the Julian Calendar), the socialist revolution in Russia. The Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR) was the first Marxist and Leninist country, but it was not Marxist-Leninist; Marxism-Leninism was only synthesized in the late-1920s. The RSFSR was founded in 1917, after the October Revolution. Vladimir Lenin became the head of its government.

This republic, along with the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR, which also included a region that would become the Moldovan SSR), Transcaucasian SSR, and Belorussian SSR, formed the USSR in 1922. This arrangement was a federal arrangement, though each SSR ended up being unitary while the Russian SFSR remained federal as well. The reason for this is explained in the “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions” (our emphasis):

7) Federation is a transitional form to the complete unity of the working people of different nations. The feasibility of federation has already been demonstrated in practice both by the relations between the R.S.F.S.R. and other Soviet Republics (the Hungarian, Finnish and Latvian in the past, and the Azerbaijan and Ukrainian at present), and by the relations within the R.S.F.S.R. in respect of nationalities which formerly enjoyed neither statehood nor autonomy (e.g., the Bashkir and Tatar autonomous republics in the R.S.F.S.R., founded in 1919 and 1920 respectively).

8) In this respect, it is the task of the Communist International to further develop and also to study and test by experience these new federations, which are arising on the basis of the Soviet system and the Soviet movement. In recognising that federation is a transitional form to complete unity, it is necessary to strive for ever closer federal unity, bearing in mind, first, that the Soviet republics, surrounded as they are by the imperialist powers of the whole world—which from the military standpoint are immeasurably stronger—cannot possibly continue to exist without the closest alliance; second, that a close economic alliance between the Soviet republics is necessary, otherwise the productive forces which have been ruined by imperialism cannot be restored and the well-being of the working people cannot be ensured; third, that there is a tendency towards the creation of a single world economy, regulated by the proletariat of all nations as an integral whole and according to a common plan. This tendency has already revealed itself quite clearly under capitalism and is bound to be further developed and consummated under socialism. [Source]

None of these developments were possible in peace, though, for the workers’ state had to deal with civil war. Tsarist reactionaries held onto power across Russia, and they were organizing a counter-revolution against the Bolsheviks. Furthermore, as the Soviet state established itself, it had to work with the remnants of the bourgeois state. In 1917, after the October Revolution, the bourgeois Constituent Assembly held a country-wide election; the Bolsheviks won the overwhelming majority of the working class and a substantial portion of the peasantry [Source], and the SRs won the majority of the peasantry, who were the majority of the population. What anti-communists often exclude, however, is that it was the Left-SR^[78] program that won that party those votes, while it was the Right-SR (the mainstream SR party) delegates that took state power upon the election’s results. At the time, the party had not split (dates here are in the Julian calendar, not the mainstream Gregorian one): “the party which from May to October had the largest number of followers among the people, and especially among the peasants—the Socialist-Revolutionary Party—came out with united election lists for the Constituent Assembly in the middle of October 1917, but split in November 1917, after the elections and before the Assembly met” [Source].

That factor alone proved to cause big problems with representing the peasant masses in the Constituent Assembly; on that basis alone, the bourgeois government became illegitimate and the workers’ and peasants’ soviets were the sole legitimate government. But Lenin also describes a number of other contradictions with the Constituent Assembly: the ongoing war made elections hard to implement, the development of peasants’ and soldiers’ consciousness after the election made the election’s results not represent their new positions and power, and most importantly, the superiority of the proletarian dictatorship made this bourgeois government agency not nearly democratic enough for the masses. Thus, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly hours after it assembled, with Lenin’s speech ending like this: “The Constituent Assembly is dissolved. The Soviet revolutionary republic will triumph, no matter what the cost” [Source].

During the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks dealt with not just the Russian Empire/Republic remnants (the White Army), but also its allied countries (the Allied Powers of World War 1: Japan, the UK, US, and other allies and colonies), the Central Powers (the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, etc.)—with whom the Bolsheviks signed a peace treaty with, only for them to seize the territory they could get their hands on—, 27 anti-communist national separatist^[79] movements, and various “socialist” (opportunist) groups that fought the Bolsheviks (Mensheviks, SRs (those two often fought for the White Army), Left-SRs, anarchists, and the Green Army^[80]). Because of these rival forces, the new proletarian state, the RSFSR, created a proletarian state, with the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army and the Cheka. The young Soviet republic faced many terrible conditions and very brutal conflict, making these workers’ state bodies more necessary. Despite all of the contradictions and all of the odds against them, the Soviet state survived, albeit at a great cost.

To give the masses what the Bolsheviks promised (peace, land, and bread), the Soviet leaders nationalized land for the working people, mobilized the masses to grow food for the new republic, and sought peace with the Central Powers of World War One. As a result, after making an armistice with them following the revolution, they worked toward a peace treaty in 1918, signing the Brest-Litovsk treaty and thus giving up a lot of Soviet land in exchange for the survival of the Soviet state. Ultra-“left” and right opportunists both wanted to continue the war with Germany for seemingly different reasons, but the working people supported Lenin’s line, forcing the opportunists to accept peace. Lenin described why the Bolsheviks signed this peace treaty:

Today, when I hear our tactics in signing the Brest-Litovsk Treaty being attacked by the Socialist-Revolutionaries, for instance, or when I hear Comrade Lansbury say, in a conversation with me, “Our British trade union leaders say that if it was permissible for the Bolsheviks to compromise, it is permissible for them to compromise too”, I usually reply by first of all giving a simple and “popular” example:

Imagine that your car is held up by armed bandits. You hand them over your money, passport, revolver and car. In return you are rid of the pleasant company of the bandits. That is unquestionably a compromise. “Do ut des” (I “give” you money, fire-arms and a car “so that you give” me the opportunity to get away from you with a whole skin). It would, however, be difficult to find a sane man who would declare such a compromise to be “inadmissible on principle”, or who would call the compromiser an accomplice of the bandits (even though the bandits might use the car and the firearms for further robberies). Our compromise with the bandits of German imperialism was just that kind of compromise. [Source]

When the Central Powers lost World War One, they withdrew most of their troops, but the ones that stayed continued fighting for German imperialism, often by trying to annex the newly-independent Baltic states, but also by fighting Soviet troops once Brest-Litovsk ended with the war. Though the peace treaty lasted for just a year, it provided the young workers’ state the time needed to build up a proper military and defend itself.

In that way, the Bolsheviks ended the imperialist war front, but they were faced with an intensifying and complicated civil war front. To wage class struggle, the Bolsheviks began the “Red Terror”. This was a period in which the workers and peasants exercised their dictatorship over the bourgeoisie to defend the revolution, allegedly killed some tens of thousands of people. This is about the only count that could be attributed to the Leninist USSR. That being said, we proletarians have no qualms about this terror, for nothing justifies the numerous murderous crimes of the capitalist class that does not justify the “terror” used by the proletariat against the capitalists. Indeed, this exercise of Soviet power is precisely what kept the Soviet state alive despite all the difficulties of the war and despite the viciousness of the workers’ class enemies; after all, the red terror only came about a year after the white terror of the deposed Tsarist ruling class and the bourgeoisie supporting it.

Besides the war’s deaths and the deaths from the red terror, there was a famine in 1921, and it killed an estimated five million people, but this famine was caused by the Russian Civil War, not the Bolsheviks’ policies. We could mainly attribute these deaths to the imperialist powers and reactionary Tsarist soldiers that started the conflict. Therefore, saying that the USSR under Lenin killed millions of people is dishonest. We mourn those who died from the famine, for they were victims of capitalist-imperialism’s insatiable desire to crush the masses and exploit every resource it can get.

A lot of violence had occurred prior to and during the October Revolution and subsequent Russian Civil War. After the February Revolution, state repression, peasant rebellions, urban riots, anarchist attacks, and more all committed horrendous acts of violence, including torture, against others (even civilians)! Only with the Bolshevik seizure of power and the formation of a proletarian dictatorship did order and stability come back and peace spread across the land after the civil war. In Chapter Three of Stalin: the History and Critique of a Black Legend, it says:

The combination of these multiple contradictions causes a bloody state of anarchy with the “collapse of all authority and all administrative organization”, with an explosion of savage violence coming from below (in which millions of deserters or disbanded soldiers are the primary protagonists), and with a “militarization and an overall brutalization of social behavior and political practices”. It’s a “brutalization without possible means of comparison to that known in Western societies”. …

The oppression, exploitation and humiliation of an immense mass of peasantry by an exclusive, aristocratic elite, who considered themselves foreign in relation to their own people, considered a different and inferior race, were precursors to a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. Especially because the social conflict became even more acute with the outbreak of World War I, in which the noble officers on a daily basis exercised a true power of life and death over peasant soldiers; it’s no coincidence that at the first signs of crisis they sought to maintain discipline on the front and in the rear by resorting to the use of artillery. The collapse of the old regime is the moment for revenge and vengeance, cultivated and sown over centuries. The prince G. E. Lvov self-critically recognizes this: ‘the vengeance of the peasant servants’ was a settling of accounts with those who for centuries had refused to “treat the peasants as people, rather than as dogs”. …

What caused this brutal violence? The policies carried out by the Bolsheviks? Only in part: in 1921 and 1922 ‘a terrible famine’ ravaged the countryside, ‘directly caused by a year of drought and freezing temperatures’. Yet the peasant revolt was also a protest against ‘a state that took their sons and horses to the army, that prolonged the devastation caused by the civil war, that forcibly conscripted peasants into work crews, that looted their food supplies’; this was also a protest against a catastrophe that began in 1914.

With respect to Bolshevik policies it’s necessary to know how to distinguish between measures that unreasonably struck against the peasantry, from those that had a completely different character. …

Once again, we see the extent of the violence that is unleashed in a Russia consumed by crisis. This is true as well for the horrific pogroms directed against Jews and Bolsheviks, the first especially, who are suspected of being behind the Bolsheviks, using them as puppets. [Source]

After Lenin died in 1924 (after being shot in August 1918 and suffering injuries that worsened over time along with the immense stress he faced), the other leaders of the Communist Party argued over what they needed to do. Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary^[81] of the party, ended up becoming the de facto leader of the Soviet Union and the AUCP(B) in the 1920s. He synthesized Marxism-Leninism, making the USSR the first official Marxist-Leninist state. This ideology was put in contrast to Leon Trotsky’s idea of “Bolshevik-Leninism”, which is now called Trotskyism.

Trotsky believed that socialism could not be constructed in one country, and so the socialist state must always push for revolution in other countries without any compromise with the bourgeoisie. He also wanted to end the New Economic Policy (NEP) that Lenin put in place following victory in the war. Stalin’s Marxism-Leninism defended Marxist theory and practice by proving that socialism could be constructed in one country and that there could be some diplomacy with capitalist nations; he also understood that the NEP needed to stay for at least a few years before socialist planning, collectivization, etc. could take place. Furthermore, Trotsky believed that the peasantry was a reactionary mass with no revolutionary potential. Lenin, in contrast, said that the peasantry must be in alliance with the proletariat, which happened in the February Revolution and the October Revolution. Lenin’s line was correct, but Stalin had to defend it.

At the same time, there was a right-opportunist line in the AUCP(B), led by Nikolai Bukharin, a member of the Political Bureau (or Politburo)^[82] of the party. Bukharin was initially a left-“communist” but he became a rightist during the NEP. Specifically, he thought it needed to continue for a considerable amount of time, and he supported the kulaks’^[83] growth and the rise of a new bourgeoisie in the USSR. Since this faction of bourgeois forces was less of a threat to the proletariat at the time, the workers’ faction under Stalin allied with it against the ultra-“left” Trotskyite faction to eliminate it, and then it broke with the revisionist Bukharinite faction and purged that as well. Chapter One of Anna Louise Strong’s The Stalin Era summarizes this process:

In a series of critical decisions on policy, he defeated and finally drove from the Politburo one rival after another — Trotsky, then Zinoviev and Kamenev, then Bukharin and Rykov. Each opponent denounced Stalin for “despotism,” but each time Stalin swung the majority in the Politburo and won wide popular support as well. Yet, with the defeat of each opponent, the right of dissent was more and more challenged. By December 1929, the Fifteenth Party Congress declared: “adherence to the opposition is... incompatible with membership in the Party.” After each victory, Stalin made overtures to beaten opponents and took them back if they “repented.” When Trotsky proved unyielding, Stalin proposed that he be exiled from Russia. This was done. Opposition to the “Party line” had thus become a crime. Yet, most individual members of various “oppositions” had “repented,” been reinstated, and were working on jobs that Stalin assigned.. [Source]

The USSR was experiencing rapid economic growth under socialism. It had five-year-plans, which were economic plans that the USSR used to estimate what they could do and figure out how to develop properly. This planned economy worked well. The first five-year-plan, which was implemented from 1927–32, gave a huge jump for the Soviet economy; the second one made the USSR the second most powerful country in its economy. In “False Lessons from the Great Depression”, Scott Harrison states:

… I should mention that the one genuine socialist country in the world during the 1930s—namely, the Soviet Union^[84]—did not itself undergo any sort of depression, recession, nor even the slightest economic slowdown. On the contrary, economic growth and development zoomed ahead in the USSR during this entire period. While the major capitalist countries were sinking into the depths of the Depression, gross industrial production in the USSR during the First Five Year Plan increased from 18.3 billion rubles in 1927–8 to 43.3 billion in 1932 (an increase of 136%). During the Second Five Year Plan, from 1932 to 1937, gross industrial production jumped from 43.3 billion rubles to 95.5 billion (another increase of 120%). From 1928 to 1940, during a decade in which the capitalist world stagnated overall, steel production in the USSR rose from 3.3 million tons to 14.9 million, coal from 35.5 million tons to 165.9 million, electricity from 5.0 billion KWH to 48.3 billion, and so forth. [Source]

Chapter Two of The Stalin Era says:

In January, 1933, Stalin reported to the Central Committee that the former backward peasant Russia had become the second industrial nation in the world. The Five-Year Plan had been basically completed in four and a quarter years, from October, 1928, through to December, 1932. The number of workers in industry had doubled, from eleven million to twenty-two million; output also had doubled.

“Formerly we did not have an iron and steel industry. Now we have such an industry,” he reported.

“We did not have a tractor industry. Now we have one.

“We did not have an automobile industry. Now we have one.

“We did not have an engineering industry. Now we have one.”

He went on through the aviation industry, the production of farm machinery, the chemical industry and others and added: “We have achieved these—on a scale that makes the scale of European industry pale.”

The plan had cost heavily in dislocation of populations and disorganization of harvests. But never in history was so great an advance so swift. Had the pace been less swift, the Soviet people believed that not only their Socialism would have been postponed but their existence as a nation would have been in danger. For, in 1933, Japan already probed their borders from Manchuria and the German Nazis published claims to the Ukraine. The Soviet people believed that they might have faced invasion on both borders but for their swiftly rising economic might.

“We could not refrain,” said Stalin in that January report, “from whipping up a country that was a hundred years behind and which, owing to its backwardness, was faced with mortal danger. We would have been unarmed in the midst of a capitalist environment which is armed with modern technique.”

With the conclusion of the first Five-Year Plan, the USSR plunged into a second, which proposed five times as much new industry as the first had built, and a technical reconstruction of the whole economy. Yet, as Stalin said, the task was “undoubtedly easier”; no future Five-Year Plan would be as hard as the first. Five-Year Plans became the pattern by which the country moved ahead. [Source]

On top of this, the USSR had guaranteed education, employment, healthcare, housing, etc. for the entire population of the USSR, and the Soviet wage system rewarded workers by their output, i.e. “according to their work”. By 1939, literacy was over five times what it was in 1917, a jump from 15% to nearly 90%. The USSR allowed workers and peasants to hold democratic political power through their councils (soviets, as they were called in Russian), and it united over 140 different nationalities and ethnicities. This country—one of the only socialist states around at that time—became the second-most powerful state on Earth in just 10 years (and it became a nuclear power just a few years later), and without any sort of colonialism or exploitation! In contrast, the United States, United Kingdom, and all of the world’s most powerful capitalist states used exploitation, subjugation, and destruction to make themselves wealthy and dominant; they took longer, too. This is why the workers of the world looked to the Soviet Union relatively positively. In Chapter Three of Soviet Democracy, it says:

Today in the Soviet Union the employers are extinct. Citizens are wage-earners or co-operators, and a large section of them are wage-earners. Every Soviet citizen, according to the Constitution of the USSR, enjoys the right to work, to leisure, and to security. The abolition of unemployment guarantees that all may work. Leisure is guaranteed by a working day averaging less than seven hours and by paid holidays for all workers. Security is safeguarded by social insurance against illness, by which wages are drawn during ill health; and by non-contributory pensions for the aged at sixty for men, fifty-five for women, and at still lower ages in occupations considered particularly arduous or harmful to health. But, in addition to these rights, which workers in other countries may well envy their Soviet comrades, the Soviet worker has the right to participate in running the concern in which he works, for he, as a citizen of the Soviet State, is a partner in the ownership of this concern. [Source]

In the USSR under the 1936 Constitution, the Supreme Soviet was the legislative body of the government; it was directly elected by the working people, in contrast to the system of the 1924 Constitution which was more indirect.^[85] It elected a Presidium (the collective head of state in the USSR) and appointed the Supreme Court (the judicial body), the Council of People’s Commissars (the highest executive and administrative body, later renamed to “Council of People’s Ministers”; the chairman of this was the Premier of the USSR and was the head of government), and the Procurator General (the person responsible for the activities of public procurators, people who would investigate crimes and prosecute criminals). This meant that the people’s representatives were in charge of selecting the major officials in government, making the USSR a true democracy in its socialist era (to at least a decent degree).

In the introduction of Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan, it says:

A very great deal is being said and written nowadays about democracy and dictatorship. We repeatedly hear it said that democracy must be defended; and as an example of the kind of dictatorship of which we must beware the Soviet Union is often quoted. And yet, at the same time as this Soviet Union is described as a dictatorship, well-known people of different political views make statements which suggest that, in the Soviet Union to-day, there exists a system of government which possesses all the essential features of democracy. …

We are sometimes inclined, I think unwisely, to treat democracy and dictatorship as two mutually exclusive terms, when in actual fact they may often represent two aspects of the same system of government. …

Democracy, then from its origin, has not precluded the simultaneous existence of dictatorship. The essential question which must be asked, when social systems appear to include elements both of democracy and dictatorship is, “For whom is there democracy?” and “Over whom is there dictatorship?” …

[In the Soviet Union, t]he urban and rural workers, together with the poorer peasantry, made up over 95 per cent of the population of Russia. So that this dictatorship was to be a government by the vast majority of the people—those who worked. …

The Soviet State introduced universal suffrage for working citizens, without property or residential qualifications, and irrespective of sex, nationality, or religion. The right to vote and to stand for election was made available to all such citizens from the age of eighteen upwards. But those who employed labor for profit were deprived of electoral rights. The Soviet State in this way provided a degree of democracy for the working people such as they do not enjoy in any other country even at the present time; but over the employers this democratic power exercised a dictatorship. The small circle of the employers of labor had no voice whatever in the making of the laws to which they were subject. [Source]

What this means is that workers’ democracy—soviet democracy—was actual democracy for the working-class. Workers chose the people who made laws for them, and they could remove them from power with instant recall. Workers also held economic power. In Chapter Four, it elaborates:

The Soviet trade unions are represented on the management of the factories, and, higher up, on the boards of the state trusts. In each factory the trade union mobilizes the workers and problems of production; and it runs a press in which expression is given to the opinions of the workers. But such discussion, in words and in writing, has a purpose: the purpose is the raising of the standard of life of the whole population as rapidly as possible. And this, as we have seen, depends on increasing production. Therefore, on the one hand, the Soviet trade unions are interested in increasing production as the only way in which the standard of life of all workers may be raised; while, on the other hand, in every Soviet enterprise the trade union is interested in immediately improving the living conditions of the workers, in improving their conditions of work, and, in general, in seeing that the increased production effectively reflects itself in a higher standard of life for the workers concerned. [Source]

And again it details the democracy of the USSR in Chapter 13:

The procedure was extremely simple. A general meeting of all the workers in our organization was called by the trade union committee, candidates were discussed, and a vote was taken by a show of hands. Anybody present had the right to propose a candidate, and the one who was elected was not personally a member of the party. In considering the claims of the candidates their past activities were discussed, they themselves had to answer questions as to their qualifications, anybody could express an opinion, for or against them, and the basis of all the discussion was: What justification had the candidates to represent their comrades on the local Soviet? …

The Central Executive Committee, in considering legislation of major importance, has often called conferences or congress of those particularly concerned, for consultative purposes, before such legislation is adopted. Or, in cases where it is considered that the proposed legislation affects the personal interests of the whole population, then it may be submitted to the whole country for consideration. [Source]

National contradictions were also resolved considerably under socialism. While capitalism leads to uneven economic development, socialism equalizes economic development between nations in the interest of proletarian internationalism. This was seen in the USSR as minority nations received great amounts of productive forces as well as cultural development, leading to the improvement of women’s rights as well. Chapter Four of The Stalin Era explains how this occurred:

Soviet policy was to let all national cultures develop, as long as the economy grew towards socialism. But fifty-eight small nationalities had not even an alphabet, much less books. So scientists developed written languages for them; books were printed in Moscow in a hundred languages, until book publication in the USSR, at the end of the first Five-Year Plan, was greater than in Germany, France and Britain together. Books were only one transforming force; there were also new laws, science, art.

The greatest transforming force was the peoples’ own struggle for life. The writer, Panferov, put it this way in a Paris conference:

“The working class built a dam on the surging Dnieper and made its unruly waters serve man. It transformed the misty Urals into an industrial center and mastered the wild and distant Kuzbas. In remaking the country, the working class remade itself.’’ …

The change in women’s status was one of the important social changes in all parts of the USSR. The Revolution gave women legal and political equality; industrialization provided the economic base in equal pay. But in every village women still had to fight the habits of centuries. News came of one village in Siberia, for instance, where, after the collective farms gave women their independent incomes, the wives “called a strike” against wife beating and smashed that time honored custom in a week. [Source]

As industry rapidly grew, agriculture also expanded, but it started off worse due to the famine of 1932–33. People point to the 1930s Soviet famine as a “genocide”, specifically one against Ukrainians—which right off the bat makes no sense since the Ukrainian nation had a Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Soviet leaders supported Ukrainian nationhood. The famine of 1932–33 killed millions indeed, but it was never an intentional famine, much less a genocide, as is commonly claimed by Nazis. In “The ‘Holodomor’ Explained”, the author says:

The famine in Ukraine, the so-called “holodomor” , was a serious natural disaster. The collectivization of agriculture began in 1928 and the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33 seriously threatened the success of collectivization and the entire Five-Year Plan.

The primary reasons for the famine were the weather conditions. There were two serious crop failures in a row (and others before) because of drought and snow which prevented sowings. A plant disease called “grain-rust” also destroyed much of the crops. “Rusted” crops can look normal and so the government didn’t originally recognize that much of the food was ruined. The bulk of this article describes the causes of the famine in detail, based on the research of Mark B. Tauger, Associate Professor of History at West Virginia University, who has published many peer-reviewed scientific papers and articles on these topics. …

The Soviet government had two options: to accept the demand for de-regulation and move back to unrestricted capitalism. Or to fight the kulaks and move towards socialism. Of course they chose to fight. It was impossible to accept the kulak demands, it would’ve meant the death of the socialist revolution and the country would’ve remained underdeveloped.

Poor peasants were encouraged to take over lands from kulaks which were not being used, and set up collective farms on those lands. The fight intensified in the countryside and kulaks were able to destroy many farm buildings and kill huge amounts of animals. This contributed to the famine, but was not the main cause of it.

Prof. Mark Tauger has shown conclusively that the Soviets couldn’t have avoided the famine in any way. The weather caused the crops to not grow, and thus they didn’t have enough food regardless of what they did.

Right-Wing propagandists claim that collectivization caused the famine, which is obviously false. We have evidence that the famine was caused by crop failure due to weather, but also the famine ended when the collective farms produced a good harvest. And after that the Soviet Union didn’t have famines anymore, except because of the war.

Some right-wingers also claim that the famine was purposefully orchestrated to kill Ukrainians, but there is no evidence of that. Ukraine received a million tons of food aid from the Russian SSR etc. The famine was a disaster for the Soviet economy, so they would never have caused it on purpose. [Source]

The book Fraud, Famine, and Fascism explains what happened in the famine in an honest way, and it even goes into how fascist myths about it spread to bourgeois academia. In Chapter Eight (“The Famine”), it talks about fascists’ lies and what really happened with the famine:

Throughout the history of the famine-genocide campaign, the factors of drought and sabotage have been ignored, denied, downplayed or distorted. Soviet excesses and mistakes, in contrast, are emphasized, given an "anti-Ukrainian” motivation, described as deliberately and consciously planned, and the results exaggerated in depictions of starvation deaths in the multi-millions. The central event—the collectivization of agriculture as part of socialist development—is never given anything but a classically anti-communist interpretation. …

More recent histories can also be cited on the subject of drought. Nicholas Riasnovsky, former visiting professor at Harvard University’s Russian Research Center, notes in his History of Russia that drought occurred in both 1931 and 1932. Michael Florinsky, immediately following a description of the mass destruction wrought by kulak resistance to collectivization, states: "Severe droughts in 1930 and 1931, especially in the Ukraine, aggravated the plight of farming and created near famine conditions.” Professor Emeritus at Columbia and a prolific writer on the USSR, Florinsky can hardly be accused of leftist sympathies: born in Kiev, Ukraine, he fought against the Bolsheviks in the Civil War. …

While drought was a contributing factor, the main cause of the famine was the struggle around the collectivization of agriculture which raged in the countryside in this period. …

Though only a small fraction of the farm population, the kulaks occupied a significant place in agricultural production, with a larger crop area and marketable grain production than their number implied. In 1927 for example, four per cent of households owned 15 percent of the area under crop. The kulaks were the money-lenders, the middlemen, the entrepreneurs of the countryside. It was primarily they who owned the farm sires, the rural industrial enterprises such as mills and smithies, who leased to the poorer peasants their farm implements, machinery and draught animals, who controlled a large part of the retail trade in the rural areas. …

As part of the collectivization program, the land of the kulaks was to be confiscated and transferred to the collective farms, as was their cattle, machinery and other farm property. A sizable number of wealthier kulak families were to be evicted from collectivized areas and sent elsewhere.

The kulaks responded—fighting against collectivization with an organized campaign of large-scale destruction. The struggle swept through the countryside, approaching civil war scale in many areas, with devastating results particularly in Ukraine. …

The struggle around collectivization was not limited to kulaks. A considerable number of middle peasantry were wrongly treated as kulaks. Instead of being won over to supporting collectivization, they resisted collectivization. Louis Fischer observed: “I myself saw, all over the Ukraine in October 1932, huge stacks of grain which the peasants had refused to gather in and which were rotting. This I write 'was their winter's food. Then those same peasants starved.’ Mr. Chamberlin has falsely interpreted the famine and some Americans have accepted his interpretation.”

Problems inherent to the massive introduction of a new, collective system of farming further complicated the situation. The very scale and speed of collectivization was astounding: in the space of four years, over 14 million farms were collectivized, including 70 per cent of the farms in Ukraine. Collectivization took place at rates and with methods subject to extreme swings depending on the abilities and attitudes of local and regional authorities. Careful planning gave way to confusion as even at the top level collectivization schedules and targets were subject to drastic changes and revisions. With limited historical experience to draw upon and in a countryside renowned for backwardness and age-old peasant traditions, millions of small strips and holdings were amalgamated into a few hundred thousand collective farms. Peasants long used to manual labor and working with draught animals were now introduced to tractor plows, tractor-drawn seeders, mechanical combines and threshers. Against this background and widespread sabotage, a smooth transition was impossible. [Source]

If anything, collectivization improved agriculture greatly. Collective farms were more productive than private peasant holdings, and they could get advanced industrial machinery from the Machine and Tractor Stations established to provide it to them (it did not sell these means of production, but it received payment for the service of providing and repairing them, ensuring large means of production remained decommodified and thus making it easy for farms to maintain their new technology). Stalin showed the success of the stations as early as 1931 in “To The Chairman of the Board of the All-Union Centre of Machine and Tractor Stations”:

Last year about 2,000,000 hectares of collective-farm fields were sown by machine and tractor stations. This year—more than 18,000,000 hectares. Last year the machine and tractor stations served 2,347 collective farms. This year—46,514 collective farms. From the wooden plough to the tractor—such is the path traveled by the peasant farms of our country. Let everyone know that the working class of the Soviet Union is firmly and confidently promoting the technical re-equipment of its ally, the laboring peasantry! [Source]

Even though famine happened due to the conditions of the time, the country was able to build agriculture back up rapidly thanks to these stations, improvements in management, and more. Anna Louise Strong writes this Chapter Three of The Stalin Era:

The conquest of bread was achieved that summer, a victory snatched from a great disaster. The 1933 harvest surpassed that of 1930, which till then had held the record. This time, the new record was made not by a burst of half-organized enthusiasm, but by growing efficiency and permanent organization.

Victory was consolidated the following year by the great fight the collective farmers made against a drought that affected all the southern half of Europe. In former years, drought-stricken peasants would have eaten their livestock and fled to the cities to look for jobs. In 1934, the collective farmers held regional congresses, declared “War Against Drought” and planned measures to suit each region. Some used their fire departments to haul water; some planted forest glades. On North Caucasus slopes, they dug thousands of miles of irrigation ditches, saying: “We have mountains; we don’t need rain.” In each area where winter wheat failed, scientists determined what second crops were best; these were publicized and the government shot in the seed by fast freight. This nationwide cooperation beat the 1934 drought, securing a total crop for the USSR equal to the all-time high of 1933. Even in the worst regions, most farms came through with food for man and beast and with strengthened organization.

By 1935, the new farming was stabilized; for two years almost no one had wanted to leave the collective farms. The model constitution for a farm, the model type of “farm plan” had been determined; crop rotations and the location of fields was settled. For three years, the grain crop had run fifteen to twenty million tons above past records; the sugar beet area had doubled; the area in cotton was two and a half times any in the past. There had been heavy loss in livestock because so many had been killed and eaten in the first year of collectivization. (In China, the cooperative farms, learning from the Russian errors, buy the animals from the peasants on the installment plan.)

More important than the economic gain was the change in the peasant. The farmers not only learned reading and writing; they went in for science and art. Seven thousand “laboratory cottages” where the farmers studied their own crops, exchanging data with the government experiment stations, were set up in two years in the Ukraine alone. Almost every farm had its drama circle, its gliding and parachute-jumping club, even its aviation courses. The farmers related themselves to the nation’s life and the nation related itself to the farmers. A Soviet agricultural scientist said to me: “We scientists used to feel unregarded, but now that the collective farms demand our science, we see our work for several thousand years.” [Source]

Deportations of kulaks led to around 400,000 deaths; kulaks were not murdered for the most part, but the deportations happened at a time when the USSR was still relatively poor. The number of kulaks executed was rather small: “the Party only placed 63,000 kulaks in the first category [the ideologically counter-revolutionary] and only those guilty of terrorist and counter-revolutionary acts should be executed”. The book Another View of Stalin by Ludo Martens debunks the idea that dekulakization killed “millions” of kulaks. It explains:

What can one say about Conquest's^[86] affirmation of 6,500,000 `massacred' kulaks during the different phases of the collectivization? Only part of the 63,000 first category counterrevolutionaries were executed. The number of dead during deportations, largely due to famine and epidemics, was approximately 100,000. Between 1932 and 1940, we can estimate that 200,000 kulaks died in the colonies of natural causes. The executions and these deaths took place during the greatest class struggle that the Russian countryside ever saw, a struggle that radically transformed a backward and primitive countryside. In this giant upheaval, 120 million peasants were pulled out of the Middle Ages, of illiteracy and obscurantism. It was the reactionary forces, who wanted to maintain exploitation and degrading and inhuman work and living conditions, who received the blows. Repressing the bourgeoisie and the reactionaries was absolutely necessary for collectivization to take place: only collective labor made socialist mechanization possible, thereby allowing the peasant masses to lead a free, proud and educated life. [Source]

From the beginning of socialist construction right up to World War 2, the USSR had to face internal—like the kulaks deported, as shown above— and external enemies, and it dealt with them by force, including by execution; the famine we wrote about above is a perfect example of internal enemies the Soviet state faced. According to modern scholars and historians (even heavily anti-communist ones!), the excess mortality under Stalin caused by government policy was 2–4 million, which is still a high death toll range, but it is not nearly as bad as, say, Nazism (an ideology that existed within a capitalist economy!), which killed more than 20 million people in the USSR alone.

Still, we must explain the government policies and actions that caused these excess deaths. We already covered the deportation of kulaks and the deaths they caused, but there are more examples of bloody class struggle under the Soviet state. The Great Purge, a period of mass removal of corrupt officers and enemies from the government, had a death toll of about 0.8 million people; we must go over what this period was and why so many had died.

The Great Purge occurred from 1936–38 as a response to the assassination of Sergei Kirov, a communist leader in Leningrad, and a series of sabotage and terrorist attacks in the country. “A shock of dismay was felt throughout the country. It appeared that not only ‘bourgeois-minded engineers,’ [who sought high salaries and did not believe socialism could get them that] but supposedly loyal Communists might hate the party leadership enough to commit murder” [Source]. As a result, the USSR unleashed the armed bodies of its state and mobilized people to look for and report anti-communist activities within workplaces, the state, and the party; as it turned out, there were fifth columns, people embedded within the USSR who worked for one or multiple imperialist powers against the workers’ state, particularly Nazi Germany. The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), commonly called the “secret police” of the USSR in Stalin’s time, was the body that searched for and eliminated threats to the workers’ state from within. While it succeeded in eliminating numerous threats to Soviet power, and while working people were able to use it to secure their rule, it had contradictions within itself, and enemies of the state had embedded themselves within the organization, right up to its top leadership!

The leader of the NKVD at the beginning of the significant purges (i.e. in 1936) was Genrikh Yagoda, and he was quite moderate and ineffective, delaying the arrest of Trotskyist saboteurs and practically protecting terrorists within the Soviet state: “Tokaev [a leader of the illegal opposition] claimed that his group maintained close contact with another faction at the head of the Party, that of the Chief of Security, Yagoda. ‘(W)e knew the power of ... NKVD bosses Yagoda... in their roles not of servants, but of enemies of the régime’” [Source]. Thus, after some struggle by Stalin and his allies, Yagoda was removed from his position and executed, startling Soviet society as it meant that the arm they thought they could rely on was itself not really reliable if it protected the guilty and harmed the innocent.

Thus, to correct the inaction of Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov arose as the new leader of the NKVD. “The number of arrests at once multiplied; Khrushchev states that between 1936 and 1937 the arrests increased tenfold. Torture was used, he says, to extort confessions; Stalin authorized it” [Source]. Until then, all torture was illegal in the USSR, showing just how desperate the situation became. Yezhov successfully discovered and eliminated many enemies of the Soviet state, and in hindsight this elimination probably saved the USSR from crumbling in the Nazis’ invasion the way West European states fell. However, Yezhov’s errors leaned the opposite way: “In early March 1937, top-level Moscow leaders again denounced the ‘heartless and bureaucratic’ repression of ‘little people’,” and by 1938 the purges had eliminated so many enemies (as well as a number of innocents) that Yezhov, to justify his power and positon in a careerist fashion, worked to eliminate numerous innocents and even good communists. [Source]. These deeds only helped the enemy, and while Yezhov was useful for the working class in removing many enemies, he also avoided certain enemies within the state, and he removed working people and their leaders who were fighting those enemies more properly.

On the Great Purge, and specifically on Nikolai Yezhov, Grover Furr’s Yezhov vs Stalin has notable information in defense of Stalin and against Yezhov. In an article about this book, Furr states:

Once Ezhov had resigned, to be replaced by Beria^[87], orders were issued to immediately stop all the repressions, to repeal all the NKVD Operational Orders that enabled them, and to re-emphasize the need for oversight by the Prosecutor’s Office of all cases of arrest. Then there began a flood of reports to Beria and the central Party leadership concerning massive illegitimate repressions and shootings on the part of local NKVD groups. The central Party leadership began to investigate.

On January 29, 1939, Politburo members Beria, Andrei Andreev, and Georgii Malenkov signed a report detailing massive crimes during Ezhov’s tenure (Petrov and Iansen 2008, 359–363). This important evidence that the mass repression was Ezhov’s, not Stalin’s, doing was only published in 2008. During the next few years, further investigations and prosecutions of guilty NKVD men proceeded. …

Ezhov’s own confessions are evidence that Stalin and the central Soviet leadership were not responsible for his massive executions. Ezhov explicitly states many times that his repressions and executions were carried out in pursuit of his own private conspiratorial goals. In his confession of August 4, 1939 Ezhov admitted: “[W]e were deceiving the government in the most blatant manner.” There is no evidence that these confessions represent anything but what Ezhov chose to say—no evidence of torture, threats, or fabrication.

Ideologically, anticommunist accounts suppress the evidence of Ezhov’s conspiracy against the Soviet government. The apparent reason is the desire to falsely accuse Stalin of having ordered all the huge number of executions carried out by Ezhov. [Source]

In Khrushchev Lied, Furr debunks Khrushchev’s accusation that Stalin was responsible for the Yezhovshchina:

The interrogations of both Ezhov and Frinovskii published in early 2006 fully confirm Ezhov's deliberate torturing and killing of a great many innocent people. He organized these massive atrocities to cover up his own involvement in the Rightist conspiracy and with German military espionage, as well as in a conspiracy to assassinate Stalin or another Politburo member, and to seize power by coup d’etat.

These confessions are the most dramatic new documents to appear in years that bear upon our subject. They completely contradict Khrushchev’s allegations on every point: his contention that Ezhov was just doing Stalin's bidding; that the Military leaders were "framed"; and that the Moscow Trials were faked (as Khrushchev suggests). We now (2010) have a great many more interrogations of Ezhov's, all of which confinn the existence of his very serious conspiracy and give much detail about it. …

The recently published confessions of Frinovskii and Ezhov now confirm that Ezhov himself headed an important Rightist conspiracy, in collusion with the German military, and that he conspired to seize power in the USSR himself. …

Ezhov was removed from office, evidently with difficulty. In April 1939 Ezhov was arrested for, and immediately confessed to, gross abuses in investigations: beatings, falsified confessions, torture, and illegal executions. Jansen and Petrov, relying in part on documents no longer available to researchers and in part on some documents only released in 2006, show the tremendous extent of these abuses and describe the criminal methods of Ezhov and his men. There is zero evidence—none at all—that Stalin or the central leadership wanted him in any way to act like this and plenty of evidence that they thought this criminal. [Source]

Regardless of the number, executions in the USSR were meant to fight crime and bring justice (except for the ones committed by saboteurs, obviously); no such intentions existed in the Nazis’, Americans’, Brits’, etc. mass murders and genocides of indigenous ethnic groups. It is unscientific to believe that we can have a society in which everyone can thrive. There will always be bad people who attempt to undermine the interests of the majority of the population, and they must be dealt with if socialism is to survive. That is why the deaths in the USSR were executions while the deaths in those imperialist countries were murders. In “The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930–45”, Stephen G. Wheatcroft concludes:

The nature of Soviet repression and mass killing was clearly far more complex than normally assumed. Mass purposive killings in terms of executions were probably in the order of one million and probably as large as the total number of recorded deaths in the Gulag. In this narrowest category of purposefully caused deaths, the situation is exactly the opposite to that generally accepted. Hitler caused the murder of at least 5 million innocent people largely, it would appear, because he did not like Jews and communists. Stalin by contrast can be charged with causing the purposive death of something in the order of a million people. Furthermore the purposive deaths caused by Hitler fit more closely into the category of “murder”, while those caused by Stalin fit more closely the category of “execution”. Stalin^[88] undoubtedly caused many innocent people to be executed, but it seems likely that he thought many of them guilty of crimes against the state and felt that the execution of others would act as a deterrent to the guilty. He signed the papers and insisted on documentation. Hitler, by contrast, wanted to be rid of the Jews and communists simply because they were Jews and communists. He was not concerned about making any pretense at legality. He was careful not to sign anything on this matter and was equally insistent on no documentation. [Source]

There were people who deserved execution. There were pro-fascist conspirators within the military, the Soviet bureaucracy, and elsewhere in the socialist society; these were the “fifth columns” mentioned earlier. Class struggle continued in the USSR, with the former bourgeoisie sending its representatives to infiltrate the proletarian state, sabotage its functions, and destroy it from within.^[89] The developing Soviet economy also had such enemies working to harm the industrialization efforts. All of these elements had to be dealt with by force, and the proletarian state used such force (though the state’s bodies themselves did fall under the control of fascists themselves, ironically). Another View of Stalin explains this in its chapter, “The Great Purge”:

During the Civil War that killed nine million, the bourgeoisie fought the Bolsheviks with arms. Defeated, what could it do? Commit suicide? Drown its sorrow in vodka? Convert to Bolshevism? There were better options. As soon as it became clear that the Bolshevik Revolution was victorious, elements of the bourgeoisie consciously infiltrated the Party, to combat it from within and to prepare the conditions for a bourgeois coup d'état. …

The workers and the peasants who made the Revolution by shedding their blood had little culture or education. They could defeat the bourgeoisie with their courage, their heroism, their hatred of oppression. But to organize the new society, culture and education were necessary. Intellectuals from the old society, both young and old, sufficiently able and flexible people, recognized the opportunities. They decided to change arms and battle tactics. …

The Bolshevik Party's strategy assumed that war with fascism was inevitable. Given that some of the most important figures in the Red Army and some of the leading figures in the Party were secretly collaborating on plans for a coup d'état showed how important the interior danger and its links with the external menace were. Stalin was extremely lucid and perfectly conscious that the confrontation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would cost millions of Soviet lives. The decision to physically eliminate the Fifth Column was not the sign of a `dictator's paranoia', as Nazi propaganda claimed. Rather, it showed the determination of Stalin and the Bolshevik Party to confront fascism in a struggle to the end. By exterminating the Fifth Column, Stalin thought about saving several million Soviet lives, which would be the extra cost to pay should external aggression be able to profit from sabotage, provocation or internal treason. [Source]

Chapter Four of Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend refutes the idea that Stalin supported the purges for his personal power:

In the three decades of Soviet history led by Stalin, the principal aspect is not the transition from dictatorship of the party to autocracy, but more precisely the repeated attempts to transition from the state of emergency to a state of relative normality, attempts which fail for reasons both internal (abstract utopianism and millenarianism that prevent the recognition of what has been achieved) and international (the permanent threat that looms over the country that emerged out of the October Revolution), or better yet the combination of them. If millenarianism is, in part, an expression of tendencies intrinsic to Marxism, it’s also a reaction to the horror of the First World War, which even in circles and personalities distant to Marxism gives rise to the aspiration for a totally new world, unrelated to a reality capable of producing or reproducing such horrors. [Source]

As for external enemies, throughout the 1930s, when fascist groups were taking over capitalist countries in Europe, and when Japan was engaging in imperialism, the USSR tried to work with the United Kingdom (UK) and France against them; these two bourgeois “democracies” refused to work with the proletarian state, but they tried to appease the Nazis, fascists, etc. In multiple instances, the Soviets tried to fight fascism alongside the liberal “democracies”, but the latter failed to step up to this cause. “While Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan left the League of Nations, the Soviets joined it. … While the Soviets backed the Spanish Republic and its allies [in the Spanish Civil War], the Germans backed Spanish monarchists and fascists, and American, British, and French capitalists looked on” [Source]. And when the Soviets wanted to protect Czechoslovakia from Nazi Germany’s invasion, it received no support from the Western allies, even as “A Gallup poll, in April [of 1939], found 92 per cent of British voters favoring alliance with the Soviets” [Source]. In this context, is it really unreasonable that the USSR worked so hard to eliminate internal threats to its existence?!

Fascism was rabidly anti-communist, and the Soviets rightly saw it as an existential threat to socialism; it arose because the ruling classes of capitalist and semi-feudal states saw socialism as a rising threat from the working class, and it succeeded in rising to power because the workers’ movements of many European countries failed to effectively combat fascism! Both the social-democratic parties’ betrayal of their working class base and the communist parties’ practical mistakes led to this very unfortunate situation in Europe [Source]. Once fascism came to power in certain states, the capitalists of those states could convince other capitalists to unite behind them against “international Bolshevism”, i.e. the USSR, prompting a second imperialist attempt to destroy the workers’ state.

Now that the purges have been explained, who are the other people Stalin is blamed for “killing”? Another main source of excess mortality from the Soviet state was the Gulag, the labor camp system of the USSR that was used to punish criminals. It had a death toll of around one million people in the Stalin era; most of these people died during World War Two, when resources were scarce and had to be diverted for the war effort, and the death rate of the camps dropped sharply after the war when resources could go back there: “In 1944, for instance, the labor-camp death rate was 92 per 1000. By 1953, with the postwar recovery, camp deaths had declined to 3 per 1000” [Source]. Besides the wartime deaths and natural deaths, a number of detainees were executed, but this was far from the majority. To ascribe all one million Gulag deaths, or even worse any exaggerated death toll, to the USSR and/or to Stalin is fraudulent:

In 1934, Conquest counted 5 million political detainees. In fact there were between 127,000 and 170,000. The exact number of all detained in the work camps, political and common law combined, was 510,307. The political prisoners formed only 25 to 35 percent of the detainees. To the approximately 150,000 detainees, Conquest added 4,850,000. Small detail! …

Conquest, the fraud, claims that in 1937–1938, during the Great Purge, the camps swelled by 7 million `politicals' and there were in addition 1 million executions and 2 million other deaths. In fact, from 1936 to 1939, the number of detained in the camps increased by 477,789 persons (passing from 839,406 to 1,317,195). A falsification factor of 14. In two years, there were 115,922 deaths, not 2,000,000. For the 116,000 dead of various causes, Conquest adds 1,884,000 `victims of Stalinism'. [Source]

This class struggle, this struggle against imperialist enemies and their agents, extended well beyond Soviet borders. Even as revolution did not come about elsewhere, communists led the fight against fascism across Europe. German and Italian communists were the first targets of fascist repression in their countries, for once the vanguard of the proletariat was crippled, the masses’ struggle against fascism was crippled. But more importantly, countries in which the victory of fascism was not yet certain had conflicts in which the communists fought valiantly to stop fascist expansion and terror.

Spain was one example of a battleground between fascism and communism. Spain was a feudal monarchy for most of its history, but the expansion of industrial capitalism during the 19th and then 20th centuries created a conscious bourgeoisie. [MTBA]

All of these conditions greatly endangered the USSR since imperialism encircled it and started to turn its guns back onto it (like it had during the Russian Civil War). Therefore, the Soviet Union was forced to have a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany; the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the USSR, unofficially called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, defined the Soviet and German “spheres of influence”; Germany could not enter the Soviet areas, and vice versa. What the USSR planned to do was allow bourgeois governments to act as buffer states between it and Germany. What happened instead was that these governments were either too sympathetic to Germany to even want to fight back, or too cowardly to try to fight. The former applied to the Baltic countries, especially Lithuania, and the latter to Poland.

The Soviet intervention in Poland in 1939 is often a talking point used to equate communism with Nazism; anti-communists frequently say that the USSR and Germany sought to divide Poland among themselves. This was false, though. In“Did the Soviet Union Invade Poland in September 1939?”, Grover Furr says:

The Soviet Union signed the Nonaggression Pact with Germany not to “partition Poland” like the Allies had partitioned Czechoslovakia, but in order to defend the USSR.

The Treaty included a line of Soviet interest within Poland beyond which German troops could not pass in the event Germany routed the Polish army in a war.

The point here was that, if the Polish army were beaten, it and the Polish government could retreat beyond the line of Soviet interest, and so find shelter, since Hitler had agreed not to penetrate further into Poland than that line. From there they could make peace with Germany. The USSR would have a buffer state, armed and hostile to Germany, between the Reich and the Soviet frontier. …

By September 17, 1939, when Soviet troops crossed the border, the Polish government had ceased to function. The fact that Poland no longer had a government meant that Poland was no longer a state.

On September 17 when [Vyacheslav] Molotov[, the Premier of the USSR at the time,] handed the Polish Ambassador to the USSR Grzybowski the note[,] Grzybowski told Molotov that he did not know where his government was, but had been informed that he should contact it through Bucharest. …

In fact the last elements of the Polish government crossed the border into Rumania and so into internment during the day of September 17, according to a United Press dispatch published on page four of the New York Times on September 18 with a dateline of Cernauti, Rumania. …

Without a government, Poland as a state had ceased to exist under international law. This fact is denied—more often, simply ignored—by anticommunists, for whom it is a bone in the throat. [Source]

Unlike Germany, the USSR had no intention of taking Poland; it had to do so out of necessity because the Polish state did not exist, and Germany could have easily rolled up to the Soviet border, giving it a big advantage over the USSR; in fact, Germany had marched well past its “sphere of influence”^[90], forcing the Soviets to intervene to send them back. Similarly, Eastern Europe as a whole was threatened with Nazi expansion. “On the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and on National ‘Socialism’”, in the section called “Why the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Was Justified”, contains much information defending Soviet actions in Eastern Europe in this period:

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact did not define how history played out in Poland alone. Other countries in Eastern Europe were involved with this. (All of the information from here until the end of the section is from The Stalin Era.) Romania had the threat of pro-Nazi fascist uprisings by the Iron Guard, but as Soviet troops entered Poland and got close to Romania, these fascists stopped their activities. Romania also gave Bessarabia (Romania stole this from the RSFSR in 1918), a region rich in grain that the Nazis desperately wanted; this return of Bessarabia to the USSR encouraged Soviet-backed Balkan anti-fascists to resist Nazi takeover. The Balkans, being rich in food and oil, proved to be hard for the Nazis to take, and this was thanks to the non-aggression pact; the Nazis could not attack the Soviets, but the Soviets had every right to supply the Nazis’ enemies, and they used that right as much as possible.

The Soviets tried negotiations with Finland to reduce its threat to Leningrad (by moving its border further from the city), but Finland responded aggressively. When the Soviets destroyed the Mannerheim Line, a series of forts designed to assist the Nazis in their invasion of the USSR, Finland surrendered, allowing the USSR to gain a buffer to protect it from the North; despite winning the war, the Soviet terms for Finland were generous, returning nickel mines and showing willingness to supply food. Doing this allowed Sweden to be neutral, rather than hostile, to the USSR, making the benefits of peace more profound. Again, this was only possible due to the pact.

The Baltic states, who were technically allied to the Soviets because they gave them military bases, started turning more pro-Nazi, especially since the Nazis started marching eastward. The USSR sent more troops to their military bases in these countries (even Lithuania, which was in the German sphere of influence, but was still a Soviet ally), and since these countries were allies, this was not an invasion. The pro-Nazi officials fled the countries, and the Baltic states volunteered to join the USSR as new Soviet Socialist Republics because their workers wanted this. Yet again, the Nazis could not fight the Soviets, and the Soviets got a buffer against the Nazi invasion.

From the Baltic Sea to the Balkan Peninsula, the USSR got a buffer belt that checked Hitler more times than all of Western Europe did, and this was due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Not once did the USSR want more land; it always wanted peace, and its doctrine of “socialism in one country” showed that. Nevertheless, as the USSR became a non-aggressor to Nazi Germany, bourgeois governments in Eastern Europe understood the necessity to allow the Soviets to protect them. Hitler knew the seriousness of this pact, and knowing that the Soviets stopped his expansion numerous times, he and his allies made the decision to invade the USSR on June 22, 1941, launching the largest invasion in human history. [Source]

The Soviet Union’s attempts to postpone war and maximize its ability to fight an imperialist invasion are likely what saved it from destruction upon the Nazis’ invasion. That being said, there was one policy that was more destructive than beneficial to the Soviets’ anti-fascist resistance: the deportation of problematic ethnic groups.

The deportations of ethnic populations were a main policy that caused many deaths, with an estimated 800,000 killed by it. The USSR had banned national chauvinism already, so many people see these ethnic deportations as hypocritical at best since they appear chauvinist toward ethnic groups; it cannot be denied that members of these ethnicities hold resentment toward the USSR, Stalin, and the government of his time for this policy. But in truth, populations were not deported for “colonization” or for “extermination” as the reactionaries assume; if anything, they were done for the opposite purpose.

The Soviet state believed certain groups were either prone to imperialist collaboration or actually had high rates of collaboration upon the Nazi invasion of their country. The Koreans of the Far East in the USSR were moved almost in their entirety to Central Asia due to fears of Japan (which had conquered Korea and northeastern China, and which was fighting the Chinese people at the time) coercing them into being spies; many Finns, Poles, and people from the Baltic nations were also expelled, albeit for class reasons rather than ethnic ones. Due to the vast number of Koreans in the USSR, the process of moving them to Central Asia was extremely difficult, and they did not get the proper resources to sustain them, killing thousands.

More deportations occurred after the German invasion; the Finns, German populations, various peoples from the Caucases, and the Crimean Tatars were expelled in their entireties to Central Asia and Siberia. As Furr says, the Soviets believed that “the Nazi collaboration of these groups was so massive that to punish the individuals involved would have endangered the survival of these ethnic groups as groups,” so the Soviet state did not have genocidal intent, but precisely the opposite [Source]. Nevertheless, many grave mistakes were made due to this sweeping policy, which hurt many innocents; this policy was significantly erroneous, and the deaths it caused should be condemned, and Stalin and the workers’ government criticized for them. At the same time, though, we must remember that this took place during the Nazi invasion, which was a genocidal invasion which led to the industrialization of the Holocaust—before 1941, the deaths of Jews were not very high, and of course millions of Slavs were murdered as well—, and the Soviet state could not afford to have enemies behind its lines. As such, in its desperate situation, these peoples were deported: “We correspondents in Moscow heard rumours but when we enquired, we were told that German and Turkish agents had been corrupting the Volga Germans and the Muslim nationalities of the Crimea and Caucasus; the details were military secrets” [Source].

When the Nazis invaded the USSR in 1941, the USSR fought Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy (and later Imperial Japan). Western commentators tend to mock Soviet efforts against fascism, for they believe the USSR could not have defeated the beasts without Western aid. In truth, the brunt of defeating the fascists fell to the Soviets, who waged a war of the entire working people against the capitalists. It was really the Western countries that would not have been able to win without the Soviet struggle and bloodshed. Strong writes in Chapter Nine of The Stalin Era, the chapter named “War of the Whole People”:

The view in Berlin, London and Washington was that Russian resistance would be smashed in a one-month blitz. After a fortnight, Washington cautiously admitted: “The Russians have put up the strongest resistance the Germans have yet met.” In six weeks, America and Britain began to re-appraise the conflict. Winston Churchill, now Prime Minister, broadcast praise of the Russians’ “magnificent devotion” and noted the efficiency of their military organization. Raymond Clapper cabled from London August 20 (World-Telegram): “Russia has opened up a new pattern for victory. Never before . . . has there been put up against Hitler the manpower sufficient and willing to do the job.” …

Socialized medicine, the care given to mothers and babies in childbirth, physical education and sports among young people had improved the national health. Army statistics had shown steady increase in height, weight, chest measurements. The education and military knowledge of recruits had also increased year by year. Millions of trained women took part in the defense; the medical service of the army was full of them, as were communications, supply and engineers. Civilians had prepared themselves physically to cooperate with the army. Six million people had passed the tests of the GTO badge—“ready for labor and defense”—which demanded all-round fitness in walking, running, swimming, jumping, rowing, skiing. Many had taken free courses in parachute-jumping and gliding—even small children loved to jump from the “parachute-towers” in the parks of culture and rest.

The form of the collective farm fitted admirably the needs of defense. Every farm had its working brigades with their leaders; these could act as labor battalions for the army, even bringing their own cooks and cooking equipment. Every farm had its summer-time nursery, run by the older mothers under trained nurses; this organization could handle the children in groups and evacuate them to the interior, in the returning box-cars that had brought up troops. Every farm had its civil defense group which had learned sharp-shooting and had weapons; here was a guerrilla band already formed. …

“There is no land beyond the Volga,” went the word in Stalingrad. They fought from street to street, from house to house, from room to room. They used rifles, grenades, knives, kitchen chairs, boiling water. The Tank Factory continued to make tanks and drove them against the enemy right from the factory yard. “Not a building is left intact,” said the German report. Then the people fought from cellars and caves. “Every pile of bricks can be made a fortress if there is courage enough,” went the word. “Every hillock regained, gains time,” Stalin wired them. The people of Stalingrad fought thus one hundred and eighty-two days. Then, fresh reserves, organized and trained far in Siberia, drove over the plains and took the city in a great pincers. Over 300,000 Germans were caught in that trap. They surrendered February 2, 1943. …

All Soviet writers mention the numbers of Russian, Polish and Yugoslav slaves that poured from German factories. Often the troops dislodged the enemy slowly to avoid killing their own people. In a typical case the Germans were firing from the roof of a large factory that made silk for parachutes. Suddenly a crowd of Russian women rushed from the factory to freedom, and embraced the arriving troops. [Source]

As said above, the Holocaust ramped up during Operation Barbarossa. The genocides already intensified with the Germans’ seizure of Poland, once a home of three million Jews (of whom almost half were in the Soviet zone and thus moved eastward for safety), as “the residents on the other side of the Bug River… immediately fell into the hands of the Nazis with their occupation of Poland… [and faced] disaster fell in the blink of an eye” [Source]. But once the USSR faced its attack, the genocide reached unprecedented levels rapidly: death tolls that formerly took years occurred in months, roaming bands of SS and army troops and their collaborators rounded up towns and concentrated them in churches and other central buildings to burn them up, shoot them, rob their wealth, and so on, and Jews and communists were the first ones sought after and eliminated at a pace never seen before. The genocide of Jews was obviously a key part of Nazi imperialism, but broadly the Nazi imperialist movement was one to exterminate East Europe at large, with all of its nationalities decimated under their Generalplan Ost.

This reality, of the unbelievable terror that the Nazis practiced in the Soviet Union, against the first socialist country, against the Communists, is almost systematically covered up or minimized in bourgeois litterature. This silence has a clear goal. Those who do not know of the monstrous crimes committed against the Soviets are more likely to believe that Stalin was a “dictator” comparable to Hitler. The bourgeoisie covers up the real anti-Communist genocide to better publicize what it has in common with Nazism: the irrational hatred of Communism, the class hatred of socialism. And to better cover up the great genocide of the war, the bourgeoisie shines the light on another genocide, that of the Jews.

In a remarkable book, Arno J. Mayer, whose father was left-Zionist, shows that the extermination of the Jews only began once the Nazis had, for the first time, suffered heavy losses. It was in June--July 1941, against the Red Army. The bestiality against the Communists, followed by the unexpected defeats that demolished the sentiment of invincibility of the Ubermenschen (Supermen), created the atmosphere that led to the Holocaust.

“The Judeocide was forged in the fires of a stupendous war to conquer unlimited Lebensraum from Russia, to crush the Soviet regime, and to liquidate international bolshevism .... Without Operation Barbarossa there would and could have been no Jewish catastrophe, no ‘Final Solution’.” (Mayer, op. cit., p. 234.)

Once the Nazis had to face the defeats on the Russian front, they decided on a “global and final solution” of the “Jewish problem” during the Wannsee conference of January 20, 1942.

For years, the Nazis had put forward their hatred of “Judeo-Bolshevism”, Bolshevism having been the worst invention of the Jews. The determined resistance of the Bolsheviks prevented the Hitlerians from finishing off their principal enemy. So the latter turned their frustations on the Jews, whom they exterminated with blind fury. [Source]

It is in face of this gargantuan enemy that the Soviet Red Army, and other East European anti-fascists, fought valiantly for their motherland, for their workers’ state, for the freedom of the world. And it is the East European partisans whom we must cover as well.

Albania developed its own communist movement in the Party of Labor of Albania (also known as the Albanian Workers’ Party and the Communist Party of Albania). The leader of this was Enver Hoxha, and they were able to defeat the fascists in Albania without significant Soviet aid. In Yugoslavia, the communists (members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, renamed in 1952 to League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY)) also fought Nazis and Italian fascists without Soviet aid. The Yugoslav and Albanian Marxist-Leninists had disagreements (for example, they argued over what country Kosovo belonged to), but they still worked together in their anti-fascist struggle.

All of Europe and Asia had anti-fascist partisan and resistance movements that opposed the fascist countries’ occupying soldiers. Often, communists led these partisan movements, and they armed and organized workers and peasants to conduct sabotage, assassinations, and guerrilla war. While the Soviet Red Army and the capitalist Allies made progress in conventional war against the fascists, these partisans utilized irregular methods of war behind enemy lines. The Albanian and Yugoslav partisans were the best example of this anti-fascist action, but countries as far West as France had progressive and revolutionary anti-fascists, and even the fascist countries themselves had internal anti-fascist saboteurs, particularly Germany [Source].

The People’s Republic of Albania and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia became the next Marxist-Leninist countries in 1945–46 (1945 for the latter, 1946 for the former). After many years of fighting the fascist scum in their countries—without much Soviet support, actually—the people created People’s Democracies. However, Yugoslavia quickly became revisionist and constructed “market socialism” (socialism with competing workers’ enterprises, as we explain in the chapter on revisionism in Booklet I); it also opposed Stalin’s USSR and its allies. Albania developed socialism, in contrast to this blatant revisionism. Yugoslavia started trying to violate Albania’s sovereignty by trying to annex it^[91], and it was going against the USSR and its allies. Albania took the side of the USSR and its allies, so Yugoslavia, while claiming to be “non-aligned”, cooperated with US imperialism in the late-1940’s and onward.

The Soviets’ fight ended in the defeat of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. They got considerable aid from the US and the UK, but this aid many came in after the victory of key battles, particularly the deadliest on in history, the one in Stalingrad; furthermore, foreign aid only consisted of about 5% of the value of the USSR’s production. The liberal Allied Powers also fought hard to defeat these powers, and they defeated the fascists in North Africa, but they specifically waited for the Soviets to expel the Nazis from their country to launch D-Day, the beginning of their West European campaign.

As the USSR defeated Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe, it took control of many different regions. It helped set up Soviet-allied People’s Democracies in Bulgaria (the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, founded in 1946), Czechoslovakia (the Czechoslovak Republic, 1948), East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, 1949), Hungary (the Hungarian People’s Republic, 1949), Poland (the Polish People’s Republic, 1949), and Romania (the Romanian People’s Republic, 1947). The Warsaw Treaty was later created as a military alliance between these European People’s Democracies and the USSR, and it was made in response to the capitalist countries’ North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. [MTBA]

The Soviet textbook Political Economy has information regarding the People's Democracies in Chapter 41, “The Economic System of the People's Democracies in Europe”, in which it says:

The People's Democratic revolution in the countries of Central and South eastern Europe had its way prepared by the whole course of development of capitalism and the class struggle of the working class and working people of these countries, by the entire course of the world liberation movement. Capitalist relations predominated in the economies of these countries, with the exception of Albania. Czechoslovakia was a developed industrial country in which light industry working for export predominated; Poland and Hungary had a medium level of development of industry, with agriculture playing the predominant role; Rumania and, still more, Bulgaria, were agrarian countries with poorly developed industry. Albania was an economically backward country with important survivals of the patriarchal-tribal system. …

The chief motive forces of the People's Democratic revolution are the working class and the peasantry, under the leadership of the former. During the struggle against fascism in the countries of Central and South-eastern Europe, a national front had been formed which united all the anti-fascist forces, including, besides the working class and the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and part of the middle bourgeoisie. The revolution eliminated the political rule of the landowners and monopolist bourgeoisie. People's Democratic governments came into being, based on an alliance of the working class and the peasantry. The foundations of a State of a new type—the People's Democratic Republic—were laid down. Together with the Communist and Workers' Parties, in a number of countries the petty bourgeois and bourgeois parties who had joined the national front of struggle against fascism participated in the government and machinery of [the] State. [Source]

The People's Democracies completed their tasks and were about to go further in their socialist transitions. However, the USSR and most of Eastern Europe ended socialist construction in the 1950’s and started reversing it, for capitalist restoration was in full swing after Nikita Khrushchev delivered his “Secret Speech” attacking Stalin; we talk more about this in the chapter on revisionism, which is in Booklet I, but basically, Stalin’s death was the catalyst that led to the revisionists in many countries removing their proletarian leaders, a process that continued until the 1960’s with the revisionists’ victories. Because the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie had been established, there was no way any “socialism” continued to exist in the USSR. Most of the People's Democracies followed suit, becoming puppets of the new social-imperialist^[92] power, but Albania resisted Soviet attempts to subjugate it, becoming the only European socialist state. (We gave it its own subsection that has more information on it.) In “Soviet Social Imperialism and the International Situation Today” by I Wor Kuen, it says:

The Soviet Union today is not the red color of revolution but is counter-revolutionary through and through.

At home, there is state monopoly capitalism. Brezhnev^[93] openly advocates operating on the profit motive. He proclaims that the Soviet capitalists should “allocate each ruble to the place where we can be compensated by two, three and even ten rubles tomorrow… All of us, from the central to local organizations, must learn the complex art of money making. That is nothing to be ashamed of.” (Brezhnev, On Basic Problems of the CPSU Economic Policy at the Present State) The salaries of the managers of the big enterprises are 15–20 times higher than those of the average workers.

Wage slavery prevails in the Soviet Union and is legally authorized and enforced. “The Regulations Governing Socialist State Productive Enterprises” published recently in the Soviet Union openly stipulates that a manager of an enterprise “has the right to recruit and dismiss personnel” and “has the right to fix the workers’ rate of wages and bonuses.” This is an unabashed confession that wage labor is bought and sold in the Soviet Union today. …

From its so-called foreign aid and arms deals too, the Soviet Union makes huge profits. …

This is clearly seen in terms of Soviet “foreign aid.” Soviet loans for example must first of all be used to buy Soviet machinery and equipment usually at prices 20–30% higher than in the world market. Furthermore, products turned out by the Soviet-aided projects must first be used as debt repayments—usually at prices 10–15% lower than the world market. Therefore a Soviet loan can often produce a huge profit 4–5 times more than the original loan. By the time that India has cleared all its present debts to the Soviet Union, Indian journalists estimate that she would have paid back 565.9% of her original loan.

The Soviets have also conjured up elaborate imperialist theories to justify their exploitation of other countries. Brezhnev propounds that all countries should “take part in the international division of labor” which means that the Soviet Union, which is developing “the material basis for communism,” builds industry while other countries subordinate themselves to the Soviet Union’s economic plan. (Brezhnev, “The Triumph of Soviet Democracy”) This amounts to industrialized Russia and underdeveloped Asia, Africa, and Latin America. [Source]

The Red Papers #7: How Capitalism has been Restored in the Soviet Union and What This Means for the World Struggle is extremely informative on the topic of Soviet capitalist restoration. In Section Two, the authors state:

In the spring of 1957, a showdown came. V. M. Molotov and L[azar] Kaganovich were able to assemble a majority in the Politbureau against Khruschev. In fact, the majority may have been overwhelming. But Khrushchev, as ever a wily fox, held a hidden card. This was the support of the notoriously self-seeking and individualistic Defense Minister, Marshal Zhukov. When Zhukov apparently indicated that he would oppose the Politbureau majority with armed force, the more vacillating allies began to reach for a compromise. Soon, Khrushchev had [forced] the majority. Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, and Shepilov were expelled as the so-called “anti-Party group.”^[94] … As for Zhukov, Khrushchev, seeing in him a future rival, dumped him too.

The seizure of power in 1956-57 by the bourgeois headquarters led by Khrushchev marks the crucial turning point in the restoration process. It was at this juncture that political power passed out of the hands of the proletariat and into the hands of the bourgeoisie. The reestablishment of fully capitalist relations of production was now inevitable, for it is impossible for a bourgeois political line to lead society in any direction but that of capitalism, But first, of course, socialism, built carefully for 40 years, had to be destroyed. Thus began the third stage in the restoration. This was the period of the wrecking of socialism which extended to the fall of Khrushchev in 1964.

Of course, the first move in destroying socialism was Khrushchev's ideological attack on the political basis of proletarian power, Marxism-Leninism. This attack took three forms. First was his vicious condemnation of Stalin. …

The second attack was the doctrine of the three peacefuls: peaceful coexistence, peaceful competition, and peaceful transition to socialism. ….

Instead of aiding and encouraging the world revolutionary movement, the Soviet Union now asked the revolutionary people of the world to sit back and wait while the Soviet Union peacefully competed with the U.S. In this competition the obvious economic and political superiority of the Soviet system would somehow mystically ensure that one day other people could also be free. …

Khrushchev asserted that the dictatorship of the proletariat was no longer necessary in the Soviet Union. This goes counter to everything Marxism-Leninism has summed up about the state. …

Once this ideological offensive had been mounted, Khrushchev was in position to launch attacks on the very structure of socialist society. …

Khrushchev set about destroying the collective farm system, which accounted for most agricultural production. These collective farms are a lower form of social property than state farms. They involve large numbers of farmers who own and work farm lands cooperatively and sell their products to the state. It had always been the aim of. the state to draw these collectives closer to it, and where possible to replace them with state farms. The chief mechanism used in this was the state-owned Machine Tractor Station (MTS) network which provided the use of up-to-date agricultural machinery as well as offering agronomic and often political guidance to the collective farms. …

… Khrushchev encouraged the development of wealthy collective farms and within these collectives acted to strengthen the position of the collective farm chairmen and other officials. … [P]eople left the state farms for the cities. Thus, the state farm system was undermined and the spontaneous forces of capitalism unleashed in the stronger and more developed collectives. …

Having cripled socialist agriculture, Khrushchev turned to central planning itself. In one stroke he shut down the central planning ministries and placed their responsibilities in the hands of more than a hundred scattered, but equally bureaucratic, regional ministries known as economic councils. … The door was opened for the whole economy to be “rescued” from this chaos by reintroduction of that great “regulator”: Profit.

