Joint International Mayday Declaration: The Catastrophic World Situation Demands Proletarian Revolution! Unite Under the Red Banner of Maoism!
UPDATE OF SIGNATURES!
We have received two more signatures. One from Colombia and the other from Great Britain.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
The Catastrophic World Situation Demands Proletarian Revolution!
Unite Under the Red Banner of Maoism!
This May Day we address the international proletariat and the suppresed peoples and nations of the world reaffirming our solemn pledge to sweep away imperialism, revisionism and reaction off the face of the earth, with democratic, socialist and cultural revolutions, establishing and developing the dictatorship of the proletariat, through People’s War, until all humanity is liberated from all forms of oppression and exploitation, until we reach our unrenounceable final goal: Communism, the classless society where everyone’s needs will be satisfied, where there will be neither rich nor poor, exploiters and exploited, and where all will enjoy abundance. We will fight relentlessly and selflessly to create a new world, which will be totally and utterly opposite and different from this hell we live in now, a new society without the blood-sucking murderers who are the masters of the present.
The prevailing social order, the imperialist world system which develops amidst collusion and strife, and as part of it, US imperialism, the common enemy of the peoples of the whole world, is outdated and rotten to the core, it is sustained by the bloody bayonets of mercenary armies which will be powerless before us, the oppressed and exploited, when we organise our common power under the leadership of the proletarian vanguards, the Communist Parties, and rise up all over the world with arms in hand, destroying the old and building the new. Anyone who takes a look at the world today will see that we are facing a situation where the world proletarian revolution is the only way out, the only road for humanity and that the development of the objective and subjective conditions in the world are favourable for revolution; in this situation, it is up to us to break through with new People’s Wars into the new period of revolutions that the world has entered.
The Imperialists and their Lackeys take Advantage of the Pan-Epidemic
The sinister management of the imperialists and their lackeys of the pan-epidemic shows their genocidal character; with vile cynicism they use it to achieve their economic, political and military aims and they do not care about the millions of dead who are sacrificed for these purposes.
The global economic crisis was foreseen long ago and had already begun to manifest itself at the end of 2019. The appearance of the COVID-19 virus gave them an ideal pretext to force an abrupt recession and to destroy productive forces on a large scale and at the same time, in the main imperialist countries, to push forward state monopoly capitalism, as in Europe, the US imperialist Biden is already doing this in his early days in office by going ahead with the massive 3.3 trillion dollar package, transferring huge funds to the direct benefit of the big monopolies and restructuring their economies, with the main cost being borne by the oppressed nations. The result: 6000 to 12000 starvation deaths per day, directly caused by the crisis; and even in countries that are not among the poorest like Argentina, the masses suffer rampantly from hunger and have to claim food aid to survive and even in the imperialist countries hunger is increasing. At least 495 million jobs have “disappeared” all over the world, in the cities of India alone 100 million lost the possibility to earn their daily bread and those who are affected are mainly the poorest and within them, above all, those belonging to ethnic minorities, women and youth. At the same time the owners of financial capital are making fabulous profits, to illustrate it is enough to note that between March and December 2020, while the vast majority became poorer, the 10 richest men in the world increased their fortunes with 540 billion US dollars. At the same time, following the perverse logic of profit, in the crisis finance capital moves to the imperialist centres, driven by the “stimulus packages”, deepening even more the crisis of bureaucratic capitalism in the oppressed countries, which at the same time means even more hunger and misery for the peoples.
