Tag: Maoism

Reposted Content

Four main issues to be debated in the International Communist Movement

Revolutionary Initiative is reposting this piece from the (new) Communist Party of Italy [(n)PCI] for the significant questions and debates it raises concerning the reconstitution of genuine communist parties in the imperialist countries. The translation is not perfect, but none of its essentials points are lost in translation.

The (n)PCI has made some rather original contributions, if not creative developments, of MLM in the area of: (1) conceptualizing the nature of the state in the imperialist countries, which they refer to as the Preventive Counter-Revolutionary Regime; and (2) their understanding of Protracted People’s War, namely, its universal significance and its particularities as a strategy for revolution in the imperialist countries, which they refer to as Protracted Revolutionary People’s War..

This posting does not express an endorsement of the lines in this document, but rather an intention to more deeply explore the question of revolutionary strategy in the imperialist countries at a time when revolutionary communists are regrouping in the imperialist countries. The Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada / Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire (Canada) also upholds PPW as a strategy (click here and here for their documents on this debate) for the imperialist countries, but we believe that it is a rather distinct conception from the one upheld by the (n)PCI.

In unity and struggle, Revolutionary Initiative

Four main issues to be debated in the International Communist Movement
15 March 2010
(new) Communist Party of Italy

This document deals with:

1. The issues we think important for carrying out the struggle for getting a higher unity in the International Communist Movement,
2. Our positions about those issues,
3. The documents in common languages (English, French, Spanish) where our position are explained in a thorough way.

Issues about which to carry out the discussion

The issues about which we think it is necessary to carry out the discussion in the ICM are four:

1. The evaluation of the communist movement (first wave of proletarian revolution and first socialist countries, crisis of the communist movement and modern revisionism, new birth of the communist movement on the basis of Marxism Leninism Maoism);

2. The theory of the (first and second) general crisis of capitalism in imperialist epoch and the connected developing revolutionary situation;

3. The regime of preventive counter-revolution established by the bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries;

4. The strategy of the protracted revolutionary people’s war. Continue reading “Four main issues to be debated in the International Communist Movement”

Reposted Content

The Ten Declarations of the Maoist Communist Party of China (MCPC)

Thanks to Kasama Project for making this document available.

22 March 2009

1. We strongly condemn the traitorous revisionist ruling bloc of the Chinese Communist Party and its policy of secretive suppression of our party!

On 26 December 2008, our party gave out the pamphlet “To all the people of China” that declares that “the peoples of China have the right to rise up against the traitorous revisionist ruling bloc of the Chinese Communist Party” in the central districts of cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. By doing this we have “dared to touch the tiger’s ass”!

Afterwards we engaged in more propaganda online and in other cities. This revolutionary action of our party has resulted in a strong political wave against the traitorous revisionist ruling bloc of the Chinese Communist Party, and managed to beat down the arrogant air of the revisionist ruling bloc.

Smash Revisionism!

This is the clarion call for a great revolutionary movement among the Chinese proletariat against capitalist restoration; this is the signal flare to mobilise the people to strike against the crimes conducted by the traitorous revisionist ruling bloc; to peel away the false skin of the revisionists, and to engage in a people’s revolutionary war through both words and actions.

The pamphlet of our party “To all the people of China” not only received great attention within China, and to a great extent served to wake up and stimulate the Chinese proletarian class, but it also triggered a lot of international political responses. “Radio Free Asia” and “Voice of America” all made reports about us. Reactionary forces both inside and outside of China immediately felt threatened by our pamphlet, and started to attack our party and offered strategies to the ruling regime of China. Continue reading “The Ten Declarations of the Maoist Communist Party of China (MCPC)”

RI Articles & Statements

The Significance of the Refoundation of the Maoist Movement in Pakistan

A Statement to the Seventh National Congress of the Pakistan Mazdoor Kissan Party

From the General Secretary of Revolutionary Initiative

With our fists raised as high as our hopes for the future of the Pakistani revolution, Revolutionary Initiative, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist pre-party formation in Canada, offers a red salute to the comrades convening the August 2010 7th National Congress of the Pakistan Mazdoor Kissan Party (Pakistan Workers and Peasants Party).