But none of these attacks could have been successfully carried through had Khrushchev and Company not managed to capture and destroy the Communist Party. Their expulsion of loyal proletarian leaders was merely a prelude to a massive purge of honest communists at all levels. [Source]

Indeed, Soviet imperialism became a new form of Russian imperialism under the revisionist rulers. As state capitalism created unequal development among nations in the USSR, the Russian republic grew wealthy while the other Soviet republics faced exploitation. Bill Bland’s The Restoration of Capitalism in the Soviet Union, shows this in Chapter 26, on “National Discrimination”.

… [S]ignificant differences remain between the various Union Republics in the level of industrialisation, the national income per capita, the living space per capita, the average wage, the average savings bank deposit per capita, the number of hospital beds and doctors in proportion to population, and so on…

The picture strongly suggested by the foregoing analysis—that the peripheral Union Republics have a semicolonial status in relation to the Russian Republic—is confirmed by a more detailed analysis of the economy of the most backward of these peripheral Union Republics, Uzbekistan. …

Cotton-growing for "export" to the industrialized Union Republics—Uzbekistan itself has few textile mills—is thus the basis of the Uzbek economy, and it is the policy of the leaders of the CPSU and state to maintain this situation… [Source]

Section Six of Red Papers #7 also has insight on the national inequality between Soviet republics thanks to capitalism:

… [U]nder the rule of the new tsars and the restoration of capitalism, this great progress [of socialist internationalism] has been reversed. Increasing attacks on the rights of minority nationalities in the Soviet Union have called forth powerful protests and resistance from among these peoples and from the Soviet people in general. …

The Soviet leadership's preoccupation with capitalist economic “efficiency” and “intensive” rather than “extensive” development has led to concentration of investment in the already developed “European core area” of the economy. This, despite the fact that population growth is currently most rapid in the relatively underdeveloped areas of Central Asia and Azerbaidzhan, and that these regions now suffer from a growing labor surplus exacerbated by further immigration from ethnic Russia and the Ukraine. (One estimate envisions the population of these regions doubling within 30 years. Moreover, according to the 1970 census, between 52 and 56% of the population of the four Central Asian republics and Azerbaidzhan were under 20 years of age compared to only 29 to 38% in the major western regions.)

Under socialism the factors of investment efficiency, strategic and foreign policy considerations and regional equalization were all taken into account by the plan, and within the overall economic advance of the Soviet Union disproportionately high growth indexes were registered for those national republics initially most backward. This was achieved mainly through mobilizing and training of the native population. However, as one scholar has pointed out, “the tendency toward equalization of regional levels of development observable before World War ll and on through the mid 1950s appears to have reversed since 1958.” [Source]

Capitalist restoration occurred in the former People’s Democracies at the same time, too; these countries became semi-colonies of Soviet imperialism, particularly as the Red Army—formerly a proletarian army that became a tool of the bourgeoisie—maintained its presence in the region and could force those countries into accepting Soviet economic dominance. This resulted in proletarian leaders’ attempts at restoring proletarian rule, especially during China’s Cultural Revolution. Which East is Red? reveals this in many of its chapters (our emphasis):

While a new General-Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP), Todor Zhivkov, was elected by the Central Committee in March 1954, much of the mid-tier and lower-tier Party officials became displeased with him over the course of the next decade. The prior General-Secretary (as well as the brother-in-law of Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov), Valko Chervenkov, was known as Bulgaria’s “little Stalin” and was supportive of China’s resistance to Destalinization, making it necessary for Zhivkov to sideline him despite his popularity with many BCP rank-and-file. The “home communists” (now consolidated between the Chervenkov faction, Yugov faction, and Bulgarian nationalists within the military) felt that Zhivkov and the “Muscovites” had not only allied Bulgaria with the USSR, but had transformed their country into something akin to a Soviet vassal state. Angered by the military and economic reforms that Zhivkov was replicating from the Soviet reforms, a hardline section of the BCP Central Committee and Bulgarian People’s Army conspired to carry out a coup against the general-secretary’s revisionism. …

On the other side of the Berlin Wall^[95], a small group of East German communists of a younger generation (also joined by a small group of older, hardline communists who survived the concentration camps of the Nazis) reached out to their fellow countrymen in the West who had already formed a cohesive Maoist party named the Communist Party of Germany/Marxist-Leninist… The KPD/ML had been looking to form a German Democratic Republic (GDR) section for some time, hoping to harness dissatisfaction among East German youth with the ruling Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) and its stagnant, authoritarian, Soviet model of rule, especially as Beijing was heating up its global propaganda war against Moscow. …

Over twenty years later, in 1967 a new policy known as the “Economic System of Socialism” added reforms to the setting of wages and prices, as well as the autonomy of management of enterprises. Ulbricht, much like Khrushchev, was seen as incompetent in moving the economic reforms forward and in 1971 was replaced with the much more Brezhnev-esque (and Brezhnev-aligned) Erich Honecker. Much like the Kosygin Reforms did for Soviet anti-revisionists, the Economic System of Socialism would later be used by the East German Maoists of the KPD/ML as evidence that the GDR’s economy was a capitalist one and that the SED was a junior partner in the CPSU’s social-imperialist policies. …

Like the Kosygin Reforms of 1965 in the USSR and the Economic System of Socialism in the GDR of 1967, the conception of Hungarian Maoism is rooted in economic reforms. Goulash Communism—known for its use of free market mechanisms and small private enterprises within a broader state-planned apparatus—was the product of Kádár’s “New Economic Mechanism” initiated across 1966 to 1968. Like the Bulgarian reforms of the early 1960s, Goulash Communism was also a process of sidelining hardline Stalinists, mainly centered around the first postwar Party leader Mátyás Rákosi. …

Kazimierz Mijal was a man with impressive credentials: born in 1910 in the Polish region of the Russian Empire, he grew up to help found the Polish Workers’ Party and fought the Nazis within the ranks of the communist People’s Guard (Gwardia Ludowa) and Polish People’s Army (Armia Ludowa) from 1942 until Poland’s liberation in 1945. …

His career took a downward plunge, however, with the death of his good friend and political ally Boleslaw Bierut, who had served as President of the Polish People’s Republic and First Secretary of the PZPR from 1947 until his death in 1956. Bierut was succeeded by Wladyslaw Gomulka, whose economic reforms in October 1956 (the “Gomulka Thaw”) were a near lock-and-step emulation of Khrushchev’s own thaw. …

After some years of silence, Mijal published in 1963—with the help of the Albanians—a pamphlet titled “The Struggle for Victory! Silence and Passivity Mean Defeat!” which was smuggled into Poland via Chinese ships. … In December 1965, a new pamphlet titled “Under the Marxist-Leninist Banner, Into a Battle for Socialism!” was released and distributed illegally among the Polish public, announcing the formation of the “Communist Party of Poland” (or CPP—also known as the Communist Party of Poland (Marxist-Leninist) or Communist Party of Poland (Mijal)). [Source]

The USSR was strict in maintaining its imperialist hegemony in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, a period of tensions and wars between America and the USSR. When the Western bourgeoisie tried to support a reactionary, anti-communist rebellion in Hungary in 1956, the Soviet military was called in to suppress the rebellion by force. The rebellion was in no way a people’s rebellion, for it had reactionary aims. The revisionist Soviets, while not having the people’s interests in mind, fought these reactionaries with appropriate force.^[96] In Czechoslovakia in 1968, while the West supported reactionary and anti-communist rebels, and while the Czechoslovak rulers were even more revisionist than the USSR’s, the Soviet response was not progressive; by this time, Soviet revisionism had developed even more, and capitalist restoration was complete economically as well as politically. Peking Review, Volume 11, Issue 37 explains why we support the suppression in Hungary but not in Czechoslovakia in the article, “Vice-Premier Chen Yi Condemns U.S. Imperialism and Soviet Revisionism For Collaborating in Vain Effort To Redivide the World”:

The Vice-Premier laid emphasis on exposing the fascist crimes of the Soviet Union in sending troops to occupy Czechoslovakia, the reactionary social-imperialist nature of the Soviet revisionist renegade clique and the scheme of U.S. imperialism and Soviet revisionism which are colluding in a vain effort to redivide the world. He said: The Soviet revisionist renegade clique is trying hard to prove that, like the sending of troops by the Soviet Union to suppress the counter-revolutionary rebellion in Hungary in 1956, its fascist aggression against Czechoslovakia is necessitated by what it calls "the defense of the socialist community." But there is no analogy at all between the two. In 1956, Khrushchov revisionism was only beginning to raise its head in the Soviet Union, and it had not yet embarked on the road of collaboration with imperialism, while in Hungary there was indeed a counter-revolutionary armed rebellion in which imperialism took a direct hand. But now, as a result of the continued practice of Khrushchov revisionism by the Soviet revisionist renegade clique, socialist gains have long been forfeited in both the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. To put it bluntly, "the socialist community" on the lips of the Soviet revisionist renegade clique today is simply a synonym for Soviet revisionism's sphere of influence.

Vice-Premier Chen Yi added: The occupation of Czechoslovakia by Soviet revisionism with the tacit understanding of U.S. imperialism is a signal of their intensified counter-revolutionary collaboration on a global scale. It must be pointed out here in particular that, in the Asian people's struggle against U.S. imperialism and Japanese militarism, the Soviet revisionist renegade clique has likewise played the role of the No. 1 accomplice of U.S. imperialism. The Soviet revisionist renegade clique not only has done its utmost to invite Japanese militarism to "exploit" the resources of Siberia, but, fully in tune with U.S. imperialism, is brazenly advertising that Japanese militarism is "peace-loving" and "a stable force in Asia." On the question of the reunification of Korea, the Soviet revisionist renegade clique has been striving for many years to bring the question into the orbit of U.S.-Soviet "cooperation" through the United Nations while shutting its eyes to U.S. imperialism's forcible occupation of south Korea and its provocative activities in conniving at the return of Japanese militarism to Korea. As a matter of fact, Soviet revisionism has long tacitly recognized south Korea as in the sphere of influence of U.S. imperialism. [Source]

Albania became the last socialist state in Europe after the rest of the People's Democracies became puppets of Soviet imperialism in the 1950s. The capitalist-roaders in the USSR wanted Albania to focus on growing certain crops for it, and they discouraged the country from industrializing; this was part of the revisionist “International Division of Labor”, for it was to make the countries dependent on each other and the USSR, allowing them to be semi-colonies. Albania’s proletarian leaders, especially Enver Hoxha (the Prime Minister of the country and the First Secretary of the party), knew damn well that this was a plan for the imperialists to make Albania a country dependent on Soviet “aid”, making it a semi-colony. Therefore, the Albanian proletariat resisted Soviet imperialism and revisionism in general.

In The Working Class in Revisionist Countries Must Take the Field and Re-Establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Albanian authors explain how revisionist states were not “socialist” in any way, and therefore needed real workers’ parties to take power:

In all the countries where revisionists are in power, the dictatorship of the proletariat is being smashed and replaced by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the socialist regime is being replaced by the capitalist bourgeois regime and the party of the proletariat, degenerated from within, is now but a smokescreen to conceal this treason, to suppress the vigilance and legitimate revolt of the working class and of laboring people. The vigilance and legitimate violence of the working class against the class enemies is what scares the revisionists to death. It is the only force that can subdue them, it is the only way out from this disastrous situation in which socialism and communism find themselves today in the countries where the revisionists are in power. Thus, the revival and fanning of the flames of the proletarian revolution in these countries is the “sine qua non” of the road of salvation. No other road, as events have been unfolded and are rolling on, can be of any stable and lasting benefit to the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism. Any other course can serve only as a posture of compromise, harmful and temporary, with grave consequences for socialism.

It is only the working class at the head of the masses, it is only the working class headed by its real Marxist-Leninist party, it is only the working class through armed revolution, through violence, that can and must bury the traitorous revisionists. [Source]

Despite it losing Soviet support and getting an embargo from it, Albania’s economy was able to do well because it still had some trading partners in Eastern Europe and because it was allied with China, the other existing socialist state at the time. (More information on China is found in the subsection on Asia.) In Chapter 12 (“Creating the Socialist Economic Base”) of Pickaxe and Rifle by William Ash, the author says this on Albania’s socialist economy:

Bridges and highways were rebuilt and lines of communication were quickly re-established. During 1945 workers got some of the factories, power stations and mines back into operation. Peasants were mobilized to sow the plowed land and make a start on rebuilding the burned-out villages. A wave of enthusiasm for work swept the country and young people in their thousands from town and country joined the voluntary labor brigades and worked tirelessly at the tasks of reconstruction. …

In December 1944 the mines and the property of refugees who had fled the country for political reasons were nationalized, and a month later a law transferred to the Albanian state, without compensation, as the common property of the people, the banks and shareholder companies owned by foreign capitalists. In April 1945 all privately owned means of transportation were taken over. These nationalization measures were dictated by the democratic needs of the people; but their social and economic content, transferring ownership of the means of production to the people and putting them completely at the people’s service, inevitably went beyond the bare requirements of a people’s democratic state and created the basis of a socialist state. Since socialism is the ideology of the working class and can only be maintained and developed when the working class enjoys state power, what this change really amounted to in political terms was the transformation of the people’s democratic dictatorship which had united the widest possible coalition of forces in the anti-fascist war into a dictatorship of the proletariat. …

Up to 12 acres of land were allotted to the head of each family and the buying, selling and leasing of land was prohibited. Committees of poor peasants were set up to supervise the distribution of land and to organize resistance against those who tried in various ways to circumvent agrarian reform. These committees became centers for raising the level of political consciousness in the countryside and took the lead in the movement to form agricultural cooperatives.

Part of the expropriated land was not distributed but turned into state farms which established a socialist sector in agriculture. Forests, springs, water supplies and all subsoil riches were proclaimed the common property of the people while most of the land cultivated by agricultural workers, their implements and farm animals were the property of cooperatives. …

The economic base was able to sustain increasingly large units of production like the big oil refineries, mechanized copper, chrome and iron-nickel mines, the great Stalin and Berat textile mills, the Hammer and Sickle knitting mills, huge cement factories and chemical works for the production of fertilizers, the tractor spare parts factory at Tirana and gigantic hydro-power stations like the Karl Marx and Friedrick Engels plants in the north, and Joseph Stalin in the south and the new Vau i Dejes (Deja Ford) station on the Drin River which produces over one billion Kw/H.

The rate of annual increase of industrial production has been over 15 per cent, reaching in 1967 a level 44 times that of 1938, and in under 25 years the national income has grown to more than five times its original size.

Albania, the most backward country in Europe, has left most European countries far behind in its rate of development. [Source]

Because Albania was a socialist state, the workers were the masters of society. The book covers this in Chapter 9 (“The State”):

The real question of politics is who rules whom, who enjoys state power and how is that power maintained. The essential political problem of a socialist society is that of vesting real state power in the hands of the masses of people in town and countryside, headed by the working class, and keeping it there. A socialist society is not simply created for the working masses; it must be created and preserved by the working masses. If this does not continue to be the case, state and society will soon degenerate from socialism into some form of capitalism with a consequent restoration of exploitative relations of production.

The Constitution of the People’s Republic of Albania, adopted on March 14, 1946, by the Constituent Assembly brought into being by the first democratic election ever held, is short, straightforward and democratic in the fullest sense. The whole document of fewer than a hundred articles takes up only 40 pages of a very small book. This conciseness and simplicity stem from the fact that, unlike most constitutions, there are no ruling class interests to be concealed in elaborate verbiage, no complicated divisions of power to check the state’s interference in business and finance, no pseudo-democratic formulations designed to give people the illusion of governing themselves. It is worthwhile setting out the basic structure of Albanian governmental institutions; but the test which has to be applied in judging their efficacy is whether the people, the working masses, really are in control of their own social destiny. This can only be demonstrated concretely by examples drawn from every aspect of the life of the people and from the very quality of that life in the broadest sense.. …

The people’s power as embodied in the Albanian Constitution was not, therefore, grafted onto the institutions of pre-war society nor even developed as a radical modification of them. It was established after a clean sweep in which the whole governmental apparatus of the old ruling class had been brushed aside. This was the lesson Marx had drawn from the experience of the Paris Commune — that it was not enough for the working class to lay hold of the state machine of the bourgeoisie: they must smash it and create their own organs of proletarian power.

All the major democratic organizations which enable the Albanian working masses to exercise state power originated and developed in the heat of national struggle. As they came into being in answer to the national need they were tested in the fires of the liberation war involving the whole people. Out of the National Liberation General Council grew the People’s Assembly; and the National Liberation Committee appointed by the Council became the Government, Prime Minister and Cabinet, elected by the Assembly. The National Liberation Councils at village, district and city levels developed into the People’s Councils which are the local organs of state power. …

For Albania to remain socialist, defend itself and play a constructive role in international affairs the state requires the direct participation of the people — the working class, the cooperative peasantry and the people’s intelligentsia constituting very nearly the whole of society. Not only do the working people own the means of production, they must actively direct economic, cultural and political development. The socialist state cannot even be conceived apart from this direct participation of the masses and the Constitution is designed to ensure that such participation occurs at every level and in every department of government. It has already led to the discovery of talented organizers among the workers and peasants whose abilities have strengthened the state apparatus in the service of the people. [Source]

In spite of the dictatorship of the proletariat’s existence in Albania, socialism was overthrown after capitalist-roaders took power. First, Enver Hoxha and the vanguard party made mistakes in the 1970's. They condemned socialist China when Mao met with Richard Nixon in 1971-72, and they accused Mao of being a bourgeois leader after he died. In addition, in the 1976 constitution (which renamed the country to the People's Socialist Republic of Albania), Albania became the first state in modern history to be explicitly anti-theist; the measures taken after this declaration were too extreme and damaging, and they were unnecessary. They simply made the masses unhappy with the state they were meant to control. These errors were arguably not as big as Hoxha's mistake in 1978, when he claimed that class antagonisms ceased to exist in his country. This grave mistake reduced the Albanian people's supervision of the state and the vanguard party, allowing the closet revisionist Ramiz Alia to get powerful enough to be elected as Hoxha's successor. His taking power was followed by the Albanian state becoming a bourgeois, not a proletarian, state.

Alia weakened the link between the Party of Labor of Albania and the working class. Like all revisionists, he used paternalistic rhetoric to justify the reduction and destruction of workers’ power; the Albanian capitalist-roaders wanted to seem like good leaders who “took care of” the people, rather than actual leaders who taught the people to rule society. With this justification, the party abandoned the mass line and became a bourgeois party concerned with exploiting the Albanian working people and using part of their surplus value for concessions to these people. This is in direct contrast to the mass-based rule that Hoxha supported, that the proletarian leaders of Albania sought to implement.

During this time, many of Albania’s former trading partners, the revisionist states of Eastern Europe, ended their trades as imperialist-backed uprisings overthrew the revisionist governments and set up Western-style bourgeois dictatorships; by 1991, Albania was the last self-proclaimed Marxist country (though it had turned revisionist after Hoxha’s death) in Europe. Because of this, Albania’s economy, already in decline after revisionist China ended its trading in the late-1970s, was in decline, leading to many Albanian workers falling for Western imperialist propaganda. Albania could have made compromises with its bourgeoisie, and it could have implemented something akin to the NEP of the early years of the USSR, but instead, the ruling revisionists refused to lead the people against this imperialist aggression. The state bourgeoisie, which controlled the party, abandoned the people. The Revisionist Alia and Co.—Enemies of the Albanian People covers this topic marvelously. In Chapter 1, “The Working Class has Lost its Vanguard Party”, it says:

The PLA [Party of Labor of Albania] today has radically abandoned any thought of empowering the working class to take a leading position in society; not even phrases are left of it. In the election programme, the PLA declared that “its basic aim is to take care of the people, their prosperity, the creation of necessary conditions to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of the people”.

In other words: the party “takes care of the people” instead of aiming at the self-activity of the members of society, instead of fighting for every cook to be able to govern the state, as Lenin demanded. Just like Ulbricht and Honecker^[97], Alia and co. could not imagine and did not want a future in which all social decisions were not monopolized in their hands.

This is diametrically opposed to Lenin's demand: “Communism says: The vanguard of the proletariat, the Communist Party, leads the non-party mass of the working people by enlightening, training, educating this mass, first the workers and then also the peasants (‘school of communism’) so that they can reach and really reach the point of concentrating the management of the entire national economy in their hands.” (Lenin, Works vol. 32, p.34)

The idea of the party "taking care of the masses" is instead reminiscent of the Polish revisionist Gierek's saying: “We will govern well and you will work well.”

And since the revisionists Alia and Co. have abandoned any thought of mobilizing the working class for the social planning, management and control of production, they consequently regard socialism as an “outdated model”. The PLA is fighting for power, but the preservation of power is an end in itself, is only meant to defend the sinecures of a privileged class, and no longer has the slightest thing to do with the interests of the working class, with the defense of socialism. [Source]

Because of the crimes of these revisionists, there were numerous protests against the government, and it was dissolved in 1992, after most of the other revisionist states were dissolved.

People assume that Albania was poor because of socialism, but in fact, Albania’s development was under socialism. In less than 30 years, Albania’s industrial production grew to be 44 times what it was, and while its GDP was only about $2 billion by 1990, the quality of life it provided was comparable to capitalist countries of higher income; its life expectancy went from being over a decade below Western countries’ expectancies to just a few years below them [Source]. As for its economy, Albania would have grown even faster if it had more socialist allies to help it, but the capitalist restorations in Europe and Asia prevented that. When capitalism was restored in Albania, crime rates rose sharply, people fell into extreme poverty, their quality of life fell, and more.

The “Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States of America”^[98] (RCPUSA) published “Capitalist Albania: The Ripoff and the Revolt” to illustrate how capitalism ruined the lives of working Albanians and why they began to revolt against the government. It states (with its authors’ emphasis, not ours):

From 1991 on. massive changes swept over Albanian society. Collective ownership was destroyed in Albanian villages. Land was broken up among families. …

When the country was opened to the capitalist world market, Albania as a whole sank into economic collapse. As cheap foreign goods flooded in, many domestic Albanian factories closed.

Agriculture also stagnated. Formerly collective village granaries, day care centers, meeting balls and mills fell into disrepair—as the collective village organizations were broken up. Each farming family was now on its own, trying to make a living. A small handful was starting to get wealthy at the expense of the majority. The reactionary traditions of Albania's patriarchal clan got a new lease on life.

The promises of foreign investment and loans also faded. Albania, it was said, did not have the “infrastructure”—highways, railroads, electrical power—needed for profitable investments. A few Italian capitalists opened new factories in Albania and a few new Albanian businesses sprang up—routinely forcing the workers to labor extra long hours for as little as $20 a week. …

Now about 400,000 people are officially listed as unemployed (in a country with about 1,500,000 adults). Less than 10 percent of the old industrial capacity is being used. Many working people have been forced to leave the cities and return to farm villages—and even there most people reportedly had a hard time avoiding starvation. The average per capita yearly income is $360. …

In 1990, as the Soviet Union collapsed and Western-style capitalist restructuring took hold in Eastern Europe, the Committee of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement [RIM] put out a call to the peoples of Eastern Europe: “If you want to know what Western [bourgeois] democracy is really about, turn off Radio Free Europe and find the way to ask South Africa's blacks, or Palestinians in the Gaza strip, ask the Arab dustmen in Paris or Turks in Hamburg, ask England's coal miners or Chicago's ghetto inhabitants—get them to tell you about the 'marvels' of Western democracy. Or you can just wait to find out for yourselves.”

The people of Albania have found out. [Source]

This is why Albania’s “success after socialism” never happened. Albania is still a poor country, and even though it had nominal improvements in GDP per capita, the lives of the vast majority of Albanians did not improve in any significant way. Rather, the people who benefited the most from capitalist restoration were the comprador capitalists of Albania, those who helped sell their nation for their own benefit.

Despite starting off with numerous People’s Democracies, Eastern Europe fell to revisionism when the USSR did. Therefore, its socialist history is very little. Revisionism was also damaging to Eastern Europe because it made the countries in the region submit to Soviet social imperialism, allowing the Soviet bourgeoisie and its compradors to exploit the working people in those countries. The state-capitalist systems stagnated in terms of their economic development, even though they received Soviet aid, and eventually, when market reforms were implemented, shortages occurred, being one of the main causes of unrest in the region.

On top of that, the revisionist USSR experienced national contradictions within its borders; the capitalist system created inequalities between nations that socialism had worked against. As a result, Russian chauvinism and minority nations’ nationalism gained popularity among individual bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals and leaders as the revisionist system failed to satisfy the masses’ needs and as genuine communism faced suppression, so dissidents and protests in Soviet republics popped up in favor of secession and the destruction of the USSR. They often received direct aid from the CIA, and they consisted of ex-Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers, the types of ideologists totally isolated from the masses. Regardless, their misinformation worked at riling up people in favor of nationalist bigotry and jingoist calls for violence.

The leading émigré organization was known as National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, or the National Union of Labor (NTS). It was composed largely of two distinct groups: the sons of the Russians who had gone to the West following the revolution, and those Russians who, through circumstance or choice, had wound up in Western Europe at the close of the Second World War. Members of both groups had collaborated with the Nazis during the war. Although NTS was generally classified in the right wing of the various émigré organizations, their collaboration had been motivated more by anti-Stalinism than by pro-Nazi sentiments. …

The most pervasive propaganda penetration of the socialist [and revisionist] bloc was by means of the airwaves: Numerous transmitters, tremendous wattage, and often round-the-clock programming brought Radio Liberty and Radio Free Russia to the Soviet Union, Radio Free Europe and Radio in the American Sector to Eastern Europe, and the Voice of America to all parts of the world. With the exception of the last, the stations were ostensibly private organizations financed by "gifts" from American corporations, nickeland-dime donations from the American public, and other private sources. In actuality, the CIA covertly funded almost all of the costs until 1971; exposure of the Agency's role in 1967 (although it had been widely assumed long before then) led to Congress eventually instituting open governmental financing of the stations. [This did not stop the CIA from funding other propaganda groups, though.] …

Many of the Russians who worked for the various stations, which broadcast at length about freedom, democracy and other humanitarian concerns, were later identified by the US Justice Department as members of Hitler's notorious Einsatzgruppen, which rounded up and killed numerous jews in the Soviet Union. One of these worthies was Stanislaw Stankievich, under whose command a mass murder of Jews in Byelorussia was carried out in which babies were buried alive with the dead, presumably to save ammunition. Stankievich wound up working for Radio Liberty. German war criminals as well were employed by the CIA in a variety of anti-Soviet operations. [Source]

All this led to was the replacement of the Soviet imperialist state with an openly-capitalist Russian imperialist state and openly-capitalist comprador states. The new leaders of the capitalist states were often either ex-revisionist officials that took off their socialist masks, or agents of US imperialism that replaced the former agents of Soviet imperialism. In Russia’s case, it was a mixture of the two, with Boris Yeltsin being a former leader of the RSFSR and Vladimir Putin being a former KGB agent, and with both being supported by US imperialism (Yeltsin’s electoral campaigns received US support since the “Communist Party of the Russian Federation” [CPRF], which succeeded the CPSU as a revisionist party, had significant popularity for its promises of welfare programs and a return to Soviet revisionist policies) [authors’ bolding]:

The line between state capitalism and private enterprise is thin .... both representing different forms of rule of the bourgeoisie. It was in fact the severe crisis in the economy during the latter part of the Brezhnev era coupled with the rising tide of discontent of the people against dictatorial rule that resulted in the collapse of state capitalism and its replacement with private enterprise. Due to the lack of a genuine communist force to lead this mass upsurge; a section of the bourgeoisie, backed by the West, diverted this revolt against the very people themselves by introducing a most ruthless, mafia-style carpetbagger capitalism. …

… Gorbachev sought to loosen the tight controls of the state capitalist system and reduce military expenditures. His hesitant ‘reforms’, finally led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the complete opening out of the Russian economy, through the Yeltsin coup, heavily backed by the West. …

State monopoly capitalism, on breaking up, resulted, not in a laissez faire economy, but private monopoly capital with the bulk of the wealth cornered by a handful of oligarchs.... called ‘clans’. These ‘clans’ are loose-knit groupings of industrial and financial interests, each with a clique of politicians at its head, a mass media outlet under its control and armed formations (state or private) at their disposal. These ‘clans’ are closely linked to the powerful mafias and also are intimately interlinked with international finance capital. They acquired state assets cheaply through rigged privatizations ... their banks grew fat on free floats of state money... they received big tax concessions from their political accomplices ... and they have ties with regional groups that operate along similar lines. Seldom in the history of contemporary capitalism have such a tiny number of rapaciously concentrated financial parasites risen so glaringly. …

Today, the major focus of its contention with the West, is focussed on the ex-Soviet countries, against the NATO’s expansion eastwards, and to some extent over Iraq and the middle east. On most contentious issues with the USA, outside of those concerning NATO and the ex-Soviet bloc, it rarely goes much beyond the stand taken by Europe, or, particularly France. …

In this desperate tug-of-war Russia only seems to have won out with Belarus, as the two countries have agreed to merge into a single entity by mid-1999. While the Baltic countries, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, appear to have swung more towards the West, the battle for Ukraine, the largest country of the ex-Soviet bloc, has intensified. While, on the one hand it, in 1997 established close ties with NATO, on the other, in 1998 it signed three treaties with Russia. [Source]

The fall of the revisionist USSR brought about this state of affairs in Eurasia. Later on, as fully-capitalist Russia’s economy developed thanks to state-based measures under Putin, its capacity to engage in imperialism improved again, hence its involvement in conflicts in the Caucasus countries and its current imperialist invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s imperialist ventures are far from abnormal in the capitalist system: Lenin proved over a hundred years ago that capitalist-imperialism necessitates the violent redivision of the world’s colonized and semi-colonized countries among big capitalist powers and international monopolist associations. Russia is simply a relatively weak, but growing player in this bloody game.

As we emphasized repeatedly, capitalism, not socialism, “collapsed” in the Eastern bloc. “The Need for Planning” by Joseph Ball shows how Soviet capitalist restoration led to the country’s decline in terms of its economy:

This article will examine the claim that this reversal happened because of some underlying flaw in the socialist economic system. In this article we will analyze what actually happened, mainly using the example of the Soviet economy. It will be shown that the basis of this economy changed radically after the death of Stalin in 1953. In short, within the span of a few years, a dynamic, socialist system was replaced with a stagnant capitalist system. It was this capitalist system that suffered slow-down and final dissolution in 1991. …

Once this system of planning and subsidies was swept away, the incentive to innovate was largely eliminated, as economic competition did not exist to provide an alternative system of incentives. Progressive economic stagnation set in and there was the rapid growth of rent-seeking behavior (seeking rewards unrelated to effort or quality of work) by enterprise managers and industrial ministries. …

It is held that enterprises in centrally planned economies always lack a strong incentive to innovate. Devoting resources to innovation, according to this view, disrupts the socialist enterprise’s effort to meet its plan target, without any corresponding reward. Whereas a capitalist firm that successfully innovates can make higher profits and stay ahead of the competition, the rewards for the manager of a socialist firm that innovates tend to be meager or non-existent, or so it is claimed. It is this factor that is usually held to be the core reason for the stagnation of economic growth in the USSR.

However, what is not fully considered by this dominant view is the direct evidence that a mechanism existed within the Soviet Union for the successful diffusion of technology in the period up to 1953, but that as the economy moved away from the socialist model, after 1953, this mechanism disappeared. Reputable bourgeois authors on the subject such as Joseph Berliner and David Granick do actually present evidence to this effect. However, their own ideological framework means that they tend not to follow up or fully consider the evidence they present for this line of explanation. [Source]

Yugoslavia experienced a similar problem to the USSR. Kosovar Albanians protested against chauvinist policies from the Yugoslav capitalist system, and the Yugoslav state tried to suppress this fire, prompting a response from Albania. In the article, “Who Incites Hostility Amongst the Peoples of Yugoslavia?”, it states:

In an interview given to foreign and Yugoslav journalists in Belgrade in connection with the events in Kosova, the member of the Presidium of the [Central Committee] of the LCY, Stane Dolanc, who is from Slovenia, where the standard of living is the highest in Yugoslavia, said nothing at all about the grave economic situation in Kosova. Not only should he have mentioned this, but he should also have explained to the international press the reason why Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia have so high a standard of living and Kosova such a low one, why the gulf between them is growing deeper, although the potential wealth of Kosova, both above and below the ground, is greater than in any other republic of Yugoslavia.

Does Dolanc not know that the economy, economic relations in general, play the decisive role in the existence of states and peoples? Why did he not bother to speak about the principal economic problems which are worrying Kosova and which determine its general situation? …

The large number of economic emigrants is evidence of the low level of development of the economy in Kosova. About 250,000 of the Albanians who live in Yugoslavia have been obligated to emigrate to Turkey alone, apart from tens upon tens of thousands of others who have gone to other countries of Europe, to America, Australia, and elsewhere. You can find Albanian emigrants from «self-administrative socialist» Yugoslavia everywhere, but not one economic emigrant from «[s]tatist-bureaucratic, Stalinist» Albania!^[99] The youth of Kosova cannot find work, can hardly earn a living in the Yugoslavia of Tito and post-Tito time. It is in these problems that the reason must be sought and the diagnosis made with the purpose of curing the illness properly and as quickly as possible. [Source]

In addition to the inherent national economic inequalities Yugoslavia had, it had US imperialists sponsoring nationalist separatists, for they wanted to break up and exploit the Yugoslav nations. While claiming to oppose Serbian expansionism against Bosnia, Kosovo, Croatia, and Slovenia, US imperialism exploited those nations and murdered hundreds from all of them as well as Serbia. In The Dismantling of Yugoslavia, Edward Herman and David Peterson go into how the West deliberately destroyed the bourgeois Yugoslav state to further their colonization of the region:

Diana Johnstone recounts a January 1991 meeting in Belgrade between the U.S. ambassador and Borisav Jovic, a Serb then serving on Yugoslavia's collective State Presidency. "[TJhe United States would not accept any use of force to disarm the paramilitaries," Jovic was told. "Only 'peaceful' means were acceptable to Washington. The Yugoslav army was prohibited by the United States from using force to preserve the Federation, which meant that it could not prevent the Federation from being dismembered by force"—a remarkable injunction against a sovereign state. …

Between the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in early 1989 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, no other theater of conflict inspired a greater commitment of Mujahedin and jihad resources than wartime Bosnia. As we've seen, Izetbegovic had long advocated an Islamic state in the Balkans; and both the Bosnian Muslim Army and later the KLA used Mujahedin volunteers along with an organizational infrastructure whose roots reached back to some of the major U.S. campaigns of the 1980s in what Richard Aldrich calls an "Iran-Contra style operation" and "one of the dirtiest wars of the new world disorder." But the Clinton administration overlooked the regressive ideology of its "assets," and supported and participated in the importation of vast quantities of arms and up to 4,000 Mujahedin to fight in Bosnia, just as the Carter and Reagan administrations had done in Afghanistan from 1979 on. …

NATO's "humanitarian" war exacted no less fearful a toll. Aside from the perhaps 1.5 million people uprooted during the three months it was waged, the material damage was considerable. Serbia-Montenegro had already been subjected to extensive sanctions dating back to May 30, 1992, along with highly theatrical condemnation and isolation around the world. The ruthless bombing campaign in 1999 not only killed and injured several thousand people (including large numbers of Kosovo Albanian), but in a targeting pattern reminiscent of the U.S. strategy during the first Iraq war, it struck a severe blow to Serbia's infrastructure (electrical plants, bridges, factories), causing yet more economic hardship, unemployment, and pollution. A postwar assessment by the UN Environment Program identified at least four "hot spots"—in or near Pancevo, Kragujevac, Novi Sad, and Bor, where oil refineries and petrochemical plants had been destroyed. [Source]

So since Western imperialism has been responsible for worsening people’s lives after the revisionist states’ destruction, we oppose their lies against these countries as well, for they seek to obfuscate Marxism and confuse it with opportunism, and they do not help people really understand what happened there and then. For one, were these countries really “dictatorships of individuals”? No, of course not; we have stressed this more than enough times, but these countries were dictatorships of their capitalist classes, and those classes chose their representatives and leaders. This is why Khrushchev was the leader of the USSR until 1964, when he was removed in favor of Brezhnev, for example. They were no less democratic than the Western capitalist countries in that none of them were democratic for their workers and peasants.

Were these countries horrible places to live in? No, not necessarily. They gave concessions to the masses just like Scandinavian and West European welfare capitalist countries did (and continue to do, albeit less than before), for they needed to maintain the illusion of workers holding power. Capitalists give “safety nets” to workers during periods of intense class struggle, and such struggle existed in both the Western welfare states and the East-European revisionist states, which had movements of anti-revisionist workers and their party representatives condemning the capitalist direction their countries were taking. To convince the people that the systems remained “socialist”, the leaders gave them healthcare, education, etc. all while stripping away the powers they had over their managers, the economy, and more.

Were these countries’ economies bad? While they undoubtedly would have been better with socialism, they did perform decently for their conditions. Take the “German Democratic Republic”, for example; despite having to pay 98% of Germany’s war debt from World War 2, lacking the good resources of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), being more destroyed from the war, denazifying in a meaningful way, and more, the GDR was able to develop its industry extremely fast, becoming the strongest economy in Eastern Europe and being in the top 20 industrialized countries of its time [Source]. This means that the East German economy did not “fail”, but did remarkably well given its conditions.

The revisionist USSR was also able to use benefits from its socialist past in advancing its new capitalist production. The industrialization and infrastructure development of the first economic plans allowed the Soviet people to make marvelous achievements even under their new capitalist leeches; the first man and woman to go to space were Soviet citizens, and the first probes to reach Venus and Mars were Soviet. Soviet healthcare was outstanding and matched the quality of Western capitalist states even though the USSR had to deal with the destruction of World War Two and with many resources diverted for the military; capitalist reforms of the 1970s in Soviet healthcare caused a decline in the system, but even then, there were more Soviet doctors than doctors of any other country. Therefore, even with all the hindrances the capitalist parasites caused for scientific workers, the Soviet masses were able to astonish and even scare Western capitalists.

We can look further into how revisionist countries fared compared to openly-capitalist ones in terms of people’s lives; this could show people that policies like universal healthcare, education, public transportation, and more are beneficial for the people. Shirley Ceresto and Howard Waitzkin conducted a study comparing the qualities of life of different capitalist and “socialist”^[100] countries adjusted for economic development levels, and they found that “socialist” countries fared better in almost all ways:

Our analysis of the World Bank's data supports a conclusion that, in the aggregate, the socialist countries have achieved more favorable PQL outcomes than capitalist countries at equivalent levels of economic development. …

Historically, there is some evidence that the discrepancies between capitalist and socialist nations have reflected varying social policies. All the socialist countries have initiated major public health efforts. These initiatives have aimed toward improved sanitation, immunization, maternal and child care, nutrition, and housing. In every case, the socialist countries also have reorganized their health care systems, to create national health services based on the principle of universal entitlement to care. These policies have led to greater accessibility of preventive and curative services for previously deprived groups. Expanded educational opportunity also has been a major priority of the socialist nations, as publicly subsidized education has become more widely available. Literacy campaigns in these countries have brought educational benefits to sectors of the population who earlier had not gone to school. …

In the less developed countries, the differences in PQL between the capitalist and socialist systems are profound. There, the options in public health and education that a socialist political-economic system provides seem to overcome some of the grueling deprivations of poverty. Many of the recent post-revolutionary societies (which we treated as a separate category in the data analysis) have adopted socialist systems. Predictably, these countries may witness improvements in PQL during the next decade that will differentiate them from other countries at their level of economic development. [Source]

Overall, the revisionist countries were not that different from Scandinavian social democracies except for their false appearance of being Marxist. To assume that Western-style capitalism is superior to socialism by using their “failure” is historically inaccurate because they were neither examples of socialism nor examples of a failed system; they were evidence of the problems of revisionism and state-capitalism, and if anything, they show what socialism really could have achieved in those countries.

Asia had a similar trend to Europe in its revolutions, but it also had differences due to its different conditions; for example, Asia still has revisionist, so-called “Marxist” countries. To understand how they came into existence, we must go back to when Marxism-Leninism first became an influence in Asia.

Asia (Mainly China)

In the early 1920s, while the Russian Bolsheviks were fighting remnants of the reactionary Russian governments, Mongolian communists of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP) were fighting the KMT, which wanted to take Mongolia and other regions of countries bordering China, and former soldiers of the Russian Empire. People of the former Tuvan Protectorate of the Russian Empire revolted and created the Tuvan People’s Republic in 1921, a short-lived People’s Democracy that the USSR annexed (because the TPR wanted to be annexed) in 1944. The Tuvan and Mongolian Communists received Soviet backing after the Russian Civil War ended, and the Mongolian People’s Republic was founded in 1924.

The Short Outline of the History of the Mongolian People’s Revolution by Khorloogiin Choibalsan (the leader of Mongolia from 1939 until his death in 1952) describes how the Mongolian people revolted, smashed the old feudal system, and established People's Democracy despite Tsarist Russian and Nationalist Chinese aggression. On one side, the Mongolian revolutionaries faced Chinese expansionists who wanted to control Mongolia; on the other side, they fought Tsarist forces who wanted to retain the Mongolian monarchy.^[101] This book explains the party’s goals, which were in line with those of the people:

“The Party seeks to take power into its own hands in order to eliminate the bitter suffering of the masses of Mongolia, and thereby contribute to their achievement of equality and universal happiness along with other peoples, as well as to promote the revival of the power of their homeland and the development of their national culture
“Because the peaceful co-existence of the Mongolian people and its exposure to culture and enlightenment is impossible until Mongolia gains independence, the People’s Party’s ultimate goal is to establish an independent state of the Mongolian people; the Party’s immediate goal is to free the Mongolians from the Chinese militarists and Russian White Guards, and to restore the recently destroyed autonomy of Outer Mongolia.
“With the establishment of the people’s power and the restoration of the country’s independence, the People’s Party will have to be guided in its policies by the firm principles of a revolutionary party.
“If parties of a different direction arise in Mongolia which will contribute to the achievement of our main objectives, the People’s Party will enter into temporary agreement with them; if these parties hinder the struggle of our Party, they will be recognized as enemies of the Mongolian people. Traitors and conniving hypocrites who betray the great cause of the Mongolian people to the Chinese militarists will be declared enemies of the people
“Our Party will resolve issues of foreign and domestic policy, as well as religious life, issues of changing long-established customs, traditions and everyday life, according to the spirit of the times experienced by the peoples of the world, and in accordance with the nature of future changes in world events, in the interests of the welfare and progress of the Mongolian people. But those customs which are useless or harmful, which do not correspond to the spirit of the age, or which are outmoded, will be eliminated as far as necessary as outdated and destructive, as softly as possible, but in extreme cases by drastic measures.
“The Party seeks to establish friendly relations and contacts with revolutionary organizations in Russia, China and other countries which are striving, like our Party, for the destruction of despotism, for progress and establishment of the power of the people.
“Taking into account that the interests and goals of small peoples, groaning like Mongolia under the heel of strong states, are united, the Party welcomes the realization of their common and just tasks.
“As for the tasks of nation-building mentioned in paragraph 5, namely central government, local government, courts, education, national economy, public health and fair tax distribution (on which the welfare of the people depends), the Party will publish its demands in the near future. Believing that the masses of the people have the right to freedom, the Party seeks to remove obstacles to the exercise of that right and only opposes actions which are contrary to the interests of the people and the policies of the state.
“All Mongolians, regardless of gender, who wish to devote themselves to the great cause of liberating the Mongolian people, who recognize our Party program and obey its statutes, are accepted into the ranks of our Party.” [Source]

In the end of their fight, the Mongolian people liberated themselves and created their people’s republic. Choibalsan’s book explains the importance of both the Mongolian people’s fight and the Soviet Union’s revolutionary internationalism in its last chapter:

The great storm of the October Revolution awakened the oppressed peoples of the whole world. It was a bright beacon lighting the way to a free and happy life for all the persecuted and exploited, it strengthened their courage and readiness in combat, led them in the struggle for freedom and independence.

“It is precisely because,” says Comrade Stalin, “the national and colonial revolutions took place in our country under the leadership of the proletariat and under the banner of internationalism, that for the first time in human history the pariah peoples, slave peoples, rose to the position of peoples truly free and truly equal, infecting the oppressed peoples throughout the world by their example.”

The Mongolian people raised the banner of the liberation struggle, the banner of the people’s revolution and, with the fraternal help of Soviet Russia, won victory. In 1921 Russian proletarians, fighters of the mighty Red Army fought together with Mongolian servicemen for the liberation of the Mongolian Arats from foreign invaders, for their social and national independence.

The soldiers of the Mongolian People’s Army and the Red Army fought shoulder to shoulder to protect the inviolability of the borders of the Mongolian Republic from Japanese invaders at Khalkhin-gol in 1939.

For nineteen years, relying on the unselfish friendship of the Soviet Union, the Mongolian people have lived freely and happily.

Breaking the old feudal order, exposing all the enemies of the revolution, the Mongolian People’s Republic is steadily moving forward, bypassing the capitalist path of development, towards a bright future—to socialism. The guarantee of these victories is the unbreakable and blood-bound friendship of the Mongolian people with the peoples of the Soviet Union. [Source]

The workers of China were becoming more radical after the old Qing Empire died in 1911 to be replaced by the “Republic of China”; as China’s industry developed, however slowly it did so, the industrial proletariat grew in size. The proletariat became the leader of China’s ongoing democratic revolution, making it a People's Democratic or New-Democratic revolution. This was the case in Shanghai, a major city in China. There, in 1921, Chinese communists formed the Communist Party of China (CPC); 12 delegates representing 50 or so communists came together. Mao Tse-Tung ended up being a particularly famous communist, and he helped found the party. He implemented Marxism-Leninism in China; since Chinese conditions were different from Imperial Russian characteristics, Mao had to try new ideas to help him successfully construct a workers’ government. These ideas became Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought . The book Thirty Years of the Communist Party of China summarizes the history of the CPC. In Chapter One, “The Foundation of the Party and the First Revolutionary Civil War”, it explains:

On July 1, 1921, twelve delegates elected by the Communist groups that had developed in various centers after the May Fourth Movement, held the First Party Congress in Shanghai, a center of China's industries and working-class movement. These delegates included Mao Tse:tung, Tung pi-wu, Chen Tan-chiu, Ho Shu-heng and others, representing about fifty Communists. The First Party Congress adopted the first Constitution of the Communist Party of China, elected the central organs of the Party and founded the Communist party of China. From that time, there appeared in China an entirely new and united political party, a party of the working class, with Communism as its aim and with Marxism-Leninism as its guide to action. A representative of the Communist International was present at this Congress.

Comrade Mao Tse-tung was the delegate of the party organizations in Hunan Province, where, prior to the May Fourth Movement, he had formed revolutionary organizations. In 1920 he organized a group to study Marxism and in the same year formed the Socialist Youth League. After the First Party Congress, he returned to Hunan to take up the post of Party Secretary for that province. His work enabled Hunan to become one of the most advanced provinces in the working class movement and peasant movement during the First Revolutionary Civil War. [Source]

The communists worked on organizing the workers through their unions for the next years, leading strikes that over 300,000 workers got involved in. Due to this, the reactionary rulers massacred workers that would attempt striking. This taught the communists that they needed class allies, and they found such allies in the peasantry. This was why the Chinese revolution was a New-Democratic revolution, not yet a socialist one. This was also why the Communists formed unity with the KMT under Sun Yat-sen. Following Sun’s death, the fascist Chiang Kai-Shek took power within the KMT. Rather than leading the national bourgeoisie, Chiang was the representative of the compradors and feudal landlords. This caused him to murder hundreds of workers in 1927. Thirty Years of the Communist Party of China explains this:

Exactly as Comrade Stalin had foreseen, the imperialists stepped up their intervention against the Chinese revolution. On March 24, 1927, after the Northern Expeditionary Army had occupied Nanking, warships of the British, American, Japanese, French and Italian fleets bombarded the city. Under instructions from the imperialists, Chiang Kai-shek staged a counter-revolutionary coup in Shanghai on April 12, massacred large numbers of workers and Communist Party members and declared his opposition to the Communists. Although the KMT at Hankow publicly declared a punitive campaign against Chiang Kai-shek, the reactionary tendencies within its ranks nevertheless developed rapidly. [Source]

This meant that the CPC was no longer allied with a lot of the KMT. The proletariat and peasantry were even more exploited by this fascist KMT and the warlords in China. Therefore, the CPC founded the Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Army, commonly called the Chinese Red Army, and called on the peasants to revolt that year. In addition, the CPC changed its strategy from focusing on the urban areas with their proletarians to setting up revolutionary base areas in the countryside with the peasants’ support; workers were still the leading class of this revolution, but the majority of the revolutionary soldiers would be peasants. This allowed Mao to create the theory of people’s war, now called protracted people’s war. (This theory is found in the section on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.)

The CPC began the revolution against the KMT government in 1927. In his “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hanan”, Mao showed how new power was being built in the early years of the people’s war. With regards to the progress of the revolution, he stated:

The main targets of attack by the peasants are the local tyrants, the evil gentry and the lawless landlords, but in passing they also hit out against patriarchal ideas and institutions, against the corrupt officials in the cities and against bad practices and customs in the rural areas. In force and momentum the attack is tempestuous; those who bow before it survive and those who resist perish. As a result, the privileges which the feudal landlords enjoyed for thousands of years are being shattered to pieces. Every bit of the dignity and prestige built up by the landlords is being swept into the dust. With the collapse of the power of the landlords, the peasant associations have now become the sole organs of authority and the popular slogan "All power to the peasant associations" has become a reality. Even bides such as a quarrel between husband and wife are brought to the peasant association. Nothing can be settled unless someone from the peasant association is present. The association actually dictates all rural affairs, and, quite literally, "whatever it says, goes". Those who are outside the associations can only speak well of them and cannot say anything against them. The local tyrants, evil gentry and lawless landlords have been deprived of all right to speak, and none of them dares even mutter dissent. [Source]

For four years, the fascist state attempted to crush the revolution; this is why it committed the Shanghai Massacre [MTBA].

Despite this great setback, the state failed to crush the revolution in that time, with the revolution only growing and expanding. Mao explains how the party maintained a proletarian foundation and leadership in the face of these challenges in “A Single Spark Can Start a Prarie Fire” (our emphasis):

The Central Committee's letter [dated February 9, 1929] makes too pessimistic an appraisal of the objective situation and our subjective forces. The Kuomintang's three "suppression" campaigns against the Chingkang Mountains was the high water mark reached by the counter-revolutionary tide. But there it stopped, and since then the counter-revolutionary tide has gradually receded while the revolutionary tide has gradually risen. Although our Party's fighting capacity and organizational strength have been weakened to the extent described by the Central Committee, they will be rapidly restored, and the passivity among comrades in the Party will quickly disappear as the counter-revolutionary tide gradually ebbs. The masses will certainly come over to us. The Kuomintang's policy of massacre only serves to "drive the fish into deep waters", [6] as the saying goes, and reformism no longer has any mass appeal. It is certain that the masses will soon shed their illusions about the Kuomintang. In the emerging situation, no other party will be able to compete with the Communist Party in winning over the masses. The political line and the organizational line laid down by the Party's Sixth National Congress [7] are correct, i.e., the revolution at the present stage is democratic and not socialist, and the present task of the Party [here the words "in the big cities" should have been added] [8] is to win over the masses and not to stage immediate insurrections. Nevertheless the revolution will develop swiftly, and we should take a positive attitude in our propaganda and preparations for armed insurrections. In the present chaotic situation we can lead the masses only by positive slogans and a positive attitude. Only by taking such an attitude can the Party recover its fighting capacity… Proletarian leadership is the sole key to victory in the revolution. Building a proletarian foundation for the Party and setting up Party branches in industrial enterprises in key districts are important organizational tasks for the Party at present; but at the same time the major prerequisites for helping the struggle in the cities and hastening the rise of the revolutionary tide are specifically the development of the struggle in the countryside, the establishment of Red political power in small areas, and the creation and expansion of the Red Army. Therefore, it would be wrong to abandon the struggle in the cities, but in our opinion it would also be wrong for any of our Party members to fear the growth of peasant strength lest it should outstrip the workers' strength and harm the revolution. For in the revolution in semi-colonial China, the peasant struggle must always fail if it does not have the leadership of the workers, but the revolution is never harmed if the peasant struggle outstrips the forces of the workers. [Source]

At the same time, the warlords and KMT had internal contradictions, so they fought each other often, and the KMT had no support among the Chinese people. The communists also based themselves in the rich soils of the south, where peasants could produce two crops per year; this helped their struggle a lot, but it gave the KMT more than enough reason to try and suppress them. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, but the KMT showed no resistance, further proving the internal weakness of the rotten regime. The workers and peasants of China wanted to work with the KMT against Japan at this time, but the fascists continued to murder the communists. Despite initially having victories, the combined pressure of the KMT’s forces, warlords, Japanese imperialists, and internal struggle led to setbacks for the CPC in the following years, hence the Long March of 1934–35.

The communists lost 95% of their forces in this period, but after they came back together in 1935, Mao was officially promoted to leader of the Chinese Red Army due to his successful leadership of the Communists in the Long March. He explained in “On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism” that, “The Long March is a manifesto. It has proclaimed to the world that the Red Army is an army of heroes, while the imperialists and their running dogs, Chiang Kai-shek and his like, are impotent” [Source]. The march drove them to dry areas of China, far from the sea and with very little arable land; they made the best of their conditions, though, and they won the loyalty of the peasantry. In Chapter Three of Tomorrow’s China, Anna Louise Strong talks about this:

They [the Communists] made North Shensi blossom. By land reform, production drives, and other methods, they doubled the cultivated area and doubled the crops. They developed small industries and cooperatives. They increased primary school seventeen fold. They established the first secondary schools, the first university, the first hospitals. They devised a system of voting by which even illiterate farm hands might express their will. They created here their unique, partly self-supporting government and army.

It was done in endless war with the desert. It was done against the age-old apathy of peasants who had repeatedly failed. It was done against a blockade maintained by Chiang Kai-shek and under occasional armed attack by both Chiang and Japan. Under such conditions was the new pattern of life and of government made. [Source]

In 1937, China’s Communists united with the KMT against Japan’s invasion. After rectifying their mistakes, this action was taken due to the necessity of fighting Japanese fascism and imperialism. Japan used fascist methods to control China (and all of the parts of Asia that it conquered). It sought to exploit China’s (and Korea’s) resources to enrich its ruling capitalist class. To terrorize the population, as all fascist countries do, they committed crimes against them, including looting, murder, rape, and more. Japan’s military and secret police suppressed domestic communists and those in China and Korea. While liberals attempt to separate capitalism from Japan’s imperialism and militarism, they are all connected; Japanese capitalism needed to expand, hence why it turned imperialist. And, as all imperialist countries have done, Japan committed crimes against humanity in its occupied regions to make sure they could exploit their resources for profit. The communists in these countries were almost always the leaders of the national resistance and liberation wars waged against Japan.

“Historical Experience of the War Against Fascism” by the Editorial Department of People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao) covers the lack of response from the British, French, and American imperialists in the early years of Japanese imperialist expansion and the hard work of the revolutionary forces worldwide, especially in Europe with the USSR. It states:

World War II was the culmination of a series of wars of aggression which were launched and gradually extended in the 1930s by the three fascist powers, Germany, Italy and Japan. It was the result of the imperialist policies of aggression and war. These fascist countries were the three most aggressive imperialist powers. They did not scruple to launch wars of aggression to extricate themselves from their political and economic crises and to plunder more and more countries more and more ruthlessly.

At that time two diametrically opposed policies towards fascist aggression held the world stage. For a long period the British, French and U.S. imperialists and their partners followed a policy of appeasement towards German, Italian and Japanese fascism, indulging the evil-doers and conniving at their crimes. They tacitly consented to the aggression of Japanese imperialism against China. …

The Soviet Union, which was the only socialist country at the time, was the main force in annihilating the German fascists and played the decisive role in defeating fascism. The Chinese people waged their revolutionary war against Japanese imperialism, for a very long time on their own, and made a most significant contribution to victory in the Anti-Fascist War. Likewise, the people of many countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania and America made their own contribution to the Anti-Fascist War. The people of the countries occupied by German, Italian and Japanese fascism either persisted in guerrilla warfare and underground struggles at home, or organized themselves into armies abroad which later fought their way back to their own countries. In the latter period of the War, the people in some countries successfully staged armed uprisings and liberated large tracts of their territory, or sent troops to join in the pursuit of the fascist hordes and to support the people's liberation struggle in other countries after their own countries had been freed. In Germany, Italy and Japan, the masses of the people also resisted fascist rule at home in various ways, up to and including armed struggle, and supported the struggle of other people's suffering from fascist aggression and enslavement. All these struggles contributed to victory in the Anti-Fascist War and each occupies a place of honor in the history of the War. [Source]

The Chinese Communists pushed Japan out of China by 1945. The USSR defeated Japan in WW2 by assisting the Chinese communists; contrary to American propaganda, the two atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities were not the reason that Japan surrendered. The reason for Japanese surrender was the loss of Manchuria (northeast China), where most of their troops were positioned. America wanted Japan to surrender before the Soviets got involved with it, so they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Against what America’s bourgeoisie wanted, Japan did not surrender. The Soviets were able to intervene, but less than a day later, the United States (US) dropped its second atomic bomb. Despite the two bombs, Japan continued fighting the Soviets before it eventually signed a peace treaty; despite the Soviets’ contributions, both American and Japanese rulers made sure to have the peace treaty not involve the USSR. The USSR would have gotten the ruling family executed, so Japan was incentivized to surrender to America. In “Mythmaking and the Atomic Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”, the author states:

Japan capitulated not because of the atom bombs but because of the Soviet entry into the conflict. After the obliteration of most of the country’s big cities, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no matter how horrible, made little or no difference from a strategic viewpoint. The Soviet declaration of war, on the other hand, was a fatal blow, because it eliminated Tokyo’s very last hope for attaching some minor conditions to the inevitable capitulation. Moreover, even after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese leaders knew that it would take many months before American troops might land in Japan, but the Red Army was making such rapid progress that it was estimated to cross into Japan’s own territory within ten days. Because of the Russian involvement, in other words, Tokyo ran out of time and of options other than unconditional surrender. Japan capitulated because of the Soviet declaration of war, not because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even without the atomic bombs, the Soviet entry into the war would have triggered a surrender. But the Japanese leaders took their time. Their formal capitulation occurred on August 14, 1945. [Source]

After the war, there was temporary unity; by temporary, we mean less than a year of it. The KMT betrayed the peace treaty in April of 1946, and there was civil war again for three years. The reactionaries were unable to win because the CPC’s control grew during the war against Japan; infrastructure was not fully under Chiang’s control, and the masses were done with semi-feudalism. The KMT was also very disorganized and disunited, and independent warlords did not cooperate with Chiang. The CPC liberated China from the KMT’s government in 1949, founding the People’s Republic of China (PRC).^[102]

Since China’s revolution was a New-Democratic or People’s Democratic revolution, it did concede to the national bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. That is why China did not nationalize all industrial means of production until 1956, and even then they temporarily allowed former capitalists to hold managerial positions. They even went so far as to give power to “democratic parties”, which were bourgeois and petty-bourgeois (including peasant) parties that cooperated with the Communist Party and accepted its leadership:

They include the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang, the China Democratic League, the China Democratic National Construction Association, the China Association for Promoting Democracy, the Chinese Peasants and Workers Democratic Party, the China Chih Kung Tang, the Chiu San Society, the Taiwan Democratic Self Government League^[103], the Chinese People's Association for National Salvation, the Federation of Comrades Working for the Three People's Principles and the Association for Promoting Democracy of the Kuomintang. The last three were dissolved after the founding of the People's Republic of China because they had fulfilled their historical tasks. [Source]

During and after the revolution, China’s communists carried out land reform; they took landlords’ land, distributed it among peasants, and then collectivized the land and means of production in stages, starting with smaller cooperatives and expanding them over time. This collectivization let peasants pool resources to improve production and stimulate industrialization. China’s economy expanded rapidly in the 1950s, and it guaranteed education, housing, employment, healthcare, etc. The USSR provided economic and technical aid, allowing China’s first five-year-plan (1953–1957) to be a marvelous success as steel production quadrupled, coal production doubled, industrial output doubled, and more.

On top of these, China’s system was democratic for the workers and peasants. The people exercised dictatorship over the enemy classes, and the workers had a say in economic planning, wages, and more. Because the party and state had to listen to the masses, the masses held real power, unlike under the KMT. China’s socialist democracy had People's Congresses and People’s Government Councils. Both of these institutions had elections at all levels, and workers and peasants selected representatives from their ranks for them; those congresses and councils, in turn, had their own representatives for higher-level congresses and councils, and this went all the way to the national level, just as the soviets went from local levels to the Supreme Soviet of the entire USSR. Like with soviets, members of People's Congresses and councils were subject to recall if the people demanded it; also like soviets, they were as centralist as they were democratic. Importantly, socialist China empowered their minority groups; minority nationalities lacked real power before revolution, but thanks to the workers’ seizure of power, they gained autonomy and true self-determination.

Chapter One of the 1954 Constitution declares that China’s government is democratic and centralist, like the Communist Party, and so the proletariat and its class allies (the people) hold power:

All power in the People's Republic of China belongs to the people. The Organs through which the people exercise power are the National People's Congress and the local people's congresses at various levels.

The National People's Congress, the local people's congresses and other organs of state practice democratic centralism. [Source]

Chapter Two, Section One delves into the National People’s Congress, and Section Three discusses the State Council—the Central People’s Government:

The National People's Congress is composed of deputies elected by provinces, autonomous regions, cities directly under the central authority, the armed forces and Chinese who live abroad.

The number of deputies to the National People's Congress, including those representing minority nationalities, and the manner of their election, are prescribed by the electoral law. [Source]

Chapter Two, Section Two discusses how the Chairman of China, the head of state, gets power:

The Chairman of the People’s Republic of China is elected by the National People’s Congress. …

The Chairman of the People’s Republic of China… appoints or removes the Premier, Vice-Premiers, Ministers, Heads of Commissions, and the Secretary-General of the State Council; appoints or removes the Vice-Chairmen and other members of the Council of National Defence…

The Chairman of the People’s Republic of China commands the armed forces of the country, and is Chairman of the Council of National Defence [which had the party parallel of the Central Military Commission]. [Source]

Chapter Two, Section Four goes over the local state bodies in the country:

Local People's Congresses at various levels are local organs of state power. …

Local People's Congresses elect, and have the power to remove, component members of People's Councils at the corresponding levels. …

Local People's Councils, that is, Local People's Governments, are the executive organs of Local People's Congresses at the corresponding levels, and are local organs of state administration. …

Local People's Councils carry out decisions of People's Congresses at the corresponding levels as well as decisions and orders of organs of state administration at the higher levels. …

People's Councils at county level and above direct the work of all their subordinate departments and of People's Councils at the lower levels, as well as appoint and remove the personnel of organs of state according to provisions of law. [Source]

All of these quotes show how the People’s Republic of China was democratic; the bodies were all controlled by the people, and the representatives they could choose were proletarian; similar to soviet democracy, Chinese proletarian democracy operated with a system of organizations and their representatives that were ultimately under proletarian control. Since these congresspeople were subject to the mass line, they were subject to proletarian rule and could only make decisions with the masses’ consent; this is something virtually absent in bourgeois democracy, and something working people in capitalist and semi-feudal states can look up to.

In Korea, the communists (who founded the Workers’ Party of Korea, formed after a series of mergers between Korean communist parties in both the north and the south, by this time), with Soviet and Chinese backing, defeated the Japanese occupation and liberated Korea, creating the People’s Republic of Korea (PRK), which was the legitimate government of the Korean people. However, America backed a military coup in the south that founded the illegitimate and fascist “Republic of Korea”. In response to that, the PRK became the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and held control over the north. The DPRK fought the US and its allies in the Korean War from 1950–53.^[104] South Korea, with its fascist state abusing its powers by massacring communists and workers in general, lacked sufficient support from the Korean people, who supported the soldiers of the DPRK. The communists were close to liberating the whole peninsula, but then the US backed the South Korean regime. The US bombed North Korea to bits; its schools, roads, farms, factories, 20% of its population—all of which were crucial for its economy—were absolutely obliterated and destroyed. Despite this, the Korean people, with one million Chinese volunteers supporting it, were able to survive and retain northern Korea. The criminal sanctions and restrictions placed on the DPRK during and after the war constricted its economy, though it remained stronger than the illegal southern government until the 1970s.

Mongolia in this time was not able to advance very far into socialist construction. This was due to the lack of a sufficient proletarian class. “On the Character and Specific Features of People's democracy in the Countries of the East” explains how its specific people’s democracy worked to advance into socialism proper, but still could not in 1952:

Leninism teaches us that the first effective step towards socialism is the industrialisation of the country. Although Mongolia is undertaking successfully the industrialisation of the country with the help of the USSR, is it possible to conclude that the present level of industrial development in Mongolia is able to provide the conditions for the transition of masses of individual cattle breeders to the path of collectivisation? E.M. Zhukov, based on a number of documents, shows that it is still too soon to talk about the construction of socialism in Mongolia. …

Regarding Mongolia one can say that the disinterested and constant ideological and political assistance granted by the USSR provided the Mongolian popular power, the 'Soviets of peasants' with a proletarian leadership. As a result, people's democratic rule in Mongolia, which consistently followed the principles of friendship and alliance with the USSR, with the leadership of the Marxist People's Revolutionary Party began to fulfill the functions of the revolutionary-democratic leadership of the proletariat and the peasantry. [Source]

The fact that Mongolia’s proletarian leadership was based on the USSR’s education of Mongolian leaders and not on the rise of an actual proletariat in the country itself proved to be a problem, as we shall explain a little later.

The Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), founded in 1930, was meant to be the vanguard party of the revolution in Vietnam, Laos, and Kampuchea (or Cambodia). It made errors in its early years, but in the 1940s it, with some support from Chinese KMT troops, led the Vietnamese people—whom were united under the League for Independence of Vietnam (the Viet Minh)—and took control of northern Vietnam from French colonialists and Japanese invaders, creating the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) during the August Revolution. Shortly after the founding of the country, the ICP went underground; the Vietnam Workers’ Party (VWP) replaced it in 1951. China, now a socialist state, supported Vietnam and the revolutionaries in Laos and Kampuchea.

Southern Vietnam remained under imperialist control, and this led to the First Indochina War. The US supported the French colonialists. During this time, Laos, Kampuchea, and southern Vietnam founded new comprador states to make themselves semi-colonies of the US and France rather than direct colonies of France; the masses of Indochina did not fall for these “nationalist” bluffs, and they fought until 1954, when Vietnam was officially partitioned (just like Korea, but formally) with the People’s Democracy in the north and the fascist semi-colony in the south. Peace lasted for little more than a year as the communists continued their people’s war against imperialists with the People’s Army of Vietnam (the official army of the DRV and later the Socialist Republic of Vietnam—modern united Vietnam), the Liberation Army of South Vietnam, and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. The socialist countries of this time supported the people of Indochina against America’s imperialism.

Indonesia had its national liberation struggle against Dutch imperialism. The Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) worked with nationalist groups in the country to revolt against their Dutch colonists, only to be quashed and then to be suppressed when Japanese fascism took over the area. But through their participation in the struggle against that fascism, the party gained a great reputation among the people of Indonesia; nonetheless, it failed to gain a role of leadership over the August Revolution of 1945, which took place around the same time as Vietnam’s August Revolution. Indeed, in a statement from the party’s Politburo in 1966, they stated: “The PKI did not consistently lead the armed struggle against Dutch imperialism… The PKI did not establish the alliance of the working class and the peasantry by leading the anti-feudal struggle in the countryside, and did not establish… a united front with all other democratic forces” [Source]. As a result, the newly independent Republic of Indonesia did not become a People’s Democracy, but a bourgeois democracy, one that had the national bourgeoisie share power with the comprador bourgeoisie and landlord classes; this left Indonesia a semi-feudal semi-colony of the Netherlands, and by extension the US. President Sukarno led the national bourgeoisie of this republic.

Under imperialist domination, Indonesia had its territory carved up, first during the era of direct colonialism and then during modern semi-colonialism. Malaysia, for instance, had a northwestern portion of the Indonesian island of Borneo as a British colony; the island of New Guinea, or Papua, was divided between the Dutch colony of Western New Guinea and the British and later Australian colony of Papua New Guinea; the island of Timor was also divided, with Indonesia taking the western half and Portugal holding the eastern half until 1975^[105] when it gave Timor-Leste independence—which Indonesia sought to crush with American support. “Independent” Indonesia—its bourgeois nationalist leadership supported expansionism under the guise of fighting colonialism, and its comprador-bourgeois elements also sought to crush national liberation—annexed Western New Guinea in 1962, while Papua New Guinea only became an “independent” country in 1975.^[106] The PKI made the rightist error of supporting Indonesia’s expansionism under Sukarno, and this meant it lost the potential to unite with oppressed nations and the masses of Indonesia against imperialism and semi-feudalism. It paid for these grave mistakes in 1965, when US imperialism supported a fascist coup against Sukarno, bringing the country into a dictatorship under Suharto.

Estimates of the total number of Indonesians murdered over a period of several years following an aborted coup range from 500,000 to one million.

In the early morning hours of 1 October 1965, a small force of junior military officers abducted and killed six generals and seized several key points in the capital city of Jakarta. They then went on the air to announce that their action was being taken to forestall a putsch by a "Generals' Council" scheduled for Army Day, the fifth of October. The putsch, they said, had been sponsored by the CIA and was aimed at capturing power from President Sukarno. By the end of the day, however, the rebel officers in Jakarta had been crushed by the army under the direction of General Suharto, although some supportive army groups in other cities held out for a day or two longer.

Suharto—a man who had served both the Dutch colonialists and the Japanese invaders—and his colleagues charged that the large and influential PKI was behind the junior officers' "coup attempt", and that behind the party stood Communist China. The triumphant armed forces moved in to grab the reins of government, curb Sukarno's authority (before long he was reduced to little more than a figurehead), and carry out a bloodbath to eliminate once and for all the PKI with whom Sukarno had obliged them to share national power for many years. Here at last was the situation which could legitimate these long-desired actions. …

In 1975 Indonesia invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, which lies at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago and which had proclaimed its independence after Portugal relinquished control. It was the beginning of a massacre that continued into the 1990s. By 1989, Amnesty International estimated that Indonesian troops, with the aim of forcibly annexing East Timor, had killed 200,000 people out of a population of between 600,000 and 700,000. The level of atrocity has often been on a par with that carried out against the PKI in Indonesia itself. [Source]

Malaysia (which includes the region of Malaya and a portion of the island of Borneo) and Burma had their own people’s wars; both countries were colonies of the United Kingdom, but Burma received formal independence in 1948 while Malaysia was still a colony at this time. The Communist Party of Burma had the experience of fighting imperialism during World War Two; many of the party’s leaders collaborated with Japanese fascism against British imperialism, but in 1944 they switched to the correct position of fighting Japanese fascism. [MTBA] The Communist Party of Malaya (CPM, founded in 1930) focused on the fight against Japanese fascism, founding the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army with British cooperation until 1945. When Japan lost WW2, Britain re-asserted its control over Malaya, resulting in repression of the masses and the beginning of the Malayan war for independence [Source]. This war occurred until Malaya became an “independent” comprador regime, with which Soviet and Chinese revisionists told the CPM to have peace with.

The new government of China followed democratic centralism. It is true that many opponents were suppressed under Mao, but these were reactionary opponents and dissidents that the people helped in suppressing and attacking. Mao opposed the liberal use of execution against opponents, and he frequently let people go after they served prison sentences. The masses supported suppressing counterrevolutionaries in the CPC’s various campaigns, and free expression flourished as long as it remained within the context of advancing socialism. We talked about this in the subsection on the mass line. Chinese Workers March Toward Socialism explains how Chinese workers enjoyed political freedom in Chapter One:

As the Chinese working class is the leading class in the state, the interest of the country and of the whole people is also the vital interest of the Chinese working class. The workers enjoy broad democratic rights; participating in the administration of state affairs, quite a number of workers have been elected deputies to the National People’s Congress and the various Local People’s Congresses, while many others have been elected to the People’s Councils of all levels. The Chinese trade unions represent the workers in drafting the laws and decrees concerning production and labor, as well as the material and cultural life of the workers; and they resolutely support and carry out all the policies, laws, and decrees which they have helped the People’s Government to frame, functioning as a strong backbone of the people’s democracy. [Source]

Mao, in contrast to what bourgeois media says, supported free speech in the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1956, which was based on him saying, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend.” He wanted as many suggestions and criticisms as possible, to help perfect the socialist system and to allow revisionists (like Liu Shaoqi) and other enemies of the people to expose themselves. He defended the policy in “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”:

Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land. Different forms and styles in art should develop freely and different schools in science should contend freely. We think that it is harmful to the growth of art and science if administrative measures are used to impose one particular style of art or school of thought and to ban another. Questions of right and wrong in the arts and science should be settled through free discussion in artistic and scientific circles and through practical work in these fields. … In a socialist society, the conditions for the growth of the new are radically different from and far superior to those in the old society. Nevertheless, it often happens that new, rising forces are held back and sound ideas stifled. Besides[,] even in the absence of their deliberate suppression, the growth of new things may be hindered simply through lack of discernment. It is therefore necessary to be careful about questions of right and wrong in the arts and sciences, to encourage free discussion and avoid hasty conclusions. We believe that such an attitude will help ensure a relatively smooth development of the arts and sciences. …

Literally the two slogans—let a hundred flowers blossom and let a hundred schools of thought contend—have no class character; the proletariat can turn them to account, and so can the bourgeoisie or others. Different classes, strata and social groups each have their own views on what are fragrant flowers and what are poisonous weeds. [Source]

The movement led to anti-communists abusing this by spreading misinformation and advocating for the overthrow of the proletariat’s dictatorship. Within the Communist Party, capitalist-roaders like Deng Xiaoping condemned the Hundred Flowers Campaign for this, so the Anti-Rightist Campaign came about, led by Deng. While Mao recognized that the people needed to condemn reactionary ideology, he did not believe that many people were actually reactionary; Deng, in contrast, allowed hundreds of thousands to be persecuted despite not necessarily being rightists. This was one of the first examples of China’s line struggle that would continue all the way until Mao died and even a little after that. Silage Choppers and Snake Spirits clarifies this:

As part of an effort to shake things up before that kind of thinking got solidified into party culture, in 1956 Mao launched a movement called, “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom and a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend.” The idea was to encourage critical thinking and new ideas, in arts and culture (flowers) and science and technology (schools of thought).

The Hundred Flowers Campaign, as it came to be known, initiated a flurry of papers and articles written about what was happening in China and where it should be going as a country. Among the writers were people, mostly intellectuals, who launched attacks on the Party and called for the Party to step down. Their call was for a two-party system, and since the Communist Party had been in power already for six years, it was time for them to move aside and let other people take power.

In what would become Mao’s preferred method in dealing with people who were attacking the socialist principles of the Party, his instructions were to let them say and do what they wanted so that the people themselves could understand what they were about, by seeing and experiencing firsthand their intentions and motivations. After about twenty days, those calling for a two-party system had become increasingly high pitched in their rhetoric. And the people in general were pretty pissed off. So through the Party paper, the Party countered, laying bare the different issues involved with socialist development and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It would later be articulated at a meeting at Lushan (Lu Mountain in Jiangxi Province) in 1959, but at the crux was that two ideological lines emerging since Liberation were becoming more apparent. Put simply, one was socialist and one was capitalist, and the Party was split from the very top, with Mao and Zhou Enlai^[107] on one side, and Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping on the other. Essentially, all of the complex and heated movements that followed, including the Hundred Flowers Campaign, straight through to the Cultural Revolution, were an expression of this ideological struggle among the Party’s top leadership.

The Hundred Flowers Campaign ended with Liu and Deng criticizing Mao for unleashing the bourgeoisie and allowing them to attack the Party. And because there had been an attack on the Party, the Anti-Rightist Movement was launched in 1957 in order to seek out the people behind it. Deng Xiaoping was given the responsibility of running it. …

In a short time, however, the Anti-Rightist Movement turned ugly. At its start, Mao estimated that there were maybe 400 Rightists in Beijing and 4,000 in the entire country. Within three months under Deng’s leadership, however, 300,000 people had been targeted and accused in a bona fide witch-hunt. [Source]

After the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward during the second five-year-plan (1958–1962) to progress China’s relations of production while developing its productive forces. This involved developing the existing peasant cooperatives^[108] into people's communes, which had “all-round management of agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, side-occupations and fishery, where industry (the worker), agriculture (the peasant), exchange (the trader), culture and education (the student) and military affairs (the militiaman) merge into one” [Source]. That development let peasants pool even more resources together so that they could get industrial equipment and produce more food and raw materials for the country.

People’s communes also collectivized tasks like cooking and laundry, freeing up many women from these household chores and allowing them to engage in economically productive work; unfortunately, this did occur with force at times, despite the proletarian leadership insisting that local cadres use persuasion rather than coercion. Overall, though, rural people’s communes succeeded in collectivizing agriculture and residential life.

Forming people’s communes was also the right step to take toward making agriculture owned by the entire proletariat and not just the members of the cooperative; though the people's communes only had cooperative or collective ownership rather than social ownership, their large sizes and mechanization were the conditions to let them become socialized later, and they were socialist cooperatives because they distributed goods according to work. Furthermore, people’s communes became the new bodies of town and county governments in China, with commune leaders and township governments merging into common bodies: “the local government and the people’s commune should be merged, with members of the people’s council of the township concurrently as members of the management committee of the people's commune” [Source].

At the same time, there were levels of ownership within communes. Production teams made up production brigades, and these brigades made up communes; each level of organization owned different types of means of production. The state did not own agricultural means of production except in state farms, marking a difference from the Soviet socialist system which owned large means of production, even in agriculture. Rethinking Socialism differentiates between the levels of ownership (our bolding):

The communes owned large productive instruments, including the irrigation and drainage systems and electric stations, available to all members of the communes. At the next level, the production brigade owned instruments that all teams could use including the milling stations, sewing stations, etc. In addition, starting in the mid-1960s both the communes and the brigades began to build and own industrial units that produced a variety of manufacturing products. The team was the basic accounting unit where work was assigned to members, and their work points (gong fen) were recorded and paid accordingly after deduction for the taxes, accumulation fund, welfare fund, and quota grain. The accumulation fund was used for investment in farm tools, machinery and equipment, and the welfare fund was used to help those households, which did not have any productive labor. Each member of the team (young or old, productive or unproductive) was entitled to a certain amount of grain—thus the term “quota grain.” During the period between 1958 and 1978, under the leadership of Mao Zedong until he died in 1976, the class forces that supported the commune (as a socialist project) promoted policies that favored more control by the direct producers, and policies that solidified the alliance between workers and peasants. [Source]

The relations between communes, brigades, and teams did shift over time, and the proletariat sought to raise the basic accounting unit of communes from production teams to brigades, and then to communes; this rise would facilitate the transformation of communes’ property into state-owned property, completely socializing collective property and achieving a key step in socialist construction. This did not take place, however; few communes moved their accounting unit to their brigades before China’s capitalist restoration in 1978, which we will discuss later in this section [Source].

There were also urban and suburban people's communes. Urban communes were systems of organizing life rather than enterprises that organized production differently. Since industrial production was already nationalized in urban areas, there was no need to change the mode of production there. Instead, these urban people’s communes focused on the societal superstructure of urban life. The article “Resolution on Some Questions Concerning the People's Communes” from the Central Committee of the CPC, found in the issue on December 23, 1958, says this on the urban people’s communes:

Some experiments have also begun in the cities. In the future urban people's communes, in a form suited to the specific features of cities, will also become instruments for the transformation of old cities and the construction of new socialist cities; they will become the unified organizers of production, exchange and distribution and of the livelihood and well-being of the people; they will become social organizations which combine industry, agriculture, trade, education and military affairs, organizations in which government administration and commune management are integrated. There are, however, certain differences between the city and the countryside.

… [S]ocialist ownership by the whole people is already the main form of ownership in the cities, and the factories, public institutions and schools, under the leadership of the working class, have already become highly organized in accordance with socialist principles (with the exception of some of the family members of the workers and staffs). Therefore, the switch-over of cities to people's communes inevitably involves some requirements different from those in the rural areas. …

Consequently, we should continue to make experiments and generally should not be in a hurry to set up people's communes on a large scale in the cities. Particularly in the big cities, this work should be postponed except for the necessary preparatory measures. People's communes should be established on a large scale in the cities only after rich experience has been gained and when the skeptics and doubters have been convinced. [Source]

Urban people’s communes did not revert to cooperative ownership of the means of production, of course. Instead, they worked on unifying industry and agriculture, socializing residency, improving social services and welfare programs, and transforming people’s ideology into communism. Their production was focused on light industry, while existing state enterprises handled heavy industry; they did venture into small-scale agriculture as well, though:

People’s communes in the cities are expanding the scope of their activities as they consolidate the gains already made. They still devote their major efforts to running small plants and workshops of various kinds (these play the role of an important auxiliary force to the larger factories) and social services for their members, but many of them are now striking out in new directions. Some are planting staple crops as a side line, others go in for market gardening, pig breeding and poultry raising. These undertakings are enabling them to improve the material well-being of their members and make a greater contribution to the national economy as a whole. [Source]

Communes did not last too long in urban settings, though. Being small scale, their impact was minimal, and at the end of the Great Leap Forward, traditional organizations of life returned; still, most of the services that these communes provided remained, and that meant improved welfare for the proletariat.

Suburban ones unified rural and urban regions of China, working with rural communes in supplying food for cities; since they were closer to cities, they had a more direct role in providing urban workers the food and raw materials they needed. Strong discusses them in Chapter Two of her book, The Rise of the Chinese People’s Communes—and Six Years After:

The first organized relation between the metropolitan cities and the rural communes was through contracts with suburban communes to supply the cities’ needs. An important new step was taken in July 1959 when a Congress on City Planning, held in Shanghai, adopted the policy that cities should annex surrounding counties to enable them to plan better the sources of their food. Greater Shanghai took in ten counties, Peking six. The counties and their communes were quite willing to be annexed for they thus came on the municipal budget and could count on loans, electricity, machinery and volunteer workers at harvest. The cities thus moved towards self-sufficiency in food, especially in vegetables, fruit, dairy products, poultry, fish and partially in grain. [Source]

Importantly, the people's communes also made steps closer to communism than other socialist experiments did. For instance, food was supplied for free to all commune members in canteens. In addition, commune members were compensated in work points rather than cash; this was a step similar to what Marx discussed in Critique of the Gotha Program and elsewhere, for work points did not circulate, but the points were often exchanged for cash, which did circulate. “The worth of a work point in money terms was calculated by the net income (after deductions) of the team divided by the total number of work points received by all team members,” so workers’ incomes could rise or fall as their communes’ incomes rose or fell, making work points determine their shares in commune income rather than their personal income directly [Source]. Despite the obvious “birthmarks” of old society, these steps were progressive and moved society further away from capitalism, and they could be implemented in future socialist states with necessary modifications to fit their actual material conditions.

In 1960, in the midst of the Great Leap Forward, after China’s proletarian leaders refused to submit to his demands to put China’s military under Soviet control, Khrushchev removed the technicians and scientists necessary for economic development from China, and this weakened China’s industrialization efforts of the Great Leap Forward for a time. In the same year, Peng Zhen openly called Khrushchev a revisionist. This foreshadowed the inevitable Sino-Soviet split, a divide between the revisionist, imperialist USSR and revolutionary, socialist China.^[109] Albania took China’s side while, as we said earlier, most of the other People's Democracies submitted to Soviet imperialism and became comprador-bourgeois states; Mongolia was quick to fall to this due to its reliance on Soviet leadership.

Korea and Vietnam had rather odd situations as the Sino-Soviet split widened and deepened. They refused to explicitly support either the USSR or China, promoting “unity” between them. While Korea had a power struggle in 1956 with factions claiming to be “pro-Chinese” and “pro-Soviet” going against Kim Il-Sung’s “guerrilla faction”, neither actually succeeded in their goals. The “pro-Chinese” group was overwhelmingly petty-bourgeois and sympathized more with Khrushchev’s revisionism than Kim himself. Still, Kim was a bourgeois leader himself, and the “Workers’ Party” ruling Korea became a capitalist party in a capitalist economy [Source]. As Enver Hoxha said in 1966, the Korean party “defend[ed] principles in words” while they “distort[ed] them under the guise of ‘independence’, or ‘specific conditions’” to “conceal their gradual departure from Marxism-Leninism, their deviation from the internationalist unity of Marxist-Leninists in the world” [Source]. Eventually, as the ruling party chose Juche rather than Marxism-Leninism, its leadership’s truly bourgeois essence became more revealed. Korea was not able to build proper socialism for long, if at all.

While Korea maintained friendship with both Soviet revisionism and Chinese socialism, it really adopted revisionism and did not build socialism in essence. Economically, it collectivized land and socialized industry; however, it relied on Soviet imperialist “aid”, which made Korea more dependent on the USSR. Kim opposed Khrushchev’s brazen deviation from Marxism-Leninism, but once the new Soviet bourgeoisie got better at masking its revisionism, the WPK’s leaders got much closer to the USSR…

This deal with the USSR proved to be catastrophic for the DPRK once the former dissolved. Dependence on the USSR meant that its dissolution meant a loss of an important market for Korean goods, which were generally materials for production. Kim was “bribed” into taking on the position of heading the ruling bourgeoisie, which developed in Korea’s “WPK” and state as a whole; this was the real reason Juche was deviating from Marxism-Leninism. Korea was not quite a semi-colony of the USSR, however; it maintained considerable independence, and so it maintained relations with socialist China and Albania, and so its bourgeoisie was not quite a comprador for imperialism. …

As the Soviet state-capitalist economy stagnated in the 1970’s and 80’s, so did Korea’s. Starting in this time period, Juche entirely replaced Marxism-Leninism, marking the WPK’s explicit break from proletarian ideology; this meant the party exposed itself as not being a workers’ party, but a capitalist party. While the ruling Korean capitalists were still compradors of the USSR, they had their own interests as well, hence their slight distancing with the Soviets.

Korea supported fascist Peru in its suppression of its people’s war, for Peru’s “police[men were] trained variously in the United States and North Korea, as well as arm[ed]… by North Korea,” and “North Korea’s role in the government death squads can be assumed to be tied to Soviet social-imperialism’s efforts. It is noteworthy that the U.S. is not making a fuss about the Soviet military involvement in Peru, as it is with Cuba and Nicaragua, the only other recipients of significant amounts of Soviet weapons in what the U.S. considers its ‘back yard’” [Source]. This was the sort of thing capitalist states would do; socialist countries may live in peaceful coexistence with capitalist ones, but they never oppose revolutionary anti-colonial struggles or force them to pacify as revisionist countries do, and they certainly don’t arm reactionary powers against revolutionaries. If Korea was really a workers’ state, it would have at least criticized the Peruvian state for its crimes against the people it ruled over, yet it opposed those masses’ attempts at taking power and building real socialism. [Source]

Vietnam’s People’s Democracy was more focused on freeing its entire country from US imperialist aggression, so it was not as good at advancing socialist relations of production; instead, Ho Chi Minh, the leader of Vietnam, maintained the proletarian-led state-capitalist relations of People’s Democracy. While Vietnam did not make deviations from Marxism-Leninism when Ho Chi Minh was alive, its Workers’ Party’s stance on Soviet revisionism made it culpable for going on a rightist road. This proved to cause problems later on, as we will see in the 1970’s.

The revisionist USSR also demanded China’s repayment of its debt, and this meant that China would either become dependent on the USSR (making it a semi-colony of the imperialists like it was before the revolution) or would have to pay up extremely fast. China took the second option, completely being debt-free in 1964. The debt payment, problems with weather that damaged crops, the rampant overreporting that went on during the movement, and more, the Great Leap Forward had failings. Nonetheless, it was not “the worst famine in the universe” as reactionaries tend to say. “Leap Forward” defends the movement while recognizing its immense problems (our bolding):

The challenges they had to overcome were intimidating. China had no coal or petroleum, and they were told by the phony-communists and capitalists: that will be the death of your economy. But in the Great Leap, they uncovered unknown resources of coal and petroleum by mobilizing the masses on a huge scale to find it. They developed a radical critique of Soviet economics which was foundational to the Marxist understanding of political economy, and that was critical to the success of developing all three components of Marxism which made MLM [Marxism-Leninism-Maoism] possible as the third and highest stage. Mao wanted discover ways to decentralize industry and find ways to proletarianize the peasantry. Programs to spread technical knowledge, and working class experience to the peasantry were put into place. Putting these ideas into motion, Chairman Mao Zedong was following through with the powerful words of The Communist Manifesto: “Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.” And so they began to do this, with the workers and masses in command. …

Outside Daqing with oil, elsewhere with the Great Leap Forward beginning, the Communist revolutionaries built small operations in the countryside—to serve agriculture. Small shops that could make blades for plows, for example. Small machine shops that could repair pumps also came about; and of course they began to develop local steel. Great amounts would be required to make the project succeed, and [they] did [not] have the resources or expertise for large modern blast furnaces. Some called Mao “insane” for developing these new techniques, but how did they expect the Chinese to develop steel? No prayer would make it fall from the sky. …

During the Great Leap Forward, there was a huge, parallel development in agriculture: the people's communes. The Chinese people developed a collective form that was basically at the county level. That meant that the peasants could pool resources on a much larger scale—develop canals and machine shops and side industries. All of this was impossible at the small-collective or family farm level; only during the Great Leap Forward did this begin to happen on a massive scale. Afterwards, they had a basis for commune machine shops, to send kids for technical training, etc.

However, did the furnaces lead to bad crops? No, as we know, in feudal times agriculture went by human-pulled and animal-pulled plows. And these furnaces did develop usable plows. There was no mechanized agriculture yet (except in a few advanced areas)—the whole point was/is to develop agriculture and industry. The furnaces did not “destroy” mechanized agriculture; the process laid the basis for Chinese peasants to be able to deal with machinery and technical things. They developed collective forms (at the people's commune levels) to develop the furnaces—and those forms were later used to set up machinery repair places etc.

The socialist revolution made it possible to deal with famine in new ways. There was rationing and food sharing. Areas that had good harvests sent food to areas with bad harvests. The burden and impact of the bad harvests was softened by all the new forms that socialist made. It was new and breathtaking, and saved many lives. The Great Leap Forward had its shortcomings, yes, but the way they handled those shortcomings showed the strength and superiority of socialism over capitalism. [Source]

The Great Leap Forward’s death toll estimate has ranged from as low as two million deaths to as high as 60 million. Scholars have not agreed on the actual death toll of this program, but many more are starting to find lower death tolls as more information is uncovered and the old anti-communist propaganda machine weakens. In "Sun Jingxian and the Myth of Mass Genocide. The Last Word?", the author states:

New research in China seems to have finally demolished the myth that tens of millions died due to the actions of Mao in the Great Leap Forward. Rather it seems that the famine of 1959–1961 was the last of a series of famines that China had endured throughout its history. The actual death toll figures for this famine were comparable to previous famines and had the same underlying cause-the poverty of a country that had been kept in a state of economic backwardness by imperialism. …

The article presents evidence for a figure of 3.66 million deaths due to famine. It is 12% of the 30 million figure favored by Judith Banister and other American demographers in the 1980s. It is 8% of the 45 million figure favored by Frank Dikotter. It is equivalent to about 0.5% of the country’s population dying over a three year period. If true, it is still a tragic death toll, even if it is lower than previously believed estimates. However, we must acknowledge that a very poor country, as China still was in the 1950s and early 1960s, was very susceptible to famine. As Western demographers accept a Chinese famine in 1928–31 had left 3 million dead, a 1936 famine in west China had claimed 5 million lives:

Famine in China 1958–61

We must also acknowledge that the famine of 1959–61 was thankfully the last famine China was to suffer. Finally, we must acknowledge there is no certainty about the figure of 3.66 million. Rather Sun’s article shows how certainty about the figures we have from this era can never be properly achieved. We do not and probably will never know if the true figure was less or more than 3.66 million.

Sun’s figure is the total figure for all deaths in excess of the total deaths in the ‘good year’ of 1957 when the death rate reached a historic low point in China. It does not necessarily mean 3.66 million starved to death, it includes those dying prematurely due to the effect of poorer nutrition on already fragile health, etc. Even without famine, death tolls could have fluctuated above the 1957 figure in some years anyway.

What Sun Jingxian’s article does show is that the real figure can be nowhere near 11.5 million or 30 million or any of the other previously believed figures. [Source]

The higher death tolls commonly attributed to the Great Leap Forward—and by extension blamed on China, Mao, and socialism/communism in general—come from faulty methods of measurement. In “Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward?”, Joseph Ball explains:

A variety of Chinese figures are quoted to back up this thesis that a massive famine occurred. Statistics that purport to show that Mao was to blame for it are also quoted. They include figures supposedly giving a provincial break-down of the increased death rates in the Great Leap Forward, figures showing a massive decrease in grain production during the Great Leap Forward and also figures that apparently showed that bad weather was not to blame for the famine. These figures were all released in the early 1980s at the time of Deng’s “reforms.”

But how trustworthy are any of these figures? As we have seen they were released during the early 1980s at a time of acute criticism of the Great Leap Forward and the people's communes. China under Deng was a dictatorship that tried to rigorously control the flow of information to its people. It would be reasonable to assume that a government that continually interfered in the reporting of public affairs by the media would also interfere in the production of statistics when it suited them. …

Even if it was granted that such shortfalls did occur they do not necessarily indicate massive numbers of deaths. Birth rate figures released by the Deng Xiaoping regime show massive decreases in fertility during the Great Leap Forward. It is possible to hypothesize that there was a very large shortfall in births without this necessarily indicating that millions died as well. Of course, there had to be some reason why fertility dropped off so rapidly, if this is indeed what did happen. Clearly hunger would have played a large part in this. People would have postponed having children because of worries about having another mouth to feed until food availability improved. Clearly, if people were having such concerns this would have indicated an increase in malnutrition which would have led to some increase in child mortality. However, this in no way proves that the “worst famine in world history” occurred under Mao. The Dutch famine of 1944-1945 led to a fertility decline of 50%. The Bangladesh famine of 1974-1975 also led to a near 50% decrease in the birth rate. This is similar to figures released in the Deng Xiaoping era for the decline in fertility in the Great Leap Forward. Although both the Bangladesh and the Dutch famines were deeply tragic they did not give rise to the kind of wild mortality figures bandied about in reference to the Great Leap Forward, as was noted above. In Bangladesh tens of thousands died, not tens of millions. …

If India’s rate of improvement in life expectancy had been as great as China’s after 1949, then millions of deaths could have been prevented. Even Mao’s critics acknowledge this. Perhaps this means that we should accuse Nehru and those who came after him of being “worse than Hitler” for adopting non-Maoist policies that “led to the deaths of millions.” Or perhaps this would be a childish and fatuous way of assessing India’s post-independence history. As foolish as the charges that have been leveled against Mao for the last 25 years, maybe. [Source]

Remember that China used to have famines on a regular basis before the revolution; at least 1828 famines were recorded between 108 BC and 1911 AD, meaning that for more than 90% of that time, China experienced famine. China also had multiple famines under the KMT, in 1911–43. After the famine in the Great Leap Forward, China successfully secured food for its population. This, combined with improved healthcare, education, universal employment, increased housing, etc. that came from the socialist system, improved China’s life expectancy and quality of life. The people's communes in China’s agriculture secured food production; economic planning and the policy of lowering basic needs’ prices or providing them for free also contributed to this marvel, as did the expansion of healthcare, education, and more.

China had many issues to resolve with neighboring countries. Specifically, it had to fight Indian expansionism, and it supported anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist uprisings in India and Burma. Both India and Burma had the support of the revisionist USSR, but China took a socialist stance against these reactionary regimes, supporting their people’s wars. (The Indian people’s war will be covered in the section on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.) To understand the issue between India and China, we must go back to the late 1950s. After India’s status as a direct British colony ended in 1947, the Indian bourgeoisie sought to take various regions north of their country, particularly those near China. China and India were initially decent allies, both being part of the “Bandung Conference”^[110] in 1955, but after the revisionist USSR allied with India, relations with China deteriorated. In Part 1 of The Himalayan Adventure, in “The Indian Rulers’ Expansionist Policy”, Suniti Kumar Ghosh describes this:

After Britain’s direct rule of India ended, the Indian rulers directed their attention to India’s northern neighbors: the Himalayan kingdoms of Kashmir, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim and Tibet. Even before the end of direct colonial rule the Nehrus wanted to annex Kashmir. Jammu and Kashmir^[111] (J and K) was then a native state under British paramountcy. (On the transfer of power in ‘British India’ J and K was free to accede to India or not.) …

On 7 November 1950 Patel, India’s home minister, wrote to India’s prime minister, Nehru: “The undefined state of the frontier [in the north and northeast] and the existence on our side of a population with its affinities to Tibetans or Chinese have all the elements of potential trouble between China and ourselves. Our northern or north-eastern approaches consist of Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, the Darjeeling and tribal areas in Assam.... The people inhabiting these portions have no established loyalty or devotion to India.” He suggested that “The political and administrative steps which we should take to strengthen our northern and north-eastern frontiers” were to “include the whole of the border, i.e., Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Darjeeling and the tribal territory in Assam.”...

Nehru considered Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to be “really part of India” and wanted her to be included within an Indian federation. Nepal, too, according to Nehru, was “certainly a part of India” and, as Chester Bowles, Nehru’s friend and US ambassador to India for two terms, said: “So India has done on a small scale in Nepal what we have done on a far broader scale on two continents.” [Source]

As the text says, India was interested in many areas near China. It annexed Jammu and Kashmir shortly after its independence. Other areas were either subject to its domination or annexed later. Tibet was the exception, for it was part of China; nobody recognized the “independent” government of Tibet, but the US and India wanted to use that illegitimate body as a puppet to attack China with. After the Communists in China took power and asserted China’s ownership of Tibet (and made it an autonomous region for the Tibetan nationality), the US sought to recognize Tibet as an independent nation; the reason the US did not do this earlier was that the KMT, a US ally, previously controlled China and claimed Tibet. After China sent troops to Tibet in 1959 to stop a revolt from slave owners and landlords^[112], the revisionist Soviets backed India, the primary supporter of the Tibetan reactionaries. This betrayal coincided with the Soviet removal of technicians, specialists, etc. sent in 1950 to assist in China’s economic development; after China refused to submit to the developing Soviet capitalist-imperialism, the Soviets worked with the US and tried to weaken China.

With the imperial core united against China, sabotage in Xinjiang^[113] from both the US and the USSR, and attacks from India, China had no choice but to respond with force. China fought a war with India in 1962 to maintain its sovereignty against imperialist aggression. China won the war, but it only took control of small regions of India, and it left most of its captured regions to India. India and China would continue to be rivals, with the imperialists—mainly the Soviet ones, but also American to a degree—backing India to try to weaken socialist China and its influence on communist parties in Asia and worldwide.

Because China was an anti-revisionist and socialist state, it experienced many benefits that the revisionist states experienced only in part. China had genuine workers’ democracy while the revisionist states’ workers felt the tyranny of the comprador bourgeoisie. The People's Congresses and People’s Government Councils were similar to soviets in the USSR (prior to capitalist restoration, obviously). As explained before, China’s economy exploded in the 1950s; it experienced downturns in the early-1960s in the Great Leap Forward and the late-1960s in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (which will be explained later), but its growth in the mid-1960s and the 1970s (during the Cultural Revolution, that is) was so great that it negated the downturns [Source]! In addition, programs such as the Great Leap Forward were not entire failures despite their problems.

China greatly raised its literacy rate, life expectancy, and quality of life. It was able to begin rapid industrial development, a massive literacy and education campaign, family planning initiatives, cultural advancement, womens’ liberation, and more. It was the most advanced society with the greatest levels of democracy and freedom as long as Mao was alive. The people were in control of their workplaces and their own lives, in contrast to the dictatorships of capitalist society which are ruled by parasitic capitalists that contribute nothing to our people. It is no wonder anti-communists slander Mao’s China so much. In a footnote of Is China an Imperialist Country?, the author remarked:

In particular, China’s socialist economy expanded at a very rapid pace during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (often dated from 1966 through 1976), averaging more than 10% per year! See: Mobo Gao, “Debating the Cultural Revolution: Do We Only Know What We Believe?”, Critical Asian Studies, vol. 34 (2002), pp. 424–425; and Maurice Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era: 1978–1994, p. 189. Even the capitalist-roaders themselves had to admit that, except for brief declines during the Great Leap Forward and the first 3 years of the GPCR, the growth of both industrial and agricultural production during the rest of the Maoist socialist period (1969–1976) was very fast. See the charts on the second page of the article “China’s Industry on the Upswing”, Beijing Review, Vol. 27, #35 (Aug. 27, 1984)… The later claim of the capitalist-roaders that the Cultural Revolution was a “disaster” for the economy was an outright lie. Even the brief production declines of the first three years of the GPCR were very rapidly made up for beginning in 1969, and the overall trend line from before the decline and after it was as if the short decline had not even occurred! [Source]

“Mao Reconsidered” details the successes of Chinese socialism:

When Mao stepped onto the world stage in 1945, Russia had taken Mongolia and a piece of Xinjiang, Japan occupied three northern provinces, Britain had taken Hong Kong, Portugal Macau, France pieces of Shanghai, Germany Tsingtao, the U.S. shared their immunities and the nation was convulsed by civil war. China was agrarian, backward, feudalistic, ignorant and violent. Of its four hundred million people, fifty million were drug addicts, eighty percent could neither read nor write and their life expectancy was thirty-five years. The Japanese had killed twenty million and General Chiang Kai-Shek complained that, of every thousand youths he recruited, barely a hundred survived the march to their training base. Women’s feet were bound, peasants paid seventy percent of their produce in rent, desperate mothers sold their children in exchange for food and poor people sold themselves, preferring slavery to starvation. U.S. Ambassador John Leighton Stuart reported that, during his second year there, ten million people starved to death in three provinces.

When he stepped down in 1974 the invaders, bandits and warlords were gone, the population had doubled, literacy was 84 percent, wealth disparity had disappeared, electricity reached poor areas, infrastructure was restored, the economy had grown 500 percent, drug addiction was a memory, women were liberated, girls were educated, crime was rare, everyone had food and shelter, life expectancy was sixty-seven and, by several key social and demographic indicators, China compared favorably with middle income countries whose per capita GDP was five times greater.

Despite a brutal U.S. blockade on food, finance and technology, and without incurring debt, Mao grew China’s economy by an average of 7.3 percent annually, compared to America’s postwar boom years’ 3.7 percent. When he died, China was manufacturing jet planes, heavy tractors, ocean-going ships, nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles. As economist Y. Y. Kueh observed: “This sharp rise in industry’s share of China’s national income is a rare historical phenomenon. For example, during the first four or five decades of their drive to modern industrialization, the industrial share rose by only 11 percent in Britain (1801-41) and 22 percent in Japan”. His documented accomplishments are, as Professor Fairbanks says, almost unbelievable. He:

doubled China’s population from 542 million to 956 million
doubled life expectancy
doubled caloric intake
quintupled GDP
quadrupled literacy
increased grain production three hundred percent
increased gross industrial output forty-fold
increased heavy industry ninety-fold.
increased rail lineage 266 percent
increased passenger train traffic from 102,970,000 passengers to 814,910,000.
increased rail freight tonnage two thousand percent
increased the road network one thousand percent.
increased steel production from zero to thirty-five MMT/year
Increased industry’s contribution to China’s net material product from twenty-three percent to fifty-four percent.

But, from Mao’s point of view, that was a sideshow. By the time he retired, he had reunited, reimagined, reformed and revitalized the largest, oldest civilization on earth, modernized it after a century of failed modernizations and ended thousands of years of famines. [Source]

During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese masses, with Chairman Mao’s guidance, attacked reactionary culture and promoted socialist and communist culture. They also removed revisionists from power and put proletarian leaders in place. The workers, peasants, soldiers, and students of China took direct power in local levels of government via Revolutionary Committees. These bodies had party cadres, soldiers’ representatives, and workers’ and peasants’ representatives working together to govern the masses; in China’s 1975 constitution, they replaced local people’s councils. While the share of power among the three sections was not necessarily equal, with the PLA often having most power, it was enough to secure proletarian power while representing the people. Peking Review Volume 11, Issue 43 has the article, “Unprecedentedly Excellent Situation in China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”; this text shows the success of revolutionary committees in asserting proletarian dictatorship:

Our great leader Chairman Mao teaches us: “In every place or unit where power must be seized, it is necessary to carry out the policy of the revolutionary ‘three-in-one’ combination in establishing a provisional organ of power which is revolutionary and representative and enjoys proletarian authority. This organ of power should preferably be called the Revolutionary Committee.”

With the radiant sun of Mao Tse-tung’s thought shining over the length and breadth of the land, revolutionary committees have been established in all provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions throughout the country with the exception of Taiwan Province. This presents an extremely magnificent spectacle as all-round victory is being seized in the great proletarian cultural revolution. It is a most joyous event in the political life of the 700 million people of our country. …

The three-in-one revolutionary committees have strengthened the dictatorship of the proletariat. Thanks to direct participation of the representatives of the Liberation Army in the revolutionary committees at all levels, our dictatorship of the proletariat is better able to stand severe tests of every kind, smash the plots of all domestic or foreign enemies and display greater strength in the cause of socialist revolution and construction. The representatives of the Liberation Army have introduced into the revolutionary committees our army’s glorious traditions, advanced systems and fine style of work personally established and fostered by Chairman Mao. These have helped the revolutionary committees carry through their ideological and organizational revolutionization and developed to a new stage the unity between the army and the people. [Source]

In the early years of the Cultural Revolution, many people, especially students, founded Red Guards; however, factional disputes between them (especially as rightists made their own “Red Guards” to attack the Cultural Revolution and give it a bad name) forced the PLA to suppress and end them, moving their members to the countryside to learn from the masses. (That is how their mental/manual labor divide was weakened.) Still, the movement led to great transitions to communism in politics, economics, and the superstructure. We will show the economic successes of this period later.

There was the Shanghai Commune. [MTBA]

There were excesses in China’s Cultural Revolution. We must criticize the unruly people who killed innocents and even guilty people who did not deserve to die. Nevertheless, the excessive “revolutionaries” were often tools of the capitalist-roaders, corrupt bureaucrats, and rightist party elites; more often than not, it was the very same rightists targeted under the Cultural Revolution that used excessive violence in the name of that movement! Such people were punished for their crimes. Therefore, the people who excessively killed others are not a valid criticism of the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution, it says (our emphasis):

Mao’s political experiment, the Cultural Revolution, like all other social revolutions before it, claimed many victims. It did however, again like other social revolutions, have some positive outcomes. It encouraged grassroots participation in management and it also inspired the idea of popular democracy. … The Chinese were not the brainless masses manipulated by a ruthless dictator so often portrayed in the Western media. They must be seen as agents of history and subjects of their own lives like any other people. …

Certainly there was violence, cruelty and destruction, but how should we interpret what happened during that period? … [T]here was no planned policy for violence can be seen in the sequence of events in those years. Recognizing the terrible consequences of the “Red Terror” in 1966—when in Beijing homes were raided, people judged to be class enemies were beaten up, and detention centers were set up—and determined to stop further terror of this kind, the central committee of the CCP approved a decree drafted by the CCP of the Beijing Municipality and issued it to the whole of China on 20 November 1966. … [T]he official policy was clear: yao wendou bu yao wudou (engage in the struggle with words but not with physical attack). … Neither the so-called 1967 January Storm (yiyue fengbao) that originated in Shanghai and encouraged the Rebels to take over power from the CCP apparatus, nor the suppression of the so-called 1967 February Anti-Cultural Revolution Current (eyue niliu) were meant to include physical fighting and certainly not physical elimination, though both did lead to violence of various kinds.

Much of the violence, brutality and destruction that happened during the ten-year period [of the Cultural Revolution] was indeed intended, such as the persecution of people with a bad class background at the beginning, and later action against the Rebels, but the actions did not stem from a single locus of power. To use “Storm Troopers” in reference to the Red Guards, for instance, is conveniently misleading. There was no such singular entity as the ‘Red Guards’ or the ‘Red Guard’. First, we must differentiate between university students and school students. It was the latter who invented the term ‘Red Guards’ and who engaged in acts of senseless violence in 1966. We should also note the difference between schoolchildren in Beijing, where many high-ranking CCP officials and army officers were located, and those in other places such as Shanghai, the home town of three of the so-called “Gang of Four”^[114] radicals. It was not in Shanghai, the supposed birthplace of the Cultural Revolution radicals, but in Beijing that schoolchildren beat up their teachers most violently. It was also in Beijing (in 1966) that the children of high-ranking CCP members and army officials formed the notorious Lian dong (Coordinated Action) and carried out the so-called ‘Red Terror’ in an effort to defend their parents. What they were doing was exactly the opposite of what Mao wanted, to ‘bombard the capitalist-roaders inside the Party’, that is, parents of the Lian dong Red Guards. Lian dong activists behaved like those of the Storm Troopers, but these were not Mao’s Storm Troopers. Mao supported those Rebels who criticized CCP officials including the parents of the Lian dong Red Guards. These facts can easily be confirmed by documentary evidence; yet the post-Mao Chinese political and elite intelligentsia either pretend not to see them or choose to ignore them. …

If anything the CCP under the leadership of Mao, and chiefly managed by Zhou Enlai, tried hard to control violence. Eventually the army had to be brought in to maintain order. By 1969, a little more than two years after the start of the Cultural Revolution the political situation was brought under control and China’s economic growth was back on track. [Source]

A lot of excesses happened because of Lin Biao, vice-chairman of the Communist Party of China, a marshal of the PLA, and the First Vice-Premier of the PRC. During the Cultural Revolution, he bolstered and exaggerated the existing cult of personality around Mao, and he seemed to position himself in an ultra-leftist line compared to Mao and his allies; it is not so easy to just place him in the “left”-opportunist camp because he wanted to work more with the Soviet revisionists, which is clearly a right-opportunist line. He turned out to be a careerist after he tried to overthrow and assassinate Mao in 1971; since then, the Chinese comrades analyzed why people like him existed and how to fight them in “On the Social Basis of the Lin Piao Anti-Party Clique”, in Peking Review, Volume 18, Issue 10:

It is fairly clear that the Lin Piao anti-Party clique represented the interests of the overthrown landlord and capitalist classes and the aspirations of the overthrown reactionaries to topple the dictatorship of the proletariat and restore the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The Lin Piao anti-Party clique opposed the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and had inveterate hatred for the socialist system under the dictatorship of the proletariat in our country, slandering it as “feudal autocracy” and cursing it as “Chin Shih Huang of the contemporary era.” They wanted the landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements and Rightists “to achieve genuine liberation politically and economically,” i.e., politically and economically they wanted to turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the landlord and comprador-capitalist classes and the socialist system into capitalist system. As an agent in the Party, an agent of the bourgeoisie working hard for a restoration, the Lin Piao anti-Party clique was wild in its attack on the Party and the dictatorship of the proletariat, so much so that it set up an organization of secret agents and plotted a counter-revolutionary armed coup d’etat. Such frenzy is a reflection of the fact that the reactionaries who have lost political power and the means of production inevitably will resort to every means to recapture the lost positions of the exploiting classes. We have seen how Lin Piao, after his political and ideological bankruptcy, tried to “eat up” the proletariat by staking everything on a single cast as a desperate gambler would do, and how he finally betrayed the country and fled to defect to the enemy; despite the very patient education, waiting and efforts to save him by Chairman Mao and the Party Central Committee, his counter-revolutionary nature did not change in the least. …

As regards the way the Lin Piao anti-Party clique stooped to anything to amass riches, insatiably pursued the bourgeois way of life and used bourgeois right to carry out insidious, unsavory and vile activities, many instances have been brought to light and subjected to criticism. But even more illustrative is its programme for a counter-revolutionary coup d’etat, Outline of Project “571”, in which the Lin Piao anti-Party clique used precisely the idea of bourgeois right, and not anything else, to abet or incite certain people of various classes to oppose the dictatorship of the proletariat. In other words, the class interests the programme represents, in addition to the interests of the old bourgeoisie, are precisely the interests of a number of new bourgeois elements and a few people who want to use bourgeois right to develop capitalism. This explains why the programme directs its attack on Chairman Mao’s proletarian revolutionary line and why it shows particularly bitter hatred for certain restrictions placed on bourgeois right through the socialist revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat in our country. [Source]

Such mistakes are simply inevitable in socialism. We can try our best to prevent them, and we can learn from the mistakes of China’s cultural revolution, but there will always be innocents who die in class struggle, sadly; this is not particular to anti-capitalist struggle, as it has occurred in all social revolutions. In the Peking Review issue published on January 27, 1967, in an article titled, “Proletarian Revolutionaries, Form a Great Alliance to Seize Power from Those in Authority Who are Taking the Capitalist Road!” the authors declare:

In socialist society and under the dictatorship of the proletariat, hundreds of millions of revolutionary people have formed a mighty revolutionary force, with the great alliance of the proletarian revolutionary rebels as the core, to seize power from below, from the handful of people within the Party who are in authority and taking the capitalist road and from those diehards who persistently cling to the bourgeois reactionary line. This is an important development by Chairman Mao of the Marxist-Leninist theory of proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The basic question of revolution is political power. With the victory of the People’s Democratic revolution of our country, the proletariat seized power on a nationwide scale. But the overthrown class enemies remain and they are not reconciled to their defeat. … The struggle for the seizure of power has continued vigorously all the time between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. … Only by carrying out a great mass movement like this, a mass struggle to seize power in an all-round way, is it possible thoroughly to resolve the problem of the seizure of power by the proletariat, thoroughly to resolve the problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Power of every sort controlled by the representatives of the bourgeoisie must be seized! This is the great truth of Marxism-Leninism, of Mao Tse-tung’s thought, which the revolutionary masses have grasped through arduous struggles over the last few months. …

Reversals and twists and turns over the past several months and the repeated hurricanes of stormy class struggle gave the masses of revolutionary rebels profound lessons. They are seeing ever more clearly that the reason why the revolution suffered setbacks is due precisely to the fact that they did not seize in their own hands the seals of power. … Those who have power have everything; those who are without power have nothing. … The proletarian revolutionary masses must take firmly into their own hands the destiny of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the destiny of the great proletarian cultural revolution and the destiny of the socialist economy! They have rightly said: “The proletarian revolutionaries, the real revolutionary Left, have their eye on seizing power, think of seizing power and act to seize power!” This is not “personal ambition,” but to seize power for the sake of the proletariat and communism and to let the great thought of Mao Tse-tung take possession of all positions!

The earth-shaking mass movement of the proletarian revolutionary rebels in forming a great alliance to struggle to seize power is a decisive and gigantic battle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It is inevitably accompanied by a concentrated outbreak of class contradictions, by a storm unprecedented in size. The actuality of this decisive and gigantic battle has opened a soul-stirring scene before our eyes. …

To carry out the struggle for the seizure of power, the proletarian revolutionary rebels must effect a great alliance. In the absence of a great alliance, the seizure of power from those in authority who are taking the capitalist road remains empty talk. In the Communist Manifesto more than a hundred years ago, Marx and Engels were the first to raise the militant slogan “Workers of all countries, unite!”, sounding the drums for the proletariat’s first seizure of power which reduced the bourgeoisie of the old world to fear and trembling. More than forty years ago, our great leader Chairman Mao issued the great call for “a great alliance of the masses of the people,” sounding the bugle call for our country’s New Democratic revolution. Today, in the new situation of our country’s great cultural revolution, hundreds of millions of revolutionaries are getting mobilized and plunging into struggle at the great, new call of Chairman Mao under the great slogan of “Proletarian revolutionary rebels, form a great alliance to seize power from those in authority who are taking the capitalist road!” This foreshadows the end for the handful of people within the Party who are in authority and taking the capitalist road and for those diehards who persistently cling to the bourgeois reactionary line. [Source]

Despite these troubles, improvements in people’s quality of life were unbelievable in this period. Education expanded very rapidly, and it reached extremely remote and poor villages. Medical care, too, was expanded to help the poorest workers and peasants; barefoot doctors, who were paramedics that could provide basic needs for people that often never had medical care before, were a major part of the Cultural Revolution. The economy greatly improved as well. In The Battle for China’s Past, Mobo Gao states:

In the area of industrial development, Mao took a strongly socialist view, concerning himself with eradicating the usual divide between the rural and urban. Under his leadership a strategy was developed and implemented to trial a decentralized non-Soviet form of industry programme. It was proposed that the rural population could become industrialized without a need to build cities or urban ghettos, a strategy initiated during the Great Leap Forward, shelved because of the famine disaster, but picked up again during the Cultural Revolution. As Wong (2003: 203) shows, by the end of the decade of the Cultural Revolution in 1979, there were nearly 800,000 industrial enterprises scattered in villages and small towns, plus almost 90,000 small hydroelectric stations. These enterprises employed nearly 25 million workers and produced an estimated 15 percent of the national industrial output. This development provided the critical preconditions for the rapid growth of township and village enterprises in the post-Mao reform period. …

… [N]ew socioeconomic policies were gradually introduced and these had a positive impact on a large number of people; these policies were intentionally designed. These included the creation of a cheap and fairly effective healthcare system, the expansion of elementary education in rural China, and affirmative-action policies that promoted gender equality. Having grown up in rural China, I witnessed the important benefits that these policies had for the rural people. …

The “positives” should also include developments in China’s military defense, industry and agriculture. … True, China’s economy was disrupted in 1967 and 1968, but throughout the rest of the late 1960s and through all of the 1970s China’s economy showed consistent growth. ...It is also worth pointing out that the development of she dui qiye (commune and production brigade enterprises) during the Cultural Revolution were the forerunners of the xiangzhen qiye (township and village enterprises) developed in post-Mao China. [Source]

Cultural Revolution and Industrial Organization in China describes how China’s socialism became very democratic thanks to the Cultural Revolution:

Subjecting the party cadres to mass criticism modified their relations with the workers. The election of the new committee thus took place in the context of a party which had been purified in every area of production. In preparation for the election, the masses were asked to determine the numerical composition of the committee (this varied in each factory) and to establish a list of candidates. At the General Knitwear Factory, the list included some forty names, with twenty-seven to be elected.

The workers engaged in a thoroughgoing debate to designate the twenty-seven individuals considered most competent to constitute the party committee. These discussions, and the task of coordinating the workers’ views of the candidates, were organized by the revolutionary core of the three-in-one combination. The process has been described as consisting successively of a democratic discussion, a concentration (a meeting to establish consensus), and renewed discussion with the masses. In all it consisted of “four discussions and three concentrations.” The last concentration was followed by a meeting of the entire party membership and by the election of the party committee officials. Only party members could vote in this election. …

Management at the provincial level seeks to coordinate the activities of the production units rather than stifle their initiative. In recent years, China was the scene of a struggle against centralization—the advocacy of centralization was a feature of Liu Shao-chi’s line. In certain provinces, notably in the north, organizational structures similar to those of “trusts” had been instituted; they were eliminated during the Cultural Revolution. …

Decentralization accounts for the exceptional dynamism of the Chinese economy and for the sharp contraction of the administrative apparatus that can be observed everywhere. Such decentralization, moreover, constitutes one of the conditions for the development of socialist forms of management, and for workers’ participation in management. It can be effectively combined with an economic plan only insofar as each enterprise subordinates its own interests to overall interests as spelled out in the plan. In the absence of this ideological condition, decentralization and planning are in¬ compatible. There is then no other way but to issue peremptory and detailed orders, and to verify their implementation by bureaucratic means. We know what this leads to.

To designate a plan that is not administratively centralized, the Chinese use the term “unified planning.” Its unified character is primarily political. It relies substantially on the initiative of the masses; its own role is an effort to foster and unify these initiatives.

The unified plan requires the implementation of principles that guide the workers both in the formulation of the plan and in management. At all levels, and in each production unit, the basic principles are the following: to put politics in command—to subordinate the interests of the factory as such to the collective interest and to the interests of the Chinese revolution; to rely on the initiative of the masses; to develop one’s strength to the utmost; “to view agriculture as the base and industry as the dominant factor”; “to prepare against war and natural calamities, and everything for the people”; to follow the general line of socialist construction by applying the criteria of “quantity, speed, quality, economy”; and “to walk on two feet,” which means to build both very simple factories and modern factories, big and small factories, and to use advanced and traditional techniques. The elaboration of the plan is also guided by the concrete (quantitative and qualitative) orientations given to different industries as a function of the general political line and the need for balanced overall development. [Source]

The GPCR had international impact as it inspired working people worldwide to rise up against old superstructures and even old regimes altogether. The Communist Party of Thailand (CPT), which was founded in 1946, began the people’s war in Thailand in the context of socialist China’s condemnation of Soviet revisionism and its support for Vietnam’s national liberation struggle, and the Cultural Revolution further inspired the CPT and its Patriotic Front of Thailand (PFT) (and later, after its armed forces consolidated, its People’s Liberation Army of Thailand (PLAT)) to fight the US-imperialist puppet regime there. The CPT also criticized the Vietnamese party’s erroneous centrist attitude toward Soviet revisionism at this time. “Vietnam: Miscarriage of the Revolution” describes this centrism:

Many people describe Ho Chi Minh as a great diplomat, brilliant mediator, “middle of the roader” and astute politician, trying to keep Vietnam free from entanglement with either of the “two communist giants.” Nothing could be further from the truth, or more of a bourgeois analysis. Others argue that the Vietnamese position was dictated by objective conditions. Faced with the necessity to build their country and the threat of the U.S. and its puppet regime in the south, the Vietnamese had to avoid alienating or jeopardizing the support of either China or Russia. But this doesn’t hold water either.

Obviously the Vietnamese leadership must have seen it this way, to some extent at least. And it is not a question of dictating to them how they should have handled this contradiction on the basis of a correct line, if they had had one. It was not the case that the VWP discussed and debated this decisive question, adopted an internal position in support of Marxism-Leninism, and for practical and diplomatic reasons decided not to publicly side with the Chinese and attack the Soviet revisionists at that point. Just the opposite. Although there most certainly was some sharp struggle and differing lines, none of which has ever been officially reported out, their centrism boiled down to opportunism, and in the final analysis an embrace of Soviet-style revisionism. When they did take a clear-cut position, which they did during 1960 and 1961 on numerous occasions, they sided with the Soviets, and the Soviet line which argued for cooling out the liberation struggle in the south.

The line of the Vietnamese leaders on unity in the socialist camp and unity in their own Party is the measure of the extent to which they had sunk into this stagnant pool of revisionism. Their eclectic formulations and positions around the cardinal issues facing the communist parties of the world at this point were a facile way of attempting to mask their own opportunism—and also probably a sop thrown to try to pacify revolutionaries within the Party and around the world, whose support they still needed. But the issues and principles at stake were impossible to negate by a stance of neutrality. And, as came out in the early ‘60s, they were not neutral at all. Fundamentally they sided with modern revisionism led by the CPSU, even though the intensity of the national struggle in Vietnam dictated following a “centrist” policy. Because bourgeois nationalism and not Marxism-Leninism triumphed inside the Vietnam Workers‟ Party at this critical juncture, it is not surprising that in the future they would find increasing unity with the bourgeois line of the Soviet Union. [Source]

In Malaya, it reignited the CPM’s people’s war, with the MNLA and the Malayan National Liberation Front (MNLF) following its leadership. “The GPCR in China, then sending shock waves and a deep-seated apprehension of a revolutionary upsurge among the powerful and the privileged world-wide and at the same time igniting hope and confidence among the oppressed and the exploited, undoubtedly also influenced events in Malaysia” [Source]. The war involved people of various backgrounds, including speakers of “Malay, (Mandarin) Chinese, Tamil, English as well as several non-Mandarin Chinese dialects,” and despite the repression of the comprador regime in Malaya, it made many gains for the liberation of the Malayan people. It also inspired the North Kalimantan (Kalimantan, often called Borneo, is an island in Indonesia) national liberation struggle led by the North Kalimantan Communist Party, and it revived the call for a people’s war against the fascist regime in Indonesia.

As facts have proven, in order to establish their dictatorship over the Indonesian people, the Right-wing army generals Suharto and Nasution and their accomplices are completely relying on the "aid" from the imperialist countries headed by the United States. In Indonesia, under the rule of the military dictatorship of Right-wing army generals Suharto and Nasution and their accomplices, and with the help of international imperialism headed by the United States, neo-colonialism is now being built up.

The statement indicates that the main contradiction in the present Indonesian society is still the same with what existed at the outbreak of the August Revolution of 1945, that is to say, imperialism and the remnants of feudalism are involved in a contradiction with the masses of the people who desire full independence and democracy.

Thus the target of the revolution remains the same: imperialism and the remnants of feudalism. Classes which are the enemies of the revolution, in the main, are also the same: imperialism, the compradors, the bureaucrat capitalists and the landlords. The driving forces of the revolution, too, are still the same: the working class, the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie. …

The statement emphasizes that since the present stage of the Indonesian revolution is essentially an agrarian revolution by the peasantry, the armed struggle of the Indonesian people, too, essentially will be the armed struggle of the peasants to liberate themselves from the oppression by the remnants of feudalism. The armed struggle against the armed counter-revolution can never be lasting and in the end will surely be defeated, unless it is essentially an armed struggle of the peasants in realizing the agrarian revolution. And the armed struggle of the peasants to realize the agrarian revolution will only succeed in achieving a complete victory, and in really liberating the peasantry from the oppression by the remnants of feudalism, only when it is waged under the leadership of the proletariat, and when it is not limited to just overthrowing the power of the landlords in the countryside, but is aimed at smashing the entire power of the internal counterrevolutionaries who are now represented by the military dictatorship of the Right-wing army generals Suharto and Nasution and their accomplices. [Source]

These revolutionary actions and other ones, including the ones discussed in the section on applied Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, got their inspiration from the Cultural Revolution, and they upheld Mao Zedong Thought.

Kampuchea created its communist party, the Workers’ Party of Kampuchea (WPK), later named the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), in 1960; prior to this, the communists relied on the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP). [MTBA]

Pol Pot and the “Khmer Rouge” (CPK) are often used as an example of why “communism” is bad. The claims made about them are usually highly exaggerated, and they are ahistorical. Marxist-Leninist-Maoists support the national liberation of Kampuchea from imperialism, but we also recognize that there were many excesses (and even crimes) committed under Pol Pot. We seek to learn the truth about “Democratic Kampuchea”, not imperialist cries about it.

The CPK did not kill as many people as Western academics say. According to its own statistics, it killed 300,000 people. This may very well be accurate because a lot of the “3 million deaths under Pol Pot” were actually caused by American bombings of livestock and farms (which damaged Kampuchea’s agriculture), along with the many landmines that plagued (and still plague) Kampuchea and the rest of Indochina. If there is anyone who deserves to be tried by a jury for genocide in Kampuchea, it is the Western imperialists who bombed Kampuchea to bits, left landmines in Kampuchean soil, and thereby hindered agricultural and economic development in the country.

A lot of propaganda against the CPK is blatantly false. People assume that Pol Pot killed everyone with glasses, which is an exaggeration of the real anti-intellectualism of the Khmer Rouge cadres. (Pol Pot himself wore glasses at times, as evidenced by certain photographs of him.) They also believe that Pol Pot chose to “deindustrialize” Kampuchea when really, the Khmer Rouge had to evacuate the cities to dedicate the country’s labor force to agriculture, which had been destroyed by bombings and landmines. Kampuchea’s leaders did want to industrialize their country in later economic plans, but their ruthless conditions forced the country to remain poor. "Pol Pot Was Not and Is Not A Communist" covers this quite well. In it, it says:

Although anti-Communist hacks portray the evacuation of the cities in April 1975 as an atrocity, even capitalist scholars tacitly admit it was necessary… For example, the capital, Phnom Penh, had grown to 2 million from about 600,000 from peasants fleeing the US bombings. As in South Vietnam, the US had completely destroyed the peasant economy in order to wipe out the village society in which the KR flourished. Phnom Penh was provisioned only by massive imports of US food, which stopped abruptly when Lon Nol fell. If the city population hadn't been evacuated, they'd have simply starved to death!

How many people were killed during these mass murders? The US media, following Dith Pran of The New York Times (on whom the movie "The Killing Fields" was based), claim about three million. When talking about "communists," no figure under the million mark will satisfy capitalist writers. Vickery shows that 300,000—still an appalling figure—is about the upper possible limit. In contrast, Zasloff and Brown write of the "heavy toll in lives" which "the enormous US bombing and the intensity of the fighting" caused before 1975, and imply that the KR claims of 600,000 to "more than 1 million" dead from US bombing are credible… When it comes to genocide, Pol Pot & Co. were amateurs compared to the US imperialists. [Source]

Of these executions, many came from local cadres’ independent actions that swung to the left of the party line; the party itself was already ultra-“leftist” in some ways as it tried to abolish money, among other errors. That being said, the number of those executed by the CPK is exaggerated as the deaths of deliberate killings and those of natural causes are conflated in many bourgeois studies of Democratic Kampuchea:

Mass grave or 'Killing Field' evidence seems unreliable. As the 'Demographic Expert' report concedes (p.119) the CPK banned traditional means of disposing of the dead (cremation). Therefore, it seems that all those who died in the Democratic Kampuchea period were either buried or sometimes just dumped in the jungle with little ceremony. It's certainly not clear that all those corpses disposed of in this way were victims of the CPK. The only forensic examination that appears to have been made of the Killing Fields showed only a very small percentage showing signs of violent death (7). Though the author Pollanen claimes a 'significant minority' of the bones he examined showed signs of a violent death his own report simply does not bear out this 'politically correct' conclusion. He examined three sites. At Kampong Speu, he examined 100 crania and found evidence of violent death in 1 case. Of several hundred long bones, Pollanen found 13 showing signs of violence (8). At Pomhea Lea, Pollanen examined several hundred long bones and crania. He found evidence of violence in 8 of the long bones and 2 crania had gunshot wounds (9). At the memorial site at the ruins of the Sang Prison, Pollanen examined piles of human skeletal remains, topped with 50 crania. He found no evidence of violence or violent death. Despite such evidence the authors of the 'Demographic Experts Report' insist that 50% of all excess deaths in the Democratic Kampuchea era were due to violence (11). [Source]

Kampuchea, in an attempt to get to socialism rapidly, made both ultra-“left” and rightist errors in economic policy that ultimately failed to bring it to socialism. [MTBA]

The communists in Laos were part of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP). In 1975, Laos, Kampuchea, and Vietnam defeated US imperialism; the puppet state of south Vietnam was destroyed, and Laos and Kampuchea kicked US imperialists out of their countries. Since it never created a communist party, Laos could never build socialism; the proletariat lacked its leadership and could not wage class conflict or assert its leadership, leaving it to the bourgeoisie. After Ho Chi Minh’s death in 1969, rightists in the WPV seized power, making the party capitalist in deeds; when Vietnam united, the “Communist Party of Vietnam” became the country’s leading party, but it ceased to be properly Marxist-Leninist. Thus, neither Vietnam nor Laos achieved socialism for long, if at all.

On Vietnam’s revisionism, “Jose Maria Sison: From Marxist-Leninist to Revisionist”, a text we will cite later in this book, provides good information. It explains the importance of Vietnam’s war of national liberation as well as how it fell to Soviet imperialism. It says:

For 30 years Vietnam was a storm center of revolutionary struggle against US and French imperialism. It brought the US and French ruling classes to their knees and rallied the support and sympathy of many millions the world over. Yet the anti-imperialist revolution of the Vietnamese people was aborted by the leaders of the Vietnam Workers' Party in the late 1960s and 1970s. The goal of national independence for the Vietnamese people was betrayed from within and the Vietnamese people delivered into the hands of the Soviet social-imperialists. …

It was a great disappointment and politically disorienting to people around the world who supported the struggle of the Vietnamese people against US imperialism and its puppet regimes in Saigon to see the leaders of the reunited Vietnam after 1975 build state capitalism and join COMECON^[115], the instrument of Soviet economic domination of its Eastern European satellites and Cuba. In 1977, as part of the Soviet Union's “international division of labor,” Vietnam rapidly expanded imports of heavy machinery and technology from the Soviet bloc. In order to pay for these industrial imports, the Vietnamese government oriented its economy toward cash crops like coal, cotton, coffee, rubber and fruit and vegetables as part of COMECON's "socialist" division of labor. [Source]

Did capitalist restoration help Vietnam? No, it did not. Vietnamese Maoists explained how capitalism hurts the Vietnamese people in an interview they received from Anti-Imperialist Action Ireland, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist organization working to free Ireland from imperialism:

Class relations in Vietnamese society resemble class relations in capitalist society. While there is a thriving petty bourgeoisie in the urban areas, there exists an exploitative relation among the proletariat and bourgeoisie within Vietnam where surplus value is extracted on a massive scale. Many workers in Vietnam have expressed grievances towards having to work in foreign businesses which operate in Vietnam. It is estimated that the highest paid proletariat in Vietnam which works in a foreign owned industry makes only 50 cents per hour (half a dollar in USD). Furthermore, the 2020 minimum wage was only 1,600,000 VND which translates to roughly $68. …

Recent estimates back from 2016 state that the poverty level in Vietnam was around 6%. The population of Vietnam is 100,000,000, so that 6% would be roughly 6,000,000 people. Higher estimates state that this number is within the 9-10,000,000 range. This isn’t that much better than capitalist countries like America which have poverty numbers of 30,000,000. Keep in mind that the population of America is three times higher than that of Vietnam. [Source]

Since relations between it and the USSR were poor, the PRC started improving relationships with the US and its puppets. This mostly occurred because Zhou Enlai, a “centrist” in China’s line struggle, was able to influence China’s foreign policy. These changes allowed China to trade with the US and its allies, and that kept it relatively safe; however, Zhou’s line made China increase work with “second-world” imperialist states, junior imperialist states that both oppressed the third world and were dominated by the first world (our bolding):

Chou [another spelling of Zhou], himself, went along with the Cultural Revolution-after a point and up to a point. There was a bourgeois-democratic streak that ran through his entire career which accounts for the fact that his overall role in the Cultural Revolution was a negative one. Chou was a leading force among veteran cadre for whom the supreme achievement of the struggle of the Chinese people would be the building of the country into a modern state. When the feudal landlords and foreign imperialists obstructed this they fought them, and sometimes valiantly. But once power had been seized they tended to regard the political struggle as done and over and sought to put economic development above all else. This could only mean bourgeois economic development since their schemes rested on foreign technology, experts in command, and keep- ing the workers and peasants in their place as grateful oxen. By the mid-'50s Chou had concluded that China's defense and economic construction depended on accommodation and alliance with the West. This he saw not as tactical maneuverings and the exploiting of divisions within the enemy camp, but as a strategic orientation through which a "prosperous" China would be assured. …

The Political Report given at the l0th Congress resolved the impor-tant questions of line that were being battled out in favor of the revolutionary forces. It hailed the Cultural Revolution and cited Mao's 1969 statement that "Probably another revolution will have to be carried out after several years." Lin Piao was branded a revisionist whose political line flowed from Liu Shao-chi's view at the 8th Party Congress that the main contradiction in China was between her advanced social system and backward productive forces. This summation was extremely pivotal to the perspective of the Congress and it would be contested once again in Teng's, Hua's and the whole Right's "General Program" of 1975.

The Report also drew attention to the dangers inherent in the new foreign policy laid down at the 9th Congress and which Chou had been most closely identified with. It stated that "Today, in both international and domestic struggles, tendencies may still occur similar to those of the past, namely, when there was an alliance with the bourgeoisie, necessary struggles were forgotten and when there was a split with the bourgeoisie, the possibility of an alliance under given conditions was forgotten." While both deviations of no struggle and no alliance were mentioned, clearly it was the former being targeted, given that China was undertaking an "opening to the West." The Report upheld the principle of "going against the tide," affirmed support for socialist new things, and vigorously defended the policy of instituting three-in-one combinations of old, middle-aged and young cadres as an important measure for bringing forward new successors to the revolution. …

The appearance in China of symphonic orchestras from abroad stirred great controversy. The Left did not oppose these visits as such; the question was on what terms and on what basis would they be hailed or would such cultural exchanges be recognized as an aspect of necessary diplomatic initiatives to the West which, however, increased bourgeois influences. Chou En-lai, it seems, was responsible for mak- ing the arrangements for these visits and the Right was generally ac- celerating its efforts to open the floodgates to bourgeois culture. In response, Chiang Ching, or those working under her direction, wrote articles analyzing the nature of Western classical music. (See Text 11.) Can such music like untitled sonatas and concertos purporting to be above time and place actually be considered devoid of meaning and without class content? It was explained that this music was bourgeois and must be criticized, though some of the form could be critically assimilated. [Source]

Zhou was essentially applying the revisionist “Three Worlds Theory”. This was Deng Xiaoping’s bastardization of Mao’s three worlds model. This was, in a way, a reversal of Lin Biao’s foreign policy (which is now third-worldists’ policy). While Lin wanted to work with the Soviet imperialists against the US imperialists, Deng wanted to work with the US imperialists against the Soviet ones. This made sense tactically due to the Soviets’ aggression, but while Mao and co. wanted to use the contradictions between imperialists against each other to benefit the socialist states and their third world allies, Deng and co. essentially sought to wholly side with US imperialism until China (under their capitalist leadership) became an imperialist state able to rival it. Both types of revisionists wanted to ally with (and not just maintain peaceful relations with) comprador regimes that served their preferred imperialists (namely, Lin wanted to ally with pro-Soviet regimes, and Deng with pro-US ones). Zhou leaned to the latter.

This means that Zhou Enlai was in a very interesting position politically. On one hand, he supported the proletarian leaders’ suppression of the most outlandish bourgeois agents, e.g. Liu Shaoqi. On the other hand, he was far more “moderate” than them, proving to be both beneficial (ending the excessive factional infighting among Red Guards) and detrimental (“rehabilitating” and thus strengthening Deng Xiaoping and other capitalist-roaders, against the revolutionary fervor of the working masses) for the Cultural Revolution. His “moderation” proved particularly negative in foreign policy, for he allowed Deng’s distortion of Mao’s model of the three worlds to determine China’s relations with junior imperialist states, the US, and reactionary compradors of US imperialism. Nonetheless, Mao sought to win him over to the revolutionary proletarian line.

So long as China remained socialist, it did recognize the US as a potential threat for China’s security and socialist development; its tactical non-aggression with the US did not mean that China’s leaders betrayed the international proletariat. Mao and other left-line leaders understood that both America and the Soviet Union were the “first world”, Earth’s superpowers; had the US been more aggressive and the USSR less so, China likely would have done to the USSR what it had done with the US. The alliances with national-bourgeois and even reactionary regimes that China did have were purely for diplomacy and a correct theory of peaceful coexistence. They did not give up their support for revolutionary movements just because of their relations with reactionary states.

Although fundamentally different from the socialist countries in their social and political systems, the nationalist countries stand in profound contradiction to imperialism. They have common interests with the socialist countries—opposition to imperialism, the safeguarding of national independence and the defense of world peace. Therefore, it is quite possible and feasible for the socialist countries to establish relations of peaceful coexistence and friendly co-operation with these countries. The establishment of such relations is of great significance for the strengthening of the unity of the anti-imperialist forces and for the advancement of the common struggle of the peoples against imperialism. …

We maintain that peaceful coexistence connotes a relationship between countries with different social systems, between independent sovereign states. Only after victory in the revolution is it possible and necessary for the proletariat to pursue the policy of peaceful coexistence. As for oppressed peoples and nations, their task is to strive for their own liberation and overthrow the rule of imperialism and its lackeys. They should not practice peaceful coexistence with the imperialists and their lackeys, nor is it possible for them to do so.