Politically, there is no state where the ruling classes have not used the pretext of pan-epidemic to increase oppression against the masses, increasing in great number and quality the measures and means of repression to crush their resistance and growing militancy, seeking to prevent the revolution. Concentrating and centralising more power in the executive (a process of reactionarisation of the bourgeois state). Particularly in the so-called “demo-liberal” regimes, in which, there is not a single one where there have not been decrees and laws that transfer powers or attributions of the legislature to the executive, trampling “de jure” and in fact their own constitutions (their own bourgeois legal order), applying massive and indiscriminate methods of controlling the population; even seeking to control “legally” the movements of each citizen through the so-called “Apps”, all, of course, to “fight the virus”. Thus the crisis of parliamentarism is deepening, very notorious is the case of Latin America where the United Nations itself has found that 78.8% of the population is convinced that governments only serve “a handful of powerful people” and this trend is growing. The intelligence services, mainly through their fascist agents, seek to usurp every popular protest against these measures to give them an reactionary twist, promoting outdated myths that are nothing more than “modern” versions of the infamous police hoax about “the Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and in this manoeuvre it has the unconditional support of revisionism and opportunism of all kinds which, in the name of “public health”, put on supposedly “anti-fascist” shows where they close ranks with the old states and thus unmask themselves before the masses for what they are: “useful fools”, servile defenders of the system of exploitation and oppression.
Even in the unique case of Brazil, where the de facto military and ultra-reactionary government is against any preventive health measures against COVID-19 because of obscurantism and under the pretext that these are to undermine it by paralysing the economy, opportunism and immobilist revisionism try to join the chorus of the big bourgeoisie and media monopolies in a campaign of hysteria against the popular protests, branding them as spreaders of the infection.
The conscious masses know that, if the virus can cause so much damage, it is because the health systems in the world are not at the service of the people, they do not have anywhere the necessary resources as a result of the political decisions of the governments, past and present; every death with COVID-19, therefore, is a genocide that goes on the account of the ruling classes. How the imperialist states use the respective vaccines to advance their positions, mainly in the oppressed countries, is another proof that for these hyenas the lives of the masses are of no importance to them. The imperialist countries have concentrated the largest number of vaccines. In the third world countries there are no vaccines except for the big bourgeoisie and landowners. The oppressed countries have no technology in medicine to manufacture because of beaurocratic capitalism and imperialism makes business with the lives of the workers through intellectual property with its logic of the invisible hand of the free market. In other words, the poor of the world are condemned to genocide.
In the military sphere, the imperialists and their lackeys use pan-epidemics to further militarise their states, starting from promoting state monopoly capitalism, a fundamental issue for their warmongering plans, to normalising the use of the armed forces in all kinds of tasks of state administration, be it of a directly administrative, police or health nature, promoting the image of the armed forces as national heroes. They use the panic, real but generated by them, of pan-epidemics to push their predatory wars, both by moving puppets and by increasing direct intervention as in Africa, where they have transformed the continent into a war zone stretching from Libya in the north to Mozambique in the south and from Western Sahara in the west to Somalia in the east. At the same time they are increasingly arming themselves, while supposedly lacking the men and means to deal with the health crisis.
All over the World the Proletariat and the Peoples are Combating and Resisting
The increase of exploitation and oppression, hunger and misery, repression and genocide leads to the necessity to struggle because oppression generates resistance, the masses cannot go on living under the present conditions, therefore they rise up to fight everywhere. Imperialism has increased the exploitation of the world during the last three decades, trying to escape from the general and ultimate crisis that is besetting it, pushing for the further accumulation of capital, so it is provoking a great explosiveness of the masses that is going to explode everywhere. The explosions we have seen in the last two years are only a promulgation: with the advance in the reconstitutions of the Communist Parties they are announcing that the world is entering a new period of revolutions.
The masses have increased their activity as never before, despite all the measures of social isolation to stifle them. It is up to the communists to lead them to the revolutionary way out, because the masses are the arena of struggle between revolution and counter-revolution. As long as we do not bury imperialism and reaction, they will always have a way out of their situation with the service of revisionism and opportunism, as Lenin warned in his exposition of the international situation after the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles; today, they will try to lead the masses the reactionary way out of the crisis, ranging from the present “social packages against the corona pandemic”, the way out of “the new constitution” to fascism. Therefore, it is very important to blow up their plans “against the pandemic” which are the basis of their anti-crisis programmes in favour of the exploiters; to blow them up, the key is to intensify the struggle for wages and salaries, for the most neglected and burdensome needs of the masses such as emergency health care; all the basic needs have to be demanded, demanded to lead the masses to express their protest with forceful forms of struggle, to demand that the state fulfils its obligations by showing that it is good for nothing, linking the struggle for demands with the struggle for power in order to lead the masses to the overflow.
The peasant struggle for land increasingly stirs up the oppressed nations and is the basis of the struggle against imperialism. The struggle against semi-feudalism is also developing powerfully in the Latin American countries, the conquest and defence of the land against the great dispossession is the order of the day and in countries like Ecuador and Brazil the armed peasant, armed with a proletarian mind, are systematically working towards a great leap towards the realisation of the democratic revolution. The immense struggle of the peasants in India has shaken the country and unmasked before the eyes of the whole world the plans of the old landlord-bureaucratic state to promote bureaucratic capitalism through the ruin of millions of peasants in order to further concentrate the land in the hands of the biggest landlords and thus increase semi-feudal exploitation. The importance of the struggle of the peasants, who are the most numerous class in the world, is increasing more and more because of the dispossession of the peasants’ lands, of the ancestral communities, of these territories for the big mining, energy, touristic, etc. projects of imperialism, the big bourgeoisie and landowners; dispossession of the peasants’ land and of the territory of the minorities. The armed conflicts in Africa, which the imperialists and their lackeys use to drive masses against masses, are directly linked to the struggle for land and territory.
The struggle of the proletariat is increasing all over the world, both the struggle for economic demands and strikes for wages, working hours and working conditions, and the struggle for the defence of won rights and political demands. Gigantic strikes in India, the biggest ever, struggles of the sanitary workers in Bulgaria for working conditions and wages, various kinds of struggles of the proletariat in China against the revisionist-social-imperialist bosses, such as the struggles of more than 200 million workers who have been driven out of the countryside by the revisionists to be cheap and “second class” labour force for the benefit of their native imperialist exploiters and the big monopolies of the other imperialist countries, the struggle of the car workers in Spain, of the ‘yellow vests’ and other workers in France, as well as the massive and violent anti-racist protests in the USA and all over the world. These are only a few examples of this struggle and in the face of the generalised attack of finance capital on the class in all countries huge battles are brewing. The political struggles of the masses, mainly proletarian, in Poland (where it is necessary to emphasise the outstanding role of women), as well as in other countries of Eastern and Central Europe, and the militant protests in the Spanish state where the anger of the masses is expressed for now in defence of the right of opinion and popular art, are examples that show the great activity of the masses, that all over the world the class is becoming more and more conscious and is going into action. The fact that, even in imperialist countries considered to be the most “stable” such as the Netherlands and Norway, massive militant mass struggles led by the proletarian youth have recently taken place, something that has not been experienced for more than four decades, shows that there is no place in the world where the masses are not rising up.
The petty bourgeoisie in all countries suffers hard blows in the crisis, millions of small shopkeepers are ruined, millions of owners of small shops and restaurants are deprived of everything, for the further accumulation and centralisation of capital for the benefit of the big monopolies generated by finance capital. Attacks on the intelligentsia are redoubled, either by direct attacks on freedom of expression or by the imposition of the metaphysical doctrines of post-modernism that go hand in hand with medieval obscurantism in advocating extreme idealism. Students are robbed of years of schooling, only to have no job prospects. Millions and millions of children have lost access to school education, even in the imperialist nations where the myth of “social equality” was once again blown away, because their families do not have the financial resources to afford a computer. The people’s women suffer the hardest from the crisis, they are the ones who do the dangerous jobs in the health sector, they are the ones who lose their jobs first, they are the ones who are in charge of the increased domestic work, they suffer the increase of patriarchal violence and, as if all this was not enough, their rights, such as the right to abortion, are under attack in several countries. Immigrants and ethnic minorities are the most likely to die from the virus and receive the least medical care, lose their jobs and their small but vital monthly contributions to their families in their home countries cannot be sent home, radically increasing the misery of the masses, as well as increasing discrimination and racist persecution. This is how it is for every sector of the masses, more oppression and exploitation. Thus their explosiveness, their clamour for revolution is increasing.
