THE MASSES REBEL

Several days in a row, the masses engaged in heroic combative protests in several cities and proletarian neighborhoods across Sweden, targeting the police and a touring circus of fascist clowns. So far, the masses have fought in Linköping, Norrköping, Stockholm, Örebro, Landskrona and Malmö.

The Danish-Swedish fascist clown Rasmus Paludan, leader of the Danish party “Stram Kurs”, and his circus accomplices has embarked on a tour around Sweden this eastern to propagate imperialist chauvinism, racism and fascism, and to burn the Quran. This with the de facto blessing of the Swedish state through the de jour “permission” as well as police protection. A decision which surely must be a bitter one for their running dogs, the police. They are fearing for their lives, as they have become the target of the rage and fury of the masses. They are desperate to escape the wrath of the masses, and this is made evident by the fact that the Swedish police on the 20^th of April, after days of riots, announced they would file charges against Paludan for burning the Quran.

The fascists has been prevented or disrupted from holding their demonstrations. The masses has jumped the barricades and hurled rocks. They have dismantled police barricades and erected their own. They have seized police equipment. They have seized, smashed and burnt police cars. Fireworks has been shot at the police. Several police has been hospitalized. The police, despicable, reactionary and cowardly as they are, has opened fire on the masses, and in Norrköping, the police shot and wounded three people on the 17^th of April.

“Stram Kurs” is espousing the banning of Islam and the deportation of all Muslims, clearly revealing their fascist character. The banning of Islam would essentially mean the abolition of freedom of religion, and, in essence, encroach upon freedom of conviction, of thought and belief. The deportation of Muslims would be an impossible gray area, which essentially would amount to the deportation of people from the Middle East, Asia and Africa – and this can only pave the way for one thing; an ethnostate. Make no mistake, it is not religion they are criticizing. Under the guise of “criticism of religion” they are espousing imperialist chauvinism and racism against people from the oppressed nations, particularly from the Middle East. In the past few years, a similar touring circus has also taken place in Norway, calling itself “SIAN” (“Stop the Islamization of Norway”), and there too, the fascists and police has been met with combative protest.

The masses turn to all kinds of obscurantism in the face of the desperation and hopelessness. In the absence of the hope we ought to give them. As Marx said: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”ⁱ Subsequently, the degree of devotion to obscurantism has a tendency to correlate with the degree of exploitation and oppression, and specifically in the oppressed countries, this is must be seen in relation with the semi-feudal nature of bureaucratic capitalism.

Masses from the oppressed nations are fleeing the heavy burden of the three mountains: imperialism, semi-feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism. They are fleeing wars and turmoil instigated by imperialism and their lackeys. They are fleeing the poverty that arises from imperialist exploitation. So they take their chances, the risks, in hopes of a better life in the imperialist countries. They often embark on unfathomable journeys, facing unprecedented hardships, often risking human trafficking or death. All this, to most often end up in the lowest ranks of the proletariat in the imperialist countries, in the lowest paid jobs, in proletarian neighborhoods severely stigmatized by the bourgeois media, repeatedly harassed by police – and the icing of the cake: a fascist gets the blessing of the state of come to their neighborhood and spit them in their face – burning the Quran and, simultaneously and symbolically for the masses in question, also their hope.

In a report from Norrköping and Linköping, published on the website of Kommunistiska Föreningen, the comrades write: “The brave people of Skäggetorps and Navestad were completely justified in their response to the fascist action. The police got what they deserved for protecting and supporting the fascists. The bourgeois media is using the incident to reinforce its racist propaganda. They believe that the response that the police and the fascists received for their actions is unacceptable. That violence has no place in a democracy. Even the Minister of Justice sided with the fascists. … The brave people of Beardtorp and Navestad have understood this. They understand whose side the state and the police are on. They understand that fascism cannot be fought with passivity, but only by putting their foot down and strike hard against fascism. They ought to be praised for this. Through their actions they managed to put an end to the Koran burning in Norrköping, and they proved the truth that all reactionaries are paper tigers.”ⁱⁱ

It is obvious, but worth noting that it is not just masses that are direct target of the harassment that are fighting the fascists. The deepest and broadest masses hate fascism, particularly when it rears its disgusting face in their very own neighborhood. “Stram Kurs” has in fact deliberately targeted the neighborhoods where the deepest and broadest masses live, typically areas where a large portion, if not the majority, comes from an immigrant background. This to provoke the masses, and to use this in an attempt to “prove” that multiculturalism does not work, and finally that immigration is the problem. The police, who are already hated by the deep and broadest masses, has essentially posed themselves on the side of the fascists, and thereby become the ultimate and greater target of the struggle of the masses. But this is not the only reason – it is perhaps the straw that broke the camels back.

Correlating with the cyclical crisis of overproduction, and the general crisis of imperialism, which is in an advanced stage of decay, pauperism has been on the rise globally, and Sweden is no exception; In fact, the disparity between the rich and poor in Sweden has returned to the same level as it was in 1940ⁱⁱⁱ. In Sweden, the richest 10% own 78% of the income of the households, and the richest 1% own 42%^iv. Sweden also has the highest rate of relative child poverty of the Nordic countries, in which one in five children are estimated to grow up in poverty^v. This is felt particularly strongly in the proletarian neighborhoods, the proletarian suburbs. The site of the fiercest battles.