We understand that the 7th Congress will mark a return of the PMKP to the Maoist origins of the party, as established by its founders Major Ishaq Mohammed, Afzal Bungish, Eric Sperian, and Ghulam Nabi Kaloo in the 1960s.

The new program of the PMKP will effect a decisive break with the pseudo-alternatives currently being presented to the people of Pakistan: the perpetuation of a backward semi-colonial, semi-feudal society maintained by the pro-imperialist military and civil bureaucracy, comprador bourgeoisie, and feudal ruling elite; versus the equally backward social program offered up by the Taliban of Pakistan. By breaking with the revisionist Left, which looks to U.S. imperialism for enlightenment through its brutal “War on Terror”, the PMKP is setting a course to truly rally the peasants, proletarians, and the progressive petty-bourgeois elements to the anti-imperialist cause. Further, by exposing the program of the Taliban as fascism in a different form, the PMKP has truly placed itself at the vanguard of all the toiling masses in Pakistan.

Continue reading “The Significance of the Refoundation of the Maoist Movement in Pakistan”

Reposted Content

Two Lines Struggle in the Communist Party

(new) Communist Party of Italy – Central Committee

Article from La Voce n. 35, July 2010

In the Statute approved by the 1st Congress of the (new) Italian Communist Party (paragraph 6) it is written that:

“The main organizational principles of the Party are the democratic centralism and the two lines struggle. The two principles are complementary: they are the two opposite terms of a dialectical unity. In some circumstances the first of the two terms is the principal. In some other circumstances the second of the two terms is principal.

(…)

The principle of the two lines struggles teaches us that in the Communist Party two trends are always existing, one pushing onwards and the other restraining. They are the joint effect of the class contradiction (of bourgeoisie’s influence and of the struggle against it), of the contradiction between the true and the false and of the contradiction between the new and the old. In some periods the two trends are complementary and both contribute to party’s development. In other periods they become antagonistic and incompatible. The left trend has to transform the right one. If the right trend proves to be unyielding, the left one has to expel it.”
This rule of our Statute arouses many kinds of objections, both in the Italian and in the International Communist Movement. It is in the nature of things that this takes place. The two lines struggle is a principle not universally accepted and applied in the communist movement.

Firstly, we have to apply (to learn to apply) the rule of our Statute inside us. We have to learn to use the two lines struggle in our Party’s life. We shall better and better understand the principle of the two lines struggle, we shall understand it in a more and more practical way the more we shall apply it.

Secondly, we have to make understand this principle in a just way, in the Party and among the comrades, in Italy and abroad, in the International Communist Movement (ICM).

Thirdly, we have to defend it against the objections and distortions, against the misunderstandings and the denigrations.

The two lines struggle is an indispensable organizational principle. Continue reading “Two Lines Struggle in the Communist Party”

Reposted Content

Killing Azad: Silencing the Voice of Revolution

by N Venugopal.  From Monthly Review zine, July 29.
Cherukuri ("Azad") Rajkumar, CPI (Maoist) spokesperson

To suppress the most articulate voice of the Indian revolutionary movement, the state indulged in the brutal assassination of Cherukuri Rajkumar, popularly known as Azad, spokesperson of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), along with freelance journalist Hemchandra Pandey, on July 2.  Azad was supposed to meet a courier at Sitabardi in Nagpur, Maharashtra at 11 am on July 1, to go to the Dandakaranya forest from there.  The bodies of Azad and Pandey were displayed on a hillock in the forest between the Jogapur and Sarkepalli villages in the Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh, about 250 kms from Nagpur.

Around 9 in the morning on July 2, the television channels in Andhra Pradesh started flashing that there was an “encounter” in which two Maoists were killed.  Within the next few hours it was speculated that the deceased were Cherukuri Rajkumar alias Azad and Pulluri Prasada Rao alias Chandranna, secretary of the North Telangana Special Zonal Committee.  By afternoon Gudsa Usendi, spokesperson of the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee, came on air and told the channels that the second person might be Sahadev, an adivasi courier sent to fetch Azad.  Then, Usendi came on air again and told that Sahadev returned safely after not finding Azad at the rendezvous.  Meanwhile, friends of Hemchandra Pandey recognized the picture of his dead body that appeared in the New Delhi edition of the Telugu daily Eenadu, and Pandey’s wife Babita announced that at a press conference in Delhi.  For the first few days, Pandey was passed off as a Maoist; once he was identified, police started denying that he was a journalist.