The imperialist aggression against the oppressed nations increases the national resistance and encourages wars of national liberation. The oppressed nations are the spoils for the imperialists. In their competition with each other the imperialists unleash wars of plunder, whether through direct aggression like the growing intervention in the Sahel or through puppet wars like in the Caucasus or Yemen, to control resources and markets by over-exploitation. No matter how much they crush the peoples, as in the case of the heroic people of Palestine, they cannot stop their struggle for liberation; the only thing they reap are new waves of fighters for national liberation struggle, and the result of the current assault will not be any different. In Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the national problem is getting more acute and even in Western Europe it is gaining more weight, as in Catalonia or Scotland, and the persistence of the armed actions of the Irish people shows that despite all the betrayal, nothing can stop the clamour of their anti-imperialist struggles.
The masses all over the world are crying for revolution. It is up to the communists to organise and lead them so that they express their full transformative capacity and so that there will be no force in the world capable of containing them.
The Leadership of the Communist Parties is Necessary
For the clamour of the masses to bear fruit, for their gigantic unorganised force to be channelled into an organised force capable of turning the world upside down, a force capable of organising and leading the struggle of the oppressed and exploited masses is needed. That force is the vanguard of the proletariat, the Communist Party. That is a historical truth and it is enough to see the case of how China, the “old and sick man” of Asia, divided and subjugated by imperialism, backward, humiliated and prostituted by decadent landlords and bureaucratic capitalists, traitors of its own people, was able to pass, in a few years, from this miserable condition of semi-colony/semi-feudalism to a powerful socialist state where the masses of the people reached the highest heights humanity has ever reached.
The first Condition was the Existence of the Communist Party
On July 1, 1921, the Communist Party of China (CPCh) was founded in Shanghai. It was the inevitable fruit of the development of the revolutionary proletarian movement in the country and the application of the ideology of the proletariat in that movement, brought to China by the thunder of the guns of the October Revolution. With the founding of the CPCh, the course of the revolution and the history of the country were changed. At the beginning it was still a weak force, but by gathering the best sons and daughters of the people, it began to walk and emerged from its midst Chairman Mao Tsetung as the head of the Party and the Chinese Revolution, who creatively applied the Marxism of his time, Marxism-Leninism, to the concrete conditions of the revolution in his country and under the guidance of a just and correct ideological and political line, built, in the midst of the class struggle and the two-line struggle, the instruments of the revolution: The Communist Party, the revolutionary army and the united front; the first being the leader, the second the main one and the third indispensable in the construction of the new power and in uniting the people against their oppressors. Applying Marxism to solve the concrete problems of the Chinese revolution, at the head of the CPCh, Chairman Mao developed the theory of People’s War, with which he defeated imperialism and its lackeys and thus came to endow the communists of the world, for the first time, with a military doctrine of their own – the highest known in world history. The CPCh, under the leadership of Chairman Mao, went on to build a vigorous socialist state, where the masses were masters of their own destiny and mobilised to eradicate hunger, poverty, illiteracy and every plague of the old society. It was a hard struggle and it took place in turbulent and stormy waters but the great helmsman, Chairman Mao, knew how to navigate and maintain the course of the revolution, in the midst of internal struggles in the CPCh against those who argued that the easy road should be sought by making pacts with imperialism. When revisionism usurped power in the first socialist state, the Soviet Union, Chairman Mao waged the struggle against those in the CPCh who wanted to follow the baton of those who seemed to be the strongest at the time and united the communists of the world in rejecting capitulation to imperialism and in persisting in the world proletarian revolution. Drawing conclusions from the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, he launched the greatest transformative mass movement ever seen, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), to overthrow the capitalist roaders within the CPCh, to empower the dictatorship of the proletariat and to continue the revolution, with a profound ideological struggle aimed at changing the soul and sweeping away the egoism that is the source of all reactionarism and nutrition for revisionism. This colossal deed shook the whole world and Marxism reached a third, new and higher stage, Maoism; hence to be a Marxist today means to be a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist.
After the death of Chairman Mao, the right wing in the CPCh, led by Teng Siao-Ping, staged an anti-communist counter-revolutionary coup and transformed the CPCh into a revisionist party and the socialist state into a social-imperialist state under fascist rule which is China today. This does not deny Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, but it clearly proves that everything Chairman Mao had established about the struggle in the Party and the class struggle in socialism is fully valid and that the task of the true communists in China is to storm heavens again, and that today the task of the communists there is first of all to reconstitute the glorious CPCh.
The history of the CPCh gives us very valuable lessons and we think that we should celebrate the centenary of its founding to deepen the understanding of those valuable lessons, because if we take them correctly they illuminate the path we should follow.
In most countries today we have a situation similar to that of China before the foundation of the CPCh, there are no Communist Parties, because they were destroyed by revisionism, and what we have to do is to reconstitute them. This is born out of the development of the revolutionary proletarian movement in each country and the application of the ideology of the proletariat, today Maoism, to that movement. This process has made very notable advances in recent years and what we must do is to push it forward even further, learning from the most advanced experiences of our class.
The Road to Liberation is People’s War
The most advanced detachments in the International Communist Movement are the Communist Parties that are leading People’s Wars in Peru, India, Turkey and the Philippines. These People’s Wars are torches of hope, red flags proclaiming the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. They give courage to all the oppressed and exploited, they inspire millions upon millions to combat and resist against imperialism, world reaction and revisionism of all kinds. They show the way and call upon the communists in the world, especially the new generations who are enrolling in the ranks of the iron legions of the international proletariat, to go to the deepest and broadest masses to organise their clamour for revolution.
It is a law of history that violence is the accoucheuse of the new society. The imperialists and their lackeys, those dying parasites, will never surrender power to the proletariat and the people voluntarily. They have shown that they are capable of any crime, willing to commit genocide after genocide, in order to maintain their system of oppression and exploitation. They want to drown any popular uprising in blood. That is why we, communists and revolutionaries, have to apply revolutionary violence with all firmness to overthrow them, and that is the way of People’s War. Without this there is no place for us in this world, without this humanity will never achieve its emancipation. So we must forge ourselves for People’s War and reconstitute our Communist Parties where there are none, as machines of combat, develop with actions the militarisation of the existing Parties and serve those who lead People’s Wars to leap forward by overcoming the problems and difficulties that prevent their further development, and this we can only do by firmly taking up Maoism and applying it in a creative way to the concrete conditions of each revolution by solving the new problems that arise.
Revisionism, as the front guard of the bourgeoisie within the class, is the main enemy of the International Communist Movement; it is the Trojan horse, the fifth column, with which imperialism and its lackeys try to “conquer the fortress from within”. They are the traitors who have sided with the enemy. Like snakes they try to deceive and demoralise the communists, the proletariat and the people, presenting their poison as if it were the nectar of the gods that will save us from all evils. They claim that “the character of the revolution has changed”, denying the democratic revolution, to go on to say that “the parliament must be used to accumulate forces”, that “amnesty” must be sought from the old state, to “solve the problems of the Party”, as it is the case of the rats of the revisionist and capitulationist Right Opportunist Line (ROL, now a separate party called “Movadef”), when the only way forward in the People’s War in Peru is to apply Gonzalo Thought to solve the new problems with more People’s War. In Turkey such barbarities are going on and, as in Peru, they do not stop until the communists and revolutionaries are exposed, there it is clear that the only way is to follow the path traced by Kaypakaya and to apply Maoism to solve the new problems. In India and the Philippines, too, there are those who call for capitulation but the advance of the revolution there also depends on how the communists apply Maoism to solve the problems they face, today to take the leap to the stage of Strategic Equilibrium. The historical parenthesis of Avakian and the traitor Prachanda, who tried to deceive us that Maoism was “obsolete” in the case of the former and that instead of People’s War “fusion theory” should be applied in the case of the latter, we know how both have ended up, Avakian as an open supporter of Biden and Prachanda as the slayer of the revolution in Nepal.