We see more and more the crushing of the fallacy of the “peaceful developed countries”, a perception that is prevalent with regards to European countries in general, but especially with regards to the Nordic countries. In the Nordic countries, this lie is used as fuel for the most deceitful nationalism propagated especially by the social chauvinists. The “welfare state” is generally spoken the confession that the system of wage labor itself cannot nurture its own slaves, because the loans are not enough to reproduce the workforce, so welfare is needed. It is also used merely as a fraudulent bourgeois term for what is actually, on the one hand, merely concessions of the bourgeoisie, acquired through decades of fierce class struggle, as well also through the indirect pressure of the ebbs and flows of the class struggle in the neighboring countries. On the other hand, it is also, as Lenin taught us, the crumbs of the imperialist superprofits acquired through the blood, sweat and tears of the toiling masses in the oppressed nations, used to cultivate opportunism in the imperialist countries by bribing a strata of the population, the labor aristocracy, and through this attempt to put a poke in the wheel of the class struggle. This manifests itself in “bourgeois labor parties”, and affiliated yellow unions. Lenin tells us that this is “inevitable and typical in all imperialist countries; but in view of the desperate struggle they are waging for the division of spoils it is improbable that such a party can prevail for long in a number of countries. For the trusts, the financial oligarchy, high prices, etc., while enabling the bribery of a handful in the top layers, are increasingly oppressing, crushing, ruining and torturing the mass of the proletariat and the semi-proletariat.”^vi The so-called “peaceful developed countries” are no different in character than any other capitalist, imperialist states; they are also the class dictatorships of the monopoly bourgeoisie.

The Netherlands is often also typically regarded as one of the “progressive” and “peaceful developed countries”. But also here, a decisive blow was dealt to this fallacy; just 5 months ago, during the wave of protests against the corporativist so-called “corona-restrictions”, the police opened fire on the masses, wounding three. Now, once again, as the struggle of the masses are met with the bullets of the reaction, this time in the “peaceful social democratic paradise of Scandinavia”. It is overdue to bury this fallacy once and for all. Moreover, it yet again demonstrates a question of vital importance, which is senseless to deny any longer: They are shooting the people. We are living in war times.

The National Police Commissioner Anders Thornberg, attempting to discredit the struggle of the masses, claimed that it is actually merely the attacks of criminal gangs against the rule of law and democracy. Jimmie Åkesson, the leader of the “Sweden Democrats” – the third largest party in the Swedish parliament, contradicted this narrative by stating that “There were gang criminals there, but there were also everything from elderly ladies to small children who helped throw stones.” The motivations of Åkesson for stating there are obviously in no way honest and noble, for he seeks to exploit the courageous combativeness of the masses of all walks of life to fuel imperialist chauvinism by portraying people from the oppressed nations as barbaric in nature and thereby to “justify” restriction of immigration.

Moreover, the “Sweden Democrats” has exploited the rebellion of the masses as a pretext to promote corporativization and militarization. They have put forth a 30 point program which proposes the passing of all-round reactionary legislation that among other things would: introduce the possibility of imposing state of emergency and curfews; expand the arsenal and armament of the police; the employing of AI-technology, surveillance cameras and data gathering for the mapping of individuals in “problem areas”, i.e. in the proletarian neighborhoods; introduce the possibility to withdraw social benefits for families that has not “adapted” or “integrated properly”; the ability to withdraw the residence permits of entire families depending on the “seriousness of the crime committed”; and perhaps most strikingly, a higher possibility of, and lower threshold for, the involvement of the military to support the police in upholding the monopoly on violence.

For decades, the so-called “welfare state” in the Nordic countries has been in a state of decay, and are being gradually dismantled. The concessions from the bourgeoisie conquered by the masses through struggle are being gradually decreased or removed. The conquests of the masses will be lost in the next crisis, as Marx thought us, and moreover if the masses do not combat and resist they will loose even more. Meanwhile, the renewed struggle of the masses is being exploited by the reaction as a pretext to further reactionarization, corporativization and militarization. This is characteristic of the epoch in which we live – imperialism, which today is in an advanced state of decay. It is rotting, festering. Consequently, we see that the general crisis of imperialism is continuously deepening.

On the one hand, the militarization of the reaction must be seen as a bracing for the storm to come, and in vain hopes of consolidating their power which is becoming increasingly more impossible in light of the sharpening of contradictions, the crisis in parlamentarism, the rebelliousness of the masses and revolution being the main trend in the world – the latter being the principle aspect. This has become a global tendency, which reaffirms that the conditions for revolution are excellent, and is characteristic of the Strategic Offensive of the World Proletarian Revolution. In the document “Let’s Develop the Growing Popular Protest!” the Communist Party of Peru writes that “Lenin defined what is a revolutionary situation, what are objective conditions of the revolution and synthesized them in two: 1) that those below do not want to continue living as before and 2) that those above cannot continue to administer and govern as before”

On the other hand: the imperialist powers are sharpening their sables, plotting, scheming, with the ultimate ambitions of engaging in direct contention for the repartition of the spoils that is the oppressed nations. As Lenin taught us, this is an inevitability, a law of imperialism. Militarization serves these ends. The particularities and the role of the Nordic countries in this question is outlined in a joint Finnish-Norwegian statement titled “Fight Militarization of the Nordic States” (April 21, 2022) in which they write: “all the Nordic imperialist states, without exception, are militarizing and increasing their collusion to advance their common interests, serving the Yankee objectives … This way “our” imperialisms in the Nordic countries hope to gain something for themselves, as scavengers on what the Yankees prey. At the same time … there is no real unity among thieves, only collusion based on common interests and contention inside it. The collusion is relative, the competition is absolute. On this basis their plans are condemned to fail.”

In the Construction Line of its General Political Line, the Communist Party of Peru writes “We see how reaction militarizes itself more and more, militarizating the old States, their economy, developing wars and aggression, trafficking with the struggles of the peoples and aiming at a world war, since revolution is the main tendency in the world, the task of the Communist Parties is to raise revolution making reality the main form of struggle: The People’s War”

“Chairman Gonzalo set forth the militarization of the Communist Parties and the concentric building 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 need to lead the People’s War as the main form of struggle that will generate the new State.” Therefore, the militarization of the Communist Parties is the key for the democratic revolution, the socialist revolution and the cultural revolutions.”

“The militarization of the Party has precedents in Lenin and Chairman Mao, but it is a new problem developed by Chairman Gonzalo taking into account the new circumstance of the class struggle and we must realize that new problems will arise which will be solved through experience. … It is the militarization of the Party which has enabled us to initiate and develop the People’s War; and we consider that this experience has universal validity, for that reason, it is required and necessary for the Communist Parties of the world to militarize themselves.”

The third world is the storm center of the World Proletarian Revolution, and we can see that a mighty storm is brewing. We’re seeing a new high tide of national liberation struggle developing. This is all a part of the new great wave of World Proletarian Revolution that is developing, that is starting to unfold. In the World Proletarian Revolution there are two currents: the international proletarian movement, which is the command, and the national liberation movement, which is the base. In the imperialist countries we see that the deepest and broadest masses, the masses with background from the oppressed nations, and also particularly proletarian youth, are yearning for struggle. They are throwing themselves head first into it.

As Chairman Mao pointed out, young people are full of vigour, and are “the most active and vital force in society. They are the most eager to learn and the least conservative in their thinking”^vii, and so are most often, as we see again and again throughout history and throughout the world, the first to clamor for, the first to reach out for, vital and creative Marxism. Today that is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, with the universally valid contributions of Chairman Gonzalo – the ideology of the proletariat in the epoch of imperialism in it’s advanced stage of decay, the ideology of the proletariat in the Strategic Offensive of the World Proletarian Revolution.

The deepest and broadest masses are permeated with hatred for the reaction, the bourgeois state and it’s running dogs. The masses are rebelling with vigorous spirit – they are clamoring for leadership. As Chairman Gonzalo put it: “Since ancient times the masses live subject to oppression and exploitation, but they have always rebelled. This is a long and inexhaustible history . . . From the beginning, since the masses have fought their oppressors they have always clamored for organizing their rebellion, their arming, their uprising, that it be led, that it be conducted. It has always been this way and it shall continue to be so.”^viii

We know that the comrades will assume their historical task. This task will not be short of trials and tribulations – it never is. Like Chairman Mao said: “While the road ahead is tortuous, the future is bright.”^ix We are however confident that the comrades will overcome and succeed. We know they will. For we are condemned to win. It is not in the absence of adversity, but through it, that cadres will be forged. Cadres capable of constituting or reconstituting the Communist Party, today necessarily as a militarized Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Communist Party, and ultimately initiating and waging People’s War, building the new power and establishing through the socialist revolution the dictatorship of the proletariat, followed by great proletarian cultural revolutions and people’s war until our final goal: Communism. Let the struggle of the masses be an impulse to this struggle.

Dare to struggle, dare to win!

It is right to rebel!

The masses are the makers of history!

Use the struggle of the masses as an impulse to the struggle for the constitution and reconstitution of the Communist Parties!

iThe Introduction of “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, 1843

iiKommunistiska Föreningen: “Rapport: Norrköping och Linköping: Fascisterna och deras beskyddare fick vad de förtjänade“, April 18^th (Original in Swedish. The citation is our unofficial translation)

iii“Kapitalet, överheten och alla vi andra” by Göran Thernborn, 2018

ivIbid.

vUnited Nations / Förenta Nationerna: “Sverige högst barnfattigdom i Norden”

vi “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism”, 1916

viiIntroductory note to “A Youth Shock Brigade of the No. 9 Agricultural Producers’ Co-operative in Hsinping Township, Chungshan County ” (1955), The Socialist Upsurge in China’s Countryside, Chinese ed., Vol. III. – As cited from Quotations from Chairman Mao

viiiThe General Political Line of the Communist Party of Peru, The Mass Line, 1988

ixMao Tse-tung, “On the ten mayor relationships”, 1956, SW Vol. 5