International Commission – PCm Italy – “Do you see” – A hysterical attack to the Maoist Communist Party of Italy which has nothing to do with the the two-lines-struggle
“Do you see” – A hysterical attack to the Maoist Communist Party of Italy which has nothing to do with the the two-lines-struggle
On 26/05/2022 the editorial staff of the International Communist web-site (IC) published a document entitled “Do you see? Some critical notes on the declaration of May 1st 2022 of the CP (m) of Italy”1.
All coherent communists (MLMs) welcome any criticism, but it is good to remember what the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist movement means by “criticism” and in this particular case we remind the IC comrades the words of Chairman Mao:
“… in inner-Party criticism, guard against subjectivism, arbitrariness and the vulgarization of criticism; statements should be based on facts and criticism should centre on politics”2.
The document of the IC comrades, instead of a criticism of this kind, is a concentrate of insults, subjective judgments, arbitrary and vulgar criticisms, falsehood, without a precise political purpose except to attack our party, as we will show later.
The document turns out to be an “improved” version of the letter shortly before sent to our Party by one of the parties belonging the fraction gathered around IC, in which the attacks against us were expressed in even more hysterical tones, reason why our party did not respond.
On April 19, 2022, we had already publicly noted in “On the Necessary Development of the Two-lines-struggle on the War in Ukraine“3, that IC, while criticizing our party and our stands on the Ukraine issue, lacked to publish the documents on this issue on their web-site, differently form Maoist Road, which instead had published the statements of all the MLM Parties and Organizations. Few days later, on April 30, 2022, IC announced the opening of the section “Tribune of Debate” on their website, concerning the debate on the Unified Maoist International Conference (UMIC); then we clung to the illusion that our criticism had been received; indeed in this section the comrades still do not provide an objective view of the ongoing debate and two-lines-struggle, they select and publish only some documents and not all of them. For example, despite that in the above mentioned letter we were blamed for not having taken a stand on the UMIC and not contributing to the two-lines-struggle on this subject, since the May 31, 2022 -when we published our “Some critical notes on ‘For a Unified Maoist International Conference! ‘- Proposal…”4– to the date, the so-called “Tribune of Debate” did not publish it, although other documents of other Parties and Organizations have been published there after that date -certainly not an oversight.
Let us now go to the content of the criticism of the comrades, who point out four alleged deviations of our party before launching into quite questionable accusations as well as final insults we do not feel useful to even comment on.
First, they blame us for using “What Is to be done?” by Lenin against the subsequent Mao’s developments of party theory, we are blamed for using Lenin against Mao with “the sinister attempt” to:
“turn back, i.e. negate Marxism in one of its very key questions, disorientating the developing new forces and spread confusion in the ranks of the ICM, homaging and praising immobilism not progress. Do you see?”.
The blamed sentence of our May Day statement is the following, quoted as follows by the comrades:
“This year marks the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s” What is to be done? “, A theoretical weapon given to us by the great master of the world socialist revolution to build Communist parties, today Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, as an advanced detachment of the working class, a war machine and a necessary guide to make proletarian revolution in every country.
[…]
Lenin demonstrated with the victory of the Socialist October Revolution that this is the only way to transform the imperialist war into a socialist revolution. “
The comrades omitted from the original text the following sentence:
“Without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary party. Without revolutionary party, no revolution.“
As well as they omit the sentence immediately following the one they quoted:
“And today more than ever this is the watchword that we must transform into a guide for action in the current conditions of the imperialist system in crisis that is marching towards a third world imperialist war.
Mao taught us:
‘the means to oppose a war of this kind is to do everything possible to prevent it before it breaks out, but once it has broken out we must oppose the war with the war, oppose the unjust war with the just war whenever possible’ (Mao on the protracted war, May 1938)”.
It is fully evident from our writing that by revolutionary theory we mean the Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, including the Mao’s developments on the party related to the other two revolutionary instruments (the United Front and the People’s Army). For any reader in good faith who knows our writings (and the comrades do), it is also clear, by reading the complete quotation, that there is no opposition between the contributions of Lenin and those of Mao in our statement. Indeed, it is in well known that our party uphold the strategy of the People’s War in the imperialist countries and that it has always fought the mechanical repetition of the “October’s Way” even within the RIM. The only way is the construction of the Communist Party as the vanguard of the working class that, by means of revolutionary violence, leads the oppressed people’s masses to the seizure of political power in the given conditions of each country and contextualized in its developments (read: Marxism-Leninism-Maoims plus the revolutionary experiences, today the People’s Wars).
In order to “prove” our alleged bad faith in the use of Lenin, the comrades recur, as often happens, to a long quotation of the chairman Gonzalo and the Communist Party of Peru and then conclude:
“This should be standard in the International Communist Movement. Moreover, Chairman Gonzalo and the CPP with the all-embracing understanding of Maoism and by and with its application in the People’s War developed especially the concentric construction, the militarization of the Communist Party and that the party reflects the omnipotence of the proletariat, leading absolute everything – its own construction, the construction of the red army and the proletarian dictatorship.“
And continuing they claim with arrogance:
“Do you, Italian comrades, have comments, remarks, observations in this question? Do you agree or oppose? Are you aware of this at all?”