It is therefore wrong to apply peaceful coexistence to the relations between oppressed and oppressor classes and between oppressed and oppressor nations, or to stretch the socialist countries' policy of peaceful coexistence so as to t make it the policy of the Communist Parties and the revolutionary people in the capitalist world, or to subordinate the revolutionary struggles of the oppressed peoples and nations to it.

We have always held that the correct application of Lenin's policy of peaceful coexistence by the socialist countries helps to develop their power, to expose the imperialist policies of aggression and war and to unite all the anti-imperialist peoples and countries, and it therefore helps the people's struggles against imperialism and its lackeys. At the same time, by directly hitting and weakening the forces of aggression, war and reaction, the people's revolutionary struggles against imperialism and its lackeys help the cause of world peace and human progress, and therefore help the socialist countries' struggle for peaceful coexistence with countries having different social systems. Thus, the correct application of Lenin's policy of peaceful coexistence by the socialist countries is in harmony with the interests of the people's revolutionary struggles in all countries. [Source]

In a specific instance of such an application, socialist China did not sever relations with Chile even after Augusto Pinochet—a puppet of US imperialists who overthrew Salvador Allende^[116]—took power in 1973. As Chile grew weaker with American pressure mounting, Pinochet overthrew Allende and sold off the country to US imperialism. He defended the comprador-bourgeois regime with the fascistic repression of progressive and revolutionary groups. Despite being reactionary compared to Allende, China maintained basic diplomacy with Chile, continuing economic relations with them while supporting revolution in the country (as opposed to the reformist movement led by pro-Soviet bourgeois leaders there). Geng Biao clarified this in his speech:

The American imperialists also want to take advantage of our conflict with Soviet revisionists to cope with the Soviets. They are unable to use us. Rather, we can use them. Chairman Mao taught us: “Our foreign work should focus on the people, rely on the people, and pin hopes on the people, rather than rely on the ones in authority.” Some don’t understand why we don’t sever diplomatic relations with Chile and why we establish diplomatic relations with Spain. Some Marxist-Leninist governments and organizations often talk about these issues to us. If we severed relations with them, they would build relations with the Guomindang [in Taiwan]. [Source]

China’s flawed foreign policy of the 1970’s was not due to Mao or the “Gang of Four”, and the pro-Soviet revisionists and third-worldists who claim otherwise either do not know how China’s line struggle played out or knowingly distort it. Remember that Mao did not hold absolute power like reactionaries claim he did. People like Zhou Enlai, elected as representatives of the proletariat despite having mistaken views, were able to influence foreign policy, and that meant they often made errors resulting in poor decisions on who China supported. Indeed, as he helped rehabilitate Deng Xiaoping, Zhou took Deng’s “three worlds theory” to heart. That being said, foreign policy under Mao was largely correct, and China’s stances only turned incorrect when the bourgeoisie took power.

The foreign policy debate was an example of the truly complicated multi-line struggle that existed in the CPC; in fact, in the two-line struggle, different opportunist trends grudgingly united with each other, and some even united with the proletarian line against other opportunists! As the bourgeoisie infiltrated the Communist Party, the proletarian majority had to work with certain bourgeois and petty-bourgeois agents against their main enemies. In other words, they temporarily allied with certain “lesser” opportunists against “greater” ones. This is similar to what Stalin did with opportunists in the Soviet Union’s party, such as his usage of the right opposition against Trotsky’s “left”. Whenever the greater danger was right-opportunism, Mao tolerated the ultra-“left”, and when the greater one was the “left”, Mao tolerated the right. Over time, proletarian rule of the party grew stronger and more experienced; furthermore, certain people who were leaning toward opportunism (e.g. Zhou Enlai) could potentially be won over to the proletarian line with this method of ruling. Part II of Unity and Polemic in the International Communist Movement^[117] explains how Mao did this:

The CPC, under the leadership of Mao, many times, adopted the policy of using contradictions prevalent among different opportunist trends seen in the party and government while waging a struggle against them. Objectively evaluating the possible effects and influences of opportunist thinking and attitudes, the CPC, under the leadership of Mao, adopted the policy to ascertain the primacy of struggle. Unity with Lin Piao to defeat Liu Shao-chi and Company, using the [centrist] Chou En-lai in the course of leading a struggle against the open opportunists such as Liu Shao-chi, Teng Hsiao-ping, Lin Pio and use of Hua Kuo-feng against Teng Hsiao-ping and others are remarkable examples in this reference. …

Many types of opportunist thinking and attitudes can be seen in the party and government at the same time. In this situation, it will not be possible for revolutionaries to struggle against them at a time. In such a condition, they have to identify which type of thinking is the greatest challenge to the party and revolution and to ascertain the order of the primary struggle accordingly. In this context, the policy of unity with secondary dangers to struggle against the main danger can be adopted as tactics. … Mao adopted the policy with a strategy of defeating the opportunist headquarters well settled in the party and the government one by one. … As Leninism allows adopting this type of policy in the course of struggle against imperialism, and adopting that policy in the course of struggle against opportunism can never be a mistake. [Source]

But sadly, revisionism was able to develop even in the last socialist states that existed in the 20th century. The Chinese Cultural Revolution failed in the end. After Mao Tse-Tung’s death, revolutionary communists across China were arrested as supposed “counterrevolutionaries”, and capitalist-roaders started gaining power. Hua Guofeng was responsible for this, and he conceded power to Deng Xiaoping, who de-collectivized agriculture and allowed foreign capitalists to exploit Chinese workers. The History Project of the Republic by Chinese Maoists describes how the coup occurred:

Mao Zedong's political strategy was to unite widely for balance and wait until there was enough power to continue the revolution. However, after his death, this political strategy was not continued. The revolutionaries such as Jiang Qing wanted to break the political balance quickly in order to gain dominance, and launched a debate in the media they controlled about whether to "act according to past guidelines" or "act according to established guidelines", eventually pushing the moderates to the opposite side. Because of the disparity in political power and tactics, the plan of the moderates and capitalists to eliminate the revolutionaries succeeded quickly. …

It was very difficult for Hua Guofeng himself to gain a foothold among the many capitalist-roaders with great achievements and huge political influence. Therefore, he needed to arrest the Gang of Four and investigate the rebels to gain the favor of the veteran cadres, and on the other hand, showing himself as loyal to Mao Zedong for legitimacy. Hua Guofeng's popularity peaked on October 21, 1976, when a mass meeting was held in Tiananmen Square to celebrate the smashing of the Gang of Four.

In this way, the three-legged stand that had been stable for a month inevitably ended with the arrest of the representatives of the revolutionaries and the suppression of the revolutionary masses. The proletarian cultural revolution was completely suppressed and the proletarian revolutionary cause in China was interrupted and began to take a sharp turn for the worse. At this point, only two factions remained, the moderates and the capitalist-roaders, and they began to fight for the right to lead the development of Chinese society. …

After the arrest of the Central Revolutionaries, a brutal crackdown on the mass revolutionary organizations was launched, and the bureaucratic clique proposed an "expose, criticize and investigate" campaign to remove the "hidden remnants of the Gang of Four", and a brutal crackdown began immediately. The campaign was very concentrated, and the focus was on the rebels. …

No matter how appalling the atrocities committed during the Cultural Revolution, as long as they did not join the Revolutionary Committee, were not rebels, or “starters”, they were not included in the purge. Most of the Red Guards, whether they were the early bloodline Red Guards [Red Guards that upheld the reactionary idea that class alignment depended solely on one’s ancestry] or the later conservative mass organizations supported by the powers that be, were absolved of responsibility. The sons and daughters of the senior cadres who had smashed and looted during the early years of the Cultural Revolution were considered to be “opposed to Lin Biao and Jiang Qing” and were protected. …

Thus, the movement was not judged by the bad behaviour of those involved in the Cultural Revolution, but directly by their affiliation. The aim of the movement could not be clearer, therefore, as it was nothing more than a crackdown on the revolutionary representatives of the proletariat and the masses [and thus on the dictatorship of the proletariat]. …

After Deng Xiaoping's comeback, the liberation of [reactionary] cadres and the struggle over the criterion of truth, the capitalist-roaders had gained a huge organizational and ideological advantage, while the moderates were in decline, and all that was left for the capitalist-roaders to do was to seize political power and complete the party's political turn. It was at the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee that the dominant role in guiding China's historical development after the Cultural Revolution changed hands from the moderates to the capitalist-roaders. [Source]

As the excerpt above shows, the process of capitalist restoration was highly repressive, undemocratic, and most clearly anti-proletarian. The coup and what followed it are why modern China is capitalist. The book From Victory to Defeat by Pao-yu Ching explains what happened after China’s privatization campaigns:

Deng’s Reform consisted of two interrelated components: capitalist reform in China and opening up China’s economy to link it with the international capitalist system. Within a short amount of time, Deng and his followers began to dismantle the socialist economic and social system built during 1956-1976 by fundamentally changing the relations of production, as well as the superstructure, from socialist to capitalist. The Reformers understood that the principal opponents of their Reform would be the working people (workers and peasants) so their class strategy was to create disunity among the workers to weaken their power and to break up the close alliance between workers and peasants. During the socialist construction, the state and collective ownership of the means of production was fundamental to the socialist class strategy: the unity of workers and their close alliance with peasants. To be successful the capitalist Reformers had to attack this economic base. However, since the socialist superstructure supported the socialist economic base, the capitalist Reformers had also to fundamentally change the superstructure from socialist to capitalist. …

Dissolving the communes was a calculated and necessary move for the Reformers. Without collective ownership in the countryside workers could no longer form an alliance with the peasants. The Chinese Communist Party (representing workers) had formed a close alliance with the peasants when fighting the Revolutionary and Civil Wars by promising them land reform. Peasants sacrificed their lives and their loved ones when they joined the Red Army to fight the guerrilla war. Without the peasants the Chinese Communist Party could not have won the revolution. After Liberation, the CCP strengthened the worker-peasant alliance by collectivizing agriculture and by carrying out policies that mutually benefited workers and peasants. The strong alliance between workers and peasants was key to socialist construction. When the capitalist Reformers broke the worker-peasant alliance by de-collectivizing agriculture, they weakened both the worker and peasant resistance against capitalist projects they enacted. [Source]

In addition, China became imperialist as it was able to export capital to poorer countries, particularly in Africa and southeast Asia. Is China an Imperialist Country? explains in Chapter 24:

As the economic transformation of China from socialism back to capitalism was completed, China began to show some early signs of its rising new imperialist nature. It began to export capital, and then greatly expanded this, finding special opportunities in the “vacuum” in Africa (which the established imperialist countries had been largely ignoring) and in Latin America and even Europe, in part because of the international financial crisis, thus taking advantage of the weaknesses of the other imperialist powers. And China began working feverishly to expand its military might for the eventual purpose of protecting and expanding its ever-growing foreign economic assets. [Source]

Even when Chinese capitalism was not developed enough to be fully imperialist, it collaborated with imperialists, especially American imperialists. That is why it supported the Mujahideen (Islamists^[118]) in Afghanistan against the Soviet imperialist invasion and not the revolutionary communist resistance that existed and fought both the Mujahideen and the Soviet imperialists and their Afghan puppets:

Ever since the Soviet invasion, the Western imperialist powers (especially the U.S.) have pumped an enormous amount of aid to phony “liberation” organizations in Afghanistan. The purpose of such “assistance” is clear - to try to manipulate the just struggle of the Afghan people and pervert it into a weapon in the Western bloc's own arsenal aimed at the Soviet Union. In particular, the U.S. has sought to support and prop up the most reactionary forces in Afghanistan opposed to the Soviet Union—feudal chieftains, religious authorities, and the like.

This complex situation makes the need for the independent role of the proletariat, of a genuine vanguard party based on Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought [now Marxism-Leninism-Maoism], all the more evident. Without such a party it is not possible for the proletariat to hoist its independent banner. Without a genuine vanguard it is not possible to thoroughly demarcate politically and ideologically from those who would characterize the Soviet invaders and their Afghan puppets as "communists" nor, on the other hand, defeat the propaganda of the Soviets and international revisionism which have tried to portray the Afghan resistance as solely the work of feudal reactionaries in the pay of the US or the current rulers in China struggling against the so-called “progress” represented by the Soviet puppet regime. [Source]

Deng Xiaoping is often praised by capitalist media for bringing market reforms into China. American capitalists glorify him because he submitted to their demands, at least to start his leadership; he allowed them to access China’s now-cheap labor-power, and capitalists say that this was good. They even cite the commodification of essential services, and the subsequent “rise” in people’s incomes as proof that he lifted China out of poverty; in fact, the capitalist measures of wealth used to assert this claim are incorrect, as the introduction to Fundamentals of Political Economy clarifies:

The visit to Peking of President Nixon ushered in a new epoch in our perceptions of Chinese development. Many American economists have toured the PRC, including Professors Wassily Leontief and John Kenneth Galbraith from Harvard University; James Tobin and Lloyd G. Reynolds from Yale University; and John Gurley from Stanford. According to Tobin’s estimate, the 1974 Chinese GNP in the Western concept of national accounting was approximately $145 per capita. This is close to Reynolds’ estimate which amounted to $150 per capita. Taken literally, this would imply imminent starvation of the population. “The error in the calculation,” Reynolds explained, “arises from the fact that Chinese prices for basic consumer goods are much lower than U.S. prices; thus; the purchasing power of the yuan is much higher than the official exchange rate suggests.” [Source]

In fact, a new study shows that poverty actually increased under market reforms until social services returned as concessions to workers. “Capitalist reforms and extreme poverty in China: unprecedented progress or income deflation?” by Dylan Sullivan, Michail Moatsos, and Jason Hickel says such:

In the year 1990, China’s poverty rate appears to have been around 0.2 per cent. For perspective, the extreme poverty rate in the United States at that time was 0.5 per cent. Of course, given the limitations of the OECD [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development] dataset, we cannot assume precision at the fractional level. The evidence is best interpreted as indicating that China’s poverty rate was very low, although precisely how low is difficult to say. It is also worth noting that the BNPL [basic needs poverty line] does not account for the price of health care (in this sense it is similar to the WBPL [World Bank’s poverty line], which in most contexts is far too low to access modern health facilities). It is possible that if health care was accounted for, we would find that poverty rose during the 1980s, when China’s public health system was dismantled. What is clear however is that, prior to the mass privatisation of SOEs in the early 1990s, China’s poverty rate appears to have been substantially lower than the WBPL suggests. …

The privatisation of China’s socialist provisioning systems caused a major subsistence crisis, with the share of the population unable to meet their basic needs rising dramatically to a peak of 68 per cent in 1995. This rise in extreme poverty was driven by a surge in the relative price of food. China’s BNPL rose from $0.35 in 1990, to $2.7 in 1995. In other words, while the World Bank’s $1.9 threshold overstates the level of extreme poverty during China’s socialist [and early revisionist] period, it understates the level of extreme poverty during the capitalist reforms. …

In the 2000s, China experienced a series of labour strikes, forcing employers and local governments to improve wages and other benefits (ibid). As Minqi Li puts it, ‘At a time when large parts of the world are suffering under the tyranny of neoliberal austerity, China may be the only large country where the working class is making significant gains’ largely because the ‘rural surplus labor force continues to be depleted’ (ibid., p. 29). But despite China’s strong economic growth and tight labour markets, the country’s performance on extreme poverty is scarcely better than during the socialist era of the 20th century. China’s economy has grown by over 300 per cent since 1990. Yet the country’s 2018 poverty rate (5.4 per cent) is virtually identical to its average poverty rate during 1981–90 (5.6 per cent). [Source]

The capitalists say Deng was a supporter of “freedom”, unlike the “authoritarian/totalitarian” Mao. However, Deng instituted the one-child-policy to keep a hold on the population (this would be one of his capitalistic actions); simultaneously, he ended the barefoot doctor program and other programs that helped the people because he wanted to impose undemocratic, unpopular, but “profitable” systems instead. This combination of oppression and deprivation, in the medical field of all things, faced opposition from the Chinese people. None of these moves could be considered “liberating”.

Deng was also responsible for the Tiananmen Square massacre—an event that imperialists love to use to condemn China, but not Deng himself. People hate how China murdered the 1989 Tiananmen Square protesters. They portray the victims as liberals. Some of the protestors were liberal-democratic people who wanted more capitalist reforms as well as more freedoms, but a lot of them were genuine communists looking for a return to the socialist era. Indeed, the bourgeois state did significant damage to the proletarian forces in the movement, while liberal supporters of US imperialism were better-off:

What the Chinese protesters wanted, and what the world's people were told they wanted, were not the same thing. The Western media one-sidedly played up the pro-West, pro-parliamentary democracy sentiments which were prominent in the leadership of the Beijing students. They dismissed the workers as an independent political force, describing them as simply strong backs of support for the students, and attacked more radical and proletarian youth as "common criminals" profiting from the opportunity to blow off steam. …

One of the great differences between the Chinese movement and any movement elsewhere was that the masses have a basis for comparison between Deng's bourgeois regime and the genuinely socialist society led by Mao. One joke making the rounds in China has Deng paying a visit to Mao's tomb to plead, what can I do? Mao replies, let's change places. An American newspaper reported that a ditty heard in the countryside before the spring turmoil broke out, at a time when Deng was much less exposed, goes like this: "Mao Tsetung was fine, a dime was worth a dime. Deng Xiaoping may be okay, but a dollar is worth a dime today." In Tiananmen Square one could frequently see posters of Mao along with other prominent figures from the pre-1976 epoch. What such activity reflected was an understanding that Iife for the basic masses was growing harder as well as a longing for a past that was better. …

Some observers on the scene reported intense discussions of Mao's works in the Square, with people reading out loud to each other from the Little Red Book and Mao's Selected Works. These books are now very difficult to find in bookstores (many had been preserved for years in basements, attics, etc.) - it is generally assumed that the regime wants to suppress Mao's writings, so there is a sense that they must hold some truth. Some of the youth involved in these discussions talked of going back to Mao as discovering the history that they had not lived through. [Source]

Western media did not show this because Western capitalists want us to think that the Chinese people hated socialism, which is absolutely untrue. China’s capitalist restoration was not good for the people, either. The Great Reversal, a book about China’s capitalist restoration and its consequences, shows this in “Introduction: China’s Rural Reforms”:

… [D]own in the southeast corner of Shanxi province five years of heavy capital investment and hard work on the part of the peasants of Long Bow village also came to naught. In 1978, Long Bow villagers had begun the mechanization of almost 200 acres of corn with a collection of scrounged, tinkered, and homemade equipment that did everything from spreading manure to tilling land, planting seed, killing weeds, picking ears, drying kernels, and augering the kernels into storage. The twelve members of the machinery team multiplied labor productivity by a factor of fifteen while cutting the cost of raising grain almost in half. But when the reform, offering subsistence plots to all and contract parcels to the land hungry, broke the fields into myriad small pieces, comprehensive mechanization gave way perforce to intermittent plowing and planting. This left the peasants no alternative but to abandon most of their advanced equipment and reactivate their hoes. When the bank asked for its loan money back the village head said "take the machinery." But the bank never found a buyer, so to this day the manure spreaders, the smoothing harrows, the sprayers, the sprinkle irrigation sets, the corn pickers, and the grain dryers lie rusting in the machinery yard, mute testimony to a bygone—or is it a bypassed?—era. …

Where once, under a seamless web of adobe villages and their linking roads, clear squares and oblongs of land—green, yellow, and brown—had stretched unbroken to the horizon, now 1,000 kilometers of miniscule strips crowding first in one direction, then in another, in haphazard, never duplicated patterns. This was not "postage stamp" land such as used to exist before land reform, but ''ribbon land," "spaghetti land," "noodle land"—strips so narrow that often not even the right wheel of a cart could travel down one man's land without the left wheel pressing down on the land of another.

After decades of revolutionary struggle, after China's peasants had finally managed to create a scale and an institutional form for agriculture that held out some promise for the future, some promise that the tillers could at last lay down their hoes and enter the modern world more-or-less in step with their hi-tech-oriented, machine-savvy urban fellow citizens—it had come to this! With one blip on the screen of time, scale and institution both dissolved. The latest page in the great book of history barely rustled as it turned hundreds of millions back to square one.

A stunned peasant comrade said to me, "With this reform the Communist Party has shrugged off the burden of the peasantry. From now on, fuck your mother, if you get left behind blame yourself."

Nevertheless, to me, the irrational fragmentation alone meant the eventual neutralization of whatever advantages the government saw in it or had served up with it to make it palatable. "Noodle land" could only lead, in the long run, to a dead end. I could not think of any place in the world where rural smallholders were faring well, certainly not smallholders with only a fraction of a hectare to their names and that in scattered fragments. The low output of peasants farming with hoes meant that on the average each full-time laborer could produce about a ton of grain a year, one eight-hundredth of the amount I harvested farming with tractors in Pennsylvania. And that ton of grain, worth about $100, would determine the standard of living for countless tillers of the land far into the future. Whatever prosperity any peasant now enjoyed was bound to be ephemeral as the gap between industry and agriculture, city and country, mental and manual labor expanded and the relentless price scissors imposed by the free market opened wide. [Source]

In a discussion about his book (The Unknown Cultural Revolution), Dongping Han talks about capitalist restoration’s consequences:

The land was privatized in China in 1983. Many people tend to think that farmers are stupid and ignorant. But I think the farmers are very intelligent people. Many of them realized the implications of private farming right away. That was why they resisted it very hard in the beginning. And in my village and in other villages I surveyed, the overwhelming majority of people, 90 percent, said the Communist Party no longer cares about poor people. Right away they felt this way. The Communist Party, the cadres, no longer cared about poor people in the countryside. The government investment in rural areas in the countryside dropped from 15 percent in the national budget in 1970s to only 3-4 percent in the '80s. So the Chinese public realized that the Chinese government no longer cared about them by disbanding the communes. But I was in college at the time and I didn't start to think about the issue very hard until 1986. …

The reason the officials are corrupt today and were not during the Cultural Revolution years is because the masses were really empowered. There was always a mass meeting every night and all the government policies and directives were read to the farmers. And it was required by the government at the time. …

Most people were not aware that there was a coup in 1976. Mao's wife and three other important leaders were arrested. And there was a very extensive purge throughout China. Hundreds of thousands of people who supported the Cultural Revolution were arrested right away. Some people argue that Mao should have killed Deng Xiaoping [the leader of the "capitalist roaders"] and a few others to prevent the arrest of the Gang of Four. Maybe he should have, but he did not. …

After the Cultural Revolution years, I went to college and my two sisters who used to work for the village, found jobs in a state-owned factory in the early '80s. Now the factory has been sold and my two sisters have been unemployed since 1996. My younger sister is still working in the village, as the village cashier now. My village is doing well compared with other villages. Life has changed dramatically in the countryside. I think for most working class people, life has changed for the worse. Even though they may get more money, they have lost benefits like free medical care and free education of the socialist past. They now have to pay for their education. They have to pay for their medical care. … The medical care is very expensive now and it is beyond the reach of most farmers and working class people in urban areas. …

The Chinese government is faced with a huge challenge today and the Chinese government officials themselves have admitted that on many occasions. Some people estimate that there are 100 incidents involving more than 100 people challenging the government and 300 incidents involving less than 100 challenging the government each day. I read in a document about an incident in Guangdong province where three police officers stopped a car without a license plate and upon further check they found the driver without a driver's license. But the three people came out the car and yelled that the police are harassing people and about 2,000 people came out. They turned the police car upside down and set it on fire. The government is warning the police to be careful because the tension between the people and the government is very high. …

When the Gang of Four was arrested, the Chinese government said the people were really happy. That was not true. … Young people in my area loved Jiang Qing. When the Gang of Four was arrested a few weeks after Mao died, we knew things were going to be different. …

Another important change in the rural life was that there were almost no crimes during the Cultural Revolution years. … But now, crime has become so common in China. [Source]

Of course, the capitalist classes in China and abroad refuse to admit these truths of Chinese history. They ignore all the negative consequences of capitalist restoration. That is why we view history from a proletarian perspective.

China’s capitalist economy experienced an economic boom under Hu Jintao, making it a capitalist-imperialist country. It has all of the characteristics of capitalist-imperialism, including the centralization of capital (monopolization), the merging of financial and industrial capital, the increased involvement of the state in the economy, the export of excess capital, and more. China exports lots of capital to other countries, and it also makes countries go into huge amounts of debt, allowing it to control more of their means of production. This does not make its current system superior to socialism and the Mao-era policies. The system exploits labor ruthlessly, and it does not give many concessions to workers in China or abroad; the growth is based on heavy investments, and it can only happen because the capitalist world no longer sanctions, embargoes, or threatens it at the levels that it did to socialist China. It is not even better at economic growth. In Praise of the Maoist Economic Planning covers this in a “balanced” way:

When Maoist economic development is placed in its wider international context, the record is still more impressive. Sichuan's economic development, like that of many parts of China, had been hampered by the political instability of the Republican period. China's refusal to acknowledge pax Americana after 1949 and conform to the dictates of Washington forced upon her a strategy of defense industrialization. The wisdom of her decision to develop an independent nuclear capability and to invest heavily in defense-oriented heavy industry was confirmed by American imperialism in Vietnam. However, the price was high. The diversion of national income from consumption to investment, and non-productive defense investment at that, inevitably slowed the growth of material living standards. None of this merits the term 'failure': consumption grew slowly in Maoist China primarily because of the American threat. The repeated attempts to blame Mao for all of China's ills are little more than special pleading by the American academic establishment. China could only have avoided this fate by surrendering her sovereignty.

Planning in the main did not fail after 1949 in Sichuan. When the American threat was slight (during the 1950s, thanks to the SinoSoviet alliance) and when it receded after 1978, the Chinese economy grew remarkably quickly. It is certainly not [a] coincidence that the restoration of diplomatic relations with the USA saw the beginning of the Dengist economic 'miracle'. After 1979, investment could be reoriented towards the civilian sector. and increments to national income could be consumed rather than invested. Moreover, it was the shift in the production possibility frontier that had been achieved during the Maoist years-creation of industrial capital, the building of transport infrastructure, the massive investment of labor time in water conservancy, and a better-educated work-foree-that made possible that acceleration of growth. Further, it was not planning that failed during. the Great Leap Forward but rather the absence of central economic direction. None of this is to suggest that microeconomic failures did not happen; the insistence on double rice cropping in areas where the climate was manifestly unsuitable is one notable example. However, there are examples of technological failure occurring under all manner of economic system. What matters is not isolated failures but the net impact of planning, and there is reason to conclude that the rate of technical progress achieved in the circumstances was impressive; the extent to which high-yielding varieties had been pioneered and diffused by the late 1970s is a particularly remarkable instance of success. [Source]

China today backs reactionary countries against the masses; it has backed India and the Philippines against their people’s wars, it supports Israel’s settler-colonial and genocidal project against the Palestinian people, and it has sold weapons to Saudi Arabia, which uses them in bombings of Yemen. China does all of these not because it in particular is “bad”, but because it is a capitalist-imperialist country; like all capitalist-imperialist countries, China needs to expand its capital, and to do that, it needs loyal puppets. The only differences between the US and China regarding this are the actual actions each country takes to secure “possessions”, with the US relying on military force and sanctions while China relies on large loans of capital.

Domestically, the capitalist state and the “Communist” Party suppress workers. China’s unemployment rate is higher than America’s; no “socialist” economy should commodify labor-power, yet that is precisely what China does. Much of China’s healthcare is privatized, and private “schooling” is growing as well. All of these, along with the general rise in prices, negate the effects of “rising wages”; yes, workers may sell their labor-power for more units of money, but they have to spend more of that money, so their real wages have been in decline. From Victory to Defeat reveals the issues China’s capitalist economy created for the working class:

In the 1990s, former state-owned factories went through rounds of restructuring that laid off tens of millions of workers, who only received a very small monthly payment below the minimum amount needed to subsist. The newly unemployed workers were also deprived of any healthcare. Hospitals and health clinics that previously provided medical care to workers began charging high fees to cover their own costs as required by the Reform. In 2004 I visited Shenyang, which had been a flourishing industrial city in northeast China where heavy industry had been concentrated. By that time it looked like a ghost town where stores, nurseries, barbershops, and bath-houses were all shut down. Unemployed workers lined the street selling a few household items including family pets for cash but nobody was buying. These workers displayed “for hire” signs offering to work any odd job but no one could afford to hire them

A friend who accompanied me on that trip took me to the home of an unemployed worker. Everyone in the household—the husband, the wife, and the son—were all unemployed. The family tried to make a few RMB (Chinese dollars) by selling some food items on the street, but the small cart they had bought was overturned by a strong wind and everything was lost. The husband told me that he suffered from very bad stomach pain. When he went to the hospital the doctor ordered an expensive test and after paying for the test he had no money left to buy the medicine. The wife was a factory worker all of her adult life, but her job was terminated. The son was over thirty years old and a discharged soldier. He said that he felt his life was over. Tens of millions of laid-off workers in many industrial cities all over China were in similar situations. All of them tried to find some way to eke out a living. Some did succeed as street vendors, taxi drivers or food servers. Many women became prostitutes. Like their Third World sisters and brothers, they became part of the underground economy. These former proud factory workers have to constantly look for buyers for their labor power just to survive. At the same time, they face relentless harassment and abuse from the police. The police often charge them with some trumped up violation and force them to pay a fine that wipes out the entire earnings from their day’s work.

The privatization of state-owned enterprises has been a major component of China’s capitalist Reform. In the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of factories in older industrial cities all over China started going through rounds of restructuring. Many laid-off workers fought to save the factories where they had worked for decades from being closed or sold. Workers protected the machinery and equipment from being moved away and destroyed. But they could not sustain their struggle against the powerful political forces of privatization. [Source]

Still, most claims in Western bourgeois media about China are nonsense. They are highly exaggerated, attempt to link China’s negatives with “communism”, and do not help the people anyway. That is why we do not support imperialist narratives about China. Rather, we criticize China with points from the masses, not the imperialist bourgeoisie. For example, the supposed “Uyghur genocide” is a talking point that US imperialists—who committed crimes against humanity far worse than China’s—is baseless; China has no reason to kill off the Uyghur people or to make their language and culture go extinct. China also did not “create” COVID-19; it became a major victim of the disease, and it gained nothing from the virus. Thus, when we see Western media making extreme claims about China, it is best that we dismiss them, or at least look into them seriously before believing them.

Southeast Asian communist parties, like the CPM, CPB, CPT, and more followed China’s capitalist restoration with their falls to revisionism; they supported China in regional conflicts as it and Kampuchea fought Vietnam and Laos in the 1980’s. The CPM referred to China as a “socialist” state led by the “wise” Hua Guofeng and later Deng Xiaoping the “modernizer”, and the party abandoned its revolutionary struggle in 1989 as he sought to improve relations with American puppet regimes against the Soviet puppets of Vietnam and Kampuchea [Source]. The CPK, meanwhile, embraced Deng Xiaoping and denounced the proletarian “Gang of Four” in an opportunist attempt to win Chinese support [Source]. The CPT, CPB, and CPK all abandoned their struggles before the 1990’s, as capitalist China improved relations with Thailand and Burma^[119]—which resulted in great defections and the loss of support for the CPT while the CPB faced nationalist splinters (which are now active as various nationalities’ armies) and got forced to seek refuge in China—while the CPK felt forced to abandon communism altogether in favor of Khmer nationalism as it fought Vietnam’s invasion of the country.^[120] All these parties’ capitulations came from their alliance with Chinese revisionism, meaning that they made the grave error of replacing proletarian leadership with national-bourgeois leadership, which then became a pro-Chinese comprador-bourgeois leadership.

While old Marxist-Leninist and pro-Mao Zedong Thought groups fell off in this time period, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist groups remained active in their people’s wars, but that is covered in the section on that ideology’s application. Besides that, the CPB restarted its activity in Burma in 2021, after a military coup occurred and the old comprador government went into exile. The CPB joined that exiled government in fighting the coup, but its nationalist splinters that remained active in the country got divided over which side to support; imperialist countries like the US and China nominally denounced the coup and support the exiled government, but China has made de facto ties with the new regime. Both sides remain compradors of imperialism, though, and they both oppress the many nations of Myanmar (particularly the Rohingya Muslims who have fled to Bangladesh and India). This is why a new CPB needs to be made on a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist basis, as the current party serves comprador capital and not the masses of Myanmar.

Now we will cover revisionist countries in other parts of the world.

Other Regions

In 1959, Cuba experienced an anti-imperialist and leftist revolution, but it was not communist; Fidel Castro, the leader of this revolution, had not claimed to be a Marxist-Leninist yet, but he was still “left-wing” of some sort. Castro was not a “communist dictator”. Actually, he had condemned both communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He said: “Communism means the dictatorship of the proletariat, the dictatorship of a class. I have fought my entire life against dictatorship.” He only claimed to support communism to get the support of the USSR, which had turned revisionist long before his ascendance.

Cuba is no example that socialism “fails”; Cuba is a tiny island 90 miles away from the US, and it has to deal with a brutal de facto blockade. American imperialists admit that their blockade was designed and is used to cripple Cuban society and encourage the overthrow of the current government. The “Program Review by the Chief of Operations, Operation Mongoose (Lansdale)” explicitly states this, revealing the genocidal and inhumane views of the American imperialist ruling class (our emphasis):

Basically, the operation is to bring about the revolt of the Cuban people. The revolt will overthrow the Communist regime and institute a new government with which the United States can live in peace.

The revolt requires a strongly motivated political action movement established within Cuba, to generate the revolt, to give it direction towards the object, and to capitalize on the climactic moment. The political actions will be assisted by economic warfare to induce failure of the Communist regime to supply Cubaʼs economic needs, psychological operations to turn the peoplesʼ resentment increasingly against the regime, and military-type groups to give the popular movement an action arm for sabotage and armed resistance in support of political objectives. [Source]

Cuba has made remarkable progress given its terrible conditions. Cuba was able to improve literacy, education, healthcare access, and more. The country’s life expectancy is higher than the US’s, and that says a lot when the US is the richest and most powerful capitalist-imperialist country while Cuba was and is a victim of imperialist exploitation and subjugation.^[121] Its democratic government is the closest system we have to proletarian democracy; that is why Cuban representatives are instantly recallable, and it is why the masses are far more involved in government than they are in other countries’ governments. Thus, Cuba deserves a lot of praise.

This is why we Marxists view Cuba and the world with dialectical materialism: we see the contradictions that Cuba has, and we recognize that there are negative and positive aspects in the country. Cuba is not socialist, but its progress in the face of US imperialism is astounding and similar to socialist states; when America turns socialist, one of its first actions must be the extinguishing of the cruel policies that hinder the economic development of third world countries, including the rather impressive one of Cuba, and that liberation will allow for genuine socialism to come about.

The reason we say Cuba is not socialist is that it first became a semi-colony of Soviet social imperialism before becoming one of Chinese and Russian imperialism. RCPUSA published a pamphlet on the topic called “Cuba: the Evaporation of a Myth”. In it, they conveyed this information:

Castro said that the main problem facing the revolution was how “to produce the abundance necessary for communism”—meaning, to him, trading sugar for the means of production and machinery that he felt the worldrig class could never produce by relying on its own efforts. And to do this the Cuban leaders’ plan amounted to putting the substance of the old relations of production, in somewhat altered form—society's division of labor and its sugar plantations—to work at top speed to produce the goods to sell to get this wealthier. Now the buyer and “provider” was no longer to be the US, but the Soviet Union.

Once this line was adopted, the enthusiasm of the masses for changing the old society was increasingly perverted so that the role of the working class, rather than revolutionizing society, was reduced to working hard to produce the necessary cash. Thus the basic capitalist relation of production was preserved and strengthened the subordination of the working class to production for profit. Rather than a new socialist society, and still less communism, this was, in essence, the same old society with new masters. The workers’ role was to work hard. The Cuban leaders more and more became bureaucratic state capitalists dependent on a foreign imperialist power.

Even the revolutionary fervor and desire of the Cuban people to support anti-imperialist struggles, exemplified by their support for the people of Vietnam, was twisted to support Soviet adventures abroad against their US rivals, as in Bangladesh and in Angola.

Once the basic political road was taken of buying “socialism” instead of relying on and mobilizing the class struggle of the working class and masses which alone could revolutionize society, the basic economic policy of the Cuban revisionists followed as surely as night follows day. The cash that Castro sought could only be obtained by preserving and strengthening the very lopsided and semicolonial economy that had led to the Cuban revolution in the first place. The production of sugar for sale to the Soviet Union became the basis of economic policy, which all the get-rich-quick schemes, "socialist" proclamations and gimmicks depended on and served. And this economic dependency, in tum, became the basis for the further development of the political line of the Cuban leadership. …

… The USSR offered to substantially increase its loans to Cuba and buy up to five million tons a year of Cuban sugar—more than the country was then producing—at higher than the world market price at that time, so that Cuba could buy goods from the Soviets. The “aid” was the bait, and sugar the hook—and the Cuban Leaders swallowed it.

For the rulers of the Soviet Union this was good business. Having overthrown the rule of the working class in the USSR, these new capitalists were increasingly driven by tire laws of imperialism: the need to monopolize sources of raw materials, to export capital for the purpose of extracting superprofits and to contend with imperialist rivals for world domination. They saw that in tying Cuba into their imperialist orbit they would be able to extract great wealth out of Cuba over the years and use Cuba as a political and military tool in their contention with their US rivals. [Source]

Che Guevara, another leader of this movement, critiqued Castro and the Cuban government for siding with the USSR in the Sino-Soviet split, and eventually he left his positions in the Cuban government to try and spread his focoist^[122] method of rebellion across Latin America. That meant the only real semblance of a proletarian leadership was kept from power, meaning that Cuba’s leadership remained bourgeois.^[123] In fact, Che’s leadership would have been petty-bourgeois at best, as “Latin America: People's War great victories and brilliant perspectives” by the PCP describes his overall trend:

With the victory of the armed struggle in Cuba in 1959, and the activity of the Castroist movement, Latin America has suffered an erroneous and harmful influence by part of petty-bourgeois “tercerismo” [which roughly translates to “[MTBA]”]

Tercerismo is a renewed version of the vain attempts of the petty-bourgeoisie to substitute the proletariat as the leading factor in the revolution and wrest away its hegemony. The terceristas and their "ideologues" spread their so-called "particularity" of the revolution in Latin-America, fiercely attacking Marxism-Leninism-MaoTse-tung Thought [today Maoism], preaching its obsolescence, as well as the universal laws of the People's War.

Petty-bourgeois terceristas substitute the proletarian politics by bourgeois politics. They negate the leadership of the working class and their political party, and trust the actions of the group of petty-bourgeois heroes and their bourgeois military line. They pay homage to weapons and reject the protracted and systematic political work among the masses (especially the peasantry), favoring guerrilla "focos" for the auctioning of wandering armed bands. They cultivate spontaneity, initiating the military activities without considering the political conditions and the subjective desire of the masses (acting above the conscience of the masses.) [Source]

Cuba’s dependence on the USSR caused even harsher difficulties after the latter’s dissolution, and now it officially legalized private enterprise and further promotes for-profit production. Some of the measures the revisionist rulers of Cuba enact would be necessary in a Cuban proletarian state as well, such as the concessions to the petty bourgeoisie that are given right now; we are not left-opportunists, so we do not deny the need for compromises similar to the USSR’s NEP. However, we fail to see how other measures, especially the focus on profitability, are truly necessary for Cuba; those “concessions” and “compromises” are what revisionists use in their cooperation with imperialism. Regardless, our principal position is that of opposing US imperialism, for the demise of American imperialism frees the Cuban people and may allow for a proletarian line to gain power in the country.

During the Cold War, many self-proclaimed non-communist “socialist” nations were born in the third world (in Asia, Africa, and Latin America). These countries were what the USSR claimed were moving toward socialism, even though they were really just puppets of Soviet social imperialism by the 1960s. Some of these included India, Bangladesh, Burma (now Myanmar), Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and Sudan. Certain countries—like Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, and more—claimed to be led by “communist” parties, but they were really capitalist parties that were puppets of Soviet social imperialism. They often had truly communist resistance within their borders (like many of the European revisionist states), and revolutionary China and Albania supported that fight of the people. What is important to note about these governments is that they were not dictatorships of the proletariat, and they did not even have the leadership of nominally “communist” parties; both of these are required for a country to be socialist. That being said, the countries that were genuinely anti-imperialist were led by their national bourgeoisie, so they were progressive against imperialism and thus won the support of the international proletariat, including socialist China and Albania; China also maintained peaceful coexistence with compradors of imperialism, including compradors of Soviet imperialism that were not direct threats to China’s sovereignty.

We’ll start with Latin America [MTBA]

The most unique experience is Yemen. In 1967, the People’s Republic of Southern Yemen, later the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, declared independence from Britain. [MTBA]

In addition to them is the experience of Ghana. [MTBA]

Burkina Faso had a “socialist revolution” in 1983, and it was genuinely anti-imperialist, but because it did not arise from a people’s war, it failed. It had the support of Albania, which was turning revisionist by then, but it did not construct any People’s Democracy. It was truly progressive, and we do support it against imperialist aggression, but the fact of the matter is that it could not withstand French and American colonialism and imperialism because its government did not mobilize the masses and construct New Democracy or socialism. In “The Fall of Captain Sankara, or Why You Can’t Make Revolution without the Masses” by A World to Win, it says:

Sankara called his revolution a "People’s Democratic revolution," the goal of which was to get the people to "assume power." In fact this concentrates much of the problem: political power was never seized from below, through people's war. Instead, emerging as the charismatic leader of a fiercely nationalist, anticolonialist wing of the army, the radical young captain Sankara found himself Prime Minister in November 1982, when an army doctor commander, Jean-Baptiste Ouedraogo, took over the presidency with the collaboration of the left-wing officers and unions. …

Despite his sympathies for the plight of the peasants and undoubtedly genuine desires to improve their lives, Sankara did not rely on them and they never became his social base: his outlook and line coincided instead with that of the urban petite bourgeoisie, and from the beginning was one which could not liberate the vast majority of the toiling masses in Burkina Faso. …

Sankara tried to mobilize but could not rely on the peasantry, which had to be the bedrock and main base of support for any real revolutionary transformation in a country like Burkina Faso. He wanted to break out of the clutches of imperialism but stood at the head of a reactionary state apparatus that had been created by the imperialists themselves. The fact that he was shot down by the very neo colonial army in which he served shows once again, as if the proletariat had need of another such lesson, that there is no substitute for the destruction of the state apparatus by the revolutionary masses.

Sankara's relatively painless seizure of power in 1983 actually left the old state power and the old social system essentially intact. Despite this, the Western imperialists were not indifferent to this attempt to deviate from the traditional neocolonial path, and their overall necessities in today's world accelerated their political and financial manipulations to normalize the script, after tolerating a brief flirtation with African social-democracy.

The playing out of this scenario, at the price of a tightened grip on the oppressed, strengthens the verdict that no social class other than the proletariat can represent their genuinely revolutionary interests and no shortcuts are available to liberation from imperialism from the difficult and demanding road of people's war and the conscious struggle of the masses. [Source]

Certain Sahel countries in recent years have once again had similar progressive coups against old comprador regimes, including Burkina Faso with its leader Ibrahim Traore. While communists do not oppose these coups themselves, we see that with enough time, the national-bourgeois leaders will either be overthrown, or they will submit to imperialism, for only the proletariat is capable of leading people’s war and building power from the masses to the masses, and only the proletariat can stand for itself against imperialism [Source].

From back when Marxism-Leninism started becoming an ideology until today, numerous Marxist-Leninist parties in other countries emerged, and of them, some turned revisionist while others stayed Marxist-Leninist; of the Marxist-Leninist ones, some upheld Mao Zedong Thought if they felt it was appropriate. Many “Marxist-Leninist” groups exist today; they have not started revolution, and at this point, they cannot, for they are really opportunist and thus bourgeois.^[124] To combat revisionism, adapt to new conditions, and successfully wage revolution, genuine revolutionary communists and their parties developed and upheld Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

Modern Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Movements

This section has some overlap with the section on Marxism-Leninism’s history; in fact, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism was only synthesized in 1982, but this section starts as early as 1967. While many changes happened across the world, these people’s wars began. They began in India, Peru, Philippines, and Turkey, and there is even some activity in Nepal. To learn about these modern revolutions, we must go back to their pasts. As of right now, all of the people’s wars are in the strategic defense stage of protracted people’s war. While some are clearly stronger than others (the Philippine revolution is particularly doing well), none of them are as strong as the states that they fight. The revolutionary people continue to wage attacks on these states, though, and they do not give up. There are also Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties in other countries that are preparing for people’s war; America does not have one, though, so we hope to make it!

Let us look into the history and current aspects of the ongoing people’s wars, starting with the first of them.

India

The conditions for revolution had been ripe in India. India was a colony of the United Kingdom until 1947, when it de jure became a dominion of the British Empire (until 1950, when it became an “independent” republic). In practice, India has remained a semi-colonial, semi-feudal state, exploited by various capitalist-imperialists, especially the British, American, and later Soviet capitalists. India’s constitution nominally claimed and claims that the country is “socialist”, but it has been a dictatorship of the comprador bourgeoisie. Communists in India recognized this, so in the years after “independence”, many of them worked on organizing for revolution. In particular, anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninists in the “Communist Party of India (Marxist)”^[125] (CPI(M), also called CPM), led by Charu Majumdar (an Indian revolutionary leader), advocated for a New-Democratic revolution in India. This was seen in Majumdar’s Historic Eight Documents, written in 1965–66.

Indian bureaucratic-comprador capitalism was failing; peasants, the growers of food, struggled to feed themselves and their families. The Indian state responded not with food aid, but with the suppression of protesting peasants. Workers resorted to gheraos to protest their exploitation. The leaders of CPM did not support the workers, but it actually discouraged them from doing this! Majumdar wrote about this in his document called “Carry Forward the Peasant Struggle by Fighting Revisionism”:

In the post-election period our apprehensions are being proved correct by the actions of the party (CPI-M) leadership itself. The Polit Bureau has directed us to “carry on the struggle to defend the non-Congress ministries against reaction.” This suggests that the main task of Marxists is not to intensify the class struggle, but to plead on behalf of the Cabinet. So a convention of party members was convened to firmly establish economism within the working class. Immediately thereafter, an agreement for a truce in industry was signed at the Cabinet’s initiative. Workers were asked not to resort to gheraos. What could be a more naked expression of class collaboration? After giving the employers full right to exploit, the workers are being asked not to wage any struggle. Immediately after the Communist Party joined the Government that was installed as a result of a mighty mass movement, the path of class collaboration was chosen. The Chinese leaders predicted long ago that those who had remained neutral in the international debate would very soon take to the path of opportunism. Now, the Chinese leaders are saying that these advocates of a neutral stand are in reality revisionists and they would soon cross over to the reactionary camp. In our country we are experiencing how true this prediction is. We have witnessed the betrayal of the working class. [Source]

On May 18, 1967, the Indian peasants of Naxalbari, led by radical members of CPM, revolted against their landlords; to the dismay of these peasants, most of the so-called CPM turned against them and supported the Indian state forces, and it purged radicals. The reason for this was that the party held legal political power, and its rightist members did not want to compromise that for revolution. A week later, Charu Majumdar and other revolutionary leaders led another uprising, and this spread to tribals^[126] and other peasants attacking state forces and landlords. As expected, though totally unacceptable, the revisionist, social-imperialist USSR and its puppets armed India and supported the reactionaries and revisionists against the people’s war.

The All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR), founded in November 1967, was the organization that became the first to lead the Indian people’s war for New Democracy. Two years later, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI(ML)) was founded as the vanguard party that would continue to lead it. However, in 1971, Satyanarayan Singh led a faction of the CPI(ML) that combatted Majumdar for alleged “sectarianism” and “individual annihilations”, valid criticisms of him abused to justify revisionism; as is shown later, his group turned right-opportunist, revisionist, electoralist. Majumdar’s party remained until Majumdar was captured, tortured, and killed in prison a year later, after which the event, combined with internal disunity and violent repression from the state, caused the party to fall apart into different, sometimes rivaling factions. Chapter Five of Storming the Gates of Heaven: The Maoist Movement in India, written by Amit Bhattacharyya, states how Majumdar’s death was followed by brutal state repression and the replacement of bourgeois democracy with fascism, especially under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency in 1975–77:

The death of Charu Mazumdar signaled the end of the first phase of the Naxalbari revolutionary movement. All revolutionary forces were in a disarray; thousands were killed by the police, security forces, Congress lumpens, and CPI(M) cadres, while a large number were imprisoned on charges of sedition and carrying of illegal arms, as also detained without trial under the black law called MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act). The reactionaries now occupied the center stage of politics and bared their fangs. The Congress came to power in 1972 after the West Bengal legislative assembly elections by indulging in rigging on an unprecedented scale. The Congress regime led by Siddhartha Sankar Ray initiated a fascist rule throughout the state and mobilized all lumpens and goons of the ruling party to eliminate all dissident voices. The CPI(M) that had earlier colluded with the Congress forces to annihilate the Naxalites, themselves became targets of attack from the Congress hoodlums. While the Naxalites were killed by the thousands, the CPI(M) cadres were killed by the hundreds.^[127] However, none of the top leaders of the CPI(M) was arrested by the West Bengal government except one MP [member of parliament] from Diamond Harbour, district 24-Parganas. Young men branded as Naxalites were picked up from the streets, and… were then tortured, or killed in fake encounters, or sent to prison. The declaration of the countrywide Emergency in 1975 by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi put the last nail on the coffin of “Indian democracy”. [Source]

While CPI(ML) fell into various splitting factions, the new parties differed in ideological stances, especially on the issues of Charu Majumdar and Lin Biao. While some parties became less forceful and more reformist, others continued the revolution. This only worsened thanks to state repression during the state of emergency; thousands of Maoists were arrested and murdered, isolating many party units and bringing ideological confusion, division, etc.. Bhattacharyya wrote on this in his book (our emphasis):

Throughout the decade of the 1970s, attempts at unification of the party were made by the various factions of CPI(ML), but due to the failure to achieve a unified understanding of past mistakes as well as due to the differences in the strategy and tactics of the Indian revolution, besides different perceptions arising out of segregated practice, these attempts proved to be futile. The isolated existence and functioning of separate factions each claiming itself to be the genuine revolutionary party were considered to be the biggest hurdle to the Indian revolution. There were close to forty groups each claiming to be the revolutionary party and swearing by Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. There were at least a dozen central committees functioning under different names. …

However, of them, three distinct trends with variations in each were clearly noticeable. The first trend was essentially a continuation of the left line based on the “annihilation of class enemies” represented by the CPI(ML) Second Central Committee group… [which] was formed during November-December 1973 at its Second Congress under the leadership of Mahadev Mukherjee. This group made no self-criticism, had no direction for the future, made Charu Majumdar into a god, criticized all others as “revisionists”, and stuck more strongly to the old tactical line that had already proved to be erroneous and self-defeating. After the death of Lin Biao of the CPC in a plane crash while fleeing to the Soviet Union in 1971 and his fall from the second top position as a revisionist, this group came to be the pro-CM [Charu Majumdar] pro-Lin group. … The Second CC underwent some divisions, a few reviewed their past [and] tried to come out of the ultra-left line… The CPI(ML) led by Jahar… also followed the CM line in toto; however, after the Lin Biao episode, it developed differences with the Second CC group and was known as the pro-CM, anti-Lin group. After the Emergency, the new secretary of the party, Vinod Mishra… led the party, step by step, to the extreme right. This group, known later as the CPI(ML) Liberation, revised all its earlier positions, became a parliamentary party and ended up in the camps of the CPI and CPI(M). …

The second trend consisted of those who swung to the right… by criticizing the entire tactical line of the CPI(ML) and once again sought participation in elections. The “Revived Central Committee” [Provisional Central Committee] formed by Satyanarayan Singh of Bihar earlier in November 1972, was joined by some other leading members… who had earlier been vocal about establishing the “revolutionary authority” of Charu Majumdar and were themselves instrumental in initiating the “left-adventurist” line in West Bengal. … This group now placed themselves in a diametrically opposite position… and put the entire blame for the setback on Charu Majumdar without admitting their own responsibility for it. This group gradually swung towards the right and ultimately disowned the strategy of agrarian revolution altogether. They were joined later by Kanu Sanyal, who was in prison then, and then finally veered towards the CPI(M), thereby disowning the whole Naxalbari struggle itself—a struggle that endeared themselves to the toiling masses of India.

There was a third trend. It was particularly represented by the COC (Central Organizing Committee) which upheld the essence of the CPI(ML) line, but sought to rectify the “left” errors. The COC comprised state units from Punjab, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, and Bihar. … The Punjab unit later merged with the Unity Organization to form the CPI(ML) Party Unity [CPI(ML)PU] in 1978, and the Andhra Pradesh unit developed into the CPI(ML) People’s War [CPI(ML)PW] in 1980. During that period, the Maoist Communist Center (MCC) [later MCC of India (MCCI)], active as a separate center since October 1969, developed some struggles in the Ausgram and Budbud areas in the Burdwan district of West Bengal; however, these could hardly make any impact on the revolutionary politics in West Bengal and died down within a brief period. The reality was that there was hardly any leadership in West Bengal capable of summing up the experiences of the past struggles and giving concrete directions for the future. [Source]

The book cited earlier goes into much further detail regarding how the parties and their factions split and/or united and the lines they took regarding class struggle and ideology. Most importantly, CPI(ML)PU absorbed a faction of the COC in 1982, and that party joined CPI(ML)PW in 1998. After all of that hell, two major revolutionary parties, the MCCI and the CPI(ML)PW, merged to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI (Maoist)) in 2004. CPI (Maoist) has been the main party leading the people’s war, though there are other Maoist and Marxist-Leninist organizations in this battle for New Democracy.

Along with the Indian people’s war is the people’s war in Bangladesh. [MTBA]

There are national liberation struggles that also exist in India as the state suppresses many nations, and the Indian Maoists express their support for them. Various ethnic groups in the northeastern states in India are fighting for their right to self-determination; a lot of their organizations are around the United National Liberation Front of Western South East Asia (UNLFW); these organizations are primarily not communist, but they have communist support. Another united front exists of communist organizations in Manipur (one of the northeastern states); their alliance is the Coordination Committee (CorCOM). The state of Manipur has the Maoist Communist Party of Manipur (MCPM), a party allied to CPI (Maoist). We hope for the liberation of these peoples, and we hope for the masses’ communist parties to rule there.

The state of Jammu and Kashmir has a national liberation struggle that CPI (Maoist) supports. India and Pakistan divided the region in two, but they fought and still fight over control over it entirely; they served opposing imperialist powers during the Cold War since the US supported Pakistan while the USSR supported India, so their fights to control Jammu and Kashmir were really for their imperialist bosses. China, as described in the subsection on Asia’s application of Marxism-Leninism, wanted to maintain Aksai Chin (a portion of this state) to have trade between Tibet and Xinjiang; today’s capitalist China still asserts its claim, albeit for capitalist reasons. The proletarian position on the conflict is to support self-determination for the Kashmiri nation:

The desire for independence has been simmering inside the hearts of the Kashmiris since then and it turned into a militant armed movement in the 90s. Many militant organizations conducted armed struggle. Though there are some differences in the political aims of these organizations, they got the support of the people because they expressed the national liberation aspirations of the Kashmiris. … The Indian ruling classes had resorted to all kinds of conspiracies and scheming and had ignited differences between Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims using divide and rule policy. … With the excuse that there are pro-Pakistan forces and Islamic forces in the movement of the Kashmiris, Indian rulers are propagating that the movement of the Kashmiris is aimed at seceding from India and integrating in Pakistan. This is nothing but an utter lie. The only aspiration of the Kashmiris right from the beginning is to win liberation for their nationality. … CPI (Maoist) firmly reiterates that Kashmiri movement for the liberation of Kashmiris, for their right to self-determination is completely just and that neither India nor Pakistan have any rights over them. [Source]

The CPI (Maoist) does not have an official united front organization, but it has numerous organizations that are connected with it, making a de facto united front. The most important organizations of the united front are the Revolutionary People’s Committees, the groups that help make up the New-Democratic state in India, and the Revolutionary Mass Organizations, the groups that take care of various tasks among the people, including economic organization, political agitation, and more; they even provide basic healthcare, education, and other services for the masses when the state abandons them and the ruling classes attempt to exploit them. With these organizations, the party uses the mass line method of leading the people; it supports democracy for the people, and centralism exists as the party tells the people what they must do.

CPI (Maoist) has an official people’s army, the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA); it initially belonged to MCCI, but it merged with CPI(ML)PW’s army when the parties merged. The PLGA has “platoons, companies and battalions” [Source]. CPI (Maoist) also has a militia, namely the People’s Militia; this serves two functions: it is a support force for the PLGA, and it supervises the army, making sure it remains a genuine people’s army and not a revisionist, enemy’s army. MCPM has the New People’s Militia, “a first stage to develop Guerrilla Forces and then finally red army for the advancement of the protracted peoples' war in Manipur” [Source]. These organizations are crucial for the people’s war, as the masses democratically control them while the army, in a centralist manner, gives direction to the masses in the war. Unlike the army of the enemy, the PLGA is made by, for, and of the people, so it makes sure to respect, protect, and truly serve the people. This is why the downtrodden people support this army and not the reactionary Indian army.

Something interesting to note about the three weapons of the Indian revolution—and this is also the case for the other people’s wars—is the large number of women involved in all of the organizations. CPI (Maoist), the PLGA, the militia, and the united front all fairly represent the women among the masses. Even bourgeois media admits that at least 60% of party cadres and soldiers are women, and this is because of the extreme oppression women face, especially women of poorer and tribal backgrounds. This empowerment of working-class and peasant women is admirable of the revolutionaries, and we ought to learn from their great example; we must not confuse this with identity opportunism, which focuses on identity politics at the expense of class struggle.

The reactionary Indian state launched Operation Green Hunt, its most recent attack, in 2009. This was done in an attempt to weaken the Indian people’s war. Though the CPI (Maoist) has lost numerous comrades, it still holds some territory from which it can continue the revolution. It is a force of the most oppressed of the Indian people, and consequently, it shall not die easily. If anything, with all of the problems that India has now, the Indian people have no real choice but to support revolutionary communism, support the building of New Democracy and socialism in India, and oppose all reactionary systems. India’s ruling party is Hindu nationalist; it is reactionary, and its supporters attack Christians, Muslims, and people of lower castes and indigenous tribes. CPI (Maoist) is tasked with combating this fascism, and so it allows people of all religions, castes, and tribes to join. It is absolutely the most revolutionary, democratic force in India, and that is why India wants to crush it.

The rulers’ thugs raid villages, often with poor people inhabiting them, and they destroy their property for allegedly aiding the revolutionaries. The book Operation “Green Hunt” in India by Adolfo Naya Fernandez explains how the fascist Indian state is committing genocide in its fight against the people’s war; it lists the characteristics of genocides committed in the past, and it clearly shows how “Green Hunt” fits these characteristics. In the Conclusion, it says:

Capitalism, in its highest stage, imperialism, shows that it moves “like a fish in water” in regards to the extermination of human beings, since that is its own predatory nature. As such, genocide is a “common” practice. …

It is clear that the events and practices narrated here, and what the Adivasis, Dalits and “Naxalites” are suffering constitute crimes against humanity…

The evidence provided in this investigation certifies that a genocidal practice is being carried out that complies with all the legal characteristics to be able to be brought to the International Criminal Court. …

That is why the only alternative for the survival of the Adivasis, Dalits and Naxalite militants who believe in another society, is a radical change in the semi-feudal and semi-colonial society of India, as well as the international support and solidarity to stop this massacre, so that they can advance in their objective of building a new society without classes, castes, racism and patriarchy. [Source]

We must oppose the fascist suppression of the revolution. The masses support the communists, or at least they are sympathetic to their cause, and the state cannot win when the masses oppose it.

Let the people of India be victorious! India shall truly become the world’s largest democracy when its people’s war succeeds!

The Philippines

Like in India, the conditions in the Philippines made New-Democratic revolution a necessity. Despite nominally gaining independence from Japan after World War 2, the country was not genuinely free. The US gained de facto control over the country, making a puppet state out of it; the Philippines was and is a semi-feudal country, so bureaucratic-comprador capitalism developed. The Filipino masses were exploited and enslaved. In the years following “independence”, whatever remained of the revolutionary movement was crushed. The document called “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought as Guide to the Philippine Revolution” summarizes this:

After the crushing defeat of the revolutionary movement in 1950 and for nearly a decade afterwards, the revolutionary road had been enveloped in darkness both by the power of US imperialism and the local exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords and by a long chain of unrectified grave errors and shortcomings. [Source]

Jose Maria Canlas Sison (also known as “Joma”), the leader of the people’s war in the Philippines, wrote Specific Characteristics of our People’s War, and in it, he explains why the Philippines was a semi-colony of US imperialism:

The mastermind behind the fascist dictatorship is US imperialism. The fascist dictatorship has been set up to make sure that under a “new constitution” the privileges and interests of US imperialism under the 1935 Constitution, the Parity Amendment and the Laurel-Langley Agreement are not only preserved but even enlarged in the face of the growing anti-imperialist struggle of the broad masses of the people and furthermore to harden the Philippines as a base of US imperialism in the western rim of the Pacific and in Asia and in the face of the failed US war of aggression in Indochina. …

US imperialism maintained a firm grip on its Philippine colony. It continued to cultivate a retinue of reactionary politicians under its orders and further used the country as a forward base for its expansion in Asia. Only in 1930 was the Communist Party of the Philippines founded under conditions of world depression and local social unrest.

The world capitalist system continued to undergo a general crisis even as the first inter-imperialist war had just ended. Subsequently, fascist regimes emerged in a number of Western European countries and in Japan. The struggle for the redivision of the world among the imperialist powers further intensified. Inevitably World War II broke out. As it did in connection with the first inter-imperialist war, the United States made profits on loans and war production before and throughout the war and provided supplies to both warring sides until it was ready to join the war on the winning side and pick up the spoils.

The United States emerged from the war as the Number One imperialist power, having gained hegemony over the entire capitalist system and assuming the principal responsibility for retaining the colonies and semi-colonies throughout the world. It was in a strong position to reconquer the Philippines from the Japanese fascist and quell the revolutionary forces here. [Source]

In 1968, Filipino communists, led by Sison, gained inspiration from their Chinese and Indian comrades and formed a new Communist Party of the Philippines (the old one, formed in the 1930s, had gone revisionist and electoralist) in the First Great Rectification. The movement corrected the errors of the reformist revisionists of the old party, and it created a genuine workers’ party. A year later, the communists began their insurgency with just 60 revolutionaries who were part of the New People’s Army (the army that the communist party leads, the NPA). When the fascist Ferdinand Marcos tried to suppress the rebellion through enacting martial law starting in 1972, the people’s war grew in size and popularity. At first, the government downplayed the strength of the CPP, but after martial law was declared, it started hyping up the formation, and this, combined with fascistic repression from the Marcos regime, and the support of the CPP from China and other countries and parties (even revisionist ones, like the DPRK’s “Workers’ Party of Korea” ). In 1973, the united front of this revolutionary movement, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, was founded.

The leader of the government was Ferdinand Marcos, and he was a fascist and puppet of the US. With regards to Marcos’s regime, Sison wrote this in his book on the country’s people’s war:

As a reward [for being a comprador capitalist], Marcos is allowed to remain in power indefinitely for as long as he can be useful to US imperialism and, of course, for as long as his ambition does not go beyond being the general representative of and even becoming the wealthiest by far of the comprador big bourgeoisie and the big landlord class.

The fascist dictator Marcos keeps on prating about his unjust regime being a “new society.” But in fact its monstrous abuses have only served to stress that it is but the worsening of the old semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. We are witness today to unbridled puppetry, brutality, corruption and bankruptcy. Among the local reactionaries, the fascist chieftain, his family and his closest subalterns in the military and civil bureaucracy are the most outstanding beneficiaries of the puppet, brutal, corrupt and bankrupt “new society.”

In essence, the fascist dictatorship is the open terrorist rule of a reactionary clique with big comprador and big landlord interests. The longer it continues in power the more fertile the ground becomes for our people’s war. By negative example, Marcos has stood as the best teacher of the people on the state and revolution. In this sense, he is our best propagandist. He has superbly exposed every evil in this semi-colonial and semi-feudal society by his own lies and misdeeds. His usurpation of all governmental powers; elimination of all legal political parties; monopolization of the press; and the brutal repression of all democratic liberties by such methods as massacre, assassination, zoning, forced mass evacuation, bombardment and arson, blackmail, extortion, illegal arrest, illegal detention and torture have proven beyond doubt the necessity and justness of armed revolution against armed counterrevolution.

All the fascist acts of the US-Marcos clique carried out with brute armed force are calculated to “stabilize” the rule of US imperialism and the local reactionary classes over the broad masses of the people. [Source]

Marcos inadvertently caused the CPP and NPA to become more popular because of his brutality. As a blatant puppet of US imperialism and a representative of landlord and comprador-capitalist interests, he exposed the corrupt and rotten nature of his state, and his crimes against the people resulted in hundreds of workers, peasants, and students taking up arms, joining mass organizations, and working to build new power in the Philippines. Marcos's fascistic rule also destroyed reformists' illusions; the electoralist "communists" in the country and abroad had to face the fact that the comprador-bourgeois state and its imperialist backers, whenever faced with a powerful threat, will use the most brutal methods possible to suppress the people, forcing the people to use equal or even greater violence and authority over their enemies. That is why revolutionary violence was and is justified in the Philippine people's war and in all protracted people's wars!

In 1977, Sison was arrested under the reactionary Marcos regime. After being imprisoned for nine years, he was released and did not continue his military actions. He published numerous books, and he became a political consultant for the NDF. He moved to the Netherlands in 1988 after his passport was canceled; there, he got arrested in 2007 for being linked with certain assassinations that occurred in the Philippines, but the charges were dropped months later after no evidence was found to prove this. Sison lived in the Netherlands since then, sadly passing away in late 2022. Many Marxist-Leninist-Maoists today criticize him and have criticisms of the CPP, especially since he has not been in the Philippines to lead directly, but we will discuss these shortly.

In 1992, there was a split between “reaffirmists” and “rejectionists” in the CPP. The CPP, during its Second Great Rectification, published a document called “Reaffirm Our Basic Principles and Carry the Revolution Forward”, and in it, they restated and defended the principles of their party; they defended their application of Mao Zedong Thought (not yet Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) and critically supported leaders like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. However, certain members of the CPP rejected these principles, and they were labeled “rejectionists”; these people opposed Stalin and Mao while claiming to be “Marxist-Leninists”, and they were rightfully called counter-revolutionary. They formed the “Revolutionary Workers’ Party of the Philippines”, a Trotskyite party; it eventually became reformist even though it nominally seeks to revolt at some point. In addition to that split, there was the “Marxist-Leninist Party of the Philippines”, an organization that “respects Maoism and its members study the works of Leon Trotsky, but it is critical of Stalinism” [Source]; such an organization is obviously left-opportunist, as it attacks the CPP for working with legal mass organizations.

Many other splits occurred due to ideological differences; opportunists ended up going against the people’s war by continually upholding incorrect ideas, killing CPP cadres (with over 1000 comrades murdered by the bastards), and usually surrendering to the state. Nonetheless, the CPP remains to be the party leading the Philippine people’s war, and the people support it over the opportunists. It attacked the petty-bourgeois theories of said opportunists many times, but we will bring up its defense of protracted people’s war; it pushed this line in “Five Kinds of Insurrectionism”:

One kind of insurrectionism proposes to stop the current revolutionary armed struggle and carry out a protracted or indefinite legal struggle until it becomes possible and necessary to launch mass uprising. …

Within the Party, this kind of insurrectionism is merely a latent or potential fallback position for the more hot-headed insurrectionists, if after a long time the armed urban insurrection does not come. Omar Tupas (in Debate) now proposes insurrection or else peaceful settlement. …

A second kind of insurrectionism avows itself as still being within the framework of people’s war and aims only to ride on and accelerate the tendency of the ruling system to disintegrate by deliberately using armed city partisan actions (such as bus burning) during mass actions to inspire the unorganized masses to spontaneous action. The dangerous element in this kind of insurrectionism is the close and direct linkage of the violent actions of armed city partisans with the actions of the legal mass organizations. …

A third kind of insurrectionism… rates the exceptional case of the Sandinista armed “urban” insurrection (the final offensive in isolation) as being superior to the Chinese and Indochinese experience of people’s war as well as to our own practice of people’s war which has yielded a substantial amount of success in building Red political power. …

The “strategic counteroffensive” within the strategic defensive was a [fourth] form of insurrectionism insofar as the model it emulated was the Vietnamese Tet offensive of 1968 and sought to achieve something like this. The central leadership withdrew the concept of the “strategic counter offensive” in 1988. …

A fifth kind of insurrectionism seeks to push the peasant masses into uprisings for the immediate attainment of the maximum kind of land reform, entailing the confiscation of land, warehouses, houses and other properties of landlords. Some elements must have read Mao’s work on the autumn harvest uprising but failed to recognize that the Chinese land reform program during the anti-Japanese struggle is more suitable to the current level of our revolutionary strength in the Philippines. …

When the peasants are well organized and the people’s army is behind them, they can hold back the produce of the land and compel the landlord or his representative to come to the farm to 8 negotiate. When the peasants are not well organized and there is insufficient or no people’s army behind it, why go for a line of rousing them and putting them into violent confrontations with or, into the firing line of, well-organized and well-armed opponents. …

All the five foregoing kinds of insurrectionism proceed from an urban petty bourgeois stand, viewpoint and method of thinking. The urban petty bourgeoisie wants to decide the course of the Philippines from the convenience, if not comfort, of the urban areas. There is the impetuosity which disregards what it takes to take on and defeat the comprador bourgeoisie and landlord 9 class (more politically developed and sophisticated [than] those of Somoza’s Nicaragua) and the U.S. imperialists behind them. [Source]

While the CPP had its rectification and re-affirmation, the bureaucratic-comprador government never stopped its criminal actions when trying to stamp out the people's revolutionary fire; it had put up a mask of bourgeois democracy as early as 1986 (after Marcos fled for the US)^[128], but the new leaders maintained the “use of bombardments from the air and from the ground by artillery fire in order to massacre the people, destroy their homes and farms and force their evacuation. So-called base-denial and search-and-destroy operations are rampant” [Source]. Sison explains more of this in “On the Question of Revolutionary Violence” (and he also shows how the reactionary army increasingly became dependent on imperialist support, for it had no support from the masses):

General Ramos has completely no remorse over the more than two million people turned into refugees by his total war policy and over the thousands of victims of massacres, warrantless arrests and seizures of property, torture and extrajudicial killings since the start of the Aquino regime in 1986.

The military obsession of the Ramos regime is made most obvious by the fact that for the first year of its rule, the military budget has been increased by 20 percent to P31.2 billion. In comparison, the budget for health and education have been decreased by 51 percent and 20 percent respectively. The appropriation for the CAFGU is P1.78 billion or P5 million per day and the number of CAFGU personnel is being increased from 60 thousand to 80 thousand. The budget for intelligence services has also been increased to P392 million. Daily military expenditures is P88 million, excluding those camouflaged under departments other than the department of national defense.

The reactionary armed forces are the main component of the reactionary state and at the same time remain the puppet and mercenary force in the US. The United States has all the levers for controlling the AFP. Although the US has withdrawn its forces from military facilities in the Philippines, they retain access to these and have the core personnel in these under the guise of advisors, liaison officers and technical experts. The military facilities are now maintained mainly at Philippine expense. The US has reduced its financial and military grants and military sales credits are enough to make the reactionary armed forces dependent on the US. [Source]

The state targets the island of Mindanao in its bombings, too. Sison condemned these bombings back in 2000, in his article, “Condemn the Terror Bombings Perpetrated by the Estrada Gang”:

The Estrada ruling gang has done again what it did so many times in Metro Manila and Mindanao in the year 2000 to whip up anti-Moro hysteria and step up its all-out war policy in Mindanao and deflect attention from its corruption scandals.

Estrada and his minions are now putting the blame on others but themselves for the terror bombings. They are desperately trying to collect political profit from their own dastardly crime and to deck out Estrada as the victim rather than the criminal mastermind. …

Estrada is extremely desperate and fearful of losing power, facing criminal prosecution and giving up his ill-gotten wealth. He is therefore committing the most cowardly and most heinous crimes to keep himself in power. He is not only a shameless thief but also a mass murderer through Oplan Makabayan, his all-out war policy and the current bombings

But the broad united front and the people are more than ever determined to wage mass struggles to remove Estrada from power, precisely because of his unbridled corruption and murderous acts. [Source]

Today, the state continuously employs “illegal searches and arrests, interrogations, food and economic blockades, forcible recruitment, curfews, retaliation and collective punishment after NPA tactical offensives, and relentless intimidation and psywar campaigns (‘community support programs’, forcible ‘mass surrenders’, ECLIP, BDP) in the vain hope of cutting the links between the NPA and its peasant mass base” [Source].

Despite those crimes, the Philippine people are undaunted. They continue to build new power. The CPP has many connected organizations that all build the New-Democratic state in the Philippines. Within the party itself, there are now numerous party branches and committees, and the party is organized in a democratic-centralist manner; in the NPA, there are the regular, guerrilla, militia and self-defense, and armed city partisan forces, and all of these have different tactics and strategies in the people’s war [Source]; and in the united front, there are the various people’s parties and the Revolutionary Mass Organizations. With all of these organizations, the amount of support it has, and more, the Philippine people’s war is the strongest of all of the ongoing revolutions.

Around the time the people’s war began, conflict arose in the Mindanao (the second-largest island) region of the Philippines. The Bangsamoro people wanted self-determination from the fascist Philippine state, so the “Moro National Liberation Front” (MNLF) became prominent. In 1977, some members of that group left and created the “Moro Islamic Liberation Front” (MILF; yes, it is a funny abbreviation), an Islamist force; the two groups were allied, but different. Because these forces were national bourgeois and not led by the proletariat, they could not withstand pressure from the state, so they each surrendered in 1996 and 2014, respectively. While the MNLF was in decline, Jihadist groups became more powerful in the region, fighting both the state and the MNLF (and MILF). The Jihadists were simply reactionary opponents to expansionism, and they were never proletarian, so they did not become very popular; they are still fighting, though, and they have not surrendered. Instead, the Moro Resistance and Liberation Organization (MRLO), one of the organizations in the NDF, became the proletarian movement that led the Bangsamoro people to liberation. The CPP supports the MRLO against the Jihadists and the state.

Today, the CPP is tasked with fighting enemies of all stripes. They fight the Philippine state, but they also fight reactionary landlords and comprador capitalists, with the support of the Filipino workers and peasants. In addition to that, they fight reactionism within the people; they fight queerphobia, racism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism. The CPP and the Filipino people combat with Islamist and chauvinist forces in the Moro conflict. Simultaneously, they are able to organize Christians, Muslims, atheists, and others into their ranks, and that is impressive. In addition, LGBTQ+ people and women are safer under the CPP than they are under the reactionary state; they are empowered to take up arms to serve the people, and they are not beaten down and forced into submission like they are under the reactionary classes. The CPP is the most progressive force within the Philippines, and they are leading the masses to liberation and socialism.

Now, onto criticisms of the CPP. Communists tend to call it the rightmost of the rightist parties. This has been the case after Jose Maria Sison left the Philippines; the CPP does not recognize the theoretical contributions of Chairman Gonzalo, and for a long time, it had only considered itself to be following Mao Zedong Thought rather than Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (even after the latter had been synthesized!). The party, under Sison’s political guidance, tried various peace talks, only to have them end as the Philippine fascist state started attacks again; these talks were not about capitulation or otherwise ending the people’s war, but they did not really help in building new power. In addition, the CPP’s understanding of how the people’s three weapons are organized is more “triangular” than concentric [Source]. We will describe more of their errors in “False ‘Maoism’”, a subsection within “Incorrect Ideas”.

Even with these mistakes, we support our Filipino comrades for their struggles and praxis, just as we support our Indian comrades. Their theory may not be perfect, but they do not take the capitalist road. They have done good work despite American and now Chinese imperialism in the Philippines. Keep in mind that there is line struggle within the CPP, and if the left line takes power, we may see errors getting rectified. Time can only tell. Until then, we remain optimistic for the Philippine people’s war, as we do for all people’s wars; the Philippine people’s war in particular seems to be very successful because the comrades hold significant power in 73 of 81 provinces of the Philippines. They have set up impressive forms of New-Democratic government in the liberated areas, and when they win against the Filipino state, they will have a new state already in the making, one of the people. We hope they can rectify errors, lead the people to the very end of the revolution, and have a successful socialist experiment in their country!

Turkey

After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War 1, the imperialists of the Allied Powers (specifically the UK, France, and Italy) occupied Turkey. The comprador bourgeoisie, which ruled the Ottoman Empire, fought this occupation, but later negotiated with the occupiers, allowing themselves to make Turkey a semi-colony rather than a direct colony. This Republic of Turkey initially relied on the support of the Kurdish nation, but following “independence”, the state suppressed Kurdish independence movements. Many “progressives” took the side of the fascist Turkish state in its oppression of the Kurdish nation. In response, genuine communists in Turkey took the side of the Kurdish people against both Turkey’s national oppression of the Kurds and the class oppression of the people by Kurdish comprador capitalists and landlords. Therefore, the national liberation of the Kurds and the war of the Turkish people came together.

There were numerous problems with the Turkish movement, though. Despite all the progressive and even radical, possibly revolutionary groups, there was no communist party, no party for the workers that could lead the masses appropriately. Rather, there was an abundance of petty-bourgeois parties and bourgeois-democratic organizations; even though these movements posed as “socialist” or sometimes even “communists”, they were generally petty-bourgeois radicals that followed “Guevarism” (the term used to describe Guevara’s “petty-bourgeois leftism” [Source]). In Section 2 of the “Kurecik Regional Report”, İbrahim Kaypakkaya explained this situation, at least the part of the situation that concerned his comrades’ activities^[129]:

Apart from election speeches the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TIP) has not been active, which is not only the case here, but is also the same in other areas. …

The most well known and influential group in the area is the THKO^[130] [People's Liberation Army of Turkey], in particular Sinan Cemgil’s group. The arrival of this group in the spring of 1971 in the mountains of this area, their launching of, in their own words, “rural guerrilla”, their going hungry and sleeping in the cold and suffering 3 fatalities, had a profound effect on the people longing for armed struggle and plunged them into sadness. The peasants saw Cemil and his companions’ movement as the concrete expression of their yearning for armed struggle. … The THKO's organizational formation is not a clear and disciplined one, it is anarchic. It has neither a programme nor party rules, and no ideological unity is required from those who join its ranks. They consider everyone who joins as one of them and a member of the organization. Such an organizational form cannot be lasting and so it has been proved. …

The THKP-THKC^[131] [also called THKP-C, People's Liberation Party-Front of Turkey] is not active in the area in question and has no influence. We do not know if they are working in the provincial capital, but it is highly likely that they are active amongst the youth, since it is evident that they are relatively influential amongst high school students and some educated persons. [Source]

The “Revolutionary Workers' and Peasants' Party of Turkey” (“TİİKP” in Turkish) was the party that Turkish communists such as Kaypakkaya were part of prior to the revolution, and they had to leave the party due to its revisionism and its incorrect positions on the Kurdish national question. Kaypakkaya exposed the party’s revisionism in “The Origin and Development of the Differences Between Ourselves and Shafak Revisionism”:

The struggle continuing within the Shafak movement, previously the PDA (Proletarian Revolutionary Daylight?), between the two wings, sometimes in the open, sometimes clandestine, sometimes hardening, sometimes softening, but continuing without a break has finally reached the point where it is no longer possible for the two wings to exist within the same organization. The proletarian wing has now cut all ties with the revisionist-bourgeois clique and embarked on reorganizing on Marxist-Leninist base …

In the international sphere they [the revisionists] adopted a centrist position as regards the situation between the world communist movement and modern revisionists. The fact that in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries the revisionists had once again taken power and that proletarian dictatorship had turned into bourgeois dictatorship was rejected. They particularly dismissed the idea that in the Soviet Union revisionism had turned into social-imperialism. They rejected the experiences of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. They adopted the path of maintaining friendly relations with both socialism and modern revisionism led by the Soviet revisionist clique. It was accepted that the USSR and other revisionist parties had committed the occasional error (!). (Like the ones they committed!). The bourgeois club that was later to be called the TIIKP emerged on this ideological basis. …

…[I]n the TIIKP Draft Programme there is not one word regarding guerrilla activity. It is impossible to come across the idea that today the primary form of armed struggle will be guerrilla warfare. There is merely mention of a vague struggle that village committees (?) will manage and direct. …

The mechanic bourgeois mentality and false logic shows itself on the question of armed struggle, as it does on many questions. The Shafak revisionists assume they will be able to make the popular masses advance on the path of armed struggle by showing them where to step like trained monkeys! It's forbidden to step there! Don't touch there! Don't strike this! Don't break that! Not armed struggle, walking on a high wire!

… [A]s a means of building up strength guerrilla actions in the cities may and should be initiated. For this purpose, just as banks may be robbed, that is, the government or reactionaries’ money may be appropriated, class enemies may be eliminated. For instance, police agents, fascist officers, police torturers, ringleaders of fascist organizations, brutal bosses and their lackeys, scabs, agent provocateurs, informers, those who shoot revolutionaries and impose death sentences on them, agents of imperialists, etc. may be shot. Also, communication lines may be sabotaged, ammunition stores and military depots may be raided or sabotaged, important documents appropriated or destroyed. People may be sprung from prison. Sabotage may be carried out at certain military bases and headquarters, police headquarters, fascist organizations’ main buildings, etc.

Our revisionist gentlemen reject all of these. Is there a better example than this of the fact that they understand the armed struggle in the manner criticized and condemned by comrade Lenin as "stuck up and stupid"'? [Source]

Kaypakkaya also showed the incorrect stance of the old party on the national question in Turkey in his classic essay, On the National Question:

According to Safak Revisionism, national oppression applies to the Kurdish people. This is to not understand the meaning of national oppression. National oppression is the oppression imposed by the ruling classes of ruling, oppressing and exploiting nations on the downtrodden, dependent subject nations. In Turkey national oppression is the oppression applied by the ruling classes of the dominant Turkish nation on the entire Kurdish nation, not just the Kurdish people, and also not solely on the Kurdish nation, but on all minority subject nations.

People and nation are not the same things. The concept of people today covers the working class, poor and middle peasantry semi-proletarians and the urban petit bourgeoisie. In backward countries, the revolutionary wing of the national bourgeoisie, which takes its place in the democratic popular revolution against imperialism, feudalism and comprador capitalism, is also included in the popular classes. However, the term nation includes all classes and strata, including the ruling classes. “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” All classes and strata that speak the same language, live in the same territory, and are in the same unity of economic life and psychological formation are included within the scope of the nation. Within these are classes and strata that are enemies of the revolution and counterrevolution, just as there are classes and strata in the ranks of the revolution and whose interests are served by the revolution. …

Today Kurdish workers, Kurdish poor and middle peasants, urban semi-proletariat and the urban petit bourgeoisie that will join the ranks of the national democratic revolution are all included in the concept of Kurdish people. Apart from these classes and strata, the other sections of the Kurdish bourgeoisie and Kurdish landlords are also included in the concept of Kurdish nation. Certain smart aleck well-read persons claim that landlords cannot be part of a nation. They even claim that, since there are landlords in the Kurdish region, the Kurds do not yet constitute a nation. This is a dreadful demagogy and sophistry. Don’t the landlords speak the same shared language? Don’t they live in the same territory? Are they not part of the same unity of economic life and psychological formation? …

In claiming that national oppression is only applied to the Kurdish people, the Safak Revisionists fall into one of these two errors: either the term Kurdish people is being used correctly and the entire Kurdish bourgeoisie and small landlords are not included in this, in which case the national oppression being implemented against the Kurdish bourgeoisie and small landlords is being obscured, thereby indirectly approving this oppression, leading to the line of Turkish nationalism or, the whole Kurdish bourgeoisie and small landlords are being included in the concept of the Kurdish people, in which case the class oppression suffered by the Kurdish people in addition to national oppression is being obscured, the national movement is being portrayed as the same thing as the class movement, and in this way the line of the Kurdish nationalists is being adopted.

Moreover, apart from the Kurdish people there are minority peoples that do not constitute nations and national oppression is applied to them in the form of prohibiting use of their languages, etc. The Safak Revisionists leave this point entirely aside. [Source]

The Turkish communists started their people’s war in 1972, and many different communist parties have been taking part in it. It started with Kaypakkaya and the Communist Party of Turkey/Marxist-Leninist (TKP/ML, as it is abbreviated in Turkish), which he helped found; they began mobilizing the Turkish and Kurdish masses for the revolution. The people’s army led by TKP/ML is the Liberation Army of the Workers and Peasants of Turkey (TİKKO), founded with the party. The Turkish state captured Kaypakkaya in 1973, and its agents continually tortured him. Despite his young age, he protected the party by refusing to release any secrets. The party suffered many losses in its leadership from conflict, yet it continued waging people’s war against the fascist state. The people in the regions of their operations supported the revolution, especially the Kurdish people, who saw the cadres as their fighters and leaders. The party won many victories in Tunceli Province.

Unfortunately, starting in 1976, TKP/ML dealt with extreme factionalism and many splits, for communists faced confusion regarding the events in Turkey and across the world, including on the question of continuing revolution, on Enver Hoxha’s condemnation of Mao after his death, and more; this began when a group called “TKP/ML Hareketi” (TKP/ML Movement) left over disputes regarding “differences… on the analysis of [the] socio-economic structure of the country, the path of revolution, the character of revolution, the preparation for revolution, the main contradiction, and Mao Tse-Tung” [Source]. This group merged with other “Hoxhaist” groups to form the “Marxist-Leninist Communist Party” (MLKP) of Turkey and Kurdistan, which is currently active in Turkey and Rojava.^[132] A similar split happened in 1981, when “TKP/ML Bolşevik” (TKP/ML Bolshevik) left because they felt the original party was not critical enough of Mao; while they were not “Hoxhaist” per se, they refused to uphold Mao as a classic of Marxism-Leninism, and the certainly refused to uphold Mao Zedong Thought or Maoism. Since 1994, the party has been known as the “Bolşevik Party (North Kurdistan–Turkey)”.

The most significant of TKP/ML’s splits was in 1987, when TKP/ML-Eastern Anatolia Regional Committee (TKP/ML-DABK) and the TKP/ML (Maoist Party Centre) left the party. The former was a “militarist trend” [Source]. It left the TKP/ML after it accused its Central Committee of opportunism, especially since the party tried to organize a conference when, according to the DABK, “conditions [were] not ripe” and the “conference [would] attract the attention of the state forces,” which turned out to be correct as Turkish forces executed party cadres on their way there [Source].

After the DABK tried to reunify with the TKP/ML in 1992, it left again in 1994, becoming the TKP(ML) and then the Maoist Communist Party (“Maoist Komünist Partisi”, MKP) of Turkey and North Kurdistan in 2003. MKP has two branches of its people’s army: the People’s Liberation Army (HKO) in rural areas and the People’s Partisan Forces (PHG) in urban regions. MKP and TKP/ML remain allied in the Turkish people’s war, but they disagree on ideology and strategy; it is unknown whether TKP/ML (Maoist Party Centre) still exists.

In 2015, TKP/ML faced yet another split, for liquidationism within the party tried and failed to push their right-opportunist line. The party explained what happened in On the Path of the First Congress (all emphasis is the authors’):

In 2015, with a systematic attack based on the right line, splittist activities within the party started to grow. This splittist activity has acted by trying to turn party law into a means of establishing the right line, taking over the leadership and making its political line dominant. It carried out his work by sabotaging the democratic mechanisms operating with the clamor of “the leadership does not represent the party”, “there is unlawfulness in the party” and, ultimately, by not accepting the decisions made with these mechanisms. Leaving the party without leadership, by defending the disorganization that recommends that each committee act as it knows, by defending the class compromising line in alliance policies and current politics, by obscuring the leadership role of the party in the class struggle, it almost entered an orientation by seeing the Communist qualities as an obstacle to development and massification. As a result of the struggle waged by the communists within the party by gathering around the party leadership against this orientation, this right-wing understanding first left the party ranks and then the war ranks with the same speed and established its own structure. On the one hand, the comprehensive attack of the Turkish state and the European imperialists, on the other hand, the attack of this rotten right-wing liquidation inside surrounded the party. The Party managed to hold its 1st Congress under all this wave of siege and attack. …

The state of our Party was divided into two sections, one being the period until 2015 and the latter being the period since 2015 up to this day. Our Party has been subjected to an extraordinary putschist-factionist attack and eventually a group that has proven itself to be party and war deserter has left the ranks of the Party. The necessity to approach the process in two distinct periods originates from this situation. Within this context an assessment has been done on the Right–liquidationist, Party and War Deserter band that became systemized in January 2017 and finalized its course in October 2017 and the assessment made in the 8th Broadened Meeting of the Party Central Committee has been approved by our Congress. In the following period this band has managed to commit a series of crimes as wearing away revolutionary values, attacking the party with the backing of the police and the mafia, being deserters in the field of war, stealing the weapons and ammunition of the party and handing them to the enemy. At this point this band took its place in the stage of history as having committed a series of practices that serve the counter-revolution, having weakened its revolutionary veins, existing at a symbolic level in the country, having lost its ties with the problems of the revolution in the country and essentially becoming a band that is based in the abroad. In addition to the approaches and assessments of the 8th Broadened Meeting of the CC, these designations have been made and approved in our Congress. [Source]

Though the document above does not cover this, the rightist faction calls itself “TKP-ML”, formerly “TKP-ML ÖK” (“Organizing Committee”). This and the real TKP/ML are not the same, with the former working against Turkey’s people’s war. In another statement, TKP/ML explained (with our emphasis):

In the end, the factionists, which we have long described as a right-wing liquidation group, took the form of a separate “organization”. It publishes central statements under the name “Organizing Committee” (ÖK) and seems to have its own hierarchy. The separation was complete and final in all areas. Given this fact, the class character of this faction is the right wing of the urban petty bourgeoisie. This class character is essentially a consuming one. It has a structure which is isolated from production and the masses, which would like to be intellectual and arrogant, but at the same time which becomes lumpen. Its political line has liquidation-opportunist and reformist tendencies. Its organizational line is autonomous, random and anarcho-liberal. Its liquidation is essentially based on the erosion of the Party’s ideology and political leadership.

For this reason, from now on, our party will no longer call it a fraction [of the party] but a right-liquidatorial petty-bourgeois movement. The fact that our party ceases to define it as a faction is linked to its policy, which determines our view and attitude towards this group. Our party does not want to impose a ban on this group, nor does it consider it a group that could not be cooperated with. Our party sees it as an element and supporting subject of the class struggle, as one of the forces in the people. Here again we declare that the general political line, orientation and organizational concept of this group has nothing to do with our party TKP/ML. [Source]

MKP was not immune to splits, either; no communist party can avoid line struggle. In the MKP’s case, the split was even more confusing than TKP/ML’s recent split, for the splitters refer to themselves as “Maoist Komünist Parti” rather than “Maoist Komünist Partisi” like the genuine MKP. The party summarized the situation in a statement released on June 17, 2021:

In late 2014, our party experienced an internal crisis due to the "3rd Congress" held in 2013, which was a coup and usurpation attempt against the party. This congress has been noted down in history as the most significant transformation and liquidation of the Kaypakkaya line. After extensive struggle against this “3rd Congress”, our party was unable to maintain unity with the faction who advocated for this congress. As a result, the MKP has been in an intensive recovery process since 2014 to remove the damage that this separation has caused. The party has completed the reorganization in 2020 and has recently made public with the 3rd Congress, not to be confused with the “3rd Congress” held in 2013 by the faction which separated from our party.

After the separation, our party continues to use the name "Maoist Komünist Partisi" while the faction uses the name "Maoist Komünist Parti". [Source]

The revisionist “MKP” denies the democratic characteristic of the ongoing revolution in Turkey; it also opposes the “monopoly of power by the leadership” of the communist party, using ultra-leftist notions of “dictatorship of the party or dictatorship of the masses”, not the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory of dictatorship of the masses led by their vanguard party. The “MKP” also opposes proletarian dictatorship in general, supporting multi-party “socialism” (an impossibility, as those of us who understand our theories of the vanguard party and the proletarian dictatorship would say) and other liquidationist errors. [Source] This “MKP” has since left the actual MKP, and we support the latter and not the former.

The Turkish people’s war is not the only war that Turkey has to face. Back in 1978, Kurdish people in Turkey and eventually neighboring countries started fighting for self-determination, and the communists supported (and still support) this struggle. The main organization that has been leading this struggle was the “Kurdistan Workers’ Party” (PKK), formerly a “Marxist-Leninist” organization; after their leader, Abdullah Öcalan, was captured in 1999, and after his contact with “libertarian socialists”, he dropped Marxism-Leninism, making his party do so as well. The party then supported “democratic confederalism”, the Kurdish adaptation of communalism^[133], and thus it became a “national reformist party” rather than a national revolutionary one [Source]. TKP/ML and MKP disagree with the ideology of the PKK, and rightly so; nonetheless, they support the overall Kurdish national liberation struggle. TKP/ML explained its stance in the previously-mentioned statement:

From [the] past to today, our Party has a common struggle perspective, strong relations and alliances with Kurdish national struggle by expressing our ideas explicitly and by keeping our line and by criticizing. We fought together in the same guerrilla units and lost our comrades in this fight, so it will be. However, this doesn’t mean that we won’t criticize the line of Kurdish national move[ment] and their tendency. The relation of friendship is as a common struggle against the enemy, and as a political-ideological struggle with each other. [Source]

TKP-ML, in contrast, tails the PKK and claims that TKP/ML is “chauvinist” for not doing so as well. Öcalan’s call to end the armed struggle in March of 2025 shows that TKP/ML was right to maintain independence from PKK and to criticize its bourgeois nationalist ideology, while TKP-ML remains in trouble if it does not repudiate its revisionist line and replace its bourgeois leaders with proletarian revolutionaries.

Along with the PKK, there are other organizations in Turkey and the rest of Kurdistan (especially Rojava), but many of these are under or allied with the “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF), a coalition of various organizations that act as the military wing of the AANES; the SDF is largely a comprador of American imperialism. The PKK works with the SDF against reactionaries, but it is considered a terrorist group by the US and its allies. We do not support the SDF for its collaboration with imperialism because this collaboration made the Kurdish people pretty heavily dependent on American support; when the US tried to withdraw from Syrian Kurdistan in 2019, the reactionary Turkish military and its rebel allies attacked in hours, prompting the US to return troops to Rojava to “aid” its forces. Rather, we support the anti-imperialist forces in Kurdistan, the forces that do meaningful work to liberate their nation.

The US is not even committed to supporting Rojava. Turkey is still a comprador of the US, and it gets American support; the rebels in Syria that destabilize the government also get American aid, even though the US nominally stopped supporting a lot of them in 2017; the US continues openly supporting at least one faction of rebels, the “Revolutionary Commando Army”, and it maintains support for Turkey and Qatar, the two governments continuing their support for more reactionary rebels (even rebel groups that engage in clashes among themselves!). Regardless, what is important is that all these rebels fight the SDF, and they certainly fight the actual progressives and anti-imperialists in Rojava. Thus, the US is not interested in Kurdish autonomy or self-determination, or at least not nearly as interested as it is in the oil fields found in northeastern Syria. This is why TKP/ML, MKP, and other radical groups in Turkey and Kurdistan refuse to capitulate to US imperialism.

Neither TKP/ML nor MKP have official united fronts. That being said, they have various mass organizations that they lead forming the fronts, and they are part of the International Freedom Battalion (IFB), a large anti-fascist popular front of many socialist, communist, and even anarchist parties and organizations from around the world that work together in defense of Kurdistan against Turkish expansionism and ISIL. This organization is allied with the SDF, but it does not have support from American imperialists because of the wide presence of revolutionary and progressive parties. MKP is also part of the Peoples' United Revolutionary Movement (HBDH), another anti-fascist alliance of Turkish organizations that all work against the Turkish state. TKP/ML criticized HBDH for various reasons, and thus it withdrew from the organization after its representative briefly joined it. (The revisionist TKP-ML remained in the HBDH.)

In regards to its programmatic structure, aims and objectives, the HBDH is a “front” organization. … Our Party envisages such a body only under our Party’s ideological and political leadership. Among the necessary conditions of such a body our party envisages that our Party should attain a certain level of political, ideological, and organizational leadership, and that formation of such a body should be in line with the realization of Democratic Popular Revolution and the class interests of the proletariat. …

The HBDH programme has been extending the definition of revolution in a country which is one of the ideological approaches of our Party. Our Party aims the revolution in our country as the primary and immediate task. This is adopted as a principle. The HBDH defines its mission as being a part of a general regional revolution. … In our opinion, revolutions shall be specifically fomented in each country, and attempting to unify those differing revolutions into a single common programme of revolution shall be incompatible with the reality. We believe such [an] approach is a derivative of Trotskyism and hinders revolutions in each country. … On these grounds we regard this approach of HBDH is in contravention of our ideology and principles. [Source]

In Turkey, the fascist state oppresses the Kurdish nation, as explained before. In addition, Turkey supports terrorists against the Kurdish struggle for national liberation. Turkey supports almost all Syrian rebels, even as other regional powers and US imperialists have officially stopped backing the majority of them; these rebels use actual terrorist tactics against the masses in their captured areas, including in Rojava. Turkey has even gone so far as to support ISIL in its expansionist schemes:

The occupier and murderous Turkish State’s Army has attacked Armenia with gangs camouflaged in Azerbaijan uniform. As if the attacks on Libya, Idlib, Rojava and Southern Kurdistan were not enough now Turkey attacks Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh). … The Turkish state has once again revealed itself as the enemy of not only the Turkish-Kurdish people, but also the Greek-Armenian-Arab nations. … It was revealed that some of those killed and captured by Armenia were not Azerbaijani soldiers but members of the ISIS-SNA gang. The AKP-MHP dictatorship, which tries to hide its own crimes and lies through fake news about our battalion, cannot convince anyone with pride and conscience. [Source]

On top of this, in Turkey itself, the state forces support terrorists against the Kurdish nation within Turkey’s borders. The Grey Wolves—Turkish fascists who fought alongside Azerbaijan against Armenia in the 1990s, Chechen separatists against Russia in their period of conflict, and other reactionaries—are considered terrorists by Kazakhstan and even some of the European imperialists, but they receive state support in their attacks against Kurds; they attacked Kurds in different protests, harassed bourgeois parties and murdered activists who supported the Kurds’ struggles, and more, yet the Turkish state goes out of its way to defend these reactionaries and actual terrorists. The hypocrisy would be amusing if it did not justify terrible reactionary violence.

TKP/ML and MKP both empower women, and this is important for a country whose state actively funds Jihadist groups, which want to preserve patriarchy and sexism in general. TKP/ML’s Dersim Regional Command paid respects to female soldiers that the Turkish fascist state murdered:

We are going through a difficult process. Both the all-out attacks of the enemy and the liquidator attacks increase this difficulty even more. However, we have the power to confront this challenge. We are not strangers to these losses, and we knew how to walk our path more confidently, binding up our wounds each time. Comrades Nubar and Özgür were among the most concrete examples of this. Their daring and assertion to assume the political and military leadership of our Guerrilla War after our five red carnations (five women martyrs on February 2, 2011) gives us strength. Just as they shoulder responsibility without hesitation after February 2, it is now up to us to undertake this task. [Source]

CPI (Maoist) also pointed out the importance of female comrades in the TKP/ML and the entire revolutionary movement:

The role of women in the movement is to be upheld. There is a dynamic path for struggle with the oppressed gender in class and social struggle. There are many women’s movements that make such a struggle. In addition to the existing problems, the struggle shall develop and go forward. It decided that with the present understanding, there is a need to develop an alliance on the basis of united practice of the organizations and forces that make ‘civil rights’ struggle on this problem. [Source]

The Turkish comrades of TKP/ML and MKP have some criticisms from foreign comrades, just like the Indian and Filipino comrades. TKP/ML does not recognize Gonzalo’s additions to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, for example. It sees Gonzalo’s theories as solely applicable to Peru, which is clearly not the case; all of these parties applied Marxism to their conditions, generating guiding thoughts for their specific revolutions, proving the universality of guiding thought. The TKP/ML is a militarized party, and the Turkish people’s organizations are built in a concentric fashion, proving the importance of militarizing the communist party and the concentric construction of the people’s war. The party wages people’s war, obviously, and this people’s war is unitary since the cadres use different tactics for the same overall strategy. Therefore, the party should technically uphold Gonzalo’s universal contributions. MKP has similar issues that are relatively minor; while it upholds Gonzalo’s contributions, it takes few actions for the people’s war right now.

We fully support these parties as they fight to overthrow the rotten and reactionary Turkish state, as do all Maoist parties worldwide.

Peru

Like all of the countries with ongoing people’s wars, Peru is a bureaucratic-comprador capitalist country. The PCP—commonly called “Shining Path” by bourgeois media to distinguish it from revisionist parties with similar names—analyzed Peruvian society in its book, General Political Line of the Communist Party of Peru; specifically, it did this in “The Character of Contemporary Peruvian Society”, which is Section Two of Chapter Three (all emphasis is the author’s):

Later, in characterizing contemporary Peruvian society, Chairman Gonzalo says: “… contemporary Peru is a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society in which bureaucratic capitalism develops.” Although Mariátegui had defined this well in Point Three of the Program of the Constitution of the Party, it is in the light of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally of Maoism, that Chairman Gonzalo has demonstrated how this semi-feudal and semi-colonial character maintains itself and develops new modalities, and in particular how bureaucratic capitalism has developed on this foundation throughout the entire process of contemporary society. This a question of transcendent importance in order to understand the character of society and of the Peruvian revolution. …

Why is Peru semi-feudal? Chairman Gonzalo states: “The decrepit semi-feudal system continues subsisting and marks the country from its deepest foundations to its most elaborate ideas. In essence, it persistently maintains the land question unresolved, which is the motor of the class struggle of the peasantry, especially of the poor peasants that are the immense majority.” He stresses that the land question continues subsisting because the semi-feudal relationships of exploitation allow semi-feudalism to evolve, and it is the basic problem of society that is expressed in land, servitude, and gamonalismo.(1) We must see these conditions in all their aspects, economic, political, and ideological, in both the base and superstructure. The peasantry constitutes about 60% of the population, which for centuries has worked the land, but it is tied to big property and to servitude. He teaches us that a great concentration of land exists in a few hands, with both associative and non-associative forms, and that the immense majority of the peasantry are the poor peasants who do not have land, or if they have it they are very few, thus giving rise to the minifundio [small landowners] submitted to the voracity of the latifundio [large landowners]. …

Why is it semi-colonial? Chairman Gonzalo teaches us that the modern Peruvian economy was born subjugated to imperialism, the final phase of capitalism, which was masterfully characterized as monopolistic, parasitical and moribund. Imperialism, even though it consents to our political independence as long as it serves its interests, still controls the entire economic process of Peru: our natural wealth, export products, industry, banking and finances. In synthesis, it sucks the blood of our people, devours our energies of a nation in formation, and most strikingly today it exploits us and other oppressed nations with external debt. [Source]

Peru’s economy is semi-feudal, so it has capitalist production in industry, but agriculture is still feudal, with landlords dominating and subjugating peasants. Peru is semi-colonial, meaning that it is only independent in form; in essence, imperialists are able to extract superprofits from the country, impoverishing the proletariat and the Peruvian people as a whole. Therefore, the PCP confirmed that its revolution would have to be a New-Democratic revolution, just like the revolutions in China, India, the Philippines, and Turkey were/are.

The Peruvian communists were responsible for synthesizing Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Led by Chairman Gonzalo, and with their alliance with the people, they were able to take control of 70% of Peru after starting their people’s war in 1980. They were also able to fight off the large fascist state of Peru, and they resisted its genocides against indigenous people. The PCP even had to fight rival “leftist” groups in Peru, like the “Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement” (MRTA, abbreviated in Spanish) which was a revisionist, pro-Soviet-imperialist organization that ended up having its cadres join the Peruvian government to fight the PCP.

Chairman Gonzalo reconstituted the Communist Party of Peru in 1969, around the time of the start of the Indian and Philippine people’s wars. Having been in China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, he learned about Mao Zedong Thought and sought to try practicing it in Peru. The old PCP—which had been around since 1928, founded by José Carlos Mariátegui—had turned revisionist, and the Chinese faction of that party became the “Communist Party of Peru—Red Flag” (PCP-BR), later renamed to the “PCP (Marxist-Leninist)” (PCP (ML)); that party itself was also revisionist, so two more parties came about: the “Communist Party of Peru—Red Fatherland” (PCP-PR, a party that would engage in electoralism and Dengite revisionism), and the actual Communist Party of Peru (PCP), the latter of whom was the anti-revisionist party that Gonzalo founded. By reconstituting the PCP, Gonzalo revived the party’s anti-revisionist past. He created a Marxist-Leninist, pro-Mao Zedong Thought party.

The people’s war in Peru began in 1980, when PCP cadres burned ballot boxes in the town of Chuschi, in the Ayachuco region of Peru, a region that is in the Andean mountains; this region was, and still is, poor compared to other regions of Peru. For a long time, Peru was a military dictatorship, and 1980 was the first year of elections in a long time; many so-called “communist” parties supported involvement in the elections to attempt to take state power. Only the new PCP and some other parties had a correct line on the issue; Gonzalo explained this in his interview, saying:

In Peru it can be seen that there is a crisis every 10 years in the second half of the decade and each crisis is worse than the one before. We also analyzed bureaucrat capitalism, which makes conditions more ripe for revolution. In 1980, the government was to change hands through elections, which meant that the new government would need a year and a half to two years to fully put in place the operations of its State. So we concluded that bureaucrat capitalism had ripened the conditions for revolution, and that the difficult decade of the '80s approached—with crisis, an elected government, etc. All this provided a very favorable conjuncture for initiating the people's war and refuted the position that armed struggle, or in our case people's war, cannot be initiated when there’s a new government events have demonstrated the incorrectness of that position. Such was our evaluation, and such was the situation as the new government took over, that is, the military, having left the government after ruling for 12 years, could not easily take up the struggle against us right away, nor could they immediately take the helm of state again because they were worn down and had become discredited. These were the concrete facts, the reality.

Prior to that time, we had already put forward that participation in the Constituent Assembly was incorrect, that the only thing to do was to boycott it, because to participate in the Constituent Assembly was simply to serve the restructuring of the Peruvian State and to produce a constitution like the one we have. All this was foreseeable, there was nothing that could not be foreseen in this case. Therefore, we had planned for some time to lay the basis to initiate the people's war, to make our move before the new government took office, which is what we did. We began the armed struggle on May 17, the day before the elections.

We thought that under these conditions we could initiate our actions and even unfold them broadly and advance to the greatest extent possible—and that is exactly what we did. [Source]

The PCP, through its theoretical studies as well as practical applications of its theory, was able to synthesize Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the third and (so far) highest development of Marxism. By applying the theory of protracted people’s war to Peru, they were able to prove that it is a universal theory that, like all universal ideas and strategies, must be applied with attention to the particular conditions surrounding it in an area. The Peruvian communists did this by focusing on the nature that bureaucratic-comprador capitalism took in Peru, much like the Indian, Filipino, and Turkish comrades did. The Peruvian people’s three weapons were constructed appropriately, i.e. by concentric construction. This allowed it to organize in such a way that the masses would protect the party, supervise it from revisionist takeover, and democratically control the army; it also allowed the party to lead the masses, and it allowed the army to lead the people’s war. That is why we consider the concentric construction to be a universal tactic.

The PCP had to fight the police in its initial struggle; it was not big enough to become a serious military threat, despite being a militarized party. In late 1982 or early 1983, the Peruvian military was called in to suppress this people’s war. In response to that, the Peruvian comrades founded the People’s Guerrilla Army (PGA), the people’s army, with all of the people’s militias combined; the militias were groups of the armed people, and uniting them into an army allowed for the people’s war to develop. The PGA is “organized into squads, companies and battalions in the countryside and in special detachments and people’s militias in the cities [Source],” and the countryside troops are divided into main, local, and base forces, presumably with squads, companies, and battalions within each force. There are support bases, guerrilla zones, operational zones, and points of action, all of which “constitute the environment in which the new State develops and are key to maintaining the strategic course [Source]”. The united front is the new state and its allies: the People’s Committees, which were government bodies of the workers, peasants, etc., the Revolutionary Front for the Defense of the People in the countryside, and the Revolutionary Movement for the Defense of the People in the cities. All of these bodies within the base areas created the New-Democratic People’s Republic of Peru.

Like the other revolutions, the Peruvian revolution had a large involvement of women. 40% of the soldiers and 50% of the leaders were women. While the reactionary state’s soldiers and police took liberties with women, the PCP empowered them to fight the patriarchy and sexism they faced.

The PCP grew with an aim to fight against what they saw as an unjust class society. …

These four aspects, the poverty problem that were in Peru, the change in women’s status in Peruvian society, the expansion of university education and the impact that the Cuban revolution had in the Peruvian society was the background for the cultivation of the PCP. These historical factors are not all the factors that influenced the rise of the PCP, but it is vital to understand the role of women in the party. These four aspects are important in relation to my focus, how to understand why these women joined the party and what they fought for in the PCP. …

The representation of female fighters often comes as a shocking image to society as a whole. …

The PCP opened up a space for female participation and had a political discourse of wanting to change the old system of discrimination towards women. These two factors appealed to women from different sectors in society and especially to women that did not have their professional expectations met in the job market because of gender discrimination (Portugal 2008:37-38). Professional women were encouraged by the PCP to enter the party and to break with traditional societal gender norms. …

In the PCP there was a high percentage of female fighters. The estimated percentage differs among academics, Starn (1995) estimated the number to be about one third of the total members in 1990, higher than any other legal left party in Peru at the time. It is also known that women filled positions at all levels, holding eight out of 19 slots in the Central Committee (Starn 1995) and at the same time almost always had a woman as their second leader in rank. The first woman to hold this position was Augusta la Torre and now the second leader in rank is Elena Iparraguirre. Giving women opportunities to participate in the PCP appealed to young educated women at the time; women who thought that by joining the PCP they could transform society and their success was almost guaranteed (Starn 1995). [Source]

The PCP advanced in its struggle for state power. The Peruvian people were already building New Democracy within the liberated areas, and 70% of the country had guerilla activities. The Peruvian state, noticing the crisis they experienced due to the PCP and the MRTA, used genocidal tactics against the indigenous people and against the Peruvian people. The 1980s was characterized by the PCP’s major growth; fascistic repression began in 1981, and the Peruvian people opposed this, boosting their support of the PCP. The PCP was really close to winning by the early 1990s, with most people in the liberated areas supporting them and with an urban armed strike in Lima, the capital of Peru, in 1991. The Peruvian state was losing support really fast, and having lost most of the countryside and even many of its urban proletariat to the PCP, it had to act fast.

The state, under the new Alberto Fujimori, drastically increased repression, causing much violence and suffering for the Peruvian people to combat the PCP and the MRTA. In 1992, Chairman Gonzalo, two thirds of the Politburo, and 19 of the 22 members of the Central Committee of the PCP were captured [Source]. The state gave life imprisonment to Chairman Gonzalo without proper trial. After his capture, the state lied, claiming that Gonzalo called for surrender in two letters that he “wrote”; analysts and scientists who studied these situations were suspicious of these claims, and they accused the fascist state of forgery and torture techniques. Either Gonzalo was tortured into writing these letters, or such “letters” were forged altogether. Either way, bourgeois media claimed that there was a two-line struggle over these letters, and it claimed that Gonzalo took the rightist line; this was not true.

In the 22nd issue of A World to Win, there is an article called, “For Your Reference: A Response to the 'Investigators' of RIM”. This article explains the supposed two-line struggle that Gonzalo “started” with his “capitulation”:

In history we can find many cases of revolutionaries having to face frauds concocted by experts in anti-insurgency struggle. The most elementary manual of counter-insurgency procedures shows the two main methods for destroying a communist organization or a revolutionary process. The first method is to use violence and outright repression. This method makes use of the military superiority and the ample resources of the state. The second method uses the system of psychological warfare. It makes use of the enormous publicity machine in the hands of the reactionary state. This method aims at weakening and undermining the ideological and organizational capacity of the party leading the revolution. Its objectives are: Dividing, disorganizing and slandering the revolutionary organization, isolating it from the masses while generating capitulationism. Usually, psychological warfare makes use of infiltrated agents within the party, or renegades and turncoats that have gone over to the ranks of the enemy. Both methods are generally used in combination within a single counter-insurgency strategy.

It is an ideological and political error not to differentiate between a police plot and a two-line struggle. What is the gist of the “peace letters”? Where and how were these concocted? The “peace letters” were fabricated in the offices of the Intelligence Service of the Peruvian state (SIN). These letters did not originate in any Party organism, nor are these the product of any internal process of debate within the Communist Party of Peru. [Source]

In short, the “letters” and the “line struggle” from said letters were a reactionary plot designed to weaken the PCP and the people’s war. They were made to divide, disorganize, slander, and isolate the PCP and other people’s organizations.

This does not mean that there was no line struggle at all. The plot allowed for an actual two-line struggle to develop; rightists, who support what is called the Right-Opportunist Line (ROL), within the Peruvian revolutionary movement actually believed the state’s claims, so they gave up on the revolution, becoming capitulationists. The primary organization responsible for this is the “Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights” (MOVADEF). By spreading the lie that Gonzalo sought an end to the people’s war, they helped the Peruvian state discourage the masses from continuing their struggle. This tactic worked against the PCP, with cadres giving up on the people’s war and listening to MOVADEF’s calls for capitulation. Unlike what bourgeois media said, though, Gonzalo did not call for surrender, so he stood with the left line in the PCP.

In addition to that rightist line, there were certain groups that nominally claimed to be continuing the people’s war to justify their deviations and criminal, reactionary practices. The most notable of these is the so-called “Militarized Communist Party of Peru” (MPCP), formerly known as the “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Communist Party of Peru” (PCP-MLM). MPCP is a criminal gang founded in 1999. It denies the role of the proletariat in leading the party (revealing its true class character of being a bourgeois party) and has been explicitly homophobic. Contrary to its name, it is not a “Communist Party”, and the PCP has condemned it. It is another opportunist line. The MPCP is by no means a militarized party; it is much like the MRTA that the PCP dealt with before. Still, this rightist party claims to be a successor to the PCP.

The MPCP has “self-criticized” by attacking Chairman Gonzalo and Gonzalo Thought. They did not do this in a proletarian manner; rather than pointing out faults in Gonzalo’s leadership, they repeated the same imperialist lies against the PCP’s actions that revisionists and reactionaries of all stripes have spread since before the revolution. They labeled Gonzalo and his thought “ultra-leftist”, just as many modern slanderers of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism do. They liquidated its section of the People’s Guerrilla Army by converting all forces within into “main forces”. They even engage in reformist behavior, as they often work with authorities in Peru, in their own words; they do not smash the state of the enemy, but they ally with it! This is evidence of their right-opportunism.

In a document called “For the General Reorganization of the Communist Party of Peru as Part of the Development of the People’s War to Conquer Power in the Whole Country!” by Association New Democracy^[134], the authors explain the MPCP (at the time, PCP-MLM) and its revisionism:

It is necessary to see what the ROL [Right Opportunist Line] of José and his cronies puts forward accurately to be able to demolish and sweep away all the convergences with this ROL. Its content is feudal-imperialist, it is against the Great Leadership of Chairman Gonzalo, it is against Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Gonzalo Thought, it is against the Party and against the People’s War. …

On the ideological level José and his brood doesn’t do anything more than repeat what comes from the bourgeoisie in their attacks on Marxism, they don’t “contribute” anything new. They attack Gonzalo Thought as “dogmatic”, “sectarian”, “ultra leftist” like revisionists of all kinds have done since even before the initiation of the People’s War. They put themselves also, in tune with their bastard father, the agent of Yankee-CIA, Gustavo Gorriti and the hoaxes of the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation (CVR), trying to blame the Party for the genocide committed by Yankee-imperialism and the old landowner-bureaucratic state against our people and the Party. …

They have liquidated the special detachments, detachments and militias in the city, in the countryside they have liquidated the local forces and base forces transforming all into “main forces” –their “roaming gangs”- and in their actions an extreme conservatism are being expressed, reducing it to guerrilla combats not carrying out the other four forms of actions, expressing a roaming militarism. Concerning the Front/New State they have liquidated the generated organizations, using the pretext that “those who are for the Peace Agreement” have “usurped their names” (while saying that “the ROL has not taken even one Party apparatus”), but in reality because of their opposition to the mass line of the Party, and mainly to its proletarian military line, they follow a bourgeois military line and they have liquidated the support bases to replace them with their nefarious concept of “Mobile People's Committees”; fiercely they oppose the joint dictatorship and leave the gamonal power intact, in the cities where they oppose the sixth form of new power, the People's Struggle Committees, saying that they were an expression of “adventurism”, and “leftism” and whereas they don’t construct power in the cities, they don’t construct anything there.

This ROL, that the rat José heads, denies the role of leading class of the proletariat in the democratic revolution. Even when they speak of “the broad popular masses”, they talk about everyone (“the bourgeoisie, the national bourgeoisie, merchants, transporters, builders, students, intellectuals, foreign industrialists that are being oppressed and constrained”), but not mentioning the proletariat…, and they reach the extreme of putting forward “we respect the big bourgeoisie and the feudal landowners that are pro-northamerican but do not fight against the revolution”. These confessions by the miserable ones themselves show that they do not have a trace of proletarian vanguard, no trace of Communist Party which leads the People's War to realize the democratic revolution, but they are a group that is militaristic, a band of mercenaries. Its feudal-imperialist character is also very clearly expressed in its arch-reactionary conception of the role of women in the revolution, for these rats the female comrades are second-class fighters, the servants of men and this conception they have tried to impose in a Party which had the highest percentage of feminine participation in history, the Party that generated the largest percentage number of female leaders, cadres, party members, combatants and masses of women in the history of international communist movement, they wanted to impose this in the party which generated Comrade Norah, the greatest heroine of the Party and the revolution, a great communist leader and relentless anti-revisionist fighter. …

The seriousness of the situation in the two line struggle has led to a situation where organizational problems have become absolutely subordinate. The main thing at this point in the struggle must be the ideological, because what is at stake is the color of the Party as a whole. Without unity of understanding, without unity in ideology, there is no basis for party unity. It is more necessary than ever to grasp Gonzalo Thought to solve new problems. [Source]

While the document above refers to the MPCP’s line as right-opportunist, later documents would say the opposite, accusing it of “left”-opportunism; in truth, the opportunism of the MPCP appears to go both ways, as it combines ultra-“left” errors with clearly rightist ones:

The arrest suffered by our leadership and the central leadership is an objective fact, just as objective was later the artful and sinister capitulation of that right opportunist line that structures in prisons, policy of revision and 4 erasure of our general political line, the basis of party unity, the program and all the events, plenums, and agreements that emanated from the I Marxist Congress, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Congress, Gonzalo Thought. It is just as revisionist as the renegade of some leaders and the filthy mercenary of Jos´e and company. What ideological and political foundations have they developed? None, they have only raised a ragged flag of left opportunist line (LOL), anti-Maoist, anti-Party and anti-Gonzalo thought. [Source]

The MPCP raises funds by engaging in drug trafficking and the exploitation of indigenous and peasant labor in drug production. It sides with the big landlords and bourgeoisie who own and control drugs that are produced for sale. This gang is a way for the state to further demonize the actual PCP and its people’s war. While bourgeois media in Peru and abroad does not distinguish between these two, blurring the line between the party of the proletariat and the party of (a section of) the bourgeoisie, the liberated people can clearly tell the differences between the two.

We will now go over some common myths against the PCP. First, the claim that the party is homophobic is one of the worst lies against our comrades in Peru. The PCP did execute one gay person, but this was not for their sexuality; rather, it was because they worked with the fascist state apparatus against the revolution. Vancouver Partisan wrote an article called “REVOLUTION IN PERU: Is the PCP Homophobic?”, and it shows how the PCP was actually not homophobic:

Unlike both the reactionary government and the revisionist MRTA, the PCP seems to be, at least as a matter of policy, entirely devoid of homophobia. The PCP stated in 1994, responding specifically to claims that they were killing LGBT+ people, “It is probable that the PCP has executed a homosexual, but rest assured that it was not done because of their sexual orientation but because of their position against the revolution. It is not difficult to see that in the bars and brothels of Peruvian cities frequented by elements of the police and army some homosexuals work as snitches and collaborators…when the party seizes that city it will settle accounts with those elements, regardless of their sexual orientation. What then happens is the government and reactionary media report that the Party killed gays”. The position that snitches and collaborators should be executed regardless of their sexual orientation is absolutely correct, and one that should be emulated. Nevertheless, one could question whether, despite this solid theoretical line, in practice the PCP may act differently. In fact, even Enrique Bossio, a notable member of the Homosexual Movement of Lima (MHOL), a group which is not at all sympathetic to the PCP, admitted that “the PCP has not made gays the focus of any attacks”, and noted that the MRTA’s track record is far worse. It is also worth noting that the PCP takes responsibility for its actions, even ones as brutal and controversial as the action in the village of Lucanamarca, which Chairman Gonzalo took personal responsibility for in his interview. If they are targeting LGBT+ people, it would be extremely out of character for them to deny it. [Source]

The PCP did not deliberately kill indigenous people to “commit genocide”; this would simply not make sense as many cadres and supporters of the PCP were indigenous. “... [I]t is disingenuous to write only of the indigenous Peruvians killed by revolutionaries when the revolutionaries were themselves indigenous peasants, and when the Peruvian government was arming ‘native against native’ through the conscription of villagers into paramilitary ‘ronderos’ [‘self-defense’ militias] for use as cannon-fodder” [Source].

If any side in the people’s war is to be called genocidal, it is the fascistic Peruvian state, which forcefully sterilized over 300,000 indigenous people with the support of the US imperialists. The PCP neither has the capabilities nor the need to conduct such atrocities against the masses. The indigenous people supported the party, especially in Ayacucho, the birthplace of the war. In “Why Peasants Rebel: The Case of Peru's Sendero Luminoso”, a bourgeois study of the Peruvian people’s war, the author says this:

First in university training programs, and later on their own, the Senderista militants [members of the PCP] actually lived for long periods in Indian communities. They learned the Indian language if they did not already know it, married into the communities—and preached politics. …

… Raul Gonzalez asked “all those who wanted to converse” whether or not they thought Sendero was a peasant movement, and whether or not it counted on support from the population; according to Gonzalez, the response was virtually unanimous: “It’s a movement supported by the youngest peasants. The older ones are resigned to their lot, but they do back their kids.” [Source]

Such facts do not indicate that the PCP was against indigenous people or vice-versa; they show just the opposite, namely that the native masses supported the revolutionaries.

Now, with regards to the PCP’s use of violence and “terror” in general, we need to understand it in the context of Peru’s conditions. Peru was and remains a bureaucratic-comprador capitalist state, riddled with corruption, brutal exploitation and subjugation, a lack of freedom for the masses, major inequalities, and—most importantly—much violence. The state used armed forces against the PCP and the Peruvian people liberally, and it was not afraid to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity to suppress the revolutionary fire. Many “self-defense” militias—armed by the fascist state—would make bases within villages and towns. What could the party, the people’s army, and the people do? Gonzalo answered this in his interview (with our emphasis):

In the face of reactionary military actions and the use of mesnadas, we responded with a devastating action: Lucanamarca. Neither they nor we have forgotten it, to be sure, because they got an answer that they didn't imagine possible. More than 80 were annihilated, that is the truth. And we say openly that there were excesses, as was analyzed in 1983. On some occasions, like that one, it was the Central Leadership itself that planned the action and gave instructions. That's how it was. In that case, the principal thing is that we dealt them a devastating blow, and we checked them and they understood that they were dealing with a different kind of people's fighters, that we weren't the same as those they had fought before. This is what they understood. The excesses are the negative aspect. Understanding war, and basing ourselves on what Lenin said… the masses engaged in combat can go too far and express all their hatred, the deep feelings of class hatred, repudiation and condemnation that they have—that was the root of it. This has been explained by Lenin very clearly. Excesses can be committed. The problem is to go to a certain point and not beyond it, because if you go past that point you go off course. … the main point was to make them understand that we were a hard nut to crack, and that we were ready for anything, anything. [Source]

The article “Así mueren los enemigos de la clase” describes the proletarian, Marxist view on violence, especially as it relates to the PCP’s use of it (our emphasis):

We must contend now with the question of violence from the Marxist perspective, which is divided into two main categories: revolutionary violence and reactionary violence. We had better learn the difference. One of the sharpest knives at the liberal butcher shop that is aimed at slaughtering and dismembering revolutions is the conflating of these two distinct types of violence—combining two into one. Hence they take part in reactionary and, most often, State-sanctioned violence. …

State violence in this case is the arming of the ronderos, and the preparation of counterinsurgency on the village level, through the old ideological organs of colonialism, mainly the church. Reactionary violence was the stoning, dismemberment, and public display of the body of a beloved revolutionary and commander in the PCP. …

There are those critics who of course always seek to pardon the white terror of a fascist State by suggesting that it was the revolution that provoked reaction. This argument pardons the State of its wrongdoings. It pardons the most backward of Peruvian society, who willingly joined the death squads. …

So then we must come to understand revolutionary violence as the dialectical opposite of reactionary violence. Violence is anything but neutral. Revolutionary violence… is when the masses get so fed up with torture, exploitation, murder, and rape at the hands of the ronderos and the Party calls upon them like a mighty storm. No one, least of all the PCP, can deny the great and fearless masses their revenge. Those who are repressed by the constant threat of reactionary violence respond to the will of such a Party, and their rising cannot be struck down. For the PCP to denounce the annihilation of class enemies would be to betray their own people, their own cause—that is, the cause of the international proletariat. … [The violence] accomplished its objective and decreased interest in joining death squads. Those who fake concern for the more than 80 annihilated by revolutionary forces do so only opportunistically, from a position of safety, where the white terror has not mutilated and maimed them; to them it is most certainly “terrible” and “going too far.” For revolutionaries deeply in tune with the masses we can say “it’s fine.” We can understand that pain in the faces of the Black youth in the US, who are boiling over for revenge… their revenge will at times also contain excesses, and revolutionaries will support them, for we aim to make a revolution unlike any other. [Source]

Just like the other revolutionary parties of today, the PCP uses violence in favor of the masses against the enemy. While this may have excesses, we must defend revolutionary violence if we are to support the people. This is why we defend the PCP, and we do not see the Lucanamarca massacre as an event that ruins its legacy.

The PCP operates in secluded regions of Peru. Currently, it is working to reorganize itself, as the various revisionists and state elements have been able to weaken the party. We must not be pessimistic regarding the PCP’s future; all of the other communist parties engaging in revolution had their shortcomings as the comprador bourgeoisie—through their representatives, namely opportunists of all stripes—attempted to weaken the people’s war, but none of those parties surrendered. Instead, the communists in India, the Philippines, and Turkey were able to reorganize and continue the people’s war. The Peruvian comrades are doing the same. In "We are Advocates of the Theory of the Omnipotence of Revolutionary War", Association New Democracy explains:

... [W]e have a main form of struggle, the People's War, and a main form of organization, the Army, and the mass work is carried out through the Army, all this is developed through the military plans of the People's War which are embodied in campaigns and armed actions with which the great mobilization of the masses is generated which then have to be incorporated into the Party, the Army, and the Front/New Power. The People's War is carried out throughout the breadth and length of our geography, without excluding any geographical region... [A]ctions are carried out not only in the countryside, but also in the city. …

[W]hat corresponds is to continue the task of the general reorganization of the [PCP] in the midst of the People's War to carry it forward victoriously until the conquest of power in the entire country and culminate the democratic revolution, under the Great Leadership of Chairman Gonzalo and Gonzalo Thought, which is the center of Party unification and the guarantee of triumph that leads us to Communism. For us in particular to continue with the construction at all levels, today focusing on the reorganization of the PPM, fulfilling our three established tasks and the two campaigns, mainly the defense of our Great Leadership as the key link that allows us to pull everything. [Source]

The reorganization of the PCP required Peruvian communists’ struggle against the right-opportunist lines in Peru today. While the reformist line is the stronger and more-dangerous one right now, the “militarized” revisionists are also threatening. However, the Peruvian communists never gave up armed struggle. In the Interview with Comrade Laura, Laura of the PCP says:

The imperialists and the revisionists, in holy alliance, shout to the wind, the supposed defeat of the Party, the defeat of socialism, the expiration of Marxism. We warn you, no matter how many cannons fire, no matter how much they unload devastating blows, prepare the most cunning genocide against the people, they will not be able to prevail. We are ready to cross the river of blood that the revolution demands, to achieve our unalterable goal, communism. The universal validity of Maoism is for us the highest science of the revolution and a thunderous wake-up call for the imperialists, revisionists and opportunists of all kinds. The truth of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Gonzalo Thought, is irresistible. The popular masses will invariably rise up in revolution. The world revolution will triumph inexorably. This is demanded by Maoism and we will comply. [Source]

We wish for all the best for the PCP in its reorganization and the expansion of the people’s war in the new future! Because the party represents the people, it cannot fail, even if it has setbacks like it has right now.

Nepal

Nepal had its own Maoist struggle in the 1990s. In addition to facing feudalism, bureaucrat-comprador capitalism, and imperialism, the revolutionaries had to overthrow a monarchy in particular; the King of Nepal claimed that he had religious rights to exploit the workers and peasants of the country. On top of this, India engaged in expansionism and “sub-imperialism”, making Nepal a puppet of the semi-colony, so to speak. The article in A World To Win issue 22 called “HOISTING THE RED FLAG TO THE ROOF OF THE WORLD” is informative with regards to the suffering of the Nepalese people:

All of the “yardsticks” regularly used to measure impoverishment consistently show Nepal among the world's poorest countries. In a country where annual income is only a few hundred dollars a year, chicken and eggs can cost as much as in Europe. This means that a large percentage of the population is under-nourished by any standard. Industrial products are rare to non-existent for most of the population. Despite the fact that the Nepalese masses have, through hard labor, constructed housing stock and rudimentary sanitation that compares favorably to the widespread squalor prevalent in many Third World countries, health conditions are abominable for most people. According to the World Bank's Social Indicators of Development estimate for 1988-1993 (the latest available) only 1290 doctors were registered in the entire country - most of whom were in the capital, leaving a tiny number of doctors to serve about 18 million people in the outlying areas! All of this translates into an average life expectancy of 54 years for men and an even lower life expectancy for women (52.2 years). These averages mask the large disparities between the city dwellers and the impoverished countryside. …

For generations, the difficulties of surviving have forced millions of Nepalese to migrate in search of work. Most have gone to India, where they are employed in menial work and super-exploited. The back-and-forth movement of millions of Nepalese to India is vital economically for both India and Nepal and is an important feature of political and social life. Despite the great hardships, it has helped expose the Nepalese laboring masses to foreign culture and world affairs and especially to the liberating ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Throughout India, large numbers of Nepalese workers have taken part in revolutionary struggles, and a great many are organized under the leadership of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) through the different mass organizations the Party leads in India. There are also millions of people living in the Indian hill areas bordering Nepal who speak variants of the Nepalese language and identify closely with the masses in Nepal. These are some reasons why the revolutions in Nepal and India will be intertwined. [Source]

Since its founding in 1949, the “Nepal Communist Party” (NCP) had many errors that hindered its progress. First, from its founding, it was not revolutionary, so it did not lead the various peasant uprisings in the country. Even in 1971, when certain Nepalese communists acted similarly to their Indian comrades in 1967, the NCP did not support them, acting more like the revisionist CPI(M) of India. However, by 1984, the party (at that point called “NCP (Mashal)”) joined the RIM and was turning somewhat revolutionary. Still, it took far too long to take up the role as the leading group of the masses; it assumed that Nepal’s revolution could not succeed without it succeeding in India first; it also refused to uphold Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, sticking to old Marxism-Leninism, including the errors that Maoism rectified.

In 1991, another party, the NCP (Unity Center) (NCP(UC)), was formed by former members of NCP (Mashal), and this party created the United People’s Front, the united front that Nepal’s people’s war would have. NCP(UC) worked to organize the masses in both legal and covert ways. It spread Maoism among the Nepalese people, and they supported international Maoist struggles, especially the one in Peru (which, in 1992, suffered a strong blow because the state captured its leadership).

In 1994, NCP(UC) became the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (CPN(M)), showing its adherence to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Two years later, on February 13, it initiated the people’s war with attacks on police camps, feudal lords, and bureaucratic-comprador banks. The state responded with even greater terror, arresting suspected communists and using brutal methods to suppress the people. The article mentioned above describes the atrocities:

In the areas of Party influence, the two thousand militarized police sent by the government continued their reign of terror. Cases of rape of women, burning of houses and beatings of the young and elderly were widespread. In the "struggling areas", all of the young men are considered guerrillas and a great many have had to flee their villages to neighboring hills and forests. …

By the end of July, over 45 people had been killed by the reactionaries throughout the country and many hundreds jailed. The enemy has offered rewards of thousands of dollars for information on the whereabouts of leaders of the People's War. However, a new factor appeared as well: by July three well-planned ambushes against police patrols in the rural districts in Western Nepal had taken place. It is clear that the squads led by the CPN(M), the rudiments of a peoples' army, have been able to withstand the repression campaign and even counter-attack. [Source]

By 2001, the people’s war was greatly developed; the people’s army was formed to wage the war, and the new state was being built. The article “The Future is Bright, the Road is Torturous” shows this:

In the first half of 2001 the political situation in Nepal developed with dizzying speed. While it was the massacre of the royal family in lune that caught the most world attention, at the center has been the increasing strength of the People's War in that country, the incorporation of ever broader sections of the masses and the serious defeats inflicted on the reactionary armed forces, especially the militarized police forces that had been carrying out the main suppression against the revolution in Nepal. The advance of the People's War has been the main factor driving Nepal's ruling class into a profound political crisis. …

The military advances of the people's armed forces laid the basis for organizing a new political power of the people. In May, the formation of people’s governments was announced in huge mass meetings in Western districts of the country that had been the stronghold of the People's War…

The militarized police, who in fact have been trained and equipped by the Royal Nepal Army, proved incapable of resisting the people's strength. The Western imperialists and neighboring India became increasingly alarmed at the growing possibility of a Maoist victory. The Prime Minister of revisionist China, Zhu Rongji, also came to Nepal on 12 May to protect Chinese interests amidst an increasingly turbulent political situation. It was widely reported that the Maoist insurgency was high on his agenda. A leading US State Department official arrived in Kathmandu and began to issue orders. His main point was that the Maoist insurgency must be stopped, and he publicly barked orders to this effect to the then willing Nepalese Prime Minister Girija Koirala. [Source]

This status of near-victory only got better all the way until the end of the people’s war in 2006. However, in that year, the people’s war ended not due to the victory of the people, but rather the capitulation of the party’s leaders. The main leader of CPN(M), Chairman Prachanda, was once a revolutionary leader who brought the Nepalese people extremely close to seizing political power. Then, after a decade of waging people’s war, he took a rightist turn, deciding to collaborate with the bourgeois state and engage in the same electoralism that his party condemned revisionists for just 10 years prior. While this kept the ruling class and their imperialist masters happy, it disappointed the millions of Nepalese people that fought and hoped for a better future for them.

Members of the party that recognized the rightist turn waged dedicated line struggle until 2012, when they left and formed the Communist Party of Nepal—Maoist (CPN-M), later called the Communist Party of Nepal (Revolutionary Maoist) (CPN(RM)) and now the Revolutionary Communist Party of Nepal (RCPN). Basanta, a leader of RCPN, wrote “International Dimensions of Prachanda's Neo-revisionism” to explain how Prachanda had become a right-opportunist and capitulationist. He explained (our emphasis):

The neo-revisionism noticed in Prachanda has manifested in a different form than it had in the past revisionists, who used to attack upon the basic principles of Marxism in a direct and straightforward way. … In our context, Prachanda has not made him stand yet in open against the basic concepts of Marxism as the aforesaid leaders did in the past. He has been doing it in the name of creative development of MLM. …

Prachanda has been slowly attacking upon the universality of Mao's contributions. …

Prachanda had put forward a concept of non-class nature of State Power and the possibility of peaceful development of revolution in Nepal in the Balaju Expanded Meeting held in 2007. He tried to justify his arguments by the fact that Nepal Army and the [People’s Liberation Army] were kept inactive in their respective barracks. Prachanda stopped saying this again after the delegates in the convention strongly opposed it. In fact, it was merely a polished form of the 'state of the entire people' and 'peaceful transition' propounded by Khrushchev. But now all these things have been transcribed in their documents in a disguised form.

Insurrection and revolution in decision and parliamentary exercise in implementation i.e. revolution in word and reform in practice has been his characteristics. In all of the meetings from Chunwang to Palungtar via Kharipati, he has been raising the question of people's insurrection and the need to build up four bases to achieve it. However, except for misleading the revolutionaries he never put stress on building four bases to prepare for insurrection. His speciality has been not to take on preparation seriously till there is time and plead for reform at the last in the excuse that necessary preparation is not complete. [Source]

Since Prachanda’s rightward shift, his party, which became the “Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)” (UCPN(M)) in 2009 and has been the “Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Center)” (CPN(MC)) since 2016, is an electoralist party with considerable power in the state; it shared power with the further-right “Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist)” and other openly-bourgeois parties, and it does not lead the proletariat in any sort of united front despite what it may claim. This reflects its capitulationism. In 2024, CPN(MC) joined the opposition, but beyond that it has done nothing to reflect the needs of the people.^[135] It is the equivalent of Deng’s revisionism within Marxism-Leninism-Maoism; it is a “higher stage” of revisionism!

RCPN is trying to wage the revolution that the opportunists attempted to kill, but unfortunately, they have not done much in terms of materially gaining power. Still, they have a new united front, the Patriotic People’s Democratic Front, and they are appealing to the masses more and more, especially as the Nepalese state—with its “communist” parties all empowered—attempts to force the people to take part in their sham elections and suppresses their spontaneous desires. On the 2025 “Gen Z” protests, RCPN said this: “It is clear that the Oli government is becoming extremely fascist by banning social media and using force to suppress unarmed youth who have come out in protest. Our party strongly opposes this” [Source]. Unlike the out-of-touch revisionists, this party stands with the people.

We wish all the best for the revolutionaries in Nepal in flying the red flag again, in fighting a new people’s war!

Booklet I: Incorrect Ideologies

There are many ideologies on the left-wing. A lot of them are wrong in one way or another. Social democracy, “democratic socialism”, anarchism, syndicalism, Dengism, Khrushchevism, and others are all incorrect and deviate from Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in one way or another (“left” or right).^[136] We need to criticize these so that the workers know how to liberate their class, defend socialism, and reach communism. We have already defended revolution and criticized social democracy and reformist “socialism” (including syndicalism), so we must criticize the other opportunist ideologies.

It is important to understand opportunism and why it comes about. Opportunism in general is bourgeois and/or petty-bourgeois ideology masquerading as Marxism. As small businesses owners get proletarianized, they take their petty-bourgeois ideologies with them, so when they join workers’ organizations, they push their non-proletarian ideology within. Lenin’s article, “Marxism and Revisionism”, explains:

… [S]ide by side with the proletariat, there are always broad strata of the petty bourgeoisie, small proprietors. … These new small producers are just as inevitably being cast again into the ranks of the proletariat. It is quite natural that the petty-bourgeois world-outlook should again and again crop up in the ranks of the broad workers’ parties. It is quite natural that this should be so and always will be so, right up to the changes of fortune that will take place in the proletarian revolution. [Source]

If not the petty bourgeoisie, then it is generally the labor aristocracy or otherwise privileged workers who can and do easily fall for opportunism; they usually support revisionism (also called right-opportunism)^[137], but because of their unstable nature and their isolation from the working class, they can become left-opportunists. If not them, then the national bourgeoisie is responsible for revisionism within any communist party, especially in the third world. In the examples of revisionism within “socialist” countries, almost all of them were due to either the bourgeoisie taking control of communist parties and making them capitalist or the bourgeoisie founding opportunist, self-proclaimed “communist” groups despite them not being communist in the first place.

(Rightist) Revisionism

Within the general trend of “Marxism-Leninism”, there are many revisionist ideologies that do not represent the proletarian line. These ideologies end up helping the restoration of capitalism. Such ideologies include Khrushchevism (including other similar variants, like “Goulash Communism” in Hungary), Dengism, and Titoism. All of these variants are explicitly rightist, and they reverse socialist development.

Titoism was the first form of revisionism out of these. It developed shortly after the Yugoslav communists liberated their nation from the fascist imperialism of Germany and Italy. Josip Broz Tito was the person who took power, and he, representing the bourgeoisie, almost immediately attacked Stalin and his allies. Later on, it implemented “market socialism”. It was completely incorrect of them to do that, and it led to very weak enterprises relying on state aid. The state soon started running out of funds to pay for the losses that weak enterprises had, so it took loans from the imperialist “International Monetary Fund” (IMF). Unemployment existed in Yugoslavia because of this capitalist development; the USSR and other socialist states did not have unemployment until they themselves experienced capitalist restoration.

In “Is Yugoslavia a Socialist Country?” by the editorial departments of People’s Daily and Red Flag (Hongqi), the authors state:

All Marxist-Leninists hold that Yugoslavia is not a socialist country. The leading clique of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia has betrayed Marxism-Leninism and the Yugoslav people and consists of renegades from the international communist movement and lackeys of imperialism. …

After betraying Marxism-Leninism, which they termed obsolete, the leaders of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia opposed their anti-Leninist revisionist programme to the Declaration of 1957; they set the L.C.Y. against the international communist movement as a whole. …

One would like to ask:

Can a country be socialist when, as the Statement says, it is guided by a variety of international opportunism, a variety of modern revisionist theories?

Can a country be socialist when, as the Statement says, it has betrayed Marxism-Leninism and sets itself against the international communist movement as a whole?

Can a country be socialist when, as the Statement says, it carries on subversive work against the socialist camp and the world communist movement?

Can a country be socialist when, as the Statement says, it engages in activities which prejudice the unity of all the peace-loving forces and countries?

Can a country be socialist when the imperialist countries headed by the United States have nurtured it with several billions of US dollars?

This is indeed out of the ordinary and unheard of! …

One of Khrushchov's arguments to affirm that Yugoslavia is a socialist country is that private capital, private enterprise and capitalists do not exist in Yugoslavia.

Is that true? No, it is not.

Judging by the record in all socialist countries, it is not strange to find different sectors, including a private capitalist sector, existing in the national economy of a socialist country for a considerable period after the proletariat has taken political power.^[138] What matters is the kind of policy adopted by the government towards private capitalism—the policy of utilizing, restricting, transforming and eliminating it, or the policy of laissez-faire and fostering and encouraging it. This is an important criterion for determining whether a country is developing towards socialism or towards capitalism.

On this question the Tito clique is going in the opposite direction from socialism. The social changes Yugoslavia introduced in the early post-war period were in the first place not thoroughgoing. The policy the Tito clique has adopted since its open betrayal is not one of transforming and eliminating private capital and private enterprise but of fostering and expanding them. …

The Tito clique seizes the fruits of the people's labor which it appropriates chiefly for meeting the extravagant expenses of this clique of bureaucrats, for maintaining its reactionary rule, for strengthening the apparatus which suppresses the working people, and for paying tribute to the imperialists in the form of the servicing of foreign debts.

Moreover, the Tito clique controls these enterprises through their managers. The managers are nominally chosen by competition by the enterprises but are in fact appointed by the Tito clique. They are agents of the bureaucrat-comprador bourgeoisie in these enterprises.

In the enterprises under "workers' self-government", the relations between managers and workers are actually relations between employers and employees, between the exploiters and the exploited. [Source]

Khrushchevism (which does not really exist as an ideology; it is a term naming Khrushchev’s revisionism), along with other Eastern European forms of revisionism, was revisionist for many reasons. First and foremost, Khrushchev denounced comrade Joseph Stalin. During the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev made plenty of claims against Stalin. He referred to Stalin as “a coward, an idiot, and a dictator.” While there were and are certain criticisms to be made of Stalin, one must not make the mistake of denouncing all of Stalin. Or, to word it differently, one must not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

But Khrushchev did just that; he completely rejected Stalin’s contributions and downright opposed Stalin, even though it was Stalin and his allies who led the workers who industrialized and electrified the USSR, educated its people, defeated the Nazi forces, built up a strong military, developed and advanced very far in the sciences, and much more. Furthermore, Khrushchev outright lied about Stalin’s undemocratic ways. Despite commandist errors at times, particularly during the purges, there was democracy in the USSR that time; workers could choose their managers, party leaders, and government representatives. Workers could also fire managers and purge (remove) people from the party and government.

Khrushchev was also very hypocritical regarding “democracy” and “dictatorship”. After he delivered his “secret speech” condemning Stalin, Georgian anti-revisionist workers, students, and party officials protested against his rightist deviations. What did Khrushchev do? He suppressed them with military force. Western bourgeois media does not want people to know that Marxism-Leninism and genuine socialism were popular among workers, so it hides this event, but even basic research shows just how terrible the revisionists were to the Georgian people. Which East is Red? touches on the occurrence when talking about anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninists within the revisionist USSR:

Significant sections of Soviet people who had grown up revering Stalin as a father figure who saved the nation from the Nazi jackboot became confused. How could it be that someone so revered—if at times frightening—could so suddenly be stripped of all his sanctity? Small gatherings of protest began in Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad, albeit with no major unrest. In one particular case, however, confusion and contempt turned to rage, and in early March 1956 the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic—Stalin’s birthplace—became a storm-center of pushback by common Soviet citizens against the earliest stages of Destalinization.

The third anniversary of Stalin’s death on 5 March brought out thousands to lay wreaths and flowers at the foot of the statue of Stalin in the main square of Tbilisi, with the knowledge that authorities were planning to tear down the statue shortly. Unrest had already begun the night before, however: according to Soviet Georgian special reports and MVD (Ministry of Interior Affairs) correspondence, a young college student attempted to stab a Soviet Army officer for not setting up an honor guard around the statue of Stalin, where a crowd had gathered that night to commemorate him. The next morning, 50,000 people—primarily Komsomol youth and students—came to Stalin Square to commemorate the death of “the father of the peoples” and 150-200 people laid at the foot of the statue. On 7 March, university and workplace walkouts caused the demonstration to swell to well over 70,000 workers, students, and Party members. That same night, the cities of Gori (Stalin’s birthplace), Sukhumi, and Batumi broke out into unrest. Clearly, the people of Soviet Georgia were not going to allow their revered leader to be put to the dustbin of history without a fight. …

After the Chinese delegate had spoken, clashes began between demonstrators and local militia as they shouted pro-Stalin slogans and hung banners of Lenin and Stalin across the center of the city. Signs of the protests being peaceful ebbed slowly away into the night, as the clashes escalated in ferocity. Finally, the breaking point was reached the next day: workers and students gathered together and violently stormed the Ministry of Communications building. Realizing a full-on revolt was on their hands, the Soviet Army’s district of defense for the Caucasus region, the Transcaucasus Military District, was called into Tbilisi.

The arrival of the Army brought with it immediate tragedy. With the riots now an organized rebellion, tanks appeared around the Stalin monument and opened fire on the crowds, causing the deaths of numerous Georgian protesters. While still unclear as to who fired the first shot—the protesters were now armed with pistols and rifles—the Army’s reaction to the riots was disproportionate at the beginning. The 9 March Massacre—as it came to be known in Georgian history—ended with somewhere between 100 and 800 (according to later Russian sources) dead. [Source]

Khrushchev started “liberalizing” the USSR; this trend occurred in other Eastern European countries (except Albania, whose leaders and people were smart enough to know how much Khrushchev was lying). Freedom was certainly limited in the socialist days, but this did not change under Khrushchev, at least not for the working-class. Instead, it freed the bourgeois elements of these countries. The bureaucrats in the USSR (who essentially became capitalists), along with the capitalists in the Eastern European People's Democracies, were freed under Khrushchev, and this let them acquire more power and wealth parasitically. The working-class was exploited once again, a decade after they were liberated from the Nazis’ totalitarian capitalist grip. Market reforms were implemented nine years later, and this combined with the state bourgeoisie’s economic plans helped squeeze the most surplus value that they could get out of the working-class; we detailed this in the section on the USSR’s and East Europe’s application of Marxism-Leninism, in Book II.

Relations between Yugoslavia and the Soviet bloc warmed up quite a bit, and the Soviet bourgeoisie put in place a de facto blockade on Albania because the nation, and more specifically its working-class, refused to surrender to this imperialist domination. Revolutionary China, being the socialist nation it really was, sent food aid and other supplies to Albania to help it, and this helped strengthen socialist internationalism. But because China helped the Albanian people, and because it itself was trying to develop its economy, the USSR started attacking China, both economically and militarily. Within the USSR’s ally countries, the Soviet bourgeoisie exported capital to take advantage of the high rates of profit there; within the USSR itself, national divisions emerged thanks to the uneven development of capitalism, and the richer Russian bourgeoisie’s exploitation caused anger among emerging national bourgeois elements in other republics. The USSR did similar things even in countries that were not ruled by a “communist” party, like India, which became one of the many “bases” that the USSR would use in its combat against socialist China. To be a defender of this blatant imperialism would be to be a revisionist and capitalist-roader.

The end of socialism in the USSR was only possible with state-capitalists’ coup against socialism from 1953–56. In “The Khrushchev Coup (Death of Stalin and Khrushchev’s Rise to Power)”, it says:

Khrushchev’s government launched de-stalinization, a wave of propaganda and censorship against Stalin era policies. In their place the Khrushchevites implemented profit oriented market reforms and other erroneous policies which put Soviet socialism as well as all other countries in the soviet camp on the wrong track.

Why didn’t anybody stop him? How did he manage to avoid being voted out? Khrushchev rose to power via an undemocratic military takeover, a coup d'etat, and used the military to kill, imprison, intimidate and marginalize his enemies. …

Shortly before Stalin’s death, his personal security was drastically reduced. The head of his personal secretariat Poskrebyshev and the head of his personal bodyguard General Vlasik were both removed under accusations of leaking documents and unreliability. This left Stalin vulnerable. …

What was this motive[, the motive of getting Stalin killed]? We need to take a little detour to explore this question. Older theories have suggested that Stalin was attempting to purge the party and state of careerists and bureaucrats. However, newer research suggests a more systemic change. According to historian Aleksandr Pyzhikov (who is very much an anti-communist and anti-Stalin historian) in 1947 there was a proposition to update the party’s program. This 1947 party program has never been made available. [Source]

The Khrushchevite coup was not a smooth affair by any means. As any class overthrowing the ruling class is difficult, the bourgeoisie overthrowing the proletariat in the USSR was quite complicated, and there was factional infighting among the revisionists in the USSR. Beria, whom we mentioned in Book II, was one of the revisionists who opposed Khrushchev, not out of Marxist-Leninist principle and not out of commitment to the working class, but out of competition with Khrushchev’s wing of the new bourgeoisie. Certain “Marxist-Leninists” claim that Beria was actually a Marxist-Leninist himself, and they cite his alliance with Stalin from 1938 until his death; in truth, Beria was an opportunist, and the workers’ representatives (whom Stalin led) used him solely when he was needed before they planned to remove him from power.

The result of Khrushchevite revisionism was an inefficient state-capitalist economy. While some mechanisms of planning from the socialist era remained, they became highly bureaucratic and far less democratic; they also operated to maximize profit, i.e. maximize the rate of exploitation. This generated contradictions within the state as managers/directors, state and party cadres and bureaucrats, and illegal private capitalists all had differing interests and contradicting ways to increase their own economic standings against each other’s. Further market reforms under Mikhail Gorbachev, who took power in 1985, exacerbated these contradictions and led to political instability, the Western-backed overthrows of revisionist countries in Europe, and the illegal dissolution of the USSR. Had the USSR remained a socialist state, a genuine proletarian dictatorship, it would have been far stronger and more revolutionary, it would be around today, and it would pose a truly anti-imperialist threat to finance capital.

China was not perfect against revisionism, either. After Deng Xiaoping took power, he implemented certain market reforms that very much resembled those that Yugoslavia took. Interestingly, he went a step further and allowed private individuals to own means of production and extract surplus value. Deng also let imperialist capitalists export capital into China. Deng and the other revisionist “Marxists” in China defended all of this with the revisionist “theory of productive forces”. This supposed “theory” was invented by Liu Shaoqi in the 1960s, and it claimed that socialism requires highly-developed productive forces and cannot develop the productive forces that fast without capitalist development preceding it.

The first claim was not very wrong; Marxists know that at least limited capitalist development is needed before socialism. However, the “theory of productive forces” takes this further, saying that complete capitalist development is absolutely needed for socialism to succeed. This goes along with the second point of the “theory”. They are wrong; socialism can develop the productive forces much faster than capitalism, especially since more surplus product can be diverted to investments in technology and equipment.^[139] In the socialist era, the productive forces expanded at a rapid pace; the GDP increased at a rate of 10% per year, on average [Source]. But Deng Xiaoping and his allies did not care. They were only interested in capitalist development, after all.

The bankruptcy of the Dengist “theory of productive forces” was exposed in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. While the capitalist-roaders upheld their economist notions, the proletarian line kept politics in command. The article “Politics is in Command of Economies, Revolution is in Command of Production” shows the correctness of the left line:

If we depart from the dictatorship of the proletariat and not continue the revolution under [it], then socialist production cannot develop and genuine socialist construction cannot be carried out. The result can only be capitalist restoration. In the great practice of leading China's socialist revolution and socialist construction and in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution initiated and led by himself, Chairman Mao has incisively criticized the counter-revolutionary revisionist line of the renegade, hidden traitor and scab Liu Shaoqi for the restoration of capitalism and shattered the bourgeois headquarters headed by Liu Shaoqi. This has provided the basic guarantee that China's economic construction will continue to advance in giant strides along the socialist road. …

Chairman Mao has set forth the brilliant concept that, in socialist economic construction, it is imperative to give prominence to proletarian polities and to put politics in command of economics, and formulated the general line of “going all out, aiming high and achieving greater, faster, better and more economical results in building socialism,” the great strategic principles of “maintaining independence and keeping the initiative in our own hands and relying on our own efforts" and “be prepared against war, be prepared against natural disasters, and do everything for the people" as well as a series of other proletarian economic policies. … Chairman Mao's brilliant thinking that politics is in command of economics and revolution is in command of production is the beacon lighting up the road forward for us in consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat, preventing capitalist restoration and building socialism. It is, moreover, a sharp weapon in the criticism of modern revisionism. [Source]

China’s capitalist economy’s growth was a bit slower under Deng Xiaoping and most of his successors. But under Hu Jintao, who was in power from 2002–2012, there was quite an economic boom. There was so much production that excess capital was being exported to poorer countries. China was developing so fast during this period that it became imperialist; its industrial and bank capitalists merged, it exported capital, etc. Still, because the capitalist economy constantly has booms and busts, China’s economic growth slowed down yet again under Xi Jinping, who has been in power since 2012. But the ruling class is fine with all this since it is exploiting labor in poorer countries in Africa and Southeast Asia. Contrast this with socialism, which was able to develop China in spite of the Soviet revisionists’ aggression and the US imperialists’ economic and military pressures on it.

As we described in Book II, China’s revisionist turn hurt the working class. Despite the seemingly fast economic growth, nearly all of that benefited the capitalist class the most. The destruction of people's communes and the commodification of labor-power depressed workers’ wages; even after inflation and after the workers’ nominal wages rose, prices of workers’ needs rose much faster, so their real wages continued to decline. None of this could happen when the workers controlled the ruling party and government; only when Deng and his clique destroyed the proletarian dictatorship and imposed a bourgeois one could they implement these policies that only benefited China’s new ruling class.

All of these deviations occurred because Marxist-Leninists of the past were not wary enough of those around them and because they unintentionally created the conditions for the revisionists to rise in power [Source]. In the USSR, because the mass line method was not used in leadership (at least not as much as it should have been), Khrushchev took power quite easily without much opposition. And Khrushchev only became a capitalist-roader because he acquired bureaucratic privileges that incentivized him to take the USSR on a rightist path. Deng had a similar situation, but because bureaucratic privileges were banned in China during the Cultural Revolution and because the mass line was used much more (and since the masses supervised the Communist Party and the government), Deng could not take power until after Mao died and his successor, Hua Guofeng, arrested thousands of genuine revolutionaries.

To believe that Khrushchevist USSR and Dengist China were/are socialist is to be very mistaken and to misunderstand socialism. A socialist economy is one in which the workers hold political power and (as it develops) own the means of production. It moves toward a communist economy, and goods and services are distributed according to work.

The USSR after Stalin and China after Maoist leadership was overthrown lacked these characteristics; the rising capitalist class in these countries had seized political power, and since the state owned most of the means of production (collective farms were outside of the state sector, but they had to meet economic plans from the state, and a portion of their profits was taken by the state), this meant that the capitalists fundamentally controlled the means of production. In addition, these capitalists extracted profits from the state enterprise, taxes, etc., meaning that they got certain goods and services without working, so goods were not distributed based on work. Economic transitions were more and more in the direction of Western-style capitalism, and they were absolutely not toward communism. China even went a step further and expanded its private sector, allowing private capitalists to develop more political and economic power.

There are revisionist “Marxist-Leninists” who either fail to recognize the blatantly-capitalist transformations of these countries or outright support them as “Actually Existing Socialism”. In the former camp are various “mainstream” parties, such as the “Communist Party of Greece” (KKE), the “Communist Workers’ Platform USA” (CWP USA), and more, and these parties may criticize the revisionism of post-Stalin leaders of the USSR and other People’s Democracies, but they also attack the proletarian leaders of China and Albania, and they claim that the revisionist leaders “still ruled socialist states” while the proletarian ones were “opportunists themselves”; their attitudes toward modern revisionist states vary.^[140] These people are simply wrong, as we showed above; their line must be criticized, and their leaders must be branded opportunists. There are even further-right “mainstream” parties, like the CPUSA, CPI, etc., and these parties embrace the revisionism of both the old revisionist states (the Soviet-aligned ones) and the new revisionism of China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, and the DPRK. This camp is even more incorrect, and they are more clearly opportunists whose leaders must be condemned as bourgeois agents.

Believe it or not, there is an even further right camp of revisionists claiming to be “communist”. They go by the ideology of “Eurocommunism”, and their trend originated in the 1960’s when various West European “communist” parties—many of which were already revisionist as they opposed the proletarian line of the Communist Party of China, the Party of Labor of Albania, etc.—began to break with Khrushchevism, only to go to its right. Eurocommunism was an inevitable regression from Khrushchevite revisionism; revisionism inevitably leads to total capitalist restoration, including in ideology, and Eurocommunism’s explicit abandonment of Marxism-Leninism was a significant step to that, one that anti-revisionist Marxists hinted when the bourgeoisie seized power in various communist parties.

The Eurocommunist parties, led by the most vulgar agents of the bourgeoisie, became reformists not too different from “democratic socialists” (their only difference was their increased sympathy with the Khrushchevite states and their “goal” of communism). In 1968, they supported the revisionist (“ultra-revisionist”, specifically, meaning to the right of the Khrushchevites) leaders of Czechoslovakia against the Soviet imperialist invasion; note that this is in contrast to the proletarian position that opposed the invasion as well as the Czechoslovak revisionist clique. The Party of Labor of Albania made this statement against the revisionists of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and West Europe:

The Czechoslovak ultra-revisionists enjoy the support of imperialism, of the Yugoslav and Rumanian revisionists who have already taken their countries out of the Soviet orbit. They have the backing of the revisionist leaders of most of the European Communist Parties, who see in Dubcek’s [Dubcek was the leader of Czechoslovakia at the time] programme the blue-print of the "socialism" they wish to see in their countries. [Source]

While Hoxha became a dogmatist after Mao’s death, and he had incorrect attacks on Mao and the proletarian leaders of China that Deng and co. deposed in 1976, his condemnation of the Eurocommunists in Imperialism and the Revolution was a correct proletarian stand toward the agents of imperialism:

The revisionist parties of Europe, such as those of Italy, France and Spain, and following them all the other revisionist parties of the West, deny Leninism, the class struggle, the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. All of them have embarked on the road of compromise with the capitalist bourgeoisie. They have named this anti-Marxist line “Eurocommunism”. “Eurocommunism” is a new pseudo-communist trend which is and is not in opposition to the Soviet revisionist bloc. This wavering stand is explained by their aim to have a coexistence of ideas with European social-democracy and the whole welter of views seething in the cauldron of Europe. The “Eurocommunist” can unite with anybody at all except those who fight for the triumph of the revolution and the purity of the Marxist-Leninist ideology. [Source]

And of course, Hoxha’s work dedicated to the Eurocommunists, Eurocommunism is Anti-Communism, is worth some study, though it has the aforementioned dogmatic condemnation of Mao:

The Western bourgeoisie does not conceal its enthusiasm over the fact that now the Eurocommunist revisionists have lined themselves up with the social-democrats, and the fascists to attack the revolution, Marxism-Leninism and communism jointly, with all their weapons. The capitalists are overjoyed that they are preparing new administrators of their affairs to gradually replace the social-democrats, whose long service in the apparatuses of the bourgeois state and open struggle against the working class and the cause of socialism in many countries, has led them into the ranks of extreme reaction and compromised them deeply in the eyes of the workers. Today the social-democrats have become identified, not only ideologically and politically, but also from the social viewpoint, with the big bourgeoisie. Now the bourgeoisie has great hopes that the Eurocommunist revisionists will become the main warders of the capitalist order, the banner-bearers of counterrevolution. …

These renegades are trying to present their rapid descent down the steps of betrayal of Marxism-Leninism as a painful ascent of the mountain to find the source of the communist truth. However, all revisionists, whether Khrushchevite or Eurocommunist, fight with equal ferocity and cunning both against Stalin and against Lenin and Marx. The initial concentration of their fire against Stalin, leaving Lenin out of it for the time being, was simply tactical. Their class logic told the imperialists and revisionists that at the given moment it was preferable first to destroy socialism in the Soviet Union, first to attack Marxism-Leninism where it had been applied in practice. The bourgeoisie and reaction understood that the capitalist degeneration of the Soviet Union would greatly assist their struggle to bring about the degeneration of communist parties which were not in power. [Source]

Perhaps the worst kind of right-opportunists that claim to support “Marxism-Leninism” are those that call themselves “National Communists” or “National Bolsheviks”; Eurocommunists were and are a part of that trend, for their ideologies were justified with nationalist sentiments against both proletarian internationalism and Soviet revisionist imperialism. We shall briefly attack them in the following sub-section.

National “Communism/Bolshevism”

Certain opportunist “communists” tail the bourgeoisie of their countries by proclaiming their support of a “combination” of nationalism and “communism”. These tailists can have a variety of views, from simply upholding “national sovereignty” above proletarian internationalism to outright chauvinism, particularly racism. Among these in the US are “patriotic socialists” and “MAGAcommunists”, people who try to combine loyalty to the American state or “American nation”—a non-existent idea of a nation, for America is a prisonhouse of nations like the Russian Empire was—with proletarian ideology. Today, most “MAGAcommunists” center themselves around the “American Communist Party” (ACP) and the “Party of Communists USA” (PCUSA)—the latter being an inactive group that has since had its cells join the ACP. Other organizations exist for this social-chauvinist current, but these are the main ones.

No matter how progressive a country’s nationalism may be, it is not compatible with communism, for nationalism is bourgeois ideology while communism is proletarian. Of all people, the revisionist Liu Shaoqi wrote the work correctly distinguishing “Internationalism and Nationalism” in 1952:

In China, it was the party of the Chinese proletariat, and not the party of the bourgeoisie or the petty-bourgeoisie, that first raised a clear-cut programme for fighting against imperialism and for national independence. Our Communist Party of China has always been the leader and organizer of the anti-imperialist national united front of the Chinese people. The scale of this national united front embraces workers, peasants, intellectuals, the petty-bourgeoisie, the national bourgeoisie and even the progressive gentry. This revolutionary national liberation movement is not in contradiction to proletarian internationalism, but it is entirely consistent with it. It constitutes an extremely integral part of the movement of proletarian internationalism, constituting its broadest direct ally. The victory of this national liberation movement is a great step forward along the path of the proletarian internationalist cause, for it gives great aid and impetus to the socialist revolution of the proletariat throughout the world.

Therefore, it is clear that if the Communists in the oppressed nations fail to take concrete steps to fight against imperialist oppression and for the national liberation, if they merely regard “internationalism” as window dressing, then they are betraying proletarian internationalism, playing into the hands of imperialism, descending to the level of the mean and contemptible Trotskyites and, as a result, becoming faithful agents of imperialism.

Furthermore, Communists will be betraying the proletariat and Communism and playing the game of the imperialists all over the world and will make themselves pawns of the imperialists, if, after their own nation has been freed from imperialist oppression, the Communists descend to a position of bourgeois nationalism, carrying out a policy of national selfishness and sacrificing common international interests of the upper stratum of their own nation; or if they not only fail to oppose imperialism but on the contrary rely on imperialist aid to carry out aggression and oppression against other nations; or if they employ national conservatism and exclusive ideas to oppose proletarian internationalism, to reject the international unity of the proletariat and the working people and to oppose the Socialist Soviet Union. The Tito clique in Yugoslavia is now taking this path. [Source]

The simple, but brilliant quote from “A Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement” summarizes the communist relationship to bourgeois nationalism in all its forms:

As the internal social contradictions and the international class struggle sharpen, the bourgeoisie, and particularly the big bourgeoisie, in some newly independent countries increasingly tend to become retainers of imperialism and to pursue anti-popular, anti-Communist and counter-revolutionary policies. It is necessary for the proletarian party resolutely to oppose these reactionary policies.

Generally speaking, the bourgeoisie in these countries have a dual character. When a united front is formed with the bourgeoisie, the policy of the proletarian party should be one of both unity and struggle. The policy should be to unite with the bourgeoisie, in so far as they tend to be progressive, anti-imperialist and anti-feudal, but to struggle against their reactionary tendencies to compromise and collaborate with imperialism and the forces of feudalism.

On the national question the world outlook of the proletarian party is internationalism, and not nationalism. In the revolutionary struggle it supports progressive nationalism and opposes reactionary nationalism. It must always draw a clear line of demarcation between itself and bourgeois nationalism, to which it must never fall captive. [Source]

This principled line goes back to Stalin, Lenin, Engels, and Marx, and it continues through today. Communists can and must align with the national bourgeoisie and patriotic petty-bourgeoisie of oppressed nations, but it cannot allow the proletariat to be subject to those classes’ leadership. Lenin made this clear in The Right of Nations to Self-Determination:

It makes no difference to the hired worker whether he is exploited chiefly by the Great-Russian bourgeoisie rather than the non-Russian bourgeoisie, or by the Polish bourgeoisie rather than the Jewish bourgeoisie, etc. The hired worker who has come to understand his class interests is equally indifferent to the state privileges of the Great-Russian capitalists and to the promises of the Polish or Ukrainian capitalists to set up an earthly paradise when they obtain state privileges. Capitalism is developing and will continue to develop, anyway, both in integral states with a mixed population and in separate national states.

In any case the hired worker will be an object of exploitation. Successful struggle against exploitation requires that the proletariat be free of nationalism, and be absolutely neutral, so to speak, in the fight for supremacy that is going on among the bourgeoisie of the various nations. If the proletariat of any one nation gives the slightest support to the privileges of its “own” national bourgeoisie^[141], that will inevitably rouse distrust among the proletariat of another nation; it will weaken the international class solidarity of the workers and divide them, to the delight of the bourgeoisie. Repudiation of the right to self-determination or to secession inevitably means, in practice, support for the privileges of the dominant nation. [Source]

And in terms of patriotism, which is loyalty to a country rather than a particular nation, only patriotism for oppressed countries and socialist ones is progressive, and that too only when it is applied in tandem with proletarian internationalism; patriotism and loyalty for settler-colonies, imperialist states, semi-colonial regimes, etc. is reactionary, as Mao said [Source].

Only proletarian leadership can completely liberate nations, as Mao’s theory of New Democracy proves. “National Communism”, “patriotic socialism”, etc. are thus wrong, for they place bourgeois nationalism above proletarian internationalism. At best, this means supporting national bourgeois movements in the third world, leading to some success in national liberation, but not complete success like proletarian-led liberation can bring; at worst, it means being patriotic for imperialist countries, or even supporting national chauvinism, particularly in its “racial” form (as “National Bolshevism” does; its followers are called “Nazbols”, just as “National Socialists” are Nazis). At the same time, when these revisionists take power, they do not build socialism properly at all; every example of “national communism”, as in Yugoslavia, Romania, and arguably China with its “socialism with Chinese characteristics” has led to the construction of capitalism in practice, and market capitalism at that since most “national communists” tried to go even further right than the Soviet revisionists that implemented state capitalism.

The cases of Yugoslavia and China need no further elaboration, for it is clear that their “national communist” ideas were guises for capitalism in essence. Yugoslavia in particular had the issue of national contradictions intensifying within its borders, just as the revisionist USSR did; both countries fell and saw nationalist warfare erupt due to the inequality capitalism had brought under their “communist” parties. Romanian “national communism”, however, has hardly been brought up, mostly because its particular strand of revisionism failed to gain prominence in “communist” parties around the world. Simply put, the Romanian state-capitalist regime shifted to being a state that worked with both American and Soviet imperialism; Romania, like Yugoslavia, utilized IMF loans to develop, making the country fall into debt. In order to “maintain national pride”, the Romanian bourgeoisie paid for its debt with intense austerity programs; it was able to pay all its debt, but that only came at the expense of the Romanian masses, who then overthrew the national bourgeoisie; in their place came comprador bourgeois leaders who sold their nation entirely to the West [Source].

All of these deviations divide the proletariat instead of unifying it, and they also hinder the progress of national liberation as nations are made to fight each other for nationalist gain rather than internationalist unity against imperialism; thus, as the quotes above show, nationalist “socialism” or “communism” serves imperialist states and not the oppressed masses of the world—and certainly not the proletariat of the world. At best, they may act as typical national-bourgeois states that fight imperialism, but even then, their anti-imperialism is weak, and it is inferior to that of proper socialist states. Thus, we oppose nationalist “socialism/communism”, and we promote proletarian internationalism above all.

Something to bear in mind is that this nationalist trend of revisionism did not spontaneously occur, nor does it rise without some cause. In the US, the “ACP” poses as a dynamic, “active”, and “truly working class” (in its aesthetics, anyway) alternative to the decaying parties like CPUSA, PSL, and so on. This is because the mainstream revisionism of those parties has been so bad that relatively advanced working people still look for a party to become the vanguard of their class, allowing rival opportunists to emerge to “correct” the mainstream’s errors and promote ideas that seem to appeal to the working masses. Therefore, our fight against “patriotic socialism” must be combined with a general fight against right-opportunism, against revisionism. Lenin said this of syndialism, which arose as a result of “opportunism, reformism, and parliamentary cretinism” [Source]. In order to fight revisionism as a whole, we need to unite under Maoism, educate the masses in it, serve the people, and organize the working masses into units of action and into a proper communist party.

Of course, right-opportunists are simply those who are openly to the right of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, who make their bourgeois ideology clear. But there is another wing of opportunism, one to the “left” of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism; these ones are not clearly bourgeois or petty-bourgeois at first glance, and so they are much more deceptive.

Ultra-Leftism

Revisionist so-called “Marxist-Leninists” are not the only opportunists in the leftist movement. Toward the “left” of Marxist-Leninist-Maoists are the ultra-leftists—people who claim to be to the “left” of us while in practice being to the right of us; they often support ideas that are too radical for their time. Stalin criticized them in “Industrialization of the country and the Right Deviation in the C.P.S.U.(B.)”

What is the "Left" deviation? Is there really a so-called "Left" deviation in the Party? Are there in our Party, as our theses say, anti-middle-peasant trends, super-industrialisation trends and so on? Yes, there are. What do they amount to? They amount to a deviation towards Trotskyism. That was said already by the July plenum. I am referring to the July plenum's resolution on grain procurement policy, which speaks of a struggle on two fronts: against those who want to hark back from the Fifteenth Congress—the Rights, and against those who want to convert the emergency measures into a permanent policy of the Party—the "Lefts," the trend towards Trotskyism. …

And that is understandable: with the existence of petty-bourgeois elemental forces, and the pressure that these forces exert on our Party, there cannot but be Trotskyist trends in it. It is one thing to arrest Trotskyist cadres or expel them from the Party. It is another thing to put an end to the Trotskyist ideology. That will be more difficult. And we say that wherever there is a Right deviation, there is bound to be also a "Left" deviation. The "Left" deviation is the shadow of the Right deviation. Lenin used to say, referring to the Otzovists, that the "Lefts" are Mensheviks, only turned inside-out. That is quite true. The same thing must be said of the present "Lefts." People who deviate towards Trotskyism are in fact also Rights, only turned inside-out, Rights who cloak themselves with "Left" phrases. …

But if the Trotskyist trend represents a "Left" deviation, does not this mean that the "Lefts" are more to the Left than Leninism? No, it does not. Leninism is the most Left (without quotation marks) trend in the world labour movement. We Leninists belonged to the Second International down to the outbreak of the imperialist war as the extreme Left group of the Social-Democrats. We did not remain in the Second International and we advocated a split in the Second International precisely because, being the extreme Left group, we did not want to be in the same party as the petty-bourgeois traitors to Marxism, the social-pacifists and social-chauvinists.

It was these tactics and this ideology that subsequently became the basis of all the Bolshevik parties of the world. In our Party, we Leninists are the sole Lefts without quotation marks. Consequently, we Leninists are neither "Lefts" nor Rights in our own Party. We are a party of Marxist-Leninists. And within our Party we combat not only those whom we call openly opportunist deviators, but also those who pretend to be "Lefter" than Marxism, "Lefter" than Leninism, and who camouflage their Right, opportunist nature with high-sounding "Left" phrases. [Source]

These people—who include left-communists, anarchists, and Trotskyists—believe that by supporting adventurist ideas, they can achieve “true socialism”, which is no more than pure Utopia that cannot and will not exist. They all oppose the proletarian states of the past and the people’s wars of today, and they instead promote their ungrounded notions of “pure socialism” and “proper revolution”.

Anarchists think that the state can simply be abolished, and this completely ignores the nature of the state, how it developed, and how it will fade away. The state exists as a tool for a class to dominate other classes, and it cannot be “abolished”. It can only go away when class distinctions disappear, and that can only happen with class struggle and the establishment of a proletarian state (a dictatorship of the proletariat). If immediately after overthrowing the bourgeoisie (after smashing its state without acquiring its property or changing its culture), there is no proletarian authority established, the bourgeoisie can easily retake power. Most syndicalists—whose ideology is still generally rightist in form and essence—fall into a similar trap of rejecting authority and proletarian state power, especially as many syndicalists are anarcho-syndicalists. Friedrich Engels refuted anarchists with his essay, “On Authority”, which we cited previously.

A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned. This summary mode of procedure is being abused to such an extent that it has become necessary to look into the matter somewhat more closely.

Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand, authority presupposes subordination. Now, since these two words sound bad, and the relationship which they represent is disagreeable to the subordinated party, the question is to ascertain whether there is any way of dispensing with it, whether—given the conditions of present-day society—we could not create another social system, in which this authority would be given no scope any longer, and would consequently have to disappear. …

But the necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas. There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and absolute obedience of all to the will of one.

When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that's true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.

We have thus seen that, on the one hand, a certain authority, no matter how delegated, and, on the other hand, a certain subordination, are things which, independently of all social organization, are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make products circulate.

We have seen, besides, that the material conditions of production and circulation inevitably develop with large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture, and increasingly tend to enlarge the scope of this authority. Hence it is absurd to speak of the principle of authority as being absolutely evil, and of the principle of autonomy as being absolutely good. Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society. If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organization of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other; but they are blind to all facts that make the thing necessary and they passionately fight the world. [Source]

Left communists are wrong, too. The German and Dutch trend of left communism, council communism, rejects the leadership of the vanguard party in workers’ struggles; they instead believe that workers’ councils can lead the revolution. They foolishly assume that the vanguard party leads without the workers’ consent or input, which is simply incorrect; they also believe that councils can operate without a political leadership, making their errors similar to syndicalists.^[142] The vanguard party is democratic-centralist, meaning that though it is centralized and disciplined, it is also democratic and allows for debate, dissent, and discussion of views when making decisions. The party also uses the mass line method of leadership, so the people get to explain to the party and government what they feel is needed and what they want, and then the party can provide that to them in the form of policies and actions. This allows it to represent the working people in their organs of power, namely their councils.

In “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, Lenin refutes these opportunists. Specifically, in the chapter, “‘Left-Wing’ Communism in Germany. The Leaders, the Party, the Class, the Masses”, he said:

The mere presentation of the question—“dictatorship of the party or dictatorship of the class; dictatorship (party) of the leaders, or dictatorship (party) of the masses?”—testifies to most incredibly and hopelessly muddled thinking. These people want to invent something quite out of the ordinary, and, in their effort to be clever, make themselves ridiculous. It is common knowledge that the masses are divided into classes, that the masses can be contrasted with classes only by contrasting the vast majority in general, regardless of division according to status in the social system of production, with categories holding a definite status in the social system of production; that as a rule and in most cases—at least in present-day civilized countries—classes are led by political parties; that political parties, as a general rule, are run by more or less stable groups composed of the most authoritative, influential and experienced members, who are elected to the most responsible positions, and are called leaders. All this is elementary. All this is clear and simple. Why replace this with some kind of rigmarole, some new Volapük? [Sourcc]

There is a current of left communists known as “Bordigists”. They claim to be “Leninists”, but like Trotskyists (seen below), they oppose Stalin and Marxism-Leninism. Amadeo Bordiga was the person behind this “sect” of Leninism, and he opposed democracy; in its place, he supported some sort of proletarian dictatorship without democracy. He assumed “The revolution requires a dictatorship, because it would be ridiculous to subordinate the revolution to a 100% acceptance or a 51% majority” [Source]. This sort of nonsense is much like what Lenin critiqued in the quote above, but it paints “dictatorship of the leaders” as a good thing rather than a bad thing. This is commandist, and a party claiming to represent the working class must support democratic centralism, not Bordiga’s “organic centralism”. (Bordigists, like other ultra-“leftists”, also deny the reality of socialism in former socialist states due to their dogmatic understanding of socialism, and they deny the reality of semi-feudalism and the need for national liberation in most countries.)

Trotskyists are the only ultra-leftists who may be remotely tolerable. They do uphold the contributions of Vladimir Lenin, which is good. They also recognize the necessity of crushing the Kronstadt Rebellion, a reactionary Tsarist rebellion that posed itself as an “anarchist” rebellion to win the support of non-Bolshevik “leftists” [Source]. However, Trostkyists, who may be called Trotskyites by us Marxist-Leninists and Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, also support Leon Trotsky against Joseph Stalin, and they support “Bolshevik-Leninism” (now called Trotskyism) against Marxism-Leninism. Many Trotskyists also defend the saboteurs Lev Kamanev and Grigory Zinoviev against Stalin, and they believe the lies spread by Nazis, imperialists, and other reactionaries against Stalin.

So-called “leftist critics” like Trotskyists, various Anarchists and revisionists simply parrot bourgeois talking points, bourgeois propaganda and “facts” provided to them by bourgeois sources. Oftentimes this is totally unintentional on their part. They simply do not possess the necessary source criticism, lack the understanding of how media, academia etc. functions and how the bourgeois influences them. Their inability to grasp this is particularly tragic as they claim to be Marxists and it was Marx himself who pointed out that the ideology of the ruling class is always the hegemonic one in society and as a result often held by a vast number of people even outside said ruling class. …

Without getting into the wider political debate I will point out that its no coincidence certain groups such as Trotskyists, anarchists, liberals etc. are more prone to believing the ”mainstream” (hegemonic bourgeois) point of view on various subjects. This is not an insult, or a judgment on the validity of this point of view, but merely a statement of fact. [Source]

We must firmly oppose Trotskyist deviations of Marxism-Leninism. Trotskyists think that socialism cannot be constructed in one country, and they mix up the democratic and socialist revolutions that underdeveloped countries must have; they oppose the peasantry [Source]. Trotskyites counter our theories with the “Permanent Revolution”. Trotskyism supports two things: the absolute spread of socialist revolution, even through military intervention and war, and the push past capitalism even in semi-feudal countries. (These are in no particular order; as a matter of fact, many put more importance on its second aspect.)

Before we go into why Trotsky was wrong, there is the need to distinguish between his “permanent revolution” and the real concept that real scientific socialists upheld and implemented. The latter refers to the need to continue waging class struggle against the enemies of the proletariat and to go through all the necessary steps in the transition to communism. It also refers to the necessity of supporting revolutions abroad whenever possible. While we Marxist-Leninist-Maoist students generally avoid using the term due to its Trotskyite connotations, we must recall that the main theoretical and practical leaders of our movement used the term in a different, correct way. Mao said this in his “Speech At The Supreme State Conference” (our emphasis): “I stand for the theory of permanent revolution. Do not mistake this for Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. In making revolution one must strike while the iron is hot—one revolution must follow another, the revolution must continually advance” [Source]. Thus, the real theory of permanent revolution supports having all the stages of revolution that are required, including the cultural revolution(s) necessary to create the communist society, and all Marxists, implicitly or explicitly, support that in theory and practice.

The first part of Trotsky’s nonsense is that a socialist country must invade countries to ensure that the revolution succeeds, pitting them against the entire bourgeoisie of the world; we have already refuted Trotskyite deviations in the subsection on socialism in one country, found in the chapter on socialist relations of production, which is in the second chapter of Book I. The idea of forcing world revolution ignores the dialectic between what is universal and what is particular. Trotskyists claim that their theory is “internationalist” against Stalin’s “chauvinism” or whatever, but in reality they are focusing on the universal aspect of the revolution (the fact that it will spread) and not the particular aspects (the fact that it will start in one country, be built and developed in one country, and then be used as a base to start the spread of revolution). Stalin defended the Leninist stance in Foundations of Leninism, and he clarified the Marxist-Leninist position on the issue in “The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists” and “Concerning Questions of Leninism”. He made it abundantly clear that Marxism must be internationalist and that socialism must spread all over the world to succeed against capitalism.

In Chapter Three of Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend, it states the following:

Just as ignoring and avoiding personal responsibilities in relation to one’s own kids and relatives doesn’t represent a true overcoming of domestic responsibilities, neither is it synonymous with internationalism to lose sight of the fact that the concrete possibilities and tasks of revolutionary transformation are first centered in a determined national terrain. Distance and indifference to one’s own country can certainly have a non-progressive meaning…

Stalin understands this well, as the speech delivered on February 4th, 1931 demonstrates. … The emphasis now appears to shift from the class struggle (with its internationalist dimension) to the construction of the national economy. But more precisely, in the concrete political situation that’s been created, the class struggle becomes the task of achieving technological and economic development for the socialist country, putting it in the position of confronting the terrible challenge that’s approaching, and offering a real contribution to the emancipatory and internationalist cause. The class struggle not only takes on a national dimension, but it appears to configure itself in Soviet Russia as a banal and routine task: “in the period of reconstruction, expertise decides everything”; therefore, it is necessary “to learn skills” and become “masters of science”. In fact, this new task is no less difficult and demanding than the storming of the Winter Palace: “We Bolsheviks must conquer science” and becomes “specialists”; it’s certainly not an easy objective to reach, but “there’s no fortress Bolsheviks can’t storm”. The policy during the Great Patriotic War finds its first expression in the years when Soviet Russia is committed to a colossal endeavor of industrialization and reinforcing national defense.

In the lead-up to Nazi aggression, we have seen Stalin stress the need to link “national sentiment and the idea of the nation” to “a healthy nationalism^[143], correctly understood, with proletarian internationalism”. In the concrete situation that arose following the Third Reich’s expansionist offensive, universalism’s advance passed through the concrete and individual struggles of the nations determined not to let themselves be reduced to slavery at the service of Hitler’s master race; truly advancing internationalism was the resistance by nations most directly threatened by the Nazi empire’s program of enslavement. Just three years earlier, as confirmation of the fact that we are in the middle of a learning process that’s encouraged or imposed by the concrete necessity of developing the struggles of national resistance against imperialism, Mao Tse-Tung states: “To separate the content of internationalism from its national form is the habit of those who don’t understand anything about internationalism. With regards to us, however, we must closely link them together. Some of our worst errors were committed because of it, and they must be corrected with the utmost dedication”. Gramsci similarly distinguishes between “cosmopolitanism”^[144] and an “internationalism” which knows—and in fact must know—how to be “profoundly national” as well. [Source]

As stated above, the Permanent Revolution theory totally ignores the particular aspects of the proletarian revolution within certain countries, and it places too much emphasis on the universal aspect of the worldwide proletarian revolution. This is an idealist, metaphysical, impractical, and frankly absurd way to look at the socialist revolution. That is why socialism in one country is not only possible, but at first necessary! [Source]

The second part of Trotsky’s theory of the Permanent Revolution is wrong because it totally ignores the material conditions of semi-feudal countries. Those countries need a brief capitalist phase that expands their proletariat, preparing them for socialist collectivization and socialization; this is why there must be a bourgeois-democratic revolution before a proletarian one. If there is no such phase, the productive forces would develop very badly or simply not develop at all, and the relations of production would not be able to be implemented. Without a sizable industrial proletariat, industrialization would not be possible, and collectivization would not be possible. While one can possibly criticize the nature of industrialization and collectivization in the USSR, the fact of the matter is that the actions taken were really necessary, even if they were not perfect. To dismiss this as the product of the “degeneration of the workers’ state” is dishonest. [Source]

Connected to the previous idea, Trotsky strongly resented the peasantry. He believed that they were solely reactionary and bourgeois; whenever he said the peasants and workers had to be allies, he nevertheless said that the former had no active role in the revolution. Lenin, in contrast, supported the peasants and proletariat being in alliance to overthrow feudal society to have a democratic revolution, and then the proletariat would work with the peasantry to proletarianize them. Lenin proved correct in theory and in the USSR’s experience. Stalin further proved it during the period of socialist transition and construction; the workers and peasants were allied in the class struggle against kulaks and other capitalists, and they worked together to develop their country’s productive forces for the defense of their socialist state. Trotsky’s anti-peasant ideas were impractical.

Besides his “permanent revolution” notion, Trotsky’s conceptions of the “degenerated” workers’ state and his followers’ notion of the “deformed” workers’ states were essentially wrong. The former is the belief that the USSR remained a workers’ state even as it grew bureaucratic under Stalin, but it could not be socialist due to that bureaucracy; instead, it had “degenerated” over time. Similarly, “deformed” states were those that started off as bureaucratic workers’ states, and Trotskyites use it to refer to pretty much every other state that ever claimed to be socialist besides the USSR itself. Their beliefs superficially align with our knowledge of states and parties turning revisionist, but they differ quite a bit in essence. For instance, we recognize that the mere presence of a bureaucracy is not enough to make a country “not socialist”. [MTBA]

Some “Marxists” call themselves or get called “Luxemburgists”, and this comes from their support of Luxemburg’s ideas, both correct and incorrect. They are very similar to Trotskyists. While Luxemburg was correct about revolution trumping reform and opposing imperialist war, she incorrectly opposed the struggle for self-determination, and she made the error of ultra-democracy like Trotskyites tend to do. On the national question, Lenin criticized her, for she denied the right of self-determination to nations; she only saw the right of autonomy for Poland, and she rejected the right of secession altogether. This view point only supports imperialism and its oppression of nations.

If, in our political agitation, we fail to advance and advocate the slogan of the right to secession, we shall play into the hands, not only of the bourgeoisie, but also of the feudal landlords and the absolutism of the oppressor nation. Kautsky long ago used this argument against Rosa Luxemburg, and the argument is indisputable. When, in her anxiety not to “assist” the nationalist bourgeoisie of Poland, Rosa Luxemburg rejects the right to secession in the programme of the Marxists in Russia, she is in fact assisting the Great-Russian Black Hundreds. She is in fact assisting opportunist tolerance of the privileges (and worse than privileges) of the Great Russians.

Carried away by the struggle against nationalism in Poland, Rosa Luxemburg has forgotten the nationalism of the Great Russians, although it is this nationalism that is the most formidable at the present time. It is a nationalism that is more feudal than bourgeois, and is the principal obstacle to democracy and to the proletarian struggle. The bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we unconditionally support, At the same time we strictly distinguish it from the tendency towards national exclusiveness; we fight against the tendency of the Polish bourgeois to oppress the Jews, etc., etc. [Source]

Furthermore, Luxemburg was responsible for the theory of the Trotskyite “permanent revolution”:

As for the "Letter to the Editorial Board of Proletarskaya Revolutsia," that treats of another aspect of the question, namely, the fact that the theory of "permanent" revolution was invented by Rosa Luxemburg and Parvus. This, too, corresponds to historical fact. It was not Trotsky but Rosa Luxemburg and Parvus who invented the theory of "permanent" revolution. It was not Rosa Luxemburg but Parvus and Trotsky who in 1905 advanced the theory of "permanent" revolution and actively fought for it against Lenin. [Source]

That being said, Luxemburg herself was a good leader in Marxism. As Lenin described her with a common fable, “Eagles may at times fly lower than hens, but hens can never rise to the height of eagles” [Source]. It is her self-proclaimed followers that make the error of falling into ultra-“leftist”, ultra-democratic trends; it is they who are guilty of supporting Trotskyism in essence.

There are the semi-Trotskyites that are called “Marcyites”, after Sam Marcy. Sam Marcy was a member of the then-Trotskyist “Socialist Workers’ Party” (SWP)^[145], but in 1959 he split from them to form the “Workers World Party” (WWP) because he believed in supporting “all socialist states” as properly socialist, and not just supporting them against capitalism as “degenerated/deformed” workers’ states as the SWP and most other Trotskyites did. While mainstream Trotskyism made the error of denouncing genuine socialist states in addition to revisionist ones, the WWP did the opposite: it united both states as “truly socialist”, muddling the class struggles in those states. Thus, it is an example of ultra-“leftism” producing a rightist counterpart:

In 1959 Marcy along with Vince Copeland and others broke with SWP to found WWP. Though their central point was defending all existing socialist states, Marcy’s “Global Class War” focused heavily on the need to fight so-called Stalinism. Marcy defended the conception of the first socialist state according to Trotsky, who he claimed was the true continuator of Lenin. Hence WWP played a game of opportunism that sought to flatten the class struggle internal to the International Communist Movement by giving equal credence to both lines in a two-line struggle, with the explicit purpose of rehabilitating Trotsky. That which grows from the tree of Trotskyite revisionism can only bear ugly fruits. …

Inconsistent with a true defense of the Chinese Revolution, in 1991 Sam Marcy wrote that Khrushchev had been responsible for “the showdown with US imperialism” which “revived the revolutionary image of the USSR as the ally and protector, with qualifications, of the anti-imperialist worldwide struggle.” He went on to claim that the Cuban missile crisis represented the class struggle with Krushchev representing the “workers and oppressed”. [2] This stood in stark contradiction to the anti-revisionism Mao fought so hard to establish, and instead offering cover and defense to Soviet social-imperialism.

Even after Marcy died, the WWP did not lose its Marcyite beliefs, and neither did its split, the “Party for Socialism and Liberation” (PSL). This party takes the WWP’s rightism to the next level, becoming akin to the CPUSA and other mainstream revisionist, electoralist parties; we need not delve into its deviations here. What is important is that the PSL works in ways only federal agents work [Source]. Trotskyism, and opportunism in general, can appear in whatever form they need, be it rightist or “leftist”. It is important for us communists to oppose all opportunism and to work with the people to expose opportunists’ deeds.

There is a weird trend of “Marxist-Leninists” that are against both Trotskyism and “Stalinism”. The only organization we know of that has this ideology is the so-called “The Communist Voice Organization” [Source]. Despite claiming that “Trotskyism is pretty much just the flip side of revisionist Stalinism,” their attacks on “Stalinism” mirror Trotskyites’ attacks—attacking bureaucracy, claiming that workers had no control over production, and other anti-communist garbage—while many of their attacks on Trotskyism mirror our own criticisms—its infantile “permanent revolution” theory, its neglect of the colonized and semi-colonized countries, etc.! It has some unique critiques of both genuine Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism, but otherwise it shows itself to be semi-Trotskyist because its attacks on Marxism-Leninism are basically Trotskyite, and thus it is ultra-“Leftist” in essence.

Trotskyite sectarianism is proof of its petty-bourgeois essence. Whether it appears “rightist” or “leftist”, Trotskyism cannot help but split itself into bickering factions over minute details alien to the working class. While all “leftists” split over ideology and all things must split (after all, according to dialectics, one divides into two), the content of Trotskyite splits is nonsensical. This can be seen in the evolution of Trotskyism in the US, such as the split of PSL from WWP, which was a split from SWP [Source, even as it is incomplete as of 2025]. All of these parties differ on virtually nothing, and none of them can serve as the vanguard of the proletariat; thus, we must oppose their influences in our party, a proper communist party.

The fight against ultra-“leftism” must take place alongside the struggle against revisionism. However, the enemy we face in particular between the two varies with the conditions in place. Stalin delineated this in “The Fight Against Right and ‘Ultra-Left’ Deviations”. He focused on the communist parties in Germany and France, for the French party had to focus more on right-opportunists while the German one’s primary enemy was left-opportunists that dogmatically rejected economic and legal political work.

This idea of equity, of striking at the Rights and "ultra-Lefts" with equal intensity under all conditions and circumstances, is childish. It is one that no politician can entertain. The question of the fight against the Rights and "ultra-Lefts" must be regarded not from the standpoint of equity, but from the standpoint of the demands of the political situation, of the political requirements of the Party at any given moment. Why, in the French Party, is the fight against the Rights the immediate urgent task at the present moment, while in the German Communist Party the immediate task is the fight against the "ultra-Lefts"? Because the situations in the French and the German Communist Parties are not identical. …

Ought we to fight against both "ultra-Lefts" and Rights? Hansen asks. Of course, we ought to. We settled that question long ago. The dispute is not about that. The dispute is about which danger we should concentrate on in the fight at this moment in the two different Parties, the French and the German, the situations of which are at present dissimilar. … The point is that we are faced not with the abstract question of combating Rights and "ultra-Lefts" in general, but with the concrete question of the immediate tasks of the German Party at the present moment. And the immediate task of the German Communist Party is to overcome the "ultra-Left" danger, just as the immediate task of the French Communist Party is to overcome the Right danger. …

It is said that there are honest revolutionary workers among the "ultra-Lefts," and that we must not repel them. That is quite true, and we are not suggesting that they should be repelled. … But how are those workers to be raised to the level of political understanding of a Leninist party?... There is only one method of achieving this, and that is the method of politically repudiating the "ultra-Left" leaders, the method of exposing the "ultra-Left" errors which are misleading honest revolutionary workers and hindering them from setting foot on the broad highway. … What, then, is the solution? There is only one solution, and that is to expose the errors of the "ultra-Left" leaders, and in this way help honest revolutionary workers to take the right road. [Source]

While revisionism, or right-opportunism, is an important enemy to combat, so is ultra-leftism, or left-opportunism. Dogmatism is a third enemy of communism, and we must fight it too; dogmatism can lead to right-opportunism, left-opportunism, or both, depending on what the dogmatists want to incorrectly conserve at all costs (“dogmatize”). It is unscientific either way, and regardless of which camp of deviationists its victims fall in, it serves the same role of distorting the theory—and by extension, the practice—of the masses and their leaders.

Dogmatism

Unlike revisionists and ultra-leftists, dogmatists do not always take a clear stand in relation to genuine revolutionary communism. The revisionists are clearly to the right of us, and the ultra-leftists clearly try to be to the left of us, though they end up being to the right of us as well, but what about the dogmatic people? The truth is that it depends on what incorrect idea or policy the dogmatists wish to support. There are many dogmatists of all types. They include the following Marxist-Leninists: “Hoxhaists”, “Stalinist-Hoxhaists” (who are an incredibly tiny group who claim to be the “Communist International (Stalinist-Hoxhaists)”—Comintern (SH) [Source]), “Stalinists”^[146], and other followers of such obscure trends. In the US, the main Hoxhaist party that exists is the “American Party of Labor” (APL).

Now, why are these people incorrect? We will start off with the “Hoxhaists” and “Stalinist-Hoxhaists”—the “Stalinist-Hoxhaists” are particularly dogmatic as they condemn most other Hoxhaists [Source] and declared a “war on Maoism” [Source]. These people uphold the line of Enver Hoxha, including his ideas that developed in the 1970s. Hoxha was dogmatic, and he tried to pin the blame of capitalist restoration on Mao and other proletarian leaders; he started his attacks on China in 1972^[147], after Richard Nixon (president of the US) and other government officials came to China and talked with Mao. Hoxha accused Mao of being a revisionist, metaphysicist, and idealist, and he said that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was not great, proletarian, cultural, or a revolution. His insults had no basis in reality. In “Enver Hoxha Refuted” by Nagalingam Sanmugathasan, the General Secretary of the Ceylon (Sri Lankan) Communist Party, the author defends Mao against Hoxha’s attacks. He explains (with our emphasis on important pieces of text):

Enver Hoxha is trying to trace the origins of the revisionism of the present Chinese leadership back to Mao. He seems to ignore the fact that Deng Xiaoping has reversed all the correct decisions of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and is seeking to erase the entire period of Mao’s leadership of the Chinese Party as a bad dream. Even the rehabilitation of Liu Shao-chi, whose denunciation as a capitalist-roader by Mao has the approval of Enver Hoxha (in his book Reflections on China), has not woken up Enver Hoxha to face realities. Perhaps, only the expected open denunciation of Mao by the next Congress of the Chinese Party alone can completely expose the political bankruptcy of Enver Hoxha. Surely, it must be clear even to the meanest intellect that if Deng Xiaoping’s revisionism springs from Mao, Deng could not be so venomously opposed to Mao and everything he stood for.

Enver Hoxha accuses Mao of being an idealist and a metaphysicist. But, in fact, it is Enver who is guilty of that charge. Let us illustrate this by the way he approaches the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which is, perhaps, one of the greatest revolutionary events that has ever happened. In calling this great event as being neither great, nor proletarian nor cultural nor a revolution, Enver Hoxha displays not merely total ignorance of what the revolution is all about, but also displays his mechanical, metaphysical attitude. …

[Mao] was not inhibited by mechanical rules or by metaphysical thinking. He thought dialectically and acted to preserve the dictatorship of the proletariat from those capitalist readers who had seized power in the superstructure. To follow rules would have been to court sure disaster. Besides, Mao had immense confidence in the masses. He knew that they could make mistakes. But he also knew that, fundamentally, they would act correctly, under proper and revolutionary leadership. That is why he was not afraid of ‘stirring’ up trouble.

But Enver Hoxha cannot understand this. Therefore, he describes this great revolution in which literally millions participated, as a palace putsch on an all-China scale. This is indeed a naive description.

If Mao had to go outside the Party leadership and appeal to the people and thus give a personal leadership to the Cultural Revolution, it was because the leadership of the Party was riddled with revisionists and capitalist readers. Mao had no other alternatives if he wanted to safeguard the Party and keep China from changing color. [Source]

Beat Back the Dogmato-Revisionist Attack on Mao Tsetung Thought also shows how Hoxha was wrong in his assertion that Mao’s rural-based war made the movement a “petty-bourgeois” one. It refutes the assertion that having the peasants be the base of the revolution meant a lack of proletarian leadership in section one:

Hoxha declares that Mao’s whole line of encircling the cities by the countryside meant abandoning the hegemony of the proletariat. The truth is that not to have launched the armed struggle in the countryside would precisely have meant abandoning the leadership (hegemony) of the proletariat in the revolution, specifically over the hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants.

The hegemony of the proletariat means above all the leadership of its vanguard political party, the communist party. It does not mean that the proletariat is necessarily the main force in the revolution (as Hoxha himself is forced to admit). The leadership of the proletariat means the rallying of the masses of the oppressed to the banner of the working class, to its program for the revolution. In the concrete conditions of China, this meant for the proletariat through its Party to step to the front of the struggle against imperialism and feudalism, while at the same time building up the independent political strength of its Communist Party, which alone could lead the revolution to victory and forward to socialism. With this perspective, to have not embarked upon the war in the countryside would have meant that the proletariat would not have been leading the peasantry, and the possibility for revolution would have been lost. …

To draw an analogy, one can consider the situation in the world as a whole. Marx and Engels felt, and it was an accepted “principle” of Marxism, that revolution would first come in those countries of Western Europe with the highest development of capitalism. It was not until Lenin and the October Revolution came along that the thesis was developed that revolution would develop first at the weak link of the imperialist system. Lenin was accused by the “orthodox Marxist” Kautsky of abandoning the proletariat for believing that a proletarian revolution could, in fact, first be made in the still predominantly peasant society of Russia. Of course the October Revolution proved Lenin right. Similarly, in China it was not only the case that it was in the countryside where the central contradiction that had to be solved to complete the democratic revolution was concentrated (the land question), but it was here that the power of the reactionaries was weakest and here that the proletariat could lead the masses of people in establishing and holding on to political power. [Source]

The dogmatists’ narrative claiming that Mao was the root of revisionism and capitalist development in China after him is incorrect. In his entire leadership, Mao represented the proletariat in China’s class conflict. If he did not, then Deng Xiaoping would not have attacked Mao’s positions, and he would not have negatively reflected on the Cultural Revolution, of which he was a target. Deng would not have condemned the “Gang of Four” like he really did. Therefore, we can safely say that Mao and his allies were not revisionists, but genuine Marxist-Leninists.

All of the other narratives of these “Hoxhaists” are wrong. For example, they believe Mao did not empower the proletariat in the New-Democratic revolution, but he really did. As we explained in the subsection on New Democracy, Mao recognized the fact that the proletariat was to be the leader of the New-Democratic revolution. “Hoxhaists” claim that Mao sided with US imperialism against Soviet imperialism, but there is no evidence of this. On the contrary, Mao equated American and Soviet imperialism. As “Enver Hoxha Refuted” continues:

In the years following, nobody could doubt the anti-US imperialist bona fides of Mao when he sent the Chinese volunteers across into Korea to stem the US led invasion of that country, and when he gave unqualified support to the peoples of Indochina struggling against US imperialism and, in fact, to all peoples struggling for their independence. His famous 1970 statement, calling for the unity of all forces opposed to US imperialism and its running dogs, still rings in our ears.

But, by this time, a new element had entered the international situation. With its brutal occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Soviet revisionism signaled its development as a social imperialist power. A new imperialism has been born and Mao took note of the change in the relation of forces. There afterwards, he was to bracket Soviet social imperialism along with US imperialism as the twin enemies of mankind. This was the position to which he stuck to the last when, for the last time he presided over the Tenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China held from August 24th to 28th, 1973. [Source]

This essay by Sanmugathasan is crucial for communists to read and understand to combat the lies of dogmato-revisionists who like to claim to be “anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninists” while being revisionists and against Marxism-Leninism, now Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. That is why we have quoted it extensively. It does a good job of defending Mao against dishonesty.

Now, onto the “Stalinists”, or the “Marxist-Leninists” who refuse to support Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. These types assume that Marxism-Leninism is enough development for Marxism. This buries the contributions of newer Marxists, mainly Mao and Gonzalo. Mao contributed to dialectical materialist philosophy, political economy, and scientific socialism, as did Lenin and Stalin. Simply upholding Marxism-Leninism and not Maoism ignores the new theories developed. Gonzalo’s synthesis of Maoism is also important, as are his theories derived from applying it in Peru; again, we need to uphold these theories, hence why we uphold Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. [MTBA] The “Progressive Labor Party” (PLP) is an organization guilty of dogmatism. [MTBA]

Tjen Folket Media produced a great article on why we support Maoism. In it, they explain (with their own emphasis on important text):

Maoism is Marxism today, and Maoism is Leninism today. Lenin said that Marxism’s living soul is the concrete analysis of the concrete situation. Marx, who gave the ideology its name, established this as scientific socialism. Marxism, today Maoism, is the science that deals with how the proletariat can make revolution and create communism. No science can remain stagnant. A science for the proletariat’s revolution and power could not be complete in the 19th century, before the great proletarian revolutions in the 20th century! As a science, it must be practical. The theory must be tested against practice and must be used in practice. It must adapt in line with improved practices and be lifted to a higher level. It is only Maoism that does this in a comprehensive way today, and therefore it is only Maoism that can be Marxism today. Those who wish to be Marxists or Leninists today must be Maoists. [Source]

The dogmatists who believe in “Marxism-Leninism”, but not Maoism, fail to be scientific socialists, and they fall into dogmato-revisionism by not supporting the mass line, protracted people’s war, New Democracy, the three weapons of revolution, cultural revolution, and Gonzalo’s universal theories. They cannot seriously uphold scientific socialism without supporting it at its highest stage, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

The last opportunists we will criticize are the false “Maoists”. These people hold some “Maoist” banners, but they promote opportunism.

False “Maoism”

There are some people who claim to be Maoists while they are revisionists. Sisonites, Maoist-Third Worldists, and supporters of Mao Zedong Thought are included among these people. We have already discussed in the section on capitalist-imperialism (under Marxism-Leninism) why third-worldism is incorrect, and Maoism-Third Worldism is also incorrect as it takes these third-worldist ideas and puts “Maoist” paint on it. Mao Zedong Thought followers do not even claim to support Marxism-Leninism-Maoism at all; such people are incorrect for obvious reasons, most importantly that Mao Zedong Thought was a path of applying Marxism-Leninism, which, as we have stated, has developed into Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. While it was previously correct for communists around the world to apply the universal aspects of Mao Zedong Thought, they have since summed up their practical experiences in applying it and have made it Maoism. Comrade Ajth said such in “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought are not the same”:

Right opportunism, centrism and dogmato-revisionism are increasingly forced to reveal their counter-revolutionary essence. The space for concealing this under the flag of Mao Tse-tung Thought is being steadily cut down. … Yet right opportunists have not given up. Some have now turned to accepting Maoism without making any decisive break from their past. For such people, MLM is nothing more than a convenient sail to pick up, now that their own ones are in tatters.

It is a law of revolution that revisionism and other alien trends will adopt new forms with each advance of class struggle. Therefore, such an opportunist adoption of MLM is not surprising. But Maoists certainly have the responsibility of countering such opportunist tactics. Unfortunately, a wrong understanding persisting within the Maoist ranks is becoming a hurdle in this struggle. … It is the thinking that MLM and Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought are one and the same. The change in terminology from Mao Tse-tung Thought to MLM is certainly a more precise and scientific explanation of Mao's contributions. It is also necessary in order to draw a sharper line of demarcation from modern revisionism. But, if we fail to make it clear that MLM and Mao Tse-tung Thought are not the same, adopting MLM becomes merely a matter of change in terminology. Room is left for the new trend of right opportunism mentioned above. …

Modern revisionism within the broad Marxist-Leninist movement tries to spread its poison by presenting a distorted or fractured vision of the teachings of Mao Tsetung. To repudiate and destroy this, Maoists must sharpen their own ideological grasp, particularly their grasp of the universality of Maoism. Both these tasks are inseparably linked. If our own ideological sharpening, rectification, is kept aside under the plea that we have been Maoists all along, then the fight against modern revisionism will be weakened. To quote from a PCP document, “… it is vital and urgent to analyze Maoism again, aiming to define more and better its content and meaning, guided by the judgment that to hoist, defend and apply Maoism is the essence of the struggle between Marxism and revisionism in the present.” [Source]

Sisonites are the interesting ones here. The name of their trend comes from Jose Maria Sison. We briefly described problems of the CPP in our section on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in the world today, and we said that these stem from Sison’s errors. However, there are numerous examples of Sison’s revisionism. “Jose Maria Sison: From Marxist-Leninist to Revisionist”, as the title suggests, covers a lot of Sison’s errors; we do not completely support this article but we recognize that it has valid criticisms of Sison [Source]. In the polemic, the author criticizes Sison for many of his views. First, Sison began taking a revisionist, pro-Soviet stance in his ideology following his release from prison in 1987. The essay says:

Since 1992, Sison has continued, in somewhat more veiled forms, to claim that the “full capitalist restoration” in the Soviet Union took place in 1989–91, not 1957; justify the CPP's support for the Soviet Union and its revisionist allies from 1983–1991; gut the Maoist politics behind the Cultural Revolution; and deny political support to the heroic efforts of Mao and his closest allies in the CCP Politburo to defend the achievements of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. (See Section 5 for a discussion of the class struggle in socialist China.)

In 1984, the organ of the CPP in charge of international relations claimed that the CPSU under the Brezhnev clique was no longer a revisionist party, but a “Marxist-Leninist party,” and that the CPSU “was proletarian internationalist rather than social-imperialist, having supported third world liberation movements.” In 1986, the Executive Committee of the CPP commissioned a study that concluded that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries were “socialist because their economies were still dominated by state-owned enterprises.” (“Stand for Socialism,” p.6) [Source]

Not only did Sison praise the revisionist USSR and Eastern European “socialist” states, but he supported revisionist Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, and Nicaragua; all of these were semi-colonies of Soviet imperialism. As the essay states:

In “Stand for Socialism,” Liwanag/Sison stated that “among the Soviet Union's good commitments was the assistance to the Vietnamese people in the Vietnam war, Cuba, Angola and Nicaragua,” without providing any factual argumentation or political basis. (p. 24) … [The author goes on to explain the revisionism of these countries; we have quoted parts of this explanation previously in the book.]

In "Philippine Revolution," Sison claims that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is "an example of a state that is independent and democratic and that is building socialism in a sound and admirable way." Based on a visit to the DPRK in 1987, Sison claimed that the ruling Korean Workers' Party is a "Marxist-Leninist party that has victoriously led the Korean people and state in frustrating imperialist aggression and in achieving socialist revolution and construction." (p. 191) This fulsome praise for North Korea under Kim Il Sung, especially from the 1950s to the 1980s, again, raises serious questions about the nature of the "socialism" that Sison envisions building in the Philippines.

The CPP continues to claim in its major statements that the DPRK is "socialist" and/or a model of "defending national independence." An analysis of the political stands and social relations in North Korea refutes these claims. If socialism ever existed in North Korea, by the mid-1960s it had turned into a state capitalist militarized state based on a uniquely Korean neo-Confucian veneration of several generations of the Kim family. According to Bruce Cummings, the leading academic expert in the West on North Korea, as early as 1946 Kim Il Sung was described as "the Sun of the Nation" and "a beautiful new red star in the sky, wisely guiding everything with his brilliant, scientific methods." [Source]

The article does condemn Sison for being more pro-Stalin than the author, a view we disagree with. While Sison is incorrect in some ways, his overall view that Stalin’s merits outweigh his faults is correct. The author of the essay, on the other hand, is too much against Stalin, condemning Stalin for supposed “mistakes”. For example, he claims that dekulakization caused the Soviet famine of the 1930s; we explained the causes of the famine in the subsection on Soviet and European applications of Marxism-Leninism, and dekulakization was not one of the factors that caused famine. While collectivization did involve violence, this is inevitable during class conflict, and the violence often happened in response to crimes by kulaks. There were undoubtedly mistakes in Soviet collectivization, which is why we see China’s collectivization as a better example of socialist transition in agriculture. Nevertheless, collectivization under Stalin was not a bad example like the author claims it is.

The author condemns the Great Purge, and while there were many excesses during this period that were the fault of capitalist-roaders and fascist saboteurs, the overall purge was necessary to remove reactionaries from significant positions of power. The issue with the Great Purge is not that it killed so many people, but that quite a few of the victims were innocent, and many capitalist-roaders got away scot-free; the event is an example of a lack of proletarian supervision and control of the state, emphasizing the importance of mass supervision of the state and the leadership of the workers’ party. Again, we cover the issue of the Great Purge in the next section. The author makes other invalid as well as valid criticisms of Stalin, but this is not the appropriate section to analyze them.

Sison’s revisionist leanings are shown in his discussion of the Cultural Revolution, in which he takes the view that it should be highly centralist and not so democratic. (The author here refers to Zhou as a “capitalist-roader”, but in reality he was more of a centrist than a blatant rightist like Deng.)

Sison's view of the Cultural Revolution is that… it should be entirely top-down and has to be managed carefully by the party. There is no hint of a Maoist mass-based revolution from below in socialist society that overthrows and seizes power from the capitalist-roaders in the party. Sison's view has more in common with the reactionary efforts of capitalist-roaders such as Deng and Zhou to reverse the Cultural Revolution than the revolutionary political work of Mao and the Four to defend and further develop its historic achievements.

In “At Home in the World,” in reference to the Cultural Revolution, Sison claimed that “A major error was to let loose factional groups fighting each other and dividing the masses.” Sison characteristically did not identify who was responsible for this "major error.” What appeared to be “factionalism” was in some cases intense class struggle between revisionist party officials who formed conservative factions (including “loyalist” Red Guards) to protect their privileges, and revolutionary organizations of students, workers and peasants. This was an objective reflection of the class struggle, not because the Maoists “let loose'' factional struggle. …

Sison does not see the need for such revolutionary mass upheavals from below to maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat, instead opting for “Cultural Revolutions” carefully staged by top party leaders to “pre-empt anarchy.” In addition, Sison's political fixation on the “new petty bourgeoisie” points the spearhead of revolutionary class struggle downward instead of targeting the bourgeoisie/capitalist-roaders at the top levels of the communist party. [Source]

And lastly, Sison’s view on the universality of people’s war is incorrect. [MTBA]

This is more than enough proof of Jose Maria Sison’s significant errors after his release from prison in 1987. Sisonites of today may or may not claim to be Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, but they agree with Sison’s positions, which in today’s situation support many so-called “Marxist-Leninist” parties—including “Mao Zedong Thought” parties—around the world while being highly critical of fellow Maoist parties. Indeed, the CPP once condemned “Gonzaloism” along with Trotskyism as “revisionist currents”, implying that they considered the PCP and its allies to be “revisionist” [Source].

At best, Sisonites are mistaken comrades who may rectify their errors, but there is the possibility of them falling to revisionist leadership, jeopardizing their people’s war. (That is what their Third Great Rectification movement from 2023 sought to correct.)

Other opportunists who claim to be “Marxist-Leninist-Maoists” are the supporters of “Prachanda Path”, which was the guiding thought of Marxism in Nepal before Prachanda turned revisionist and supported “democracy” within the semi-feudal state. We explained how this was right-opportunist in the subsection on the Nepalese people’s war; it was so damaging that it set back much of the progress made, maintaining the old state and not getting rid of it for the New-Democratic state that was in construction. We cannot support any ideology that capitulates to the state, especially when the people are extremely close to taking state power.

False “Maoists” exist in the US as well. The “RCPUSA” that we mentioned earlier is the most prominent example. It started as a good organization when it was the “Revolutionary Union”, and even the early days of the party were not so bad. However, the Chairman of the party, Bob Avakian, took the party in a negative direction in the 1980’s. The party’s incorrect decisions hurt the RIM, which basically ceased to exist in 2008 and was only succeeded by the International Communist League (ICL) in late 2022 [Source]. Avakian’s assertion that his “New Synthesis” or “New Communism” is a necessary development from Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is unscientific. Comrade Ajith refuted “Avakianism” in Against Avakianism:

Avakianism claims that Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM) is no longer a sufficient basis for the international Maoist movement. Avakianism declares that the very theoretical framework of MLM is itself outdated. It arrogates to itself the halo of a “new theoretical framework.” …

To repeat, with Avakianism, the RCP places itself outside not just the RIM but the whole international Maoist movement. It has liquidated its ideological moorings by declaring that MLM is outdated and must be replaced with Avakianism. Given this, the first responsibility of the internationalist Maoist movement is to draw a firm line of demarcation against this deviation. …

Mao Zedong clearly explained why “Only social practice can be the criterion of truth.” He also qualified this by explaining, “In social struggle, the forces representing the advanced class sometimes suffer defeat not because their ideas are incorrect but because, in the balance of forces engaged in struggle, they are not as powerful for the time being as the forces of reaction; they are therefore temporarily defeated, but they are bound to triumph sooner or later.” That is, theory or line may not always succeed and get verified in immediate practice. But that does not eliminate the role of social practice as the “criterion of truth.” While, as Mao said, the forces representing the advanced class are bound to triumph, that is premised on their ideas being correct, of their conforming to reality. It is an affirmation of the dialectic of theory and practice. The RCP has been vulgarizing Mao’s position in order to attack anyone who insists that the “correctness or incorrectness of theoretical propositions could be determined by… practice.” Obviously enough, Avakianism needed this to escape the burden of proof through practice. But that wasn’t the only reason. It was a necessary tool in its attempt to “creep in” Avakianism within the RIM by whittling away at its ideological foundation. [Source]

Avakianism adds absolutely nothing to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, so it cannot even be an application of it (a guiding thought), let alone a whole new stage of communism. Nowadays, Avakian and his “RCP” support electoralism; similar to the CPUSA, they supported the liberal Democratic Party against the conservative Republican Party in the 2020 elections in the name of “resisting fascism”. This is not “revolutionary”, so it cannot be a “revolutionary party”; since it is revisionist, it cannot be “communist”; therefore, it is not a “Revolutionary Communist” party. By supporting one wing of the bourgeoisie rather than supporting a proletarian movement, it exposes itself as a bourgeois party; it is not “Maoist”. We must uphold actual Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, not any sort of opportunism with a “Maoist” face!

Booklet II: Our Positions on Current Issues

This will be dedicated to what our party supports on issues primarily of social policy, but it does include some economic issues. In short, we hold revolutionary communist views on all of these questions and matters; to go in detail, we will describe what we think on each of these problems.

On Crime

Crime in capitalist society exists mainly because members of the lumpenproletariat (the class of people who have no legal way to live) need to engage in it to survive, and among criminals, capitalists exist, and these capitalists exploit the “on-the-ground” criminals. The state also uses police forces, prisons, etc. to suppress progressives and revolutionaries. In capitalist society, we oppose the state’s crackdowns on “crime” (which end up hurting proletarians’ lives while not weakening criminal capitalists).

Under the rule of the working class, we support the workers’ state suppressing capitalists and fighting crime. That is what the dictatorship of the proletariat does. We will not hesitate to use “authoritarian” measures to secure workers’ power; there will be penal labor camps built for enemies of the people, though rehabilitation will also exist. Many “crimes” that a lot of the masses are accused of will not be criminalized per se in socialism, including drug use, drug dealing, and prostitution. Rather, drug users will get the help they need, and prostitutes and drug dealing workers will get jobs that allow them to fulfill their goals rather than be wage slaves as they would be in capitalism. The capitalists of these spheres will be punished for their crimes; they are the real criminals, for they take advantage of the plight of the poorest workers and unemployed people by superexploiting them in extremely risky fields and putting them in the frontlines against the bourgeois police force. Capitalist states never deal with drug issues properly, but Mao’s China had a great strategy to end the long-lasting opioid addiction of the country:

Narcotic addiction in the United States has been rising during the last decade [the 1960’s] so that it is now epidemic. The effect on health, personality, crime and community life constitutes a major crisis of American national life. China was the other nation with a severe narcotic problem in the twentieth century but the Chinese overcame their problem in a few years after their Revolution of 1949. Why was this remarkable accomplishment almost entirely ignored or denied in the United States? The active antagonism between the Government of the United States and the People’s Republic of China was the major factor in obscuring this noteworthy event. …

The People’s Republic of China was proclaimed on October 1, 1949. On February 24, 1950 the Government Administrative Counsel issued a Circular Order for the Prohibition of Opium signed by Premier Chou Enlai. On October 1, 1950 the Ministry of Public Health issued an Order for the Promulgation of the Provisional Regulation on the Control of Narcotic Drugs. By March 1953, the Government’s New China News Agency claimed that, “… as a result of the immense effort of the Central People’s Government in strictly prohibiting the cultivation, manufacture and sale of opium and the strict control of all narcotic drugs in the past three years, the main opium producing areas have changed completely and the cultivation… production and sale of opium and other narcotic drugs have been completely eliminated”. There were reports in 1951 of 10,000 addicts in Canton but in 1952 only secret opium smokers were reported in Canton although there still were 451 opium smugglers in Hankow and 459 smuggling firms in Nanking.

An English surgeon who worked in China for 15 years reported that there was no opium addiction when he went back to China in 1954. Robert Williams who was in China from 1965 to 1968 as a Black political refugee from the United States found no addiction. There is a similar report from Edgar Snow who traveled from China in 1960 without finding any narcotic problem although he had seen a severe narcotic problem during his 1936 trip to Chiang Kai-shek’s China. There are also reports from other Americans about the absence of narcotics in China in 1971. …

What is the explanation for the success of this campaign after 200 years of a national narcotic addiction problem? Most importantly, the ideology of the young people changed so much that there was no new supply of addicts. This is a fundamental solution to addiction since the national perpetuation of narcotic addiction depends on a supply of new users. The old users have less money to buy narcotics, diem go to jail, and are “clean” for intervals. New users are the major impetus to the supply, distribution, and crime to get money to buy narcotics.

… [L]and distribution, collective farming as well as new educational, social and vocational opportunities remain essential issues. … Similar changes took place in the cities with nationalization of commerce and industry, social benefits, full employment and worker control. An ideological transformation of the younger generation… was due to the new chance to make something of their lives. [Source]

The death penalty is justified for certain crimes to certain degrees. It should be applied to very extreme crimes. Death should be quick and painless. We oppose cruel punishments, and in fact, they are tools of capitalist-imperialist domination. It has always been fascist countries that used them to punish crime. Socialist countries, in contrast, have used less-cruel methods of execution to “get the job done”. Torture was meant to be sparingly used, and it was illegal in socialist China; as Mao said, “Persuade the peasants that it is to our advantage to refrain from using torture, which is illegal” [Source].

In a future socialist system, the most commonly-implemented method of capital punishment would involve firearms; either a firing squad or a simple execution with a pistol to the back of the head would be implemented. There are new methods, like nitrogen gas inhalation; this makes sure that the body does not feel the pain of suffocating since it does not sense the lack of oxygen, so the person passes out and then dies. Other methods may or may not be used, but they would be practical and not excessively cruel. All socialist states had at most limited usage of torture and cruel punishments (and the torture methods were not exactly extreme like they were in fascism), and the death penalty was never meant to be cruel or extremely painful.

On “Freedom of Speech”

We support workers’ free speech [Source]. We believe workers must have the right to suggest their ideas for socialist construction; as Mao said, we will “let a hundred schools of thought contend.” We also believe that the government should not arrest or otherwise harm anyone for speaking out against its policies, even if they are capitalist in nature. However, organizations that are not grassroots and are in fact astroturf movements that are backed by corporations will be suppressed. Speech that is against socialism will be criticized. Speech advocating for the overthrow of the state will be censored to ensure the security of the dictatorship of the working class; the capitalist class censors speech that advocates for its extermination and overthrow, but nobody bats an eye, so we shall do the same with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Reactionary and hate speech will not lead to arrest, but it will be corrected first and attacked after (if it persists). Mao stated this in “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship”:

He also stated this in “Why it is Necessary to Discuss the White Paper”:

In considering public opinion, the Achesons [representatives of US imperialism] have mixed up the public opinion of the reactionaries with that of the people. Towards the public opinion of the people, the Achesons have no "responsiveness" whatsoever and are blind and deaf. For years they have turned a deaf ear to the opposition voiced by the people of the United States, China and the rest of the world to the reactionary foreign policy of the U.S. government. What does Acheson mean by "informed and critical public opinion"? Nothing but the numerous instruments of propaganda, such as the newspapers, news agencies, periodicals and broadcasting stations which are controlled by the two reactionary parties in the United States, the Republicans and the Democrats, and which specialize in the manufacture of lies and in threats against the people. Of these things Acheson says rightly that the Communists "cannot endure and do not tolerate" them (nor do the people). That is why we have closed down the imperialist offices of information, stopped the imperialist news agencies from distributing their dispatches to the Chinese press and forbidden them the freedom to go on poisoning the souls of the Chinese people on Chinese soil.

To say that a government led by the Communist Party is a "totalitarian government" is also half true. It is a government that exercises dictatorship over domestic and foreign reactionaries and does not give any of them any freedom to carry on their counter-revolutionary activities. Becoming angry, the reactionaries rail: "Totalitarian government!" Indeed, this is absolutely true so far as the power of the people's government to suppress the reactionaries is concerned. This power is now written into our programme; it will also be written into our constitution. Like food and clothing, this power is something a victorious people cannot do without even for a moment. It is an excellent thing, a protective talisman, an heirloom, which should under no circumstances be discarded before the thorough and total abolition of imperialism abroad and of classes within the country. The more the reactionaries rail "totalitarian government", the more obviously is it a treasure. But Acheson's remark is also half false. For the masses of the people, a government of the people's democratic dictatorship led by the Communist Party is not dictatorial or autocratic but democratic. It is the people's own government. The working personnel of this government must respectfully heed the voice of the people. At the same time, they are teachers of the people, teaching the people by the method of self-education or self-criticism. [Source]

People familiar with the rule of the working class and with the mass line should not have any surprise with our opposition to “total free speech”. Such a policy does not exist, not even in the most “libertarian” of the bourgeois “democratic republics”; all class societies have restrictions on speech, particularly on speech that threatens the existing relations of production, either legally or de facto by other mechanisms (reducing such speech’s audience size, increasing the price of “free speech” in various ways, “shadowbanning”, and more). The bourgeoisie only supports free speech for those that spread propaganda favoring it, so when it takes power, the proletariat should do the same.

On Discrimination

Discrimination by gender, sexuality, “race”, nationality, and other non-class identities came about with class society. We talked about this in our subsection on historical materialism. In socialist society, chauvinism is prohibited, and chauvinists are punished and criticized.

Women' s and LGBTQ+ Rights

Communists must support women' s rights. Class society has subjugated women to inequality with men; while capitalism has smashed patriarchy, it still has different ways to disadvantage women compared to men. The solution for women is not bourgeois feminism but Marxism. Only in a socialist mode of production can women have true equality with men; only when labor-power is no longer a commodity and when the working class holds power in all of society can working people stand together as a class, equally rewarded for equal amounts of work. Clara Zetkin clarifies this in “Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Woman Will Socialism Be Victorious”:

As far as the proletarian woman is concerned, it is capitalism’s need to exploit and to search incessantly for a cheap labor force that has created the women’s question. It is for this reason, too, that the proletarian woman has become enmeshed in the mechanism of the economic life of our period and has been driven into the workshop and to the machines. She went out into the economic life in order to aid her husband in making a living, but the capitalist mode of production transformed her into an unfair competitor. She wanted to bring prosperity to her family, but instead misery descended upon it. The proletarian woman obtained her own employment because she wanted to create a more sunny and pleasant life for her children, but instead she became almost entirely separated from them. …

Therefore the liberation struggle of the proletarian woman cannot be similar to the struggle that the bourgeois woman wages against the male of her class. On the contrary, it must be a joint struggle with the male of her class against the entire class of capitalists. She does not need to fight against the men of her class in order to tear down the barriers which have been raised against her participation in the free competition of the marketplace. Capitalism’s need to exploit and the development of the modern mode of production totally relieves her of having to fight such a struggle. On the contrary, new barriers need to be erected against the exploitation of the proletarian woman. Her rights as wife and mother need to be restored and permanently secured. Her final aim is not the free competition with the man, but the achievement of the political rule of the proletariat. The proletarian woman fights hand in hand with the man of her class against capitalist society. To be sure, she also agrees with the demands of the bourgeois women’s movement, but she regards the fulfillment of these demands simply as a means to enable that movement to enter the battle, equipped with the same weapons, alongside the proletariat. [Source]

In legal terms, our party has no problem with abortion and birth control, though there should be obvious regulations on abortion (for example, no abortion after a certain period of pregnancy except for medically-necessary reasons). The right to abort a pregnancy is a woman’s right, and we respect that, irrespective of our religious beliefs. That being said, we also seek to get rid of the conditions that make abortion necessary. In “The Working Class and Neo-Malthusianism”, Lenin wrote this:

In the discussion the majority agreed that abortions should not be punishable, and the question of the so-called neo-malthusianism (the use of contraceptives) was naturally touched upon, as was also the social side of the matter. Mr. Vigdorchik, for instance, said, according to the report in Russkoye Slovo,[1] that “contraceptive measures should be welcomed” and Mr. Astrakhan exclaimed, amidst thunderous applause:

“We have to convince mothers to bear children so that they can be maimed in educational establishments, so that lots can be drawn for them, so that they can be driven to suicide!” …

From the point of view of the working class, however, it would hardly be possible to find a more apposite expression of the completely reactionary nature and the ugliness of “social neo-malthusianism” than Mr. Astrakhan’s phrase cited above. …

This is the radical difference that distinguishes the psychology of the peasant, handicraftsman, intellectual, the petty bourgeois in general, from that of the proletarian. The petty bourgeois sees and feels that he is heading for ruin, that life is becoming more difficult, that the struggle for existence is ever more ruthless, and that his position and that of his family are becoming more and more hopeless. …

The class-conscious worker is far from holding this point of view. He will not allow his consciousness to be dulled by such cries no matter how sincere and heartfelt they may be. Yes, we workers and the mass of small proprietors lead a life that is filled with unbearable oppression and suffering. Things are harder for our generation than they were for our fathers. But in one respect we are luckier than our fathers. We have begun to learn and are rapidly learning to fight—and to fight not as individuals, as the best of our fathers fought, not for the slogans of bourgeois speechifiers that are alien to us in spirit, but for our slogans, the slogans of our class. We are fighting better than our fathers did. Our children will fight better than we do, and they will be victorious. …

It goes without saying that this does not by any means prevent us from demanding the unconditional annulment of all laws against abortions or against the distribution of medical literature on contraceptive measures, etc. Such laws are nothing but the hypocrisy of the ruling classes. These laws do not heal the ulcers of capitalism, they merely turn them into malignant ulcers that are especially painful for the oppressed masses. Freedom for medical propaganda and the protection of the elementary democratic rights of citizens, men and women, are one thing. The social theory of neo-malthusianism is quite another. Class-conscious workers will always conduct the most ruthless struggle against attempts to impose that reactionary and cowardly theory on the most progressive and strongest class in modern society, the class that is the best prepared for great changes. [Source]

We understand the concerns of pro-life people, but abortion should be a possible choice for those who are pregnant. Pro-life beliefs support capitalist interests because capitalists want a large labor supply; a larger supply of labor-power means a lower price, and reducing birth control lets that happen. Paradoxically, capitalist leeches do not care enough to provide basic needs for children, who would grow up to be their workers; they only pay what is enough for their main workers to use to keep their children in meager, but still surviving, conditions. In contrast, socialism guarantees childcare, healthcare, and more for working people, and that improves kids’ lives and lets them grow up healthy for working and living meaningfully. Despite being pro-choice, we end up supporting more life than capitalists ever could. Let us explain what socialist countries’ policies on abortion were.

In the USSR, abortion was made legal under Lenin. However, in 1936 (as Stalin was the party’s General Secretary), abortion was made illegal. It was the Soviet masses who chose to re-criminalize abortion, not the leaders themselves; as a proletarian state, the proletarians and their peasant allies could decide how their country’s laws worked, and that extended to birth control. Abortion was only allowed in life-threatening cases or when the child would inherit highly problematic diseases; in other cases, other contraceptives were allowed and provided, mothers would get state support (in addition to their paid maternity leave) for having children, and childcare was accessible for working parents. Furthermore, it was women like Nadezhda Krupskaya, the wife of Lenin, who supported the masses’ requests to re-criminalize abortion; thus, the law on abortion was not patriarchal like bourgeois feminists may assume.

Albania only allowed women to get abortions under certain conditions. Like the USSR under socialism, women were not burdened with homemaking as much as they are under capitalism or pre-capitalist systems. Pickaxe and Rifle discusses women’s position in Albania in Chapter 18:

The complete emancipation of women to share fully in production work depends on establishing new socialist relations in the family as well as on the state creation of conditions enabling women to combine their roles of workers and mothers. They must also be delivered from the drudgery of household chores and liberated from any survivals of patriarchal attitudes. This is partly achieved by the adequate provision of creches and nursery schools at minimal costs, by cheap, wholesome canteen meals at midday, by half-cooked food which can be picked up on the way home and quickly prepared in the evening, by launderettes and other labor-saving devices. But more important is the reconsideration of the division of labor within the household itself. If there is no work which women cannot do, it follows that there is also no work, like domestic tasks, which is peculiarly theirs. …

Single mothers enjoy all due respect and the state guarantees their economic security and protection. Children born outside marriage are equal in every way to those born within.

Abortions are allowed after consultation with a committee of doctors. Birth control is a matter of personal choice. There is no family planning in the sense of national campaigns to limit births because Albania is an underpopulated country in which all births are welcomed. [Source]

In China, abortion was initially illegal other than for certain medical reasons (if the mother had one of certain pre-existing conditions, if a spontaneous abortion was expected, or if the mother had undergone more than one Cesarean section previously), but those restrictions were reduced later on; more medical conditions would allow a woman to undergo abortion, and women in certain occupations or who had four kids and became pregnant within four months after their recent child could get an abortion. Instead of abortion, Chinese doctors in the Mao era generally focused on providing education and contraceptives to families; China also needed population growth for labor to develop their economy. China’s policy was probably the most progressive of the three, with the exception of the initial total legalization of abortion in the USSR under Lenin. [MTBA]

Modern socialist states would promote womens’ rights to get abortions. We have learned from the mistakes of previous socialist experiments. Sometimes, it’s the truth that we have to adapt on certain issues to further our revolution. If the working class in a certain country is pro life, then we shouldn’t stress over this one issue and possibly alienate them. Women will be much more liberated and better off under socialism.

Revolutionary communists support the rights of the LGBTQ community. Cissexual heterosexual workers are often antagonized to the LGBTQ community by capitalists to distract them from the real issue of society, which is the very existence of capitalists. Therefore, to fight our class enemies, we unite all workers, regardless of their LGBTQ status. Homophobic, transphobic, etc. words, actions, and more are not tolerated. Those who use such disgusting language must be corrected as soon as possible, and if they persistently use it, they must be punished. The contradiction between queers and non-queers is most certainly a non-antagonistic one, and since the contradiction only came about with class society, it will go away with that as well.

We must recognize that bourgeois “identity politics” may look progressive but at their core are reactionary. Corporations that exploit workers wearing pronoun necklaces are just as oppressive as those that don’t. We must also not abandon our work with entire groups of workers because we think that they are homophobic without any evidence. We support all of our LGBTQ comrades as we struggle alongside them both against exploitation and identity politics and only then can they, and all workers, be truly liberated.

Under Lenin, there were no laws on homosexuality, but under Stalin, laws against “pederasty” were passed; the definition of “pederasty”included homosexual relations between consensual adults. This, as we stated before, was a conservative turn in the USSR’s socialist construction, and we do not support it; however, we recognize that it was more humane than capitalist countries like the UK, which literally chemically castrated homosexual males. Socialist Albania had the same problem as the USSR. The status of homosexuality in China was not officially defined in the Maoist, socialist era (sodomy was decriminalized, and the Cultural Revolution had both a rise in queer people expressing themselves and certain elements viewing queerism as bourgeois); but capitalist China was very strict on LGBT people until recently.

A modern communist movement will empower queer proletarians and educate queerphobic workers into tolerating their allies; a modern socialist state would discourage queerphobia, and workers would have no reason to be antagonistic to each other due to their sexuality or gender identity.

Immigration

Immigration is not the problem that many petty-bourgeois reactionaries portray it to be. They frequently whine and lament over “immigrants stealing jobs” and, paradoxically, they also whine about “immigrants using welfare and/or selling drugs”. Neither of these universally apply to any immigrants; most “illegal”^[148] immigrants are not “welfare hoarders” since it is literally impossible for them to take such benefits, and there are many who remain unemployed or employed in illegal work because employing them in legal work can cause problems for their employers if they get caught. However, immigrant labor is profitable to capitalists, particularly “illegal” immigrant labor; immigrants generally get paid less, and “illegal” immigrants are practically forced to accept illegal wages because they cannot bear to be caught and deported. That is why we do not have any resentment towards them when they take on low-paying jobs, driving wages down for other workers; we recognize the systemic issues leading to that problem, and we know class consciousness is important.

Capitalist-imperialism is the reason for mass immigration. Most poor countries today are only poor because they are semi-colonies or full colonies of imperialist countries, so they lose lots of wealth and resources that should go to economic development. Because of that wealth difference, better-off workers in poorer countries seek to move to richer countries to get better pay; in a negative feedback loop, the poorer countries lose those needed skilled workers for development, worsening the inequality between imperialist and imperialized countries. In addition, capitalists in the imperial core would be more than happy to hire immigrants by buying their cheap labor-power and ruthlessly exploiting them; in the meantime, certain capitalists show themselves as being “tolerant” of this labor-power—which is cheaper than native labor-power but pricier than that of workers within the global south—while others promote more deportations to exploit these workers more ruthlessly by making their existence more precarious, sending them back to exploited countries to, and/or using their labor for practically free in detention centers, and these tactics all lower third world workers’ wages. Deporting immigrants can also lead to the worsening of native workers’ conditions, as capitalists may increase the natives’ rate of exploitation.

Trump is poised to outrun Biden’s deportation record and promises to do so in the most dramatic way possible. He wants to stir his criminal social base and ensure his party fulfills the needs of the imperialist ruling class: to destroy the means of production (including the workforce) in order to stop the fall in profitability and overcome the cyclical crisis of overproduction. The only way for US imperialism to save itself now is to continue to concentrate power around the president, restrict democratic rights, and savagely attack the working class, while principally increasing its domination and oppression of the world’s people. …

The struggle for our class siblings facing deportation, deprivation and abuse at the hands of the old state is simultaneously cultivating the revolution at home and an act of internationalism. It is through such work, compelling the broad masses of proletarians to fight for both the civil rights of migrant workers as they would their own, and the fight against the worsening economic conditions inflicted on them as a whole that we spread class consciousness step by step among the workers. [Source]

Anti-immigrant, and especially anti-“illegal” immigrant, sentiments are chauvinist views that capitalists use to divide the working class, justify imperialism, and allow for the intensification of the proletariat’s exploitation. “The backward among the masses in increasing numbers get drunk off these illusions and end up blaming the migrants for every abuse they have experienced at the hands of the ruling class” [Source]. If people really hate immigration so much, they should hate capitalist-imperialism even more; that is why we must work to oppose these divide-and-conquer tactics among workers and unite the people against the system. The only way to end all of this exploitation and misery is proletarian-led people’s wars in all countries of the world.

For the immediate situation, we need to organize “illegal” immigrant workers into mass organizations like unions that are as political as they are economic; this is not easy because “illegals” can get into legal trouble (obviously), but that trouble will go away with the development of new power. When the workers’ state is made with the communist party, workers’ army, and mass organizations, we can expect some sort of protection for “illegal” immigrants. Rival workers may want to attack “illegals” (make the contradiction antagonistic even as it could remain non-antagonistic), but the role of communists as they organize workers is to educate them and give them the right tasks to do. Rather than use their energy against “illegals”, citizen workers should form covert unity with them; when all the workers strike, they can win concessions, and when all the workers together support the people’s war, they can win political and economic power, ending the need to violently fight for wages and jobs. Here is what Lenin said about immigration in capitalism (our bolding):

Capitalism has given rise to a special form of migration of nations. The rapidly developing industrial countries, introducing machinery on a large scale and ousting the backward countries from the world market, raise wages at home above the average rate and thus attract workers from the backward countries.

Hundreds of thousands of workers thus wander hundreds and thousands of versts [a vert is roughly a kilometer]. Advanced capitalism drags them forcibly into its orbit, tears them out of the backwoods in which they live, makes them participants in the world-historical movement and brings them face to face with the powerful, united, international class of factory owners.

There can be no doubt that dire poverty alone compels people to abandon their native land, and that the capitalists exploit the immigrant workers in the most shameless manner. But only reactionaries can shut their eyes to the progressive significance of this modern migration of nations. Emancipation from the yoke of capital is impossible without the further development of capitalism, and without the class struggle that is based on it. And it is into this struggle that capitalism is drawing the masses of the working people of the whole world, breaking down the musty, fusty habits of local life, breaking down national barriers and prejudices, uniting workers from all countries in huge factories and mines in America, Germany, and so forth. …

The more backward the country[,] the larger is the number of “unskilled” agricultural laborers it supplies. The advanced nations seize, as it were, the best paid occupations for themselves and leave the semi-barbarian countries the worst paid occupations. Europe in general (“other countries”) provided Germany with 157,000 workers, of whom more than eight-tenths (135,000 out of 157,000) were industrial workers. Backward Austria provided only six-tenths (162,000 out of 263,000) of the industrial workers. The most backward country of all, Russia, provided only one-tenth of the industrial workers (34,000 out of 308,000). …

The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavor to keep them disunited. Class-conscious workers, realizing that the break-down of all the national barriers by capitalism is inevitable and progressive, are trying to help to enlighten and organize their fellow-workers from the backward countries. [Source]

A socialist state would not have “open borders”, especially with capitalist states near it. Only full communism can have that because national, class, etc. divisions would go away. When a proletarian dictatorship is made, its borders must be secure to protect it from external enemies. Migration will likely not be heavily restricted for workers, but it would need to be recorded to ensure that they can be employed and guaranteed their basic needs as is required in socialism. Class enemies and their hired agents (as in police officers, fascists, etc.) trying to migrate would be restricted; emigrants that do slip away would have their accounts frozen, means of production compensated, and exploited workers liberated, and other class enemies would have to undergo proletarianization in both their material and ideological spheres. Immigrants from impoverished, imperialized, etc. countries would be welcomed, employed, and given the basic needs and rights any citizen would enjoy, including the right to vote. These would not be easy to give during and immediately after revolution, but once the country is stabilized, these accommodations would be made. Workers’ unity would persist while chauvinism would be ruthlessly struggled against.

Religion

Many communists in the past have had negative views of religion; they claimed that it was part of the superstructures of class society. In contrast, a lot of modern communists tend to be either tolerant of religion or supportive of it under socialism. Our views are mixed on this; many Maoists say that the dialectical materialist worldview means a rejection of religion, but we should still allow comrades and cadres to be religious if they leave their religion outside of the vanguard party, people’s army, and united front (i.e. make all of those organizations secular, but not necessarily atheist). Lenin, in “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion”, stated the following:

If a priest comes to us to take part in our common political work and conscientiously performs Party duties, without opposing the programme of the Party, he may be allowed to join the ranks of the Social-Democrats; for the contradiction between the spirit and principles of our programme and the religious convictions of the priest would in such circumstances be something that concerned him alone, his own private contradiction; and a political organization cannot put its members through an examination to see if there is no contradiction between their views and the Party programme. … We must not only admit workers who preserve their belief in God into the Social-Democratic Party, but must deliberately set out to recruit them… [Source]

Chairman Gonzalo shared this view, claiming in his interview with El Diario that he did not mind having religious cadres while he viewed religion as a product of class society that would fade away with it (our emphasis):

Marx taught us that “religion is the opiate of the people.” This is a Marxist thesis which is completely valid today, and in the future. Marx also held that religion is a social phenomenon that is the product of exploitation and it will be eliminated as exploitation is swept away and a new society emerges. These are principles that we can't ignore, and that we must always keep in mind. Related to the previous point, it must be remembered that the people are religious, something which never has and never will prevent them from struggling for their basic class interests, and in this way serving the revolution, and in particular the people's war. I want to make it absolutely clear that we respect this religiousness as a question of freedom of religious beliefs, as recognized by the programme which was approved by our Congress. [Source]

CPI (Maoist) praised TKP/ML’s attitude toward religion in its congratulation letter for the latter’s 50th anniversary:

You uphold the equality of religions in the society of various religions. You explained that the oppressed religions are historically being violated of fundamental freedom and democratic rights and that the religious systems related to the Sunni religious system are always facing severe oppression, massacres and aggressive policies. It is commendable that your Congress declared the utmost democratic attitude towards religions when it said that the question of religious freedom including the Sunni religious system shall be an aspect of democratic right in the struggle for New Democratic Revolution. [Source]

While some Maoists are religious, like Comrade Paul, we recognize the importance of religion in class struggle; specifically, the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist understanding of religion is that it is part of the societal superstructure, which develops from society’s mode of production (its economic base). Indeed, religious people have been revolutionary in many instances, and they were not secular; Liberation Theology in Latin America, though often aligned with Soviet revisionism, was and is a progressive expression of Catholic Christianity in the fight against semi-feudalism’s oppressions, while Hamas in Palestine is a Sunni Islamist group that combats Israeli settler-colonialism. Some claim that religion will be gone in communism; others point out that primitive communism had simple forms of religion and superstition, so communism could retain forms of religion. Whatever the case may be, the stance of revolutionary communists on religion in revolution and in socialism is one of tolerance: revolutionaries must accept all allies of the people, even religious ones, and in socialism, religion may be criticized, but it must not be forcefully suppressed.

On Violence

We oppose every imperialist nation’s attempt at dominating third-world nations; we also oppose every war between imperialist powers (such as the numerous de facto proxy wars between the US-led and Russia/China-led imperialist blocs). Therefore, we oppose all imperialist wars. We celebrated the defeat of the US in Afghanistan, and we hope that the US will leave Syria and other countries that its military is in. Imperialist wars help nobody but the finance capitalists who run our governments and control us. We not only oppose US imperialism, but the imperialism of junior allies of the US and the imperialism of the US’s rivals, mainly China and Russia [Source]. CPI (Maoist) stated this on the war in Syria:

The imperialists led by the US and their puppet regimes in the Arab world have been diplomatically and politically manipulating and financially, militarily and technically aiding, hugely arming, training and guiding the opposition in various forms. They made it more than clear that they want Assad to go and their puppets to take over Syria. Russia and China have been supporting the Assad government consistently till date and have opposed any kind of armed imperialist intervention or attack on Syria. The corporate media had also to grudgingly concede that Assad too has considerable support among the Syrians. This is one of the reasons for not attacking Syria apart from crucial support to Assad from Russia, China, Lebanon and Iran though they very much wanted to as they had done in Libya. In fact, it has been reported recently that Assad's forces have gained an upper hand over the rebels in their stronghold areas which is well one of the reasons for this haste to attack Syria.

Our Party, the CPI (Maoist) has always maintained that it is only the people of a country who have the right to retain or overthrow a particular regime in their country. It is for the people of Syria to decide whether they want Assad to be in power or not. They have every right to rebel and carve their own future. But due to the unwarranted intervention of the imperialists in the internal affairs in Syria the future of the country has already been facing a great danger and perhaps it will not lay in the hands of the Syrians for a long time to come. [Source]

We are not pacifists, though, and we believe that people’s wars are justified. If the people attack the imperialists who commit horrendous crimes against them, the people and their party are doing the right thing. We do not completely support wars where the people support a reactionary group (e.g. the Afghan people supporting the Taliban against the US), but we recognize that that war can help the people support a more progressive party; they weaken imperialist power, allowing a true a communist party to set up a firm base area and liberate their nation [Source]. True people’s wars (communist-led uprisings) get all the support we can give; obviously we have criticisms of certain tactics, policies, lines, etc., but we support them more than we criticize them.

As Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, we favor the right for all working people, including the proletariat, peasantry, military, and even petty bourgeoisie to bear arms and prepare for military conflict and total war. In a socialist society, by constructing armed bodies both within the state (military, militia, public security force, maybe a secret police, etc.) and without (paramilitaries, Red Guards, etc.), the working people, who make up the majority of our population, can experience true democracy. Every student in schools should receive at least basic military training, and that will include training with weaponry. We explained the necessity of the armed masses in the subsection on the masses’ supervision of their state, party, etc., under the subsection on the mass line, which is under the section on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. We can also see what Marx said on the matter in his “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League”:

The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. The destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible—these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising. [Source]

Of course, we believe in reasonable regulations on firearms, but we do not support disarming the working people in any way. In a socialist state, regulations would be passed if the state needs arms, if there is an unusually high amount of crime linked to the access to arms, and/or given other conditions. Still, we would never support bourgeois laws; liberal regulations on guns tend to help (certain sections of) the capitalist class, so we would not support using them. Even if the bourgeois state confiscated everyone’s guns (and it really would not because it exists to protect the ruling class’s rights), it itself has many guns, and it would use them to protect the ruling class. Huey Newton, a founder of the American Black Panther Party (BPP), wrote an article for the party’s newspaper titled, “In Defense of Self Defense”, and it says (all emphasis is the author’s):

Laws and rules have always been made to serve people. Rules of society are set up by people so that they will be able to function in a harmonious way. In other words, in order to promote the general welfare of society rules and laws are established by men. Rules should serve men and not men serve rules. The man is greater than the rules or laws that he constructs. Much of the time the laws and rules which officials attempt to inflict upon poor people are non-functional in relation to the status of the poor in society. …

The power structure inflicts pain and brutality upon the peoples then provides controlled outlets for the pain in ways least likely to upset them or interfere with the process of exploitation. The people must repudiate the channels, established as tricks and deceitful snares by the exploiter-oppressors. The people must oppose everything the oppressor supports and support everything that he opposes. If black people go about their struggle for liberation in the way that the oppressor dictates and sponsors, then we will have degenerated to the level of groveling flunkies for the oppressor himself. …

The power structure depends upon the use of force without retaliation. This is why they want the people unarmed: This is why they have made it a felony to teach guerrilla warfare. The racist dog oppressor fears the armed people; they fear most of all black people armed with weapons and the ideology of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If a government is not afraid of the people it will arm the people and teach guerilla tactics as a means for the survival of the people from foreign aggression. Black people are held captive in the midst of their oppressors. There is a world of difference between 30 million unarmed, submissive black people and 30 million Black people armed with freedom and defense guns and the strategic methods of liberation.

When a mechanic wants to fix a broken down car engine he must have the necessary tools to do the job. When the people move for liberation, they must have the basic tool of liberation: the gun. Only with the power of the gun can the black masses halt the terror and brutality perpetuated against them by the armed racist power structure; and in one sense only by the power of the gun can the whole world be transformed into the earthly paradise dreamed of by the people from time immemorial. One successful practitioner of the art and science of national liberation and self defense put it this way: “We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.” (Brother Mao Tse-Tung) [Source]

In socialist China and Albania, the masses were fully armed and organized to defend their country, fight revisionists, and engage in class struggle. Not only did people have the right to arm themselves, but they were taught to handle weaponry in school. This was the way that the dictatorship of the proletariat was formed. Rather than relying solely on specialized armed bodies, the proletarian state relied on the ready-to-fight masses in addition to the bodies of the state, which were supervised by the masses as well. While gun ownership levels were higher than anywhere else in the world, gun violence was not. We would apply these general ideas to our particular conditions under the socialism that developed in our countries.

Inequality, Safety Nets

Capitalism is responsible for the worst inequalities and injustices we see today. It is the capitalist system—its relations of production—that perpetuate such social ills. Capitalism lets the owners of the productive forces (remember, those are labor-power and means of production) extract surplus value from their workers’ labor by depressing their wages (their cost of labor-power, the cost of them sustaining themselves and being able to work), making them work extremely hard, and restricting the development of their productive forces to a maximum. The capitalists, who continually accumulate surplus value, reinvest it, and get even more surplus value, then continue the trend of inequality by shrinking wages even more and letting their already-rich children inherit their property when they die. Conversely, however, capitalism makes the working class more and more equal by reducing skilled workers’ skills, lowering their labor-power’s value and thus lowering their wages/salaries; while some workers retain their skills and remain professional (becoming the labor aristocracy in imperialist states), the majority lose skilled work and become less skilled, and even the educated workers are forced to work in unskilled jobs because of the lack of demand for their educated labor. Marx said this in the Manifesto of the Communist Party:

But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. [Source]

In a socialist system, inequality would still exist, but it would be limited to differences in skill, productivity, etc. as well as differences in needs and desires. Since the socialist distribution of goods and services is based on people’s contributions of labor, people who produce more value and have fewer needs and desires would have more leftover (disposable) income. Even if progressive taxation is implemented (and that’s if income taxation is implemented at all; since socialist economies use profits to substitute income taxes, they could be unnecessary, as they were in China), the workers who produce more value would be richer than those who produce less.

This inequality is much smaller than that of capitalism, though; in capitalism, the CEO of a company (who is often the owner of the company as well) often earns more than 350 times the average worker in their company earns, while in socialism the CEO would not be the owner of the company, and they would earn based on the value that they contribute to the enterprise. It is unlikely that CEOs would even exist in socialism, and instead the lower and middle managers would run enterprises while also doing the main labor that produces value for the enterprise. CEOs are not necessary because it is impossible for one person to manage a large enterprise. Whatever the case may be, this will reduce income and wealth inequality substantially.

We also must criticize campaigns against “inequality” that are often opportunistic in nature. It is a quite useful tool of the bourgeoisie to tell us that inequality is in fact the root of the problem and not a symptom of capitalism. That feeds into the reformist propaganda message of, “Just tax the rich and have welfare, and we’ll be fine”. If we focus too much of our energy and effort into this issue, we are inevitably going to hurt the revolutionary cause of the working class. Communists also not be misguided and believe in things like absolute egalitarianism. While we support efforts for justice around the world, we must also be careful that our struggle for a more equal society doesn’t turn against us.

Capitalist-imperialism has deindustrialized the richest capitalist states and has looted imperialized states (exporting only limited amounts of industrial capital in return, which is only done to loot more wealth), so a socialist state forming in what is now the US would need to rebuild its industrial economy. That would require labor, creating even more of a reason to eliminate unemployment; while automation may threaten unskilled labor, the guaranteed education and the benefits that come with taking up skilled and professional work will ensure that it does not ruin the working class even as it becomes more prevalent in the economy.

In a socialist economy, healthcare would be guaranteed, along with education, employment, housing, childcare, benefits for those who cannot work, and more. These would all be paid for with the surplus product that workers produce. Also in socialism, there would be widespread education about medical issues, like sanitation, nutrition, and vaccination and disease prevention. In communism, healthcare would be greatly developed to satisfy all people’s needs. Scientific knowledge would be available for all, too (this would start in socialism).

In addition to healthcare, we support free access to childcare and education. While infants need to stay with their parents, who will get paid leave for childcare, toddlers should get childcare with education, and children old enough will go to primary and then secondary school. After this, there will be potential paths for each child, with some pursuing higher education and others getting employed after secondary school. Workers’ surplus production will substitute the taxes that would normally pay for this education in a capitalist economy, so taxes would be low or nonexistent.

Public transportation and housing will be provided, albeit maybe not for free. The socialist state may need to charge fees for public transportation and rent for housing, but the prices would be low, for they are necessities for workers. With this public transportation, we will not need many cars, if any at all. Housing will be built in a way that encourages more-equal distributions of people around the country, reducing the divide between the countryside and the cities. Utilities would be free or cheap, for surplus products would cover any of their costs. Infrastructure in America is built for profit maximization, and this will change to satisfy people’s needs as well.

Rebuilding this country’s infrastructure and economy will undoubtedly have a positive effect on society and, equally importantly, the environment.

Climate Change

Climate change is a very real problem that society has to solve as soon as possible. Climate change deniers must be educated and taught about how our world works and why we are screwed if we do not take action now! Climate change was actually accelerated by capitalism. Capitalism is driven by profit; cutting costs immediately is important for capitalists, regardless of what the cost of that could be in the long term. This is why they use fossil fuels, pollute our natural areas, and make life filthier and worse. Under socialism, production and distribution would occur in the most eco-friendly way feasible, and that may lead to lower profits, but it will lead to a better society in the long term. The USSR in its genuinely socialist era had extensive environmental policies that mitigated the effects of drought and other weather events that capitalist production was and is intensifying. “Soviet Environmentalism in the Stalin Era” details this:

Soviet environmentalism wasn’t the same kind of liberal-idealist environmentalism which existed in capitalist countries. It did not put any inherent spiritual or supernatural value on nature. Nor was Soviet environmentalism merely interested in conserving natural resources, like many Western theorists. Instead the USSR saw the natural environment as something which offers economic, psychological and aesthetic value to human beings. Soviet environmentalism was tied to the deep humanism of Soviet socialism. The Soviets understood that humanity is not separate from nature, but is a product of nature, and deeply connected with nature.

Stephen Brain writes:

“Environmentalism survived and—even thrived—in Stalin’s Soviet Union, establishing levels of protection unparalleled anywhere in the world” (Stephen Brain, Stalin’s Environmentalism, p. 93)

“the Soviet Union in the 1940s went about protecting from exploitation more forested land than any other country in history. Accordingly, it is accurate to say that the Soviet Union developed a real and effective environmentalist program… Stalin emerged as a peculiar kind of environmentalist… his policies withdrew millions of hectares [of forest] from economic exploitation on the grounds that this would improve the hydrology of the Soviet Union. These millions of hectares were left more or less untouched, in keeping with the supposition that complex, wild forests best regulated water flows, and thus one may conclude that Stalin’s policies were steadfastly environmentalist—and because of the way they were carried out, preservationist as well.” (Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905-1953, p. 2)

“Stalin also actively promoted forest environmentalism for the benefit of the state, establishing levels of protection unparalleled anywhere in the world… Stalin’s environmental policies codified into law an assumption that healthy land was forested land and that deforestation represented serious environmental dangers to the state’s larger project of modernization, in the form of droughts, floods, hydrological disturbances, and crop failures… Forest protection ultimately rose to such prominence during the last six years of Stalin’s rule that the Politburo took control of the Soviet forest away from the Ministry of Heavy Industry and elevated the nation’s forest conservation bureau to the dominant position in implementing policy” (Song of the forest, p. 116). [Source]

Socialist China also had measures to reduce waste and maximize use-value (not profit), and that is very much environmentalist. In “Turning the Harmful Into the Beneficial”, an article from Issue 4 of Volume 15 of Peking Review, Chi Wei writes:

Every day large quantities of the “three wastes”—waste gas, liquid and residue—stream forth from industrial production. In capitalist countries, because the capitalists seek high profits and production is in a state of anarchy, these “wastes,” which pollute the air and poison the rivers, pose an increasingly serious menace to the people’s health. This has become an insoluble social problem in the capitalist world.

“How is pollution dealt with in China”? Some foreign friends who have seen the effects of pollution are very concerned about this question.

In our country, the “three wastes” have done little harm to the people. This is because in a socialist country like ours which is “proceeding in all cases from the interests of the people,” we can rely on the superiority of the socialist system to take various measures to prevent pollution harming the people. …

During the Great Cultural Revolution, the plant’s revolutionary committee organized all its staff members and workers to study Chairman Mao’s teachings and mercilessly criticize the revisionist line, including trash like “making great efforts to do what is most profitable, less efforts to do what is less profitable and no efforts to do what is unprofitable” and “putting profits in command,” advertised by Liu Shao-chi. They saw the question of whether or not to remove phenol as a question of “for whom?” which is a matter of principle, and one of whether or not they want to support agriculture and consolidate the worker-peasant alliance. After reaching unity in their thinking and pooling their collective wisdom and strength, they quickly made a device for removing phenol from wastewater, thus turning the harmful into the beneficial. …

There is no limit to people’s ability to know and transform the objective world. Thus[,] there is no limit to utilizing the “three wastes.” Using cotton seeds as its material, a plant used to treat the seed shells as fuel. Later, workers produced furfural from the shells, acetone from the gas emitted in making furfural, glucose out of the residue and glycerin, butanol, alcohol and weiching (a flavoring essence) out of the glucose residue. Indeed, there are no limits. They believe everything is valuable; there are only materials which have not been utilized, and there is no absolute waste which cannot be utilized. Continued scientific experiments have yielded important material from remaining “waste.” …

The principle of multi-purpose use correctly reflects the objective law of the development of production. Under the socialist system where the laboring people are the masters, mastering and using this law not only can end pollution, but also can expand production on a wide scale, creating ever more wealth for the state. At present, China’s production technique is comparatively backward and multi-purpose use has just started. Under the guidance of Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line, multi-purpose use will surely be developed on an ever wider scale. [Source]

Contrary to the myths that “laissez-faire” capitalist economists put out, these systems will not lead to inflation, much debt, etc. None of the socialist states in the past had extreme amounts of debt or inflation; if anything, their development programs helped their wealth grow better, and they worked toward self-reliance. What caused inflation and debt for these countries was really capitalist restoration and the enactment of market reforms. Only socialism can really save the world from the ravages of the oncoming and developing climate apocalypse.

Decolonization

Decolonization is the process of getting rid of colonial and imperial oppression of a nation. This means getting rid of the economic basis of exploitation as well as getting rid of the superstructure that develops from it. The only way to decolonize successfully is through overthrowing bureaucrat capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and other reactionary ills. For the colonized nations, this requires a New-Democratic revolution. We will focus on Palestine and “North America”, but we will also bring up examples from other regions.

Palestine

For the uninitiated, Palestine is a region in the Middle East, and Israel is the current state that controls most of this region. Now, Israel claims to be a homeland for all Jews of the world. What it really is is a settler-colonial state that takes the homeland of Arabs, including native Jews (Mizrahim) who had already lived in the region before the Zionist^[149] takeover. (The Mizrahim do enjoy the privileges that other Jews enjoy, such as being automatic citizens of Israel as soon as they live there. Muslims and Christians lack these privileges.) Israel has used deportations of Arabs to make space for Jews to live there, seizing Arab agriculture and . Now, Jews moving to Palestine is not necessarily bad; it is the forceful removal of the Palestinian people from the land in which they were born that is not good.

Settler-colonialism in Palestine has taken place for decades. Britain had colonized Palestine after World War One. [MTBA]

Israel does not control the world, contrary to Nazi propaganda. Israel was actually formed with the help of American and British imperialism, making Israel a puppet of America in the Middle East. There are some lobbyists who back Israel’s interests in Congress, but it is mostly the US government that supports Israel (which is why it receives billions of dollars from the US). Jews are also not the problem of Israel; settler-colonialism is. Israel’s role as an expansionist semi-colony of the US and other Western imperialists is why we oppose it.

On the flipside, anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, contrary to Zionists’ lies and slanders. There are Jews that oppose Israel’s actions in Palestine. There are Jews who oppose the settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing that Israel does. There are Jews who oppose Israel as a political concept. And Israel is not really for the Jews of the world; if it was, then it would not provide medical assistance to anti-Semitic and overall reactionary Sunni Islamists in Syria. Israel would also not persecute Mizrahi Jews if it was so friendly to Jewish people of all races.^[150] In Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) justifies the call for Palestinian self-determination and debunks the myth that Palestinian liberation must be anti-Semitic:

That Israel constitutes an aggressive presence against our people from the outset is an indisputable fact. For our people, the rise of Israel has meant the expulsion of this people from its home and lands, the usurpation of all that our people had built through its labor and effort, the dispersal of our people throughout the Arab world and the world at large, and the concentration of the greater portion of it in the camps of misery and poverty scattered in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon without hope and without a future.

That Israel constitutes a colonialist expansionist presence at the expense of Arab land and its owners is not a matter for discussion. For us it is the tangible experience before which all spurious claims and allegations fade away. The “National Home” for the Jews in Palestine became the “State of Israel” within the boundaries of the Partition resolutions adopted by the United Nations in 1947. It then expanded to include Israel with its pre-June boundaries, which are far more extensive than those established by the United Nations’ resolutions of 1947, and finally expanded once again to include the whole of Palestine as well as Sinai and the Golan Heights. …

The Palestinian liberation movement is not a racial movement with aggressive intentions against the Jews. It is not directed against the Jews. Its object is to destroy the state of Israel as a military, political and economic establishment that rests on aggression, expansion and organic connection with imperialist interests in our homeland. It is against Zionism as an aggressive racial movement connected with imperialism, which has exploited the sufferings of the Jews as a stepping stone for the promotion of its interests and the interests of imperialism in this part of the world that possesses rich resources and provides a bridgehead into the countries of Africa and Asia. The aim of the Palestinian liberation movement is to establish a democratic national state in Palestine in which both Arabs and Jews will live as citizens with equal rights and obligations and that will constitute an integral part of the progressive democratic Arab national presence living peacefully with all forces of progress in the world.

Israel has insisted on portraying our war against it as a racial war aiming at eliminating every Jewish citizen and throwing him into the sea. The purpose behind this is to mobilize all Jews for a life-or-death struggle. Consequently, a basic strategic line in our war with Israel must aim at unveiling this misrepresentation, addressing the exploited and misled Jewish masses and revealing the conflict between these masses’ interest in living peacefully and the interests of the Zionist movement and the forces controlling the state of Israel. It is this strategic line that will ensure for us the isolation of the fascist clique in Israel from all the forces of progress in the world. It will also ensure for us, with the growth of the armed struggle for liberation and clarification of its identity, the widening of the conflict existing objectively between Israel and the Zionist movement on the one hand and the millions of misled and exploited Jews on the other. [Source]

The USSR under Stalin did support Israel, even though Stalin was an anti-Zionist. At the time, the USSR sought to create an independent state in Palestine that Jews and Arabs could coexist in, but it primarily wanted to expel British colonialism from the region in the hopes of that development. That is why even though the Soviet state opposed Zionism, it supported the partition of Palestine to get the British expelled. This can be found in “The Soviet Union and the Founding of Israel”, an article in Issue 11 of A World to Win:^[151]

At the time Israel was founded in 1948, the Soviet Union was still a socialist state under the leadership of Stalin. The policy the Soviet leadership took towards the founding of Israel was nonetheless profoundly mistaken and had serious negative consequences for the revolutionary struggle.

The international communist movement had burst into the Middle East with the salvoes of the October Revolution. The Comintern had encouraged and worked towards the development of a communist movement in Palestine, with some success; it had, under Lenin's and then Stalin's leadership, denounced Zionism as a tool of British imperialism. In admitting the Palestine Communist Party in 1923, the Comintern had, for instance, stressed the need for it to "support the nationalist freedom of the Arab population against the British-Zionist occupation." But twenty-five years later the USSR gave the Zionists support at the decisive moment of Israel's founding. …

Probably the key turning point was the Soviet vote in the United Nations. Earlier the Soviets had called for a solution which did not partition Palestine. When this stand was defeated, however, they opted to support the U.S.-backed proposition for partitioning Palestine into an Arab and Jewish state. Shortly thereafter, the Zionists unilaterally declared the establishment of Israel and set out militarily to erect the state, and Palestinian and other Arab forces counterattacked. …

First, Soviet declarations of the "national rights" of the Jews may well have been a diplomatic maneuver. Stalin, as Lenin before him, had explicitly polemicised against the view that the Jews were a nation, pointing out instead that Judaism was a religion. There is no reason to suppose that this view had changed.

Instead, it may be that this was an effort by the Soviet leadership to use the Zionists' temporary conflict with the British to play up the contradictions between the aging British colonial setup and the new-coming U.S. imperialists to prevent one or the other from consolidating a grip on the area.' One effort to lend strength to this argument claims that the Soviets believed that in the Zionists they had a force at their disposal that would act somewhat independently of the two Western imperialist powers.

If the Soviet leaders were attempting to use contradictions amongst the imperialists, it must be said that such a tact was misconceived at best and winded up backfiring on the proletarian leaders. [Source]

Nevertheless, the USSR and the People’s Democracies united around the Arab states once Israel engaged in colonialism and worked for US imperialism. (This is something the article above does not state, interestingly enough, and it even says the opposite, baselessly claiming that the USSR backed Israel in the 1948 war.)

The USSR was a dictatorship of the proletariat, whereas the anti-imperialist states of the Arab world were the dictatorship of the anti-colonial national bourgeoisie, closely allied with the proletariat of the Arab countries. Such states did have the national bourgeoisie as the main force dominating the state but secondarily also incorporated the proletariat into the state, which was why these Arab states were (bourgeois) democratic—Egypt was a constitutional monarchy, Syria was a democratic republic, and Lebanon was a multi-confessional parliamentary democracy. The interests of the Soviet proletariat were the same as the interests of the Egyptian, Lebanese, and Syrian proletariat. It makes little sense to say that the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR would materially contradict the progressive bourgeois-democratic alliance of the proletariat and the anti-colonial national bourgeoisie in the Arab countries because that would mean the contradiction of the class interests of the Soviet proletariat with the class interests of the Arab proletariat. One can therefore calculate that the Soviets would never betray the anti-colonial Arab forces, even if, at face-value, appearing to betray it. And it unsurprisingly turns out that such a calculation is backed up immensely by historical empirical evidence—namely the military and economic support of the USSR and the Peoples’ Democracies for the Arab anti-colonial war effort during the 1948 War.

The Soviet media stated that the anti-imperialist bloc would support the just cause of the Arabs; these were by no means empty promises. Throughout the 1948 War, the USSR and the Peoples’ Democracies of Eastern Europe covertly furnished the Arabs with military assistance. [Source]

The USSR also critically supported petty-bourgeois “Zionists” in the “United Workers’ Party”, or Mapam. These “Zionists” were progressive in that their support for Zionism was not for colonialism or imperialism, but for migration and the building of a People’s Democracy in Israel/Palestine. Mapam opposed the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab lands and opposed the Nakba, and it led a significant portion of Jewish and Arab workers against the mainstream bourgeois Zionist parties, which were compradors of US and UK imperialism. Communist and workers’ parties recognized that even this form of Zionism was bourgeois-nationalist in essence and really Utopian, but they distinguished it from the rabid chauvinism of the rest of Zionist ideology, which clearly served capitalist-imperialism.

Advocating a bi-ethnic state of Israelis and Palestinian Arabs, the Mapam opposed the 1948 partition of Palestine and the Zionist settler-colonial expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine. After ‘Nakbah’, the Mapam advocated the Arab right of return and the economic union of Israel and Palestine within the context of revolutionary states being established in both countries. The Mapam closely cooperated with the Soviets and the progressive Arab forces. It had a 3,000-strong commando army called ‘Palmach’. It had a strong popular backing in the Israeli elections – the second most popular in Israel after the Mapai, Ben-Gurion’s Kautskyite party [one of the mainstream parties]. …

Supporting the one-state solution, the Mapam opposed the partition of Palestine on the grounds that it would prevent a democratic peace between the Yiddish/Hebrews and the Arabs and would result in both countries – Israel and the Arab part of Palestine – to be economically weak. Along Soviet lines however, since the expulsion of the British was a priority for the Party, the Mapam supported the UN plan on Palestine which entailed the expulsion of the British and at the same time the partition of Palestine. …

Nonetheless, even after the partition of Palestine, the Mapam made every effort to undo the damage of the partition of Palestine. To undo the economic damage of the partition, the Mapam called for economic cooperation and an eventual economic union between Israel and Arab Palestine. To block settler-colonial terror against the Arab civilians, the Mapam opposed the expulsion of the Arab civilians from Israel and supported the right of return. The Mapam also called for a democratic peace and extensive cooperation with Arab Palestine, as well as a military alliance with the progressive forces in the other Arab states. [Source]

In contrast to Soviet policy, China had always supported Palestine’s struggle for liberation, and was the Palestinian resistance organizations’ strongest ally.. Once Israel clearly became a semi-colony of American and British imperialism, the other socialist states followed suit in their opposition of Israel and support for Palestine. Even after most socialist states turned revisionist, those revisionist states posed as allies of Palestine—although they tended to support more peaceful methods of “national liberation”, and when they did support armed groups, they sought to co-opt them. Enver Hoxha wrote on this in “The Revisionists Are Infiltrating Into the Ranks of ‘Al-Fatah’^[152]”:

The Soviet revisionists are infiltrating into the ‘Al-Fatah’ movement of fighters for the National Liberation of Palestine, too. Yesterday, Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian organization ‘Al-Fatah’, went to Moscow at the head of a delegation, to seek aid in weapons, as the leaders of this organization inform us through our ambassadors. These leaders tell our ambassadors that they know the Soviets and their aims, and that they will be vigilant: This is just talk. If they begin to make deals with the Soviet revisionists, this is the beginning of the end of the partisan war of the Palestinians. The Soviet revisionists will not fail to supply them with some weapons, but by means of them they will dominate the Palestinians and lead them towards capitulation, as they are doing with the leaders of those Arab countries which have become pawns in their game. [Source]

Thus, the proletarian position on Palestine is to support its struggle and all progressive, anti-imperialist forces in the region. Only a proletarian party in Palestine can truly free its people from Israeli oppression, but until one can form, we critically support all groups that fight Zionism and imperialism. This previously included the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO, and its component members (which include Fatah, the PFLP, etc.). [MTBA]

This begs the question regarding support for legal “anti-Zionist” groups within the settler-colonial state. [MTBA]

The Palestinian masses deserve full self-determination and a socialist state of their own. They need to get the land that they lived in for thousands of years. To do this requires supporting the ongoing armed struggle, and decolonization. We must support any move for protracted people’s war and a New-Democratic revolution in the region just as socialist China and Albania did. Until then, we must oppose the US’s backing of Israel, and the end of US imperialism will mean the end of Israel’s biggest supporter.

Iran [MTBA]

North America

Like the Russian Empire was, the US and Canada are “prisonhouses of nations”. The African-American nation, Chicano nation, and all the indigenous nations in this continent face subjugation from capitalism and settler-colonialism; that is why we support proletarian national liberation struggles that liberate these nations, give them self-determination, and help them build socialism. Condemned to Win by the Austin Red Guards^[153] illustrates the importance of recognizing the need for national liberation in America’s people’s war:

Any genuine analysis of class in the US must include understanding internal colonies within the US. This includes black people, Chicanx people, Puerto Rican people, indigenous people, and the people of the Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa. The important role of these nations and peoples becomes clear in the fact that they experience both (a) the contradiction between the US working class and the US capitalist class and (b) the contradiction between the colonized people of the world and US imperialism. This struggle contains both the internal and external contradictions that the US working class and the workers of the world face. The right to self-determination of the oppressed nations up to the point of secession is essential to the establishment of the socialist state. Therefore we advocate the destruction of the US as we know it by breaking it into several smaller countries determined by the oppressed nations themselves. The right to self-determination of the oppressed nations means their right to secession. …

Oppressed nations also contain within them sub-groups that face additional oppression: where black working-class men face double oppression, black working-class women face triple oppression. The liberation of working-class women generally is bound to the liberation of black women particularly. The liberation of one cannot occur without the liberation of the other. Oppressed nations and oppressed groups face stacked and overlapping oppression—which can be best defined as the combination of economic exploitation and lowered social status. Oppressed nations and oppressed groups face an intense combination of low-paying jobs and unequal pay for equal work. [Source]

America would not have developed into the capitalist-imperialist power it is today without the robbery of indigenous and Chicano peoples’ land and the enslavement of those people, as well as commodified Africans. The genocide of indigenous peoples allowed American capital to expand into the interior of North America. The same is the case for Canada and its own capital. [MTBA] Thus, the overthrow of capitalism necessitates the overthrow of settler-colonialism and the right of the oppressed nations to self-determined paths of socialism; the contradiction between settlers and oppressed nations is fundamental to the current state of things in these countries, so it will be resolved in a socialist revolution. Not only will there be a socialist America, but there will be socialist republics for the Chicano nation, the African-American nation, and the indigenous nations. Nevertheless, the need for the entire American revolution to be united around a single communist party still exists, for each of these nations going their own way would leave them all surrounded by a highly-aggravated US imperialism. The article, “Defeat U.S. Imperialism for the Proletariat and all Oppressed Nations” by Red Guards Los Angeles clarifies this:

… [T]here will be special attention to the Chicano, Black and indigenous nations that make up the region—those actual nations. In theorizing possible outcomes, the two theses in our paper, we do not rob the Chicano Nation of its right to develop and steer its own course toward national liberation, even including secession—we only warn against its dangerous vulnerable position within U.S. imperialism. We, additionally, theorize a political-military method to guarantee victory—for the proletariat and all internal colonies in the U.S.: Protracted People’s War. …

A revolution—a PPW—on the continental U.S. land base would have to apply the most advanced strategy and method of warfare to guarantee victory and lasting liberation. The only proletarian method of war is PPW. Applying this method in the U.S. must involve a countrywide PPW, not an isolated (be it national or sectional) PPW, and encircling the enemy from the edges of the continental U.S., jointly working with indigenous nations and the Black Nation—primarily focusing on their proletariat. [Source]

The same communist party, people’s army, and united front will exist for all nations in America, but following the revolution, socialist republics will be made for each nation, each giving the nations self-determination while protecting the rights of minorities in them; they would be within a union of socialist republics. This means neither the current state of affairs that we have right now—which empower almost exclusively white settlers—nor the misrepresentation of decolonization that settlers tend to have, which is that settlers would be forcibly deported “back to Europe” or punished in some other way that would be neither feasible nor ideal. Just as Jews in Palestine will not be punished for being Jewish, “white” settlers—many of whom are not original settlers, but descendants of immigrants who moved onto already-taken land—will not be punished for their ethnicity; the land and means of production will go to the hands of all people.

The USSR and China are good examples of what a socialist republic in America would look like for oppressed nations; each large nation would get a territory that could secede as it wished. Stalin showed the solution to national oppression in Marxism and the National Question, specifically in Section Seven, “The National Question in Russia”:

What must be our attitude towards nations which for one reason or another will prefer to remain within the framework of the whole? …

The only correct solution is regional autonomy, autonomy for such crystallized units as Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, etc.

The advantage of regional autonomy consists, first of all, in the fact that it does not deal with a fiction bereft of territory, but with a definite population inhabiting a definite territory. Next, it does not divide people according to nations, it does not strengthen national barriers; on the contrary, it breaks down these barriers and unites the population in such a manner as to open the way for division of a different kind, division according to classes. Finally; it makes it possible to utilize the natural wealth of the region and to develop its productive forces in the best possible way without awaiting the decisions of a common center—functions which are not inherent features of cultural-national autonomy. …

Of course, not one of the regions constitutes a compact, homogeneous nation, for each is interspersed with national minorities. Such are the Jews in Poland, the Letts in Lithuania, the Russians in the Caucasus, the Poles in the Ukraine, and so on. It may be feared, therefore, that the minorities will be oppressed by the national majorities. But there will be grounds for fear only if the old order continues to prevail in the country. Give the country complete [proletarian] democracy and all grounds for fear will vanish. [Source]

There are right-opportunists who reject decolonization in North America and who claim that “socialism” in the US and Canada can be built without providing self-determination for oppressed nations or rejecting American bourgeois nationalism; in the US, they are centered around the “ACP”. These “patriotic socialists” and “MAGACommunists”—people who appeal to the reactionary aesthetics that Donald Trump promotes in his bourgeois populism—engage in the error of tailing the backwards among the masses; that is, rather than elevating backwards workers’ consciousness, they see their blind patriotism and social conservatism and accept it as something that communists can apply; as a result, they reject the self-determination of oppressed nations, and thus they reject the resolution of national contradictions among the people. These types of “socialists” also support segments of the American bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, and they support a type of “united front” that proper communists would limit to semi-feudal semi-colonies; that in and of itself is very clear proof of their opportunism. Workers must reject these revisionists’ demagogy, and Maoists must reject these deviations; workers who are fooled by them must be won over, and it is unlikely that we can achieve much tactical unity with the social-chauvinist leaders of this ideology.

Nonetheless, we cannot get ahead of ourselves; we need to focus on the revolutionary movement itself as it builds before and during the people’s war. The movement would empower proletarians from the oppressed nations, especially the indigenous nations. Our work must start with these oppressed nations (and specifically in territories where they are majorities), for they are hotbeds for revolution.

Other Examples

Most of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania are semi-colonies of one or another imperialist country. Eastern Europe and Ireland are also semi-colonies. Ireland is also partly a direct colony of Britain; “Northern Ireland” is still legally British. Most of these countries will have New-Democratic revolutions since they remain semi-feudal, but it is probable that Eastern Europe and Ireland can go straight to having socialist revolutions. Regardless, the primary task of these revolutions is to get imperialists and their compradors out of their countries. The revolutions will also have genuine decolonization that the proletariat leads.

For Ireland, we support socialist republicanism as a part of the Irish proletariat’s application of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Socialist republicanism dates back to the 1890’s as a development from the bourgeois-nationalist republican^[154] ideology dominating Ireland’s revolutionary movement. We will not delve deep into the history of the Irish people’s struggles, but we will use James Connolly’s explanation of what was (and basically still is) needed in Ireland, from “Socialism and Nationalism”:

If you remove the English army to-morrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain.

England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.

England would still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered hypocritical homage at the shrine of that Freedom whose cause you had betrayed. [Source]

What Connolly predicted is exactly what has happened to Ireland. Not only is northern Ireland still a British colony, but the current Irish state is not a state for the Irish people; rather, it is a semi-colony of the United Kingdom, and it is also one of the European Union (as in a semi-colony of the dominant countries within that union, like Germany; certain members of the union, such as Greece, are also semi-colonies) and the US. Nothing practical changed for the Irish people in their self-determination except in the legal sphere, and even that change is miniscule. Thus, we support Irish revolutionaries in their fight against all of imperialism’s fronts in their land.

The ongoing colonization of the Congo is another matter of importance. [MTBA]

The countries in the third world are currently semi-colonies, so they will have decolonization as well. The semi-feudal states, which are most of these semi-colonies (though some have gotten rid of feudal relations and have fully turned capitalist), will absolutely need New-Democratic revolutions, and when the masses take power, they must take all the means of production of the bureaucratic and comprador capitalists. That will end the robbery and exploitation they face, and it will weaken imperialism. These states are nationally diverse, for many different groups of people with different languages, territories, economic lives, psychological makeups, and cultures; each nation will be given self-determination, and each one’s national bourgeoisie will be allowed to operate with capitalist relations until the proletariat deems it necessary to socialize their means of production. With the socialist system, national differences will gradually fade within each state and between states, but that will take a long time; until then, national differences will exist, but they will not be allowed to antagonize workers against one another.

Doing all of this is needed to end the colonial and semi-colonial relations they have with imperialist countries, and this kills two birds with one stone: it ends the exploitation of their peoples (allowing them to develop their productive forces, relations of production, and societal superstructure to full communism, eventually), and it weakens imperialism by depriving finance capital of the profits it craves (forcing it to cut its concessions to workers in the first world, angering those workers and making revolution more likely). Thus, we support the decolonization of colonized and semi-colonized countries.

“Leftist” Unity, and on “Other Leftist Parties”

Many people believe in the strange notion of “uniting” all “leftists”, including Marxists and opportunists. We do not accept this. People who do not uphold Marxism-Leninism-Maoism are incorrect, and they serve enemy interests by going against the proletarian ideology and worldview. Of course, we are not opposed to the united front of the people, and we are certainly not opposed to the unity of genuine communists who may have different ideas or views of certain situations. However, against the “leftist unity” supporters, we recognize that there will be struggle within the communist party and within the united people; this struggle may lead to division, but it also leads to an advancement in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and it allows for unity afterward. In his essay called “On Unity”, Lenin wrote:

There can be no unity, federal or other, with liberal-labor politicians, with disruptors of the working-class movement, with those who defy the will of the majority. There can and must be unity among all consistent Marxists, among all those who stand for the entire Marxist body and for the uncurtailed slogans, independently of the liquidators and apart from them.

Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism. …

No flirting with the liquidators, no diplomatic negotiations with groups of wreckers of the corporate body; concentrate all efforts on rallying the Marxist workers around the Marxist slogans, around the entire Marxist body. The class-conscious workers will regard as a crime any attempt to impose upon them the will of the liquidators; they will also regard as a crime the fragmentation of the forces of the genuine Marxists.

For the basis of unity is class discipline, recognition of the will of the majority, and concerted activities in the ranks of, and in step with, that majority. We shall never tire of calling all the workers towards this unity, this discipline, and these concerted activities. [Source]

With regard to other “leftist” parties, we do not agree with them, for they are opportunist and end up serving the bourgeoisie, even if unintentionally. These parties are revisionist, dogmatic, ultra-leftist, etc. Their theories, and by extension their praxis (for praxis and theory are in a dialectical relationship), end up hurting the proletariat. Still, we can engage in temporary unity with such forces when necessary; remember, they are not correct in theory, and they might not even be correct in most practice, but in dire circumstances, unity is necessary. In the case of anti-fascist unity, we must unite all anti-fascist forces to create a large anti-fascist front. When combating imperialist invasion, anti-imperialist forces must have some sort of unity; the Chinese united front that formed in Japan’s invasion of the country is an example of this.

The type of unity that exists between most bourgeois and petty-bourgeois “leftist” parties is tactical unity, so it is definitionally short-lived and only used for certain purposes, namely single issues. The united front of the people through the mass organizations is strategic unity, longer-lasting and used for many activities. Any alliance that we may forge with opportunist groups is of the former type, and the unity among the organizations that genuinely aid, lead, and represent the people is of the latter type; furthermore, certain “socialist” parties and labor parties, and even anarchist organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)^[155] or anti-fascist groups, can be in strategic unity with communist parties in each country, so long as they do not hinder revolution or the Maoist party’s work among the people. We will build mass organizations within a united front of the people; these will receive ideological guidance from the party, and they will also help the party in formulating policies via the mass line; we will also work with existing mass organizations, such as trade unions, if needed. And with that comes our final section, the section detailing what the American Communist Party (Maoist) (ACP(M)) works toward.

What Our Party Must Do

Karl Marx said this to conclude Chapter Four of the Communist Manifesto: “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” [Source]. Therefore, we will not hide our revolutionary views, and we will show our general goals. (That is the point of a manifesto, after all.)

With this book’s publication, the authors proclaim the founding of ACP(M)’s pre-party organization. We should not get ahead of ourselves; this party is still forming, and it has not started organizing yet. It does not have any sort of headquarters or any way of really joining. We plan on taking action to reach the masses once the party is armed and organized enough. Until then, the authors of this book seek to expand their base to include more leaders of the party and its bodies, allowing the setup of the vanguard party.

The party’s members and cadres must be among the masses, and they must be able to educate and agitate them regarding topics they care about to a point that they would be willing to take action. Once members of the working people are interested, the priority would be to get them into their various organizations. When the party is organizing to be a functional group, cadres must be able to find advanced workers that can be in the vanguard. They can be seen in workers’ struggles, especially during strikes; we cannot limit our work to economic struggles, of course, for we are not economists, but economic causes are certainly important to the working class. Advanced workers can also be found in struggles of oppressed nations for self-determination and other conflicts; proletarians from these movements will be selected for vanguard party membership and leadership. The vanguard party must be involved in all the people’s struggles to expand its influence over the masses and to show that its interests align with the interests of the people.

We will form a people’s army, specifically a red army since our revolution is socialist. This will have groupings similar to the bourgeois army that exists in the US today (probably from fireteams to battalions), and it will have the division between (elected) officers and enlisted soldiers, but the party will lead and educate the army, the masses will supervise it, and the army will have to rely on the mass line of leading the masses. This army will be for comrades who seek to directly aid in the liberation of the people. The army will be divided into two forces: the regular force and the guerrilla force. The regular force will engage in mobile and positional warfare, and the guerrilla force will engage in, well, guerrilla warfare. The army will likely start with militias and become more professional and disciplined over time.

There will be a people’s militia that is an extension of the people’s army; this militia, as we have said quite a few times, will be the support of the army and will ensure the people’s power over its army; the militia will not experience as much direct combat as the army. As part of the overall militia, we will create a militant public security and/or self-defense section dedicated to working against crime, but we foresee this only developing late in the people’s war; likewise, a civilian public security force could be created at the end of or after the people’s war, taking the place of the bourgeois police force we have.

For developing the united front, mutual aid groups will be starting points, but there will also be mass organizations such as women's groups, groups for all the nations in North America, groups for the LGBTQ+ community, youth groups, anti-war groups, labor unions, and more that reach all sections of the working population; as Stalin said in Chapter Eight of Foundations of Leninism, the working class’s organizations include “trade unions, co-operatives, factory organizations, parliamentary groups, non-Party women's associations, the press, cultural and educational organizations, youth leagues, revolutionary fighting organizations (in times of open revolutionary action), Soviets of deputies as the form of state organization (if the proletariat is in power), etc.” [Source]. The party must work with existing mass organizations, and if needed, it must work to help create new ones. All the mass organizations will be able to send information and ideas to the people’s army and militia, which will send them to the party; the party can centralize the ideas and return them to the army, who can carry out some actions and also send the policies to the united front of the people, after which the people can enact them. This must be done in a democratic manner, and not a commandist one.

The united front must include non-Maoist organizations that have the support of at least some sections of the masses; overall, these mass organizations connect the party and the people’s army to the intermediate masses, and even some of the backward masses in the case of reactionary unions. In these groups, party members must try to gain leadership (through appropriate means, not through usurping power from the masses) and influence so that they can implement the mass line through these organizations. While ACP(M) will be the leading and educating organization of the people, the other organizations can help represent the people and help the party enact policies that come from and help the masses. A proper workers’ party can serve this purpose, and if needed, a popular front party could also accomplish the task by directly representing the working masses while using communist leadership to guide it.

We also seek to unite labor unions as much as possible. While we are not syndicalists who believe that the industrial unions are the only viable path for workers’ organization (indeed we know they are at best a stepping stone for developing class consciousness and workers’ power), we understand that the unity of unions beyond mere trade allows for workers to coordinate strikes and other disruptive actions better. Indeed, with a united group of industrial unions (or even one big union, if possible), a general strike is possible. [MTBA]

Revisionist parties like the CPUSA may be used for the purpose of reaching the masses, but only tactically. The primary task regarding revisionist groups is to win over the progressives and revolutionaries in them, bringing them to our party. Thus, many of them cannot be in the united front, for there are opportunist groups that hurt the party’s relations with the masses. We cover this in the subsection on “left” unity.

With all these mass organizations we can apply the concentric construction of the three weapons that Gonzalo taught us about; we admit members into the outer organizations, then we let dedicated ones join armed groups (and eventually the main army), and then we can let them into the party if they are educated enough and can lead. Once the party and army are formed, the revolution can begin, and the united front organizations can form during the early years of people’s war.

With enough support, we can set up people’s government bodies and economic organization units, and these will be the seeds of the proletarian state; more likely than not, they will only be developed once a decent-sized area and population has liberated itself from the shackles of the capitalist state. We will create the required bodies of government: workers’ councils, people’s courts, councils of representatives, and economic planning committees. All of these will operate under democratic centralism. The workers’ councils will elect delegates, who form the councils of delegates and elect their own representatives; the workers’ councils will control bases and localities, and the delegates and representatives will control larger regions. The workers will be armed and organized into various departments to ensure proletarian dictatorship; all representatives will be subject to their democratic will, and they will be elected and repealed as the people desire.

At some point, the party will have congresses. For those, it needs the following: party committees of all levels, party cells (the lowest party committees), bureaus (the management of the committees), their secretaries (the heads of the bureaus), and delegates of each committee (people that represent their organization in party congresses). However, we assume that this will only happen after the people’s war begins; the PCP only had its first congress in 1988:

Being in the midst of people's war is what has enabled us to carry out the Congress. And we say this because as far back as 1967 we proposed holding a fifth congress, and in 1976 we proposed a congress of reconstitution. For a number of years we made attempts, but we were not able to pull it together. Why? This speaks to what has happened in many parties that are preparing to take up arms, to enter into armed struggle. They become entangled in big and explosive internal struggles that lead to divisions and end up short-circuiting the development of the struggle to seize Power by force of arms. This led us to postpone the congress in I978 and to wait until we were in the midst of people's war to hold it. We simply reasoned that once we were at war, who would be able to oppose the people's war? [Source]

The socialist economy will also be in formation as big and medium enterprises are expropriated during the revolution. The proletariat will proletarianize the bourgeoisie, seizing its property and implementing the policy of distributing goods and services according to work. Means of production will not be commodified, so small businesses will have to collectivize and then be absorbed into the state-owned economy since they would not be able to make, buy, or sell raw materials, instruments of production, etc. The economy will follow democratically-created five-year-plans to ensure stable development, but this will not be easy during the revolution; the masses will express their needs and wants, and workers will be able to analyze how much growth is needed and how much can be done. The economic plans will prioritize growth for sections of the economy that satisfy people’s needs and that are more useful rather than profitable; obviously, this will be more-easily done when the people’s war is won.

When the people’s war is finished, the entire country will be socialist, so the proletariat will hold full power; the bourgeois government will be completely destroyed. Then, the proletarian state can confiscate all property not already socialized. By extension, this means the chains of US imperialism will be destroyed. We do not know when in the future this will happen (if we can even smash American imperialism before the overthrow of other imperialists at all), but we know for certain it entails an end to all criminal sanctions, embargoes, and blockades on “enemy” countries and groups. This includes ending all sanctions, embargoes, blockades, etc. At the same time, it will include an end to all support of reactionaries worldwide; semi-colonies like Israel (if it even exists by the time of revolution in America) will not be able to continue existing without American aid. In these ways, the dominance of American imperialism will end, greatly loosening the grip of capitalist-imperialism on the masses of the world and better allowing them to wage revolution; of course, rival imperialists may still exist, so the people will not be totally free, but it will take time for those imperialists to strengthen enough to take America’s former semi-colonies; thus, the destruction of American imperialism allows revolution to occur.

We will spread the revolution worldwide when we can, but we will maintain diplomacy with the enemy if we need to. Socialism in one country is possible, especially with a country as developed as the US. As socialism advances here, and as the workers’ state gets more powerful against the bourgeoisie, it will fund revolutionary movements abroad, and when possible, the military will provide support for the people in those revolutions. Still, we oppose the Trotskyite idea of permanent revolution, for imposing “socialism” onto countries without their masses receiving the necessary ideology and organization from their vanguard communist parties is a recipe for disaster. Furthermore, while the economy of the US is currently wealthy, that wealth is based on the exploitation of industry, which has largely been exported to the third world; recreating this industry would have to happen in some way, so we cannot totally cut off ties with the capitalist world. We cannot specify which relations must be maintained since the proletariat has not seized power yet (it has not even been ideologically agitated enough to seize power), but with the mass line and democratic centralism in general we will come to the correct line to take on that issue.

Regarding the socialist economy, production will be for use value rather than for exchange (and more-needed goods will be priced lower than their value while luxury goods will be priced higher), though commodity exchange will still exist as workers will work in exchange for goods and services; the law of value will become more and more obsolete due to the prioritization of usefulness over profitability. Eventually, labor vouchers/certificates will probably replace money as Marx described in the Critique of the Gotha Program, but that can only be determined after an economic planning system with both centralized and democratic elements has been constructed and is in operation. Such a system is only possible once small producers collectivize their means of production and eventually have their cooperatives merge with public enterprises; in other words, only when the differences in types of property go away can money be replaced with labor vouchers/certificates.

Workers and their representatives will plan the economy’s development democratically and with centralism, much like the systems worked in the USSR, China, etc. The only legitimate party in this proletarian state will be ACP(M), except if certain nations secede and form their own communist parties for their own socialist states (though we discourage this); the workers’ diverse views will be represented through the mass organizations and through the party’s internal debates. Unlike in the countries with New-Democratic or People’s Democratic revolutions, our country’s straight-up socialist revolution will not need a coalition with any bourgeois parties.

During the socialist transition, we will wage cultural revolutions to push the superstructure forward along with the economic base; when rightists begin taking power, the masses will overthrow them and replace them with communists. Proletarian media will spread, and the people will be able to express themselves freely within the framework of a workers’ class perspective; bourgeois media will be heavily criticized and probably suppressed. The education system will be modified to encourage cooperation and friendly competition rather than the dog-eat-dog competition characterizing capitalism. The bourgeois propaganda slandering communism’s history will go away, and history analyzed with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism will be published and distributed.

Once the party is fully built, we will carry out the actions that we talked about here. Our method of leading the masses will be the mass line; our system is democratic centralism. We shall build the mass base, wage people’s war, develop socialism, spread it worldwide, and reach full communism!

Our Programs

To summarize our goals, we have three programs, each with a number of achievements we would like to have. They are the minimum, concrete, and maximum programs, and we shall list the plans of each program. (We do not call any program the “general” one, as different parties refer to either the minimal or the maximal program as their “general” one.)

Minimum Program

The minimal program is the collection of immediate demands from the masses. Achieving the minimum program places the proletariat and its allies in the best positions of economic and political power.

Improve workers’ economic standing with raised minimum wages, reduced prices for necessities, lower taxes, reduced working hours, universal healthcare, public transportation, improved social security, etc. Increasing taxes for capitalists.
Strengthen the workers’ movement with trade unions, specifically class-conscious ones, as well as tenants’ unions, mutual aid organizations, militias, and more. Empowering indigenous nations’, New Afikans’, etc. rights within the settler-colonial empire.
Free speech and assembly for the masses and their progressive and revolutionary organizations, particularly the Communist Party; freedom of political prisoners and revolutionary “criminals”.
End to imperialist warfare and foreign policy, particularly the arming of Israel’s current genocide of Palestine.
Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, and reducing wasteful production generally.

Concrete Program

The concrete program is the specific tasks that let the working people overthrow the bourgeoisie, seize political power, and push forward in the socialist transition to communism. We describe this in our section on “What Our Party Must Do”, but we can summarize it here:

Build up the three weapons of people’s war: the party, the red army, and the united front of mass organizations; set up base areas, legally or otherwise. Use democratic centralism and the mass line to maintain proletarian unity.
Wage a people’s war to overthrow and smash the bourgeois state. Organize the proletarian state to substitute it.

In strategic defense, mainly use mobile warfare to win quick victories and solidify base areas.
In strategic equilibrium, primarily use guerrilla warfare to drain the enemy’s resources and demoralize its troops.
In strategic offensive, use positional warfare to finish off the enemy and liberate a region, or the country.

Give all oppressed nations their respective socialist republics, and let them secede if they so choose; prioritize development for these nations.
Seize capitalist enterprises and make them socialist property; allow petty-bourgeois property to enter cooperatives, which will in one way or another merge with public property. Build socialist relations of production and distribution governed by proletarian economic planning. (The development of socialism needs its own concrete program, one only a post-revolutionary workers’ state could devise.)
Develop proletarian culture, and wage cultural revolutions to defend the road to communism. (Cultural revolution, in turn, would need its own concrete program.)

Maximum Program

The maximum program is the overall goal of the Communist Party, namely the building of communist society. Though we do not know all of what communism looks like, we have its fundamental features in mind:

Abolish all class distinctions and the relations derived from them.
Abolish the distinction between town and country.
Transcend the social division of labor. End the distinctions between mental and physical labor.
Have the state wither away, replacing it with an international, stateless union of communes.
End commodity production and its derivatives, having all contribute labor as they can and receive from society what they need.
End all oppressions that class society made, including sexism, racism, queerphobia, nationalism, etc.

About the Main Author

Comrade Paul Kingsley is a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist student and worker; his family is a family of white collar proletarians, specifically workers in computer science. As a worker, he has a natural inclination towards communism. With the help of theory, fellow comrades online, and discussions with ordinary people, Paul became a student and supporter of revolutionary communism, and he remains one to this day. He hopes to take part in revolutionary work among the masses to further their goal of seizing power.

[1] We define class in the section on political economy, but we want to make it clear that one’s class is not their level of income. The capitalist myth of “lower, middle, and upper classes” is nonsensical and does not allow us to properly analyze society.

[2] The path we described here is not necessarily the trajectory every society has taken and will take. Some societies may skip stages if other societies impose their systems onto them. For example, a primitive communal tribe may go straight to feudalism without the slave system in between if a feudal lord or society integrates them into it. Still, the path described above is the general way people’s history went and will go.

[3] Division of labor in general began with hunter-gatherer divisions, but this was natural, for it was based on differences in age and biological sex; social division developed when agriculture developed, with pastoral and tillage work being the first new forms of work. Working with stone, weaving, and eventually smelting became new jobs as this social division of labor developed further. As technology developed, so did the social division of labor.

[4] Socially necessary labor time, often called social labor, is the average amount of labor time society needs to produce a certain commodity; this includes the labor used directly for making and distributing the commodity in question, the labor needed for managing and administering production, the labor used to collect and distribute necessary materials, and portions of the labor used for making the necessary means of production (the depreciation of the means of production), as well as the labor for making the means of production that helped make the means of production, etc.

[5] States are administrations of class rule, and they contain government (which leads the state), armed bodies (which enforce the government’s laws), etc.

[6] Queerphobia also emerged from this system; because of the importance of possessing private property and inheriting it, all marriages except heterosexual ones between cissexual people would harm the ability for owners to have kids to hand property to, so homosexuality and transgenderism were demonized. This has only started to go away thanks to capitalism’s destruction of patriarchy and workers’ struggles against it.

[7] As we will see, merchants and usurers made a new sort of class, but they could not implement capitalism yet. Feudalism would have to develop first because slavery—though it had commodity production and exchange—simply did not have enough commodification; slaves often worked for their owners’ needs, not to make goods and services for sale.

[8] A government is a specific form of state. Many different governments can exist for each type of state, but each sort of state defends the interests of a particular class; that class determines how they organize their state, and that is where different types of governments come about. As Stalin said, “[A] government, however, is the top section of this state organisation, its top leadership” [Source].

Slave states were often democratic for slave owners, and their government was therefore a democratic republic. However, many slave states were also run by monarchs who were chosen by family line to be rulers; thus the government was a monarchy. What matters is primarily that they were slave states, and not whether or not they had “democratic” governments.

[9] Though slavery as a mode of production was gone, slavery itself still existed in different parts of the world when it fell in Europe; it even existed in feudal societies as well as capitalist ones (like America), and it exists today in some places. The same can be said of feudalism when it was overthrown in Europe; outside of Europe, capitalists did not overthrow feudalism at those times.

[10] Under feudalism, not all peasants became serfs. Some remained “free” tenants with freer mobility, but generally the peasants in feudalism were tied to the land they tilled, making most of them serfs.

[11] Capitalism has an assortment of services that do not produce value, and thus do not produce surplus value either. Services in the “costs of circulation, which originate in a mere change of form of value… do not enter into the value of commodities” [Source]. Among these net costs are “the expenses arising from competition and speculation, from advertising, the greater part of the expenditure on the wages of commercial employees, on the keeping of accounts, correspondence, the upkeep of commercial offices, etc.” [Source]. However, “the finishing, transport and packing of goods” adds value to commodities since these costs are necessary for consumers to receive said products [Source]. Circulation services that do not produce value get paid for with productive capitalists’ surplus value.

[12] As “original” capitalism develops into capitalist-imperialism, industrial capital and bank capital merge. We will explain this in the section on capitalist-imperialism, under the section on Marxism-leninism.

[13] The different capitalists in these deals have their own contradictions with one-another: the landlords want higher rent, the bankers want higher interest, and the industrial capitalists want lower rent and interest. These contradictions are secondary or even tertiary to the primary contradiction in capitalism, which is the class contradiction between workers and capitalists.

[14] There is the possibility of capitalists exporting their capital to more profitable regions of the world, and the superprofits they get from those operations would be used to bribe workers with concessions to deradicalize them. That is what makes capitalism progress into capitalist-imperialism, its highest stage.

[15] Class consciousness is the awareness of one’s class position. When workers are class conscious, they know their class enemies are capitalists, so they must unite to wage class struggle and seize political and economic power.

[16] People often believe that socialism and communism are “radically liberal”, but that is not the case. Liberalism is bourgeois ideology, and though socialism is to the left of conservatism, it is also to the left of “social liberalism” because it is the ideology of the proletariat. Hence, we attack liberalism of all forms, right or “left”.

[17] Engels said, “... [F]eudal and patriarchal society… has already been destroyed, and is still daily being destroyed, by big industry and world trade and their creation, bourgeois society” [Source].

[18] Chauvinist means supremacist, believing that one group of people is superior to others (be it male chauvinism, believing that males are superior to females, or national/ethnic chauvinism).

[19] Marx used socialism and communism pretty interchangeably, but he used communism to describe his own ideas against non-communist socialist ones. Communist ideology is a subset of socialist ideologies, and it is specifically a proletarian one, unlike bourgeois “socialist” ideologies. As we will see later, distorters of socialism “watered down” the ideology and system to mean the most basic welfare programs a capitalist state could offer, so calling our ideas “communist” in particular has been even more important.

[20] Marx referred to the transitional society as the “lower stage of socialism/communism”, and the final society as the “higher stage”. He did list some economic developments that would occur in the lower phase, but he intentionally generalized its features and did not give too many details.

[21] There were differences between what Marx predicted and what was implemented in socialism, though. As it says in the chapter on Marxism-Leninism, specifically in the section on socialist relations of production, previous socialist states maintained the use of money, and they did not replace it so much with the labor vouchers/certificates that Marx predicted would be in use. The difference between the two is that money circulates while vouchers would not. Had socialism been allowed to advance, it is probable that socialist states would make the transition to vouchers; it will likely be possible for developed capitalist countries to replace money with vouchers relatively quickly under socialism.

[22] Anarchists oppose the state and want a stateless society, even when class conflict exists.

[23] Revisionism is the unscientific abandonment or change of a theory. With regards to Marxism, it refers to deserting its important principles, such as class conflict.

[24] “Social democracy” refers to Marxism; openly socialist, communist, Marxist parties were not allowed, hence why this party called itself “social-democratic”. Later, genuine communists abandoned the name, leaving it for reformists to take. We explain the modern meaning of social democracy later.

[25] The deindustrialization of imperialist countries, which happens because capitalists export their excess industrial capital to regions with cheap labor-power and raw materials, converts the proletariat from being industrial to working by creating services; people may assume that this is good, but it is a net-negative for workers because service labor is more alienating and discourages class unity. While workers in the imperial core are better off than those in the periphery, they lose out with imperialism because the increased alienation of service labor causes mental health problems, drug abuse, violence, and more; on top of that, workers in the imperial core take on racist, sexist, and other reactionary ideology to deal with their alienation, victimizing their fellow workers who deal with those forms of oppression in addition to class oppression.

[26] This quote explains Donald Trump’s wish to place tariffs on rival imperialist states and even countries belonging to American imperialism’s sphere of influence. Trump seeks to force weaker countries (particularly those near the US, like Canada, Mexico, and the Danish territory of Greenland) into submitting to American wishes while allowing American capital to profit from raised prices, lower competition, and greater industrial development of key sectors within America (as the US has exported so much capital that it lacks a lot of its domestic industry; it will export more commodities and more capital with greater industrialization)—which means worse labor conditions for industrial work within the US as well [Source]. This policy benefits big domestic capitalists as well as the same finance capitalists that did fine with free trade before capitalist China’s rise [Source].

Free trade works in favor for the most dominant imperialists of a given context. It worked great for Dutch capital in the 16th and 17th centuries, British capital in the 18th and 19th centuries, and American capital in the 20th and early-21st centuries; but as imperialist powers decline, they use all sorts of efforts to save themselves, and Trump’s tariff threats are among those efforts. US imperialists see that they must reckon with a rising rival bloc of Russian and Chinese imperialism. While big capitalists do see their profits decline as their costs rise thanks to tariffs, they hope to survive their trade war and win great concessions and profitable relations, and they seek to destroy excess capital to raise their low rates of profit, be it by economic war or literal war.

[27] Owner peasants are mainly middle peasants, those who “are economically self-supporting (they may have something to lay aside when the crops are good, and occasionally hire some labor or lend small sums of money at interest),” i.e. the rural petty-bourgeoisie [Source]. Some of them are rich peasants, the ones that hire more labor and own more land (and thus the rural bourgeoisie). There are also semi-owner peasants, those who own some land but also rent some; they remain above tenant peasants and rural proletarians, but they are below the middle and rich peasants. Imperialism’s exploitation of semi-feudalism ruins these peasants and enriches landlords.

[28] The comprador bourgeoisie is the class of capitalists who benefit from the exploitation of their nation; puppet bourgeoisie is a synonym of comprador bourgeoisie. A puppet state is a state that is in practice controlled by another country. Every country in the third world is this type of state, except countries ruled by their national bourgeoisie (see below).

[29] The national bourgeoisie is the capitalist class in a country that supports revolution against imperialism for its own capitalist interests; it opposes imperialism because it competes with compradors, who benefit from imperialism. When it holds power, it tries to oppose imperialism, but it must either capitulate and become the new comprador bourgeoisie, or risk losing power to the imperialist-backed compradors.

[30] In the imperial core, this contradiction does manifest in the class contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie because the bourgeoisie here is entirely imperialist even though the various elements within it disagree and fight over which countries to colonize and be aggressive against.

[31] In expansionism, the capitalist class of the dominating country is trying to exploit neighboring countries, so it may invade a country nearby; it cannot become truly imperialist due to its backward development (or lack of development).

[32] Third-worldism is the movement of self-proclaimed “Marxists” that claim that revolution is not possible in the first world unless the third-world countries revolt against imperialism.

[33] Opportunism is deviation from Marxism-Leninism-Maoism; right-opportunism is openly capitalistic deviation while left-opportunism is less open, masking itself behind calls for a more-rapid transition toward communism. Opportunism disregards Marxist principles to take advantage of opportunities (hence the name) that seemingly benefit the movement while they really hurt it in the long run.

[34] These are the people liberals and false “leftists” like to call the “professional-managerial class”. “Professionals and managers are not an autonomous class as such. Rather they are mental workers who live much better than most other employees but who still serve the accumulation process on behalf of corporate owners” [Source].

[35] A nationality is an ethnic group, a group of people with a common psychological makeup and language (but not necessarily a common territory or economy); it is almost a nation, but misses at least one qualification of nations. All nations are nationalities, but the reverse is not always true. Marxism also protects the “right of all nationalities to form separate states or to choose freely the state of which they wish to form part” as an extension of the right of nations to self-determination [Source]. However, in previous socialist states, nationalities were often given autonomy at most, not the right to independence (the USSR made Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics and other autonomous divisions, and China made Autonomous Regions); this is likely because nationalities, in lacking an independent economy, would not survive in their own states the way nations could.

[36] Nationalism is an ideology of the national bourgeoisie, and it promotes the interests of “the nation”, i.e. that national bourgeoisie. It can be progressive or reactionary, but it is always bourgeois; progressive nationalism fights for national liberation, and reactionary nationalism seeks to unite oppressor nations’ capitalists (e.g. Hitler’s nationalism uniting Germans in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere). Progressive nationalism can be an ally of socialism and communism, but it cannot be the leading force in a revolutionary struggle; progressive nationalism can turn reactionary once an oppressed nation wins state power against imperialism, as it can either oppress other groups or capitulate to imperialism.

Patriotism is distinct from nationalism. It is loyalty to a country, which may or may not mean loyalty to a particular nation. This is why the USSR’s people were patriotic, but not nationalist; the same goes for the people of other socialist states.

[37] This assimilation must be on the basis of national equality, however. Assimilation cannot require “the oppression of nations, or the privileges enjoyed by a particular nation… because all Marxists, individually, and as an official, united whole, have quite definitely and unambiguously condemned the slightest violence against and oppression and inequality of nations” [Source]. Assimilation must be gradual and natural rather than rapid and forced; the latter type is an expression of chauvinism, which is anti-proletarian and reactionary, but both types can be products of capitalism depending on what stage of development the capitalist system is in (gradual assimilation is typical of a capitalist order operating normally while forced assimilation is a sign of instability). The former also happens as socialism develops and moves toward communism.

[38] The Communist International, also called the Third International, succeeded the Second International in 1919. It helped organize communist parties for a world revolution, but it was dissolved in 1943 because the USSR wanted to reduce its perceived threat to the capitalist Allies of World War Two.

[39] Populism in general is bourgeois ideology preaching the power of “the people” and the spontaneous ideas of “the people” against “elites”. Whom it considers “the people” depends on the political lean it has: rightist populism usually defines the term on a national, ethnic, or racial basis, while “leftist” populism attempts to define it on a class basis, though it falls short of that. Either way, it does not properly analyze society on a class basis, and so it fails to mobilize the people against the real elites of society, namely the financial bourgeoisie. Right populism is like fascism in its attempts to mobilize the masses against their class interests, for it divides workers by non-class contradictions—though it is not fascist itself. “Left” populism, meanwhile, focuses on narrow economic and political struggles and not the broad societal class struggle that is needed for revolution; it does not attack the bourgeoisie as a whole.

[40] While this article incorrectly says that authoritarian semi-colonial regimes cannot be fascist, it does appropriately distinguish between right-populism and fascism while also showing that the former can lead to the latter. Donald Trump, for instance, acts as a right-populist currently but may implement fascism if the bourgeoisie needs him to.

[41] This thesis was later dropped in favor of building workers’ united fronts and anti-fascist popular fronts, as described in the subsection on “The Three Weapons”, one of which is a united front. However, it is not entirely wrong, as the social-democratic party leaders tend to capitulate to the bourgeoisie and to fascism if not for a united front government: “While the Social-Democratic government is an instrument of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie…, a united front government is an instrument of the collaboration of the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat with other anti-fascist parties” [Source]. Social-democratic leaders act as “the moderate wing of fascism”, but social-democratic workers do not when they act against those leaders, as many did in building united fronts with communists.

[42] In World War Two, workers’ organizations were able to build new power as they fought fascism, and communist parties proved to be genuine threats to bourgeois democracies and fascism alike, but the USSR wanted to maintain alliance with America, Britain, etc., so it discouraged revolution in the West and urged these cells of proletarian democracy to dissolve themselves. (That is also why the Comintern was dissolved in 1943.)

[43] A vanguard party could become a mass party of sorts; the CPC was “a great mass party” that “open[ed] its doors to the masses of workers, peasants and young activists who [we]re truly devoted to the revolution,” but this meant it allowed the masses to join while still retaining its vanguard role and democratic centralist system. In contrast, general labor parties do not necessarily need democratic centralism, and they certainly do not have a vanguard role like communist parties do [Source].

[44] This should go without saying, but since the socialist state dissolves under communism, the communist party must also dissolve. It has no role in leading the working people once workers are trained in all spheres of society, once the state has no role and communism is achieved.

[45] The rectification, or correction, of errors within the party happens via criticism and self-criticism. Communists criticize incorrect ideas, and those that promote them criticize themselves; this way, unity can be preserved while the party line becomes correct. Communists also attack rightists (capitalist-roaders) and try to win them over by this process of rectification.

[46] The Bolshevik ban on factionalism did not end factions’ formation, of course. It was necessary during the civil war, but as our section on the history of socialism Russia shows, both right-opportunist and left-opportunist factions still cropped up following the ban—and paradoxically, they were harder to regulate since they were “banned”—though proletarian democracy did get rid of most of them.

[47] Economism is an opportunist trend that focuses on economics and ignores politics, even though both are connected. It strictly seeks to improve workers’ standards within capitalism; it seldom works toward replacing capitalism with socialism.

[48] National democracy is the name used to group two systems that are both anti-imperialist and anti-feudal but differ in other ways. The old type of national democracy is bourgeois democracy, and the new one is People’s Democracy, also called New Democracy (found in the section on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism). They differ because the former is capitalist while the latter is socialist.

[49] This was the democratic revolution in Imperial Russia; it overthrew the Tsar and his feudalist system, and it put in its place a liberal, bourgeois state with many workers’ and peasants’ organizations developing dual power.

[50] State-capitalism can mean when the capitalist state owns the means of production or when the proletarian state allows capitalists to temporarily operate. Here, it means the latter.

[51] This book was written by Raymond Lotta, and it includes chapters from China’s “Shanghai Textbook” specifically relating to the characteristics of socialism.

[52] It is important to remember that Marx and Engels envisioned socialism having replaced money with labor vouchers or certificates; this was impossible in previous socialist states because of their level of development and the necessity of maintaining commodity production. “In all socialist societies established so far, money, rather than the direct calculation of social labor time, continues to be the chief means by which goods are evaluated ,and distributed. … And not only do workers still receive money wages, but the stage allocates the means of production to its enterprises as money credits.” [Source]

Lenin and Stalin also had this view of socialism: “Future society will be socialist society. This means also that, with the abolition of exploitation commodity production and buying and selling will also be abolished and, therefore, there will be no room for buyers and sellers of labour power, for employers and employed— there will be only free workers” [Source]. These leaders and others did not abandon the goal of replacing commoditt production, but socialist construction proved to be difficult when they tried it, so money remained, albeit not in the same way as in capitalism (no buying labor-power, little private trade, no buying big means of production, etc.).

[53] Housing is made cheap, but not free; state-owned apartments still charge rent for a time, and private housing obviously costs money.

[54] This was the Nationalist Party, the ruling party in China. They had worked with the communists under their founder, Sun Yat-sen, but these two forces split up under Chiang Kai-Shek, who was practically a fascist. They reunited in 1937, when Imperial Japan invaded and when the communists requested to unite China against them.

[55] The USSR under Stalin began to replace commodity exchange with products-exchange. The Machine and Tractor Stations, for example, decommodified machinery as it took payment in goods rather than money; however, agricultural products were still bought and sold between collective farms and state enterprises, and products-exchange would replace that with the direct exchange of those crops for manufactured goods. “The task is to extend these rudiments of products-exchange to all branches of agriculture and to develop them into a broad system, under which the collective farms would receive for their products not only money, but also and chiefly the manufactures they need” [Source]. This is still a form of commodity production since products would still be made for exchange, and exchange would roughly be based on the law of value (with appropriate adjustments made, such as necessary crops being exchanged at “cheaper” rates than luxury ones), but it takes a step away from general commodity production by reducing money’s role: “Products-exchange, like the mutual relations between [Machine and Tractor Stations] and collective farms, and unlike [monetary] commodity-exchange, expresses the social links of producers and their mutual assistance and co-operation, their unity on the basis of the development of public property” [Source].

[56] Bourgeois right is the right to own based on exchanging commodities of equal value. This does not exist in communism because there are no commodities, so there is no value; rather, people have free and equal rights to access articles of consumption. Bourgeois right does exist in socialism, but it is restricted over time.

[57] Marx and Engels emphasized the need to have the revolution spread eventually, but contrary to the distortions dogmatists and “left”-opportunists, they never denied that the spread would not occur in every moment of a socialist state’s existence. It would face periods of gradual and rapid expansion, and it could even have retreats (as we saw in our history so far; we discuss this in Book II), according to them.

[58] Trotsky was a member of the RSDLP who joined the Bolshevik faction in early 1917; he helped orchestrate the October Revolution, but he was still incorrect on many issues because until 1917, he was half-Bolshevik and half-Menshevik. We respect his practical leadership as the leader of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, but his political positions were petty-bourgeois, not proletarian, and his work showed that he opposed proletarian democracy and socialism.

[59] Adventurist ideas are impractical, given the existing material conditions, and spontaneous. They are unnecessarily violent, chaotic, and destructive; they encourage “adventerous” and “heroic” deeds rather than ordinary work among the masses. They usually include sporadic terrorism.

[60] Liu was a “communist” politician (he was the Vice-Chairman of the party and the Chairman of China until the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and 1968, respectively. Found to be a capitalist-roader, he ended up as the primary target of the Cultural Revolution.

[61] Also spelled Deng Xiaoping, he was a former Chinese communist who turned revisionist and capitalist; he became the “paramount leader” in 1978. He did serve well in the New-Democratic revolution, but he maintained his support for and representation of the national bourgeoisie within the Communist Party, the proletarian party.

[62] Party cadres are officials who directly lead party members, who mainly work alongside the masses; cadres are paid for party work, while members work normal jobs while completing the party’s tasks. Cadres are subject to democratic centralism and the masses’ supervision. “It is on these cadres and leaders that the Party relies for its links with the membership and the masses, and it is by relying on their firm leadership of the masses that the Party can succeed in defeating the enemy” [Source]. Cadres are selected from the party membership with both democratic input and central approval.

State/government cadres also directly organize and educate the masses, for the proletarian state. They connect the masses and the leaders of the state/government, and they are also subject to democratic centralism. In enterprises, they are managers, so the workers must approve of them, and the workers’ state must as well.

[63] People’s communes were the large cooperatives in China that came about in its socialist construction. We discuss them in more detail in Book II, but they were made of multiple production brigades, which were in turn made of production teams, the basic accounting units of these communes; brigades corresponded to the advanced cooperatives that preceded communes, and teams corresponded to the elementary cooperatives that preceded them. These will all be described in Book II.

[64] The Red Terror was a period in the RSFSR and the USSR in which there was major suppression and extermination of reactionaries.

[65] Purges in the USSR were removals of people from the Communist Party; the Great Purge was a period of numerous purges, as well as trials of people unrelated to their conduct in the party (which are also loosely called “purges” in bourgeois media). We discuss the Great Purge in the section called “Experiences of Marxism-Leninism”.

[66] Formed in 1984, this was the international organization for Marxist-Leninist parties supporting Mao Zedong Thought; in 1993, it upheld Maoism. While the CPP never joined the movement and only a section of CPI(ML) did, the RIM supported the people’s wars in India and the Philippines.

[67] The People’s Liberation Army is China’s military; it was created to wage the people’s war. When China was socialist, this army truly was a people’s army and one of liberation, but now it is an army controlled by China’s bourgeoisie. It was democratic when it was a people’s army, like all revolutionary armies; it was arguably the most democratic army of any established state since officers had to listen to their soldiers and use democratic centralism in the army [Source].

[68] Nikita Khrushchev, also spelled Khrushchov, was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party, and the First Secretary of the party’s Ukrainian chapter, under Stalin; when Stalin died, he engaged in a coup to usurp the General Secretary position in the party and then purge proletarian leaders from power. We will explain what he did later in this book, in the section on history, but in short, he was a bourgeois leader whose faction restored capitalism in the USSR.

[69] The Indian People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (which we talk about in the section on the application of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in India) has had talks of transforming into a People’s Liberation Army, moving on from guerrilla warfare [Source]. This has not happened yet, but it can in the future.

The term “red army” is traditionally for a workers’ army or a workers’ and peasants’ army, while “people’s army” is for workers and peasants as well as the urban petty-bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie, insofar as those classes are progressive. If “the people” refers to all of those classes, since the revolution is New-Democratic, than a people’s army is the appropriate army; however, if “the people” consists primarily of workers, since the revolution is socialist, then the term “red army” is more appropriate. (“People’s army” can still be correct; in China’s case, the army remained the “People’s Liberation Army” after the revolution.)

[70] Granted, of these countries, most had their states form after liberating their nations from German fascist imperialist dominance. Only the German Democratic Republic (GDR) formed a People’s Democracy as a state that was not semi-feudal or semi-colonial.

[71] At the same time, as you can see in the next section, Mao uses the phrase “People's Democracy or New Democracy”, suggesting that the two are the same. We separated the two to clarify Mao’s contribution to Marxism, which is an important reason for Marxism-Leninism’s development into Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Mao’s theory here is applicable to semi-feudal and semi-colonial countries, which constitute the majority of the world’s population.

[72] This book is harsh toward Stalin. Indeed, it reeks of Trotskyism the way it conflates Stalin’s ideas with right-opportunist ones. That being said, this quote in particular is good.

[73] The superstructure includes the state; the proletariat did get rid of the old state, so in that sense it had transformed the superstructure, but it still had much to do in culture, ideology, etc., and the state still had old remnants within it.

[74] Bureaucratic privileges are payments and privileges given to bureaucrats, party leaders, representatives, government officials, etc. based on their rank in the system rather than their work contributions. Such privileges existed in all previous socialist states, but only China abolished them; had China not used them at all, capitalist-roaders likely still would have come about, but it would have been less common and less threatening to the socialist state.

[75] Concentric circles are circles that build around each other and share a common center.

[76] The Bolsheviks were their own party by 1912, when they and the Mensheviks completely split up, and it was later named the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (AUCP(B)) in 1925 and then the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1952 [Source].

[77] The SR party, as it was called, was a petty-bourgeois party that supported land reform as the way to establish socialism after feudalism, denying capitalist relations developing in Russia. They based their ideology on Narodniks, a populist movement that preceded them. Lenin criticized Narodniks in The Development of Capitalism in Russia [Source]. The SRs opposed the Bolshevik Revolution since they already held power alongside liberal bourgeois parties from the February Revolution, so they took the side of the old Tsarist forces.

[78] The Left-SRs were SRs that, for a time, supported the Bolsheviks and the proletarian revolution. They betrayed the Bolsheviks after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 1918, a peace treaty that withdrew Soviet Russia from World War 1 and temporarily surrendered territories to German imperialists; they incorrectly opposed the treaty, and after their split with the Bolsheviks, they joined forces with anti-proletarian “socialist” groups.

[79] Lenin tolerated these because of the principle of self-determination, but the nationalists attacked the new SSRs, forcing a military response; they were not just separatists, but they were servants of imperialism. This does not mean we oppose the right of self-determination; it means we must support it while supporting proletarian leadership within national liberation struggles, and while opposing imperialism.

[80] The Green Army was a movement of peasants who opposed both the Bolsheviks and the “White Army”; it was against the proletariat, and it was reactionary.

[81] Party secretaries handle the work of their party committees. The general secretary of a communist party, therefore, handles the daily work of the central committee of the party.

[82] The politburo of a communist party is the leading body of the central committee, and it is elected by the latter; it makes day-to-day decisions and executes central committees’ plans. The general secretary of the party is the elected head of this body.

[83] Kulaks were rich farmers with more than enough land, cattle, equipment, etc., so much so that they employed others to actually use them. They opposed innovation because they liked high rates of profit, and they sabotaged collectivization and socialist construction.

[84] We disagree with this statement; the Mongolian People’s Republic and Tuvan People’s Republic were both proletarian dictatorships, even if they did not move that far forward in the socialist transition period. We talk about these countries in the subsection on Asia.

[85] Under the 1924 Constitution, the All-Union Congress of Soviets was the governing body of the USSR. This body’s members were elected representatives of local and republic Soviets; the congress elected a Central Executive Committee to carry out its tasks between sessions and to choose a Presidium for its heads of state. This system was indirect democracy, and while the proletariat did control the state, it did so less directly than under the 1936 Constitution. (Bear in mind that even under the 1936 Constitution, what mattered was that the people in power were truly proletarian representatives; after Stalin’s death, this was no longer the case as revisionists controlled the Communist Party and de facto barred proletarian leaders from those government positions.)

[86] Robert Conquest was a British propagandist paid to act as a “historian” while relying on falsification to demonize the USSR under Stalin. Despite the Soviet archives having been open for more than 30 years, many bourgeois historians rate Conquest’s work highly. At the same time, though, Conquest was honest enough to show that he understood the famine of 1932 as not being genocidal once he saw Soviet archival evidence (before which he parrotted the fascist myth of a “famine genocide”).

[87] Lavrentiy Beria was the head of the NKVD after Yezhov, and a powerful figure in the Georgian branch of the AUCP(B). Beria had conducted purges and executions during the Yezhovschina, but he did not go to the same extent as Yezhov, and as Furr shows, he actually released many prisoners after Yezhov was removed. At the same time, he is accused of power abuses of his own, including allegations of sexual abuse. We are skeptical of these claims for this reason: if they were remotely legitimate, Khrushchev would have used them in his “secret speech”. While Khrushchev lied about Beria, he did not even use this claim, so it is almost certain Khrushchev did not believe those claims. That being said, Beria was a revisionist of his own stripe, and we will cover that later, in the section on revisionism in Booklet I.

[88] This concentration of focus onto Stalin himself rather than the Soviet state as a whole is inaccurate. Stalin himself did not make everything happen; he was just one person in the entire government (in fact he only became the head of government in 1941, before which he was simply the party’s leader), which had numerous elected and appointed positions; as the Great Purge showed, Stalin did not control all of the happenings of the country.

[89] Stalin made the error of focusing on the external enemies of the USSR, not the internal class enemies, but he understood the need for proletarian dictatorship regardless.

[90] This terminology makes opportunists assert that the USSR under Stalin was “imperialist”, as only imperialist countries normally use this phrase. However, Molotov clarifies what the Soviets meant by this term in Molotov Remembers: “” [MTBA]

[91] Albania was actually going to join Yugoslavia at first, but tensions arose as Yugoslavia turned revisionist in the late-1940s, ending such plans.

[92] Social imperialism is imperialism that pretends to be socialist. When a country is capitalist-imperialist but retains a socialist face, that is social imperialism; when a party supports an imperialist war despite being “socialist”, it is also social-imperialist..

[93] Leonid Brezhnev was the revisionist and social-imperialist who came to power in 1964, after Khrushchev was removed from the party.

[94] Lazar Kaganovich was a Ukrainian Jewish communist who, like Molotov, remained truly proletarian even when it threatened his political position. Malenkov was a proletarian leader as well, but he did not take the threat of revisionism as seriously as these two, making him quite flawed. [MTBA] Shepilov was an opportunist willing to work with the revisionists until the proletarian line had a majority in the Politburo; Khrushchev expelled him for this “betrayal”. Zhukov, who was respected for his role in the anti-fascist war but otherwise criticized for his opportunist politics, was a similar sort of opportunist.

[95] The “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall” was built in Berlin by the GDR to enclose West Berlin. [MTBA]

[96] Because the revisionist USSR used tanks to suppress this uprising, supporters of the USSR’s actions were labeled “tankies”. Today, “tankie” has become little more than an insult for those who are even mildly critical of American imperialism, from moderate social-democrats to actual “tankies” who defend revisionist, self-proclaimed “socialist” states of the past and today.

[97] Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker were the two main leaders of the German Democratic Republic; they were both revisionists, for Ulbricht made the GDR a Soviet semi-colony after the revisionist and social-imperialist turn of the USSR while Honecker maintained its status as such. They represented the interests of not the German proletariat, but the German national bourgeoisie, which made itself a comprador bourgeois class for the Soviet imperialists.

[98] This was an anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist party that later turned into a cult around its founder, Bob Avakian. It had good materials in theory, but it has lost its revolutionary character, making it a revisionist organization. We discuss this in the “False Maoism” chapter of Booklet I.

[99] A point of criticism here is that socialist Albania had prohibited emigration entirely in the 1960’s. This was arguably a necessary measure to combat the international economic pressures Albania faced that would have drained its skilled labor force, but it was still a repressive measure against the proletarians that ruled the country. The authors of this article were quite arrogant to brag about people not leaving when they could not.

[100] The study’s data came from the early 1980s, so of the “socialist” countries they listed, only Albania was socialist at this time, and it was soon going to have capitalism as well.

[101] The Communist Party of China also had claims over Mongolia, but unlike the bourgeois nationalists, the communists believed in giving Mongolians self-determination as they wished for it. “The relationship between Outer Mongolia and the Soviet Union, now and in the past, has always been based on the principle of complete equality. When the people's revolution has been victorious in China, the Outer Mongolian republic will automatically become a part of the Chinese federation, at its own will” [Source].

[102] The PRC remained unrecognized until 1971; the Kuomintang’s “Republic of China” (which controls Taiwan) held China’s seat in the United Nations until that year. The modern “Taiwan debate” is more accurately around which government of China is legitimate, with the “Taiwanese government” really being the old Chinese government and the People’s Republic being the new one. Both governments claim sovereignty over Taiwan, with the ROC having more border disputes than the PRC.

[103] From the beginning of China’s revolution until 1958, the CPC and this party supported autonomy for Taiwan (as Guangxi, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Tibet, and Xinjiang are all autonomous regions for their respective nationalities) before the ROC set its base in the island. In an interview with Edgar Snow, Mao said this: “[W]hen we have re-established the independence of the lost territories of China… we will extend them our enthusiastic help in their struggle for independence” [Source].

[104] Technically, the war is ongoing, as no peace treaty has been signed to officially end the war, but outside of border conflicts in the 1960s, there has not been significant violence since 1953.

[105] In 1974, Portugal saw a movement against its authoritarian regime and against its colonial holdings. [MTBA]

[106] In practice, Papua New Guinea remains under Australian surveillance and US imperialist control, and it collaborates with Indonesia in suppressing the people of Papua and their national liberation war led by the West Papua National Liberation Army.

[107] Zhou was the Premier of China until his death in 1976. He attempted to make himself a “centrist”. The left line among the Chinese communists, while opposing opportunist attacks on him, made sure to criticize his tolerance and even empowerment of capitalist-roaders.

Zhou held most control over foreign policy, and this is why China’s foreign policy was arguably bad in the 1970s; Zhou sought to ally with reactionary regimes against Soviet imperialism, not encourage revolution in them.

[108] Cooperatives in China had their own different stages of development. After land reform and the relatively equal distribution of land to private holdings, mutual aid teams formed; following them, elementary and then advanced cooperatives came about from merging these teams. In the teams and elementary co-ops, peasants that contributed more means of production (capital) got paid more, but in advanced co-ops and later people's communes, goods were distributed according to work contributions.

[109] Other events leading to this include Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, the capitalist reforms that the USSR took following his rise to power, and the USSR’s “peaceful coexistence” with US imperialism. Despite all of this, it took until 1963 or so for China to clearly call out the USSR’s revisionism and capitalist restoration; this is likely because the Chinese and Albanian leaders assumed that the Soviet state was still a proletarian one that could oust the revisionists easily, when in reality, it had transformed into a bourgeois dictatorship.

[110] This was a conference of recently-liberated countries that were former colonies of one or another imperialist power, hosted in Bandung, Indonesia. A lot of these countries were really semi-colonies of either US or Soviet imperialism.

[111] Jammu and Kashmir was one state of India until 2019, when it became two territories; Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. Jammu is a region north of Kashmir in this area, and Ladakh is east of both.

[112] Despite China’s numerous concessions, the illegitimate government started an armed uprising against the PRC in 1959. The PLA, in support of the Tibetan peasants, suppressed this rebellion and started dismantling feudalism.

[113] This is an autonomous region in northwestern China. It mostly has Uyghers, a Turkic nationality, and ethnic Hans (the ethnicity of most Chinese people). Recently, China has been accused of engaging in “genocide” against the Uyghers, but we will discuss this later.

[114] This was a group of four revolutionary leaders who became prominent during the GPCR: Jiang Qing (Mao’s wife), Zhang Qunqiao, Wang Hongwen, and Yao Wenyuan; the name of this group came from a half-joking warning by Mao for these people to not become an isolated, detached group of sectarians (people who dogmatically uphold a sect of an idea), but the name was used by Deng and other counterrevolutionaries to condemn these people.

[115] When the USSR was socialist, this was the organization that helped facilitate trade between it and the People's Democracies of the period. Following capitalist restoration, though, it became a way for the Soviet capitalists to take in high profits on the backs of foreign labor.

[116] Allende was a reformist “Marxist” who sought to make Chile “socialist” via electoral reform; while he did become Chile’s leader via election, he proved unable to transform Chile’s mode of production, because that is simply impossible by reform, US imperialists would never let him do so, and the Soviet imperialists backing him never really wanted socialism in Chile at all.

[117] The book describes how Zhou Enlai was never won over to the proletarian line; it unfairly calls him an “underground” leader of the right-opportunists, but in fact he was an honest leader who made errors toward the right; thus, he was a “centrist”.

[118] Islamism, also called Political Islam and Islamic Fundamentalism, refers to a movement that seeks to make Islam important and in political power, at the expense of non-Muslim minorities. Though Islamists have been anti-imperialist (or at least against one or another imperialist power), many are either compradors or reactionary opponents of imperialism. Some Islamists call themselves “Salafists”. These types, like al Qaeda or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), are very reactionary, even in relation to other Islamists.

While we oppose imperialism, we also oppose reactionary attacks on imperialism. Our attack on imperialism must come from a communist perspective, from the leadership of the workers. The Mujahideen in Afghanistan were an example of reactionary compradors that attacked one imperialist power for another.

[119] Burma at this point became Myanmar, and it dropped its phony nationalist “socialism”.

[120] The CPK became the “Party of Democratic Kampuchea” as it renounced Marxism-Leninism altogether, and it allied itself with US-backed nationalist groups against the Vietnamese invasion. The DPRK, revisionist Romania, and the repressive Thai regime supported this coalition while the USSR, its allies, and Albania supported Vietnam’s invasion.

[121] Liberals, especially liberal school and college students, believe that Cuba’s small size makes it “easy” to improve life expectancy, quality of life, etc. If this was true, then the old regime that existed before Castro’s rebellion would have improved the people’s conditions, yet that government—which never had to deal with any embargo, sanctions, military threats, etc.—failed to do what today’s government is doing. Also, just as Cuba’s population is small, its economy is small, so its resources are not plenty; the embargo sure as hell does not make it easier for them to do what they do, yet they have been able to greatly improve people’s standards by educating them, giving them decent employment, providing social services like healthcare and housing, and much more.

[122] Focoism is a strategy of starting a revolution with a band of armed revolutionaries that become the “focus” of the war. It ignores the importance of having a strong mass base, and it is opportunist, having both revisionist (right-opportunist) and ultra-leftist (“left”-opportunist) deviations. [Source]

[123] Even Guevara was not so much of a proletarian leader. He was surely progressive, but his focoism was opportunist and went against people’s war. On top of that, he was at least partly responsible for putting Cuba in its semi-colonial relations, as the person in control of its banking; to be fair, he did criticize Soviet imperialism eventually, meaning that he did change his views. Nonetheless, his choice of strategy was not proletarian, but it reflected a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois worldview. “[Che Guevara’s ideology] is a bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leftism, combined with some ideas that were progressive, but also anarchist which, in the final analysis, lead to adventurism” [Source].

[124] Here in the United States, there is an abundance of such parties which claim to be Marxist-Leninist, such as the CPUSA, the “Party of Communists USA” (PCUSA), the “American Communist Party” (ACP, a party made over two years after we started writing this book), the “Party for Socialism and Liberation” (PSL), the “Workers World Party” (WWP), and more. The WWP is considered a “Marcyite” organization as it endorses Sam Marcy’s ideology, which is a weird brand of semi-Trotskyism.

[125] This is a revisionist, electoralist (seeking to achieve “socialism” by elections) party in India which originated as a pro-Chinese faction of the “Communist Party of India” in 1964. The CPI, which took part in India’s national liberation struggle, wanted a bourgeois “national democratic revolution” rather than a proletarian-led People’s Democratic one. Just three years later, the CPI(M)’s own revisionism was exposed. China supported the people’s war, to the dismay of the “conservative”, revisionist faction of the party.

[126] India’s reactionary caste system and other hierarchies have led to indigenous people, known as Adivasis, as well as people of “lower castes” being underprivileged for centuries; these people are put under the category of “scheduled castes and scheduled tribes”. The Maoist revolution gave these people power to fight back, and it does so today.

[127] While CPI(M) was and is a revisionist, bourgeois party, many of its members were and are well-meaning people that either do not know of the party’s revisionism or believe they can change the party from within. There are workers and peasants within the party that are progressive, and it is those progressives that the Indian state targeted and still targets.

[128] As Sison said in many articles found Volume I his 1991–2009 Selected Writings, the “democratization” only made real progress thanks to the National Democratic Front’s involvement and mobilization of the masses. American imperialists and their Philippine compradors deny that to this day.

[129] We say this because there were, in fact, even more groups than the ones he brings up in this report. The original “Communist Party of Turkey” (TKP), for instance, was a Khrushchevite revisionist and reformist group.

[130] This organization was dissolved in 1981; its main successor is the “Revolutionary Communist Party of Turkey” (TDKP), a “Hoxhaist” group, i.e. a “Marxist-Leninist” group that supported Hoxha’s attacks on Mao and Mao Zedong Thought.

[131] This group experienced a number of splinters, and it dissolved in 1972; its main successor is the “Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front” (DHKP-C).

[132] Kurdistan is a region in the Middle East where Kurdish people live; Kurds have been fighting for independence from the reactionary states of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran for a long time. Rojava is Syrian Kurdistan (which is in northern Syria), and it is currently run by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), a government that seeks national autonomy for the Kurds. While it originated in conflict with the Syrian government, these days it maintains peaceful relations with it, and both fight Turkey’s invasion and the various rebel groups getting Turkish support. We explain more about Rojava’s cause and its contradictions later in this section.

[133] This is a “libertarian socialist” trend that supports the creation of connected (via confederations: unions of territories that have more power than the union itself) but independent communes that have democratic planning. Though this sounds nice, it goes against democratic centralism, the system that us Marxist-Leninist-Maoists support; it promotes petty-bourgeois decentralization rather than proletarian unity.

[134] This is an organization of the Peru People’s Movement (PPM), the movement of Peruvian revolutionaries abroad. They promote the Peruvian people’s war and help us understand the situation in the country.

[135] In the 2025 “Generation Z Protests”, CPN(MC) supported the peaceful parts of the protests until Prachanda’s house was attacked; protesters turned violent in response to state crackdowns, and they seized the military’s arms, only for some to return them over the next days. These protests arose against the comprador regime’s blatant corruption and its suppression of digital media. While some protesters were backed by US imperialists, particularly the monarchist and liberal ones, most were simply students spontaneously fighting the comprador bourgeois state, which prompted that state’s brutal military response.

[136] Bear in mind that most people labeled as Khrushchevites, Dentists, etc. do not go by such names themselves. Like “Stalinism”, “Khrushchevism” does not really exist, and it is just a nickname for a political ideology, in this case revised Marxism-Leninism.

[137] Some people use terms such as “‘left’-revisionism” to describe ultra-leftists that go against fundamental principles of Marxism, but we think that it is easier to use the term revisionism as Mao did (to describe right-opportunism); we simply refer to the “left”-revisionists as ultra-leftists, and we group them under “left”-opportunism. On the other hand, many people group dogmatists with ultra-leftists as dogmatism is revisionism’s opposite, but we demarcate between the specific dogmatists we name and left-opportunists since said dogmatists’ opportunism is not really rightist or “leftist”. The specific ways we divide these incorrect ideologies are not that important, for we have the three basic camps: an openly rightist camp, a “leftist” camp that is really rightist, and a third camp that is also to the right of Marxism but with a cover that does not clearly position itself to the right or “left” of Marxism.

[138] We should not confuse this with capitalist talks of their “socialist sectors”, which are merely state-capitalist parts of the economy. In socialism (specifcially in New Democracy), the parts of the economy which the workers and peasants share are socialist while the parts that capitalists own are capitalist.

[139] In capitalism, a portion of surplus product (which takes the social form of surplus value) is used to satisfy capitalists’ needs and desires. While capitalists may still exist under a dictatorship of the proletariat, they are much weaker and do not have many employees anyway, so the vast majority of surplus product that labor produces goes into expanding production and improving social well-being.

[140] CWP USA, Politsturm, “Marxism-Leninism Today” (ML Today), and “American Council of Bolsheviks” (ACB, which was sued out of existence by the PCUSA) are all similar revisionist organizations in the US that hold similar views on matters of proletarian history [Source]. They correctly defend the proletarian legacy of the USSR before Khrushchevite revisionism, but they deny that revisionism’s restoration of capitalism in the USSR, and they condemn “dogmatic” Maoists and anti-revisionists for exposing that proper revisionism. Their line could be considered Brezhnevite, as it “condemns” Khrushchevite revisionism, but only partly so, just as Brezhnev criticized Khrushcev but did not restore proletarian politics or leadership/

[141] Here, Lenin does not condemn necessary concessions to the national bourgeoisie during New-Democratic revolutions. He simply affirms that the proletariat cannot see this national bourgeoisie as closer to it than fellow proletarians; the national bourgeoisie can only get the right to operate as long as its role is in favor of the proletariat, i.e. in the fight against imperialism.

[142] Their difference is that syndicalists rely on unions, while council communists rely on councils; syndicalism is also generally separate from Marxism, though there is the “De Leonist” trend of Marxism that agrees with syndicalism (except that it believes in a party as well). Council communism is marginally better in that it does not make the economist errors of syndicalism (which neglects politics and focuses entirely on unions and cooperatives), but otherwise both make the error of ultra-democracy.

[143] This word seems to have been misused. Stalin criticized nationalism many times for its bourgeois nature, and all communists knew that nationalism could only be progressive for oppressed nations asserting self-determination. A socialist state cannot be nationalist, even though it can and must respect all nations’ differences and their rights to self-determination.

[144] The Soviet Union had an anti-cosmopolitan campaign starting in 1948. Anti-communists, especially Zionists, have called the program “anti-Semitic”, but there is no basis for this because the Soviet state combatted all national chauvinism, the attacks on cosmopolitans were not anti-Semitic, the main cosmopolitans targeted were not Jews, and many Soviet Jews were involved in the proletarian campaign [Source]. While socialist states understand that assimilation is inevitable, they do not support forced assimilation or the forced abolition of national distinctions, which is a reactionary type of assimilation. That type is what cosmopolitanism essentially supports.

Indeed, cosmopolitanism and globalism have more in common with fascism and racism. All of these ideologies are subsets of imperialist ideology, and they work in favor of imperialism by transgressing national sovereignty and letting capital exploit the workers of the world. While racists see nationalism as a “race-dividing” idea and cosmopolitans see it as “hindering the flow of capital”, their goal is the same: they seek to suppress patriotism and revolutionary nationalism and impose imperialist domination. This is why Stalin said “Can the Hitlerites be regarded as nationalists? No, they cannot. Actually, the Hitlerites are now not nationalists but imperialists” [Source].

[145] The SWP, like most American Trotskyist organizations (and most Trotskyist organizations generally) is abysmal in its positions. While it claims to support Cuba (which did not properly build socialism), it denounces every People’s Democracy and socialist state that ever existed (except the USSR in its pre-Stalin days). It also supports Israel and Zionism, fully proving their role as puppets of US imperialism!

[146] Stalinism does not really exist as anything besides an insult from revisionists and opportunists or a personality cult around Stalin, but many Marxist-Leninists and Maoists have taken the name with great pride. Indeed, “Stalinism” and “Stalinist” began as terms used to elevate Stalin’s personality cult. [MTBA]

For this section specifically, “Stalinists” are Marxist-Leninists who know that the USSR turned revisionist and state-capitalist under Khrushchev, but do not recognize Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the highest stage of development in communism.

[147] While the Albanian comrades attempted to criticize the Chinese policies constructively before, as all revolutionaries should try to do, by this time, Albania became far more hostile to China, accusing it of not being socialist.

[148] We use quotation marks to show that we do not consider them to be illegal; no country that started as a settler-colonial project should have concerns over “illegal” immigration since settler-colonialism is the illegal immigration of colonists into an area.

[149] Zionism is the ideology that advocates for Jews moving to what is apparently their original homeland (religiously speaking). “Cultural Zionism” is the idea that Jews should move to Palestine but not create a state, while political Zionism advocates for creating Israel.

[150] “Despite being the majority Jewish population in Israel, Mizrahim are represented in small numbers in the Israeli Parliament and in elite positions such as professorships. Many still live in poor ‘development towns,’ agricultural Moshavim, or urban peripheries such as South Tel Aviv that receive fewer municipal funds than more central and majority-Ashkenazi Jewish cities, towns, and Kibbutzim.” [Source]

[151] This article makes a number of stupid claims. In addition to saying that the USSR supported Israel in its war against Arab states, it also says that the PFLP and the DFLP (whose differences we describe below) “advocated unity with and support of the policies of the now social-imperialist state” [Source]. In fact, the Soviet revisionists condemned armed Palestinian resistance and only supported it starting in the 1970’s; it was China that was the Palestinians’ strongest ally: “The Palestinian and Arab liberation movement in alliance with national liberation movements in all undeveloped and poor countries will, in facing world imperialism led by the U.S., find a strong ally to back its forces and augment its power of resistance. This ally is the People’s Republic of China, which in reality is still facing the same U.S. peril that is attempting to encircle and isolate it and impede its growth.” [Source]

[152] Fatah is a party in Palestine that used to be bourgeois-nationalist and revolutionary. Today, it leads the modern Palestinian state in the West Bank and has abandoned the war for national liberation; not unlike various Palestinian parties, it promotes a “two state solution”, the “peaceful coexistence” of Israel and Palestine. What makes it worse is its refusal to support armed struggle like it once did. Thus, it serves as a comprador-bourgeois regime for Zionist expansionism, and the warnings of Enver Hoxha and other communists were proven correct.
In late July 2024, its leaders in the West Bank were compelled to support the resistance forces that initiated a new phase in their liberation struggle in October 2023; thus, these compradors were reunited with revolutionaries, and the masses under them were overjoyed. Thanks to this development, the masses’ war against the settler-colony can expand further and be more effective.

[153] In the United States, the Red Guards were Maoist groups in various cities that sought to unite and work toward reconstituting the CPUSA; in 2019, they formed the “Committee to Reconstitute the CPUSA” (CR-CPUSA), but they failed in their goal as their organization became a victim of dogmatism and cultism around its leader, among other issues. We hope to avoid this grave issue with a proper application of democratic centralism, and not the ultra-centralist dictatorship that existed in the CR-CPUSA.

[154] Obviously this is not to be confused with the “Republican Party” in the US, which is a conservative capitalist party. Bourgeois republicanism was revolutionary at one point, but now it is not; only socialist republicanism can be revolutionary.

[155] The IWW is a syndicalist organization that favors proletarian unity and militant unionism, but also opposes political struggle and the formation of a vanguard party. It can be in a workers’ united front, but its petty-bourgeois errors deserve criticism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements, Introduction