Revisionism is a vanity of the bourgeoisie in the ranks of the proletariat, it is a tail of Chinese and Russian imperialism and in the Third World countries it supports the bureaucratic faction of the big bourgeoisie, mainly, and disarticulates the popular struggle, drags the masses into inter-bourgeois struggles (between bureaucratic and comprador bourgeoisie) and in this way it suppresses the rebellion in these countries.
The advance of the revolution in India and the Philippines crushes those who call for capitulation and there too it depends on how the communists apply Maoism to solve the problems they face today, to make the leap to the stage of Strategic Equilibrium. Thus, forging ourselves in revolutionary violence and the struggle against revisionism is indispensable to serve the development of the world proletarian revolution, to serve the advancement of the ongoing People’s Wars, to serve the initiation of more People’s Wars which is the only road to liberation. In this we must unite more and struggle side by side as communists and revolutionaries in the world.
Unite under the Red Banner of Maoism!
What we are living in today is a time of war, there is a developing, uneven but growing revolutionary situation all over the world and the masses are clamouring for revolution, a fact that defines the main political trend. We are in the first phase of the deepest crisis of the imperialist world system since the “Great Depression” of the last century. The great uprisings of the masses will increase, the struggle of the proletariat and the peoples of the world will advance in tremendous waves of rebellion and the crisis of bourgeois democracy will deepen more and more, the imperialists and their lackeys cannot rule as they have done so far. The objective conditions for the advance of the world proletarian revolution are magnificent. We communists in the world, the Maoists, must struggle to respond to the demands of the hour, to rise to the task and advance boldly. We need to concentrate our forces on serving the development of the ongoing People’s Wars, the beginning of many more, and for the reconstitution of the Communist Parties to open the path for the new period of revolutions. That is why it is indispensable that we assume the role of the International Communist Movement struggling to put Maoism as the sole command and guidance of the world revolution, striving hard to unify ourselves under its principles.
Through the struggle of two lines, criticism and sincere self-criticism, the Unified International Maoist Conference (UIMC) and the New International Organisation of the Proletariat (NIOP), which will emerge from it, is an irreplaceable step on the road, it is a historic necessity for us to make the required leap. If we communists are not able to unite, we will never be able to fulfil our historic mission and therefore it will not happen. Unity emerges through struggle and all of us who are for the struggle on the basis of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to serve the world proletarian revolution know that it is a difficult and complex task, but this is what we are made for.
All that exists in this world is matter in motion, stability is always relative, the struggle, the transformation is constant, the old world will disappear and under the victorious red banners with the hammer and sickle the new one will be born. It is up to us to storm the heavens.
Glory to the international proletariat – Long live May Day!
Long live Maoism – Crush revisionism!
Long Live the 1st Centenary of the Founding of the Communist Party of China!
Forward to the Unified International Maoist Conference and the New International Organisation of the Proletariat!
Victory to the People’s Wars!
Signatures:
Communist Party of Peru
Communist Party of Turkey / Marxist-Leninist
Communist Party of Brazil (Red Faction)
Communist Group (Maoist), China
Revolutionary Nucleus for the Reconstitution of the Communist Party of Mexico (NR-PCM)
Irish Socialist Republicans
Committee Red Flag – FRG
Red Faction of the Communist Party of Chile
Committees for the foundation of the (Maoist) Communist Party of Austria
Serve the People – Communist League of Norway
Committee for the Reconstitution of the Communist Party of the United States
Communist Party of France – Red Faction
Maoist Committee Finland
Communist Party of Ecuador – Red Sun
Communist Party of Colombia (Red Faction)
Committee for the Construction of the maoist Communist Party of Galicia
Red Wave (Denmark)
Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Party Organisation (Proletarian Power), Columbia
Committee to Reconstitute the Communist Party of Great Britain
May Day 2021