The official version of the incident goes like this: On the night of July 1, police got information that there was some movement of Maoists in the Maharashtra-Andhra Pradesh border forests and a combing party consisting of police from both the states went in search of them.  Around 10:30 the police party identified the Maoists and asked them to surrender, but the intransigent Maoists, numbering around 20, started firing at them.  In order to defend themselves the police returned fire and the exchange of fire continued till 2:30 in the morning.  The police party could not search the area due to pitch darkness and came back next morning to find two unidentified dead bodies, along with an AK-47, a 9 mm pistol, two kit bags, and revolutionary literature.

However, newspaper readers in Andhra Pradesh are sceptical: they have been reading the same story over and over again for the last forty years with changes in proper names alone.  That nobody believed the official story was a commentary on the credibility of state machinery. Continue reading “Killing Azad: Silencing the Voice of Revolution”

Basanta: The Volcano of Revolution in South Asia Today
Reposted Content

Basanta: The Volcano of Revolution in South Asia Today

The following talk was given on July 2, in Istanbul, during the European Social Forum’s seminar on South Asia’s revolutions.

By Basanta (Indra Mohan Sigdel)
member, Politburo of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)

Dear comrades and delegates, revolutionary greetings!

I would like to take this opportunity to extend our revolutionary salutation on behalf of our party, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), to the organiser, the European Social Forum, who invited our party to attend this august programme in Istanbul, Turkey.

In addition, I would like to extend our revolutionary greetings to the entire delegates participating in this seminar. I feel honoured to be here with all the delegates from around the world.

But, more than that I would like to utilise this opportunity to share experiences that the working class all across the world has gathered through their valiant struggles against imperialism and its anti-people and neo-colonial policies like privatisation, liberalisation and globalisation, and as well the ruling classes subservient to it.

Dear comrades,

Our party has assigned me to speak here on the revolution in South Asia as requested by the organisers. It is a vast course, a very difficult task to cover in a few minutes. However, I will try my best to be brief but certainly I will focus on the key points to help you reach to the basic understanding of the possibilities and challenges, the revolution in South Asia is confronting now.

South Asia consists of seven countries namely Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. More than one-fifth of the world’s population inhabit in this region. It is the most populous and densely populated geographical region in the world. Agriculture, which contributes to only 22% of the total GDP of the region, employs 60% of the labour force. Next to Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia is the poorest region on the earth. As per the information provided by the World Bank, in 2008, more than 40% of the people dwelling in this region earn less than 1.39 dollars per head per day. On the other, the total wealth of the 25 richest Indian capitalists is equivalent to 192.3 billions of dollars. [Source: http://www.forbes.com]. It is equal to the total yearly earnings of more than 379 millions of the lowest poor people from this region, which is about 31.6% of the total population of India alone. Around 2.1 million of children die of malnutrition every year in this region as per the report published by UNICEF in 2008. This gives a short glimpse of class composition in the South Asian countries. Continue reading “Basanta: The Volcano of Revolution in South Asia Today”

RI Articles & Statements

First Statement from the Central Committee of Revolutionary Initiative

In dedication to the revolutionary class struggle of proletarians everywhere Revolutionary Initiative (RI) announces the formation of its Central Committee to lead our pre-Party formation in its great historical task of reconstituting a genuine Communist Party in Canada. It is a small step forward in our effort to create a Party to lead the revolutionary upsurge of the multinational proletariat in Canada, but an important one given the proletariat has been without a revolutionary vanguard since the triumph of revisionism in the Communist Party of Canada in the late 1930s. The establishment of our Central Committee is grounded in years of ideological, political, and organizational work, guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as applied to the conditions of proletarian class struggle in Canada and utilizing the principles of democratic centralism, criticism and self-criticism, and the mass line.

Over the course of the next five years, Revolutionary Initiative will lay out the ideological, political, and organizational bases for the refoundation of a proletarian revolutionary movement and vanguard in Canada. Continue reading “First Statement from the Central Committee of Revolutionary Initiative”