The problem is that the IC comrades identify the contributions of Chairman Mao with the interpretation of them given by the chairman Gonzalo and consider the latter “universally valid”. They identify MLM as “MLM mainly Maoism with the universal contributions of President Gonzalo” and it would include such “standards” which, according to them, should be adopted by the Communist International Movement.
We remind the comrades of IC that “the standards in the International Communist Movement” are not established by our subjective desires but by the concrete and objective experience synthesized by the highest development of our ideology, MLM with at its peak the experience of the Communist Party of China and the Chinese masses in the GCPR. All this has already been synthesized by Chairman Mao in his writings and not by Chairman Gonzalo and the PCP, who instead creatively applied MLM to the concrete reality of Peru, particularly through the launch and development of the People’s War. In addition, some standards can also be established in a conjunctural way by the most advanced subjective force of the ICM itself, as long as they are not in contradiction with MLM.
The point is: how to define what is the most advanced subjective force established based on objective criteria? In the aftermath of October Revolution it was evident: the only party in power had such a responsibility. After the Chinese Revolution and the raise to power of revisionism in the USSR, it was just as easy to understand who should play this role. In the current stage, with not any Communist Party in power, such standards should be collectively established in an appropriate venue (a large and representative International Conference of MLM parties and organizations, or an International Organization as large and representative as the RIM could have been before its collapse). In this context, the parties leading People’s Wars and therefore having condensed a higher understanding than the others should be particularly taken into consideration. These parties are today the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the Communist Party of the Philippines, which lead the People’s Wars and the TKP / ML which leads an armed struggle in the path of the People’s War.
Thus, it seems to us that the Parties and the organizations expression of IC are not in a position to establish what such supposed standards of the ICM are or not: to speak like them reflects only an arrogant form of subjectivism.
Regarding the second alleged deviation: the comrades criticize us because in our May Day statement we referred to Ukraine as a “puppet country”. First of all, the “real deviation” is, on the one hand and, to attribute to Mao the “theory of the three worlds” and, on the other hand, to consider Ukraine a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country, as IC comrades do to argue their criticism (on this, we refer to our above mentioned writing on Ukraine, where we have already criticized the anti-MLM analysis made by IC on Ukraine).
The definition we have given may be simplistic, but not in the sense that the comrades mean: we consider Ukraine a capitalist country whose reactionary and oligarchic bourgeoisie is allied to US/ EU and NATO imperialism. In this sense, it is not a “puppet” but an ally of this imperialist bloc, obviously, taking into account the different level of development and the uneven balance of power. We therefore confirm our general analysis that currently the main contradiction in Ukraine is that of the inter-imperialist clash in the general trend towards World War III.
The third equally alleged deviation is put forward in total bad faith, blaming us for reversing the priorities in an opportunistic way, as stated in the following sentence of our declaration:
“The keys of the tasks of the Communists are the support to the ongoing people’s wars in the world and the constitution/construction of the Communist Parties for New Democratic and Socialist revolutions, according to the conditions of each country.”
Here the comrades run a shell game, selecting only the last three lines of the paragraph, omitting the whole initial part. Let us read the complete part:
“On this May 1st, it is necessary to intensify the class struggle against own governments and states throughout the world, to unite all forms of struggle of the proletarians and popular masses in the objectives necessary for the resistance of the masses and to leverage them for transformation into evolutionary struggle.
The fundamental tools for this struggle are the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Communist Party, the United Front of the proletarians and the popular masses, the Combat Forces5, so that in the course of the development of the struggle the class war, revolutionary war, people’s war progresses up to the ‘insurrection.
The keys of the tasks of the Communists are the support of the ongoing people’s wars in the world and the constitution/construction of the Communist Parties for New Democratic and Socialist revolutions, according to the conditions of each country. “
In the part we underlined it is clear that we point out as the first internationalist task to develop the revolutionary struggle in each country starting from one’s own. What we emphasized later, in the sentence excerpted out of its context by IC, the internationalist support to People’s Wars, goes hand in hand with the first internationalist task.
How is it possible to speak of criticism and two-lines-struggle when an evident mystification of the real positions of our party is carried out for the sole purpose of attacking us?
The fourth deviation of our party criticized by IC would be to have pointed out revisionism as the main enemy of the ICM (we wrote the “main ally of the bourgeoisie”) while for the comrades it is Yankee imperialism. We think that for the goal of constitution and reconstitution of MLM Communist Parties the main enemy is “internal”, it is revisionism in all its rightist but also “leftist” variants; on the latter, to the comrades of IC, who “intrigued” put forward rhetorical questions in their document, we answer: yes, dear comrades, you have really understood correctly, specific and detailed documents will be reserved to this issue in the development of the current two-lines-struggle.
Furthermore, it is very unusual that in the previous documents of the fraction headed by IC it is equally stated that the main internal enemy is revisionism, and when the same stand is put forward by our party, IC attacks us on this.
This leads us to believe it is further confirmation that the purpose of their writing is not to develop a genuine criticism and two-lines-struggle but a sterile attack.
It is also meaningful that immediately afterