The following statement was first published on the website of the journal Communist International on December 26 2021, as a rallying call on the Birthday of Chairman Mao. It can be read here: https://ci-ic.org/blog/2021/12/26/unite-under-maoism/
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
UNITE UNDER MAOISM!
Chairman Mao Zedong was born on December 26, 1893, and throughout his life he put himself fully at the service of the people, of the deepest and broadest masses; he was the main protagonist, the recognised leader of the Chinese revolution and became the leader of the world proletarian revolution. He founded the Chinese Communist Party and the Red Army of the workers and peasants of the Chinese people, introduced the road of encircling the cities from the countryside, developed the People’s War and thus the military theory of the proletariat. As the theoretician of New Democracy, he founded the People’s Republic, was the main initiator of the Great Leap Forward and promoted the development of socialism. Chairman Mao was the leader of the struggle against the contemporary revisionism of Khrushchev and his henchmen. He led the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, achieving the highest milestone yet in the struggle for communism. During this tremendous process, in the midst of the class struggle and the two-line struggle, he qualitatively developed the three integral parts of Marxism as a unit – Marxist philosophy, Marxist political economy and scientific socialism – and the ideology of the proletariat made the leap to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
As we celebrate Chairman Mao’s birthday today, we do so as always with the people’s wars in India, Turkey, the Philippines and Peru, with the formation or reconstitution of communist parties determined to prepare and develop the people’s war; we do this in the war against the revisionist usurpers who restored the bourgeois dictatorship in China after his death, knowing that these scoundrels will never find peace and that the Chinese proletariat and people will regain power and beat social imperialism with blood and fire. We welcome the formation of a new generation of Maoists in China who will strengthen the resistance of those who never surrendered there, and we are sure that side by side with the international proletariat they will rebuild the glorious party founded by Chairman Mao.
Chairman Mao’s mission was communism, and therefore we cannot celebrate his birthday with dignity without seeing how the struggle for communism is progressing.
IT IS RIGHT TO REBEL
More than ever, human society needs a social revolution with an ideological leadership that maintains a just and correct course to move forward. The imperialist world system is in absolute contradiction with progress and development. It has nothing to offer but genocide, war and the vilest exploitation and oppression for the benefit of a handful of bloodsuckers who live in an opulence and decadence that makes the Roman emperors look like ascetics.
The oppressed peoples and nations of the world are systematically subjected to further oppression and aggression by the imperialist powers. Inequality in the world today is at the same level as it was at the beginning of the last century, i.e. the more than hundred years have not meant more freedom and progress, but only the maintenance and even deepening and widening of the oppression and exploitation of the masses. The top 10% of the social pyramid own more than half of the total wealth, while the bottom 50%, i.e. the majority, own at most 2% and are increasingly losing the little they own. In oppressed countries such as Mexico, where 10% of the population owns 79% of the wealth, while according to official figures, about half of the population lives in complete poverty. There is more hunger, more misery, more exploitation and oppression. 800 million people in the world suffer from hunger or do not know if they will have enough to eat the next day, 267 million of them in Latin America and the Caribbean – about 40% of the total population of this region. These are the official data of the institutions of imperialism, and we could give almost endless other examples. In the world economic crisis, which is basically a crisis of overproduction that has been going on for years and which the sycophants and servants of the old order are trying to cover up with the COVID-19 pan-epidemic, the situation of the poorest is deteriorating drastically, as shown by the fact that last year more than 100 million children were among the poor. The pan-epidemic is being used so cynically by the imperialists and reactionaries all over the world, supported as always by revisionism and opportunism, that it is not only being used to commit world genocide, especially against the oppressed peoples, but also to attack the rights and gains of the proletariat and peoples in all countries in the name of measures to combat the “epidemic crisis”, They attack the most basic liberal democratic rights wherever they can, impose a state of emergency and destroy hundreds of millions of small businesses, petty bourgeois holdings, concentrate and centralise capital more in favour of the big monopolies, to whom they give billions from the state coffers under the pretext of saving and boosting the economy to create “jobs and income” for the masses. They also use climate change to expropriate millions of peasants on the one hand and to “modernise” their states and “transform” their economies for their inter-imperialist struggle on the other. In the imperialist countries, too, the proletariat and the people are suffering the consequences of the imperialist crisis; massive layoffs and wage cuts, longer working hours and deterioration of working conditions are affecting not only the lower strata of the proletariat, but also the middle and upper strata – in a country like Germany, the wages of the best paid workers were cut by 1.4%. And all this in the midst of a worldwide crisis of bourgeois democracy. This is what the overlords of the old imperialist order are giving us.
It is the task of the international proletariat and the oppressed peoples to finish them off, to break the chains, break down the walls and conquer the summits. Either them or us, enough of this hell: storm heaven! That is the order of the day.
FIGHT DARKNESS WITH THE SHINING TORCH OF MAOISM
The imperialists and their lackeys are everywhere promoting idealism and metaphysics, propagating religious obscurantism and other forms of the most perverse obscurantism to cloud the minds of the masses and blind them. Whether through the promotion of the massive spread of evangelistic sects, the constant propaganda of the Catholic Church or Islamist fundamentalism, everything serves to divert the struggle of the peoples, to divide the resistance against imperialism and to fight the influence of the communists. This is especially served by the spread of so-called “postmodernism”, which is supposedly “progressive and radical” with its myriad theories – “relativism”, “everyone’s truth”, “discourse analysis”, “postcolonial critique”, “gender theory”, “critical whiteness”, to name a few, firmly entrenched in the universities and leading institutes of reactionary brainwashing and in the press, and the opportunist parties form an essential part of the general counterrevolutionary offensive waged by US imperialism in collusion and struggle with the other imperialist powers. World reaction and revisionism, directed against Marxism, socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat and revolutionary violence, attempt to deny the irreplaceable necessity of the leadership of the proletariat in the revolution, whether democratic or socialist, by the Communist Party. Revisionism and opportunism of all kinds pretend, as they have since Bernstein, to use these bourgeois “innovations” to fight Marxism. Thus they adopt the story of the “noble Indian” – which is nothing but the flip side of the British colonial theory of the “white man’s burden” – propagated by the “NGOs” of the imperialist institutions which glorify gamonalism and deny the existence of classes in the countryside, with the aim of denying the existence of the poor peasantry and thus the existence of semi-feudalism in order to bring about a “socialist revolution” in the oppressed countries, parroting the old Trotskyist theses while preaching parliamentary cretinism and electoral opportunism.
It is up to us communists and revolutionaries to defend and apply Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the only true ideology of the international proletariat, to defeat and smash these monstrosities and machinations of imperialism and its reactionary and revisionist lackeys. Darkness is fought with light, idealism with dialectical materialism. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism has always prevailed in the struggle against bourgeois ideology and all reactionary positions, and it is no different today. To defeat the general counter-revolutionary offensive, a life and death struggle against revisionism and opportunism is indispensable, which means that we must vigorously advance the worldwide campaign for Maoism as the sole command and guide of the world proletarian revolution. In all languages, on all continents and in all countries, it is necessary that we adhere to the proletarian ideology, reject bourgeois ideology in all its manifestations and illuminate the path of the proletariat and the people with the torch of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
LET’S END EXPLOITATION AND OPPRESSION WITH REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE IN EVERY CORNER OF THE WORLD
Chairman Mao taught us to be champions of the omnipotence of revolutionary war, and that is what we Maoists are. Imperialism is a monster equipped from head to toe with the most terrible arsenal history has ever seen. It unleashes its wars of aggression against the peoples all over the world and sharpens its knives for a new world war to distribute the spoils: the oppressed nations and peoples. Every new technology is perverted into a weapon against the peoples; it aims at absolute control of the world’s population with a surveillance apparatus that the Gestapo could only dream of. But the most powerful weapon in the world is the proletarian ideology embodied by the masses. The mercenaries of imperialism fight to defend an outdated system, with no other perspective than to prolong its agony, their morality is the petty interest of personal gain and nothing more, they represent an outdated, anachronistic force. The peoples have a creativity and genius with which, guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, they find and produce the historically necessary solutions in the midst of struggle, and they know that revolutionary violence, the just and necessary violence, is the light of every new society.
The masses are ready to fight, they want to eliminate the old order, but they themselves do not understand how to overthrow the old order and build the new one. It is the duty of communists to see what the masses want, to assume our role as the proletarian vanguard and to lead and direct their struggles against the oppressors and exploiters by resolutely applying revolutionary violence and the relentless and inseparable struggle against opportunism, revolutionary war, people’s war, as the main form of struggle in the world. Without revolutionary war there is no democratic or socialist revolution, therefore the communist parties must be forged as fighting machines. The Communist Party exists to make and defend the revolution and to guarantee its road to communism with cultural revolutions. There is no place for Communist Parties to rot in the pigsties that are the parliaments of the old states. Those who delude themselves that there is a possibility of a gradual and peaceful “accumulation of forces” in any country, forgetting all the experiences of the international proletariat and the peoples of the world, lead the masses to massacre and betray, whether they like it or not, the world proletarian revolution. Bourgeois “legality” is a deadly trap if communists rely on it in any way, we have had this experience through a senseless toll of blood at the cost of the lives of millions of communists and revolutionaries.
We must cast aside all illusions. Imperialism is a colossus on feet of clay, a paper tiger, we must throw ourselves into the struggle with the banner of invincible people’s war at our head.
APPLY MAOISM TO SOLVE NEW PROBLEMS
There is no social problem that man cannot solve. The more we apply the principles of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the more we will find solutions to new problems in the service of the international proletariat and the peoples of the world. Thus, the political, economic, organisational and military problems we face in the course of the class struggle can be properly solved if we start from the world outlook of the proletariat. We must be absolutely convinced of the strength of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the all-powerful ideology, because it is true and true because it is scientific.
The problem of the communist parties is not to restore a historical past but to write new chapters in the epic of revolutionary transformation of the present in order to conquer the future. We have a glorious past, with gigantic triumphs, but also setbacks and defeats. We must learn from it, but in the knowledge that it will never be repeated in the same form, because the progress of matter is from the lower to the upper and not just circular. Therefore, our history is a weapon from which we derive a general law for the party’s process, that any deviation from Marxism-Leninism-Maoism leads to taking the road of revisionism and changing the character of the party, and that in this case the correct thing to do is to take up Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and apply it in its purest form in the midst of the two-line struggle in the Party and the class struggle of the masses in order to reconstitute it as a Party of a new Marxist-Leninist-Maoist type.
Every Communist Party – if it does not exist in a country, those who struggle for its foundation or reconstitution – must apply Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to the concrete, specific conditions of its revolution, be it democratic or socialist, in a creative way in the general context of the world proletarian revolution. Only in this way can the present moment of struggle, and thus the appropriate forms of struggle and organisation, be correctly and precisely assessed and determined. Conservatism and clichés are of no use, the meaning of our work is not to persist for the sake of persistence, but to advance in order to achieve our goals.
THE BLOOD SPILLED CALLS US BACK TO THE STRUGGLE
In the past year, several important and prominent leaders and cadres of the Communist Parties fighting the people’s wars in Turkey and India have been killed in action or assassinated by the forces of reaction. In the Philippines, comrade Ka Oris was brutally murdered by the hordes of the executioner Duterte. In Peru, Chairman Gonzalo, who was in prison for 29 years in total isolation, gave his life and his name was included in the list of titans of our class. In Brazil, important communist leaders and cadres have died and in Ecuador, the Maoist leader comrade Joselo. In Europe, the long-time communist leader from Galicia, Comrade Martin Naya, has died. All over the world, communists, revolutionary fighters and revolting masses have shed their precious blood for the cause of communism. It is up to us to remember them, learn from their examples and turn their pain into strength by raising our red flags with hammer and sickle in their honour.
It is a sign of their condition that the communists mix their blood with the blood of the masses who bravely give their lives. While the parasites, sell-outs and hucksters, opportunists and revisionists live well in the old order, the Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, the best sons of the people, show that they are always in the front line of struggle, that they are in the first line of fire.
Our fallen comrades will always live on in us, the spilt blood of communists, revolutionary fighters and masses does not drown the revolution but nourishes it. Only those who have no faith in the masses can be depressed. We follow Chairman Mao’s commanding voice: we bury our dead and fight on.
UNITY IS FORGED THROUGH STRUGGLE
Ever since Marx taught us that the united proletariat will be invincible, and ever since he raised the unchanging slogan of the communists – Proletarians of all countries, unite! – we have fought for our international unity. A struggle so inseparable from the struggle for our ultimate goal that Chairman Mao aptly summed it up in the immortal phrase “Internationalism is the spirit of communism”. We all know that achieving and maintaining unity is not easy, not even in one party and even less in the International Communist Movement (ICM); it requires a two-line struggle based on principles, well conducted, amidst the struggle between revolution and counter-revolution, both of which are armed, and the formation of a leadership with recognised supremacy and authority. This does not fall from the sky. But this is why we communists are forged through struggle to solve problems and find the way forward. If revolution were an easy undertaking, no one would need us.
Today, we have good conditions to advance the unity of the ICM.
After the capitalist restoration in China, the communists were scattered all over the world without a centre and base of world revolution. The reaction unleashed a general counter-revolutionary offensive led by US imperialism. Maoism was not accepted by different parties. In a hard struggle against surrender, against Avakian revisionism, Prachandism, the rats of the right opportunist line (ROL) in Peru and other revisionists, in the face of serious problems such as the betrayal in Nepal, the bend in the people’s war in Peru and the liquidation of the RIM in the hands of Avakianism, the communists have continued the people’s war in Peru, India, Turkey and the Philippines and new people’s wars are in preparation. In the last decade, fragmentation began to be overcome, all influential parties accepted Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and new parties and organisations emerged in countries where there had been none for many years. The general counter-revolutionary offensive is coming to an end and the revolutionary offensive is advancing.
We are now in the early twenties of the twenty-first century, communist forces are on the rise on all continents, especially in Latin America, new Maoist forces are blossoming in countries like Ireland and Spain, coordination between parties and organisations has reached a higher level than in the best days of the RIM, new people’s wars are imminent and all over the world the process of restoring communist parties is advancing. Concretely, we are much more united today than in the last decades, revisionism is in a deep crisis (within its general bankruptcy) and the objective conditions are excellent for a powerful advance of the world proletarian revolution, the basis of which lies in the unprecedented crisis of disintegration of imperialism that is looming and in the explosiveness of the masses that are exploding all over the world, predicting that world history is entering a new period of social storms and thunderstorms, of revolutions.
The conditions are ripe for the United International Maoist Conference, just as the conditions are ripe for the birth of a New International Organisation of the Proletariat. On the basis of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, of the relentless struggle against revisionism and in the service of the world proletarian revolution, under the banner of the invincible people’s war, we can and must unite. We who sign this declaration solemnly pledge to serve this goal by redoubling our efforts and overcoming all difficulties on the way.
On the occasion of Chairman Mao’s birthday, we reaffirm our pledge to struggle tirelessly to establish Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the sole command and guide of the world proletarian revolution. To be Marxist today is to be Marxist-Leninist-Maoist.
LONG LIVE THE GREAT HELMSMAN – ETERNAL GLORY TO CHAIRMAN MAO!
IT IS RIGHT TO REBEL!
UNITE UNDER MAOISM!
26 december 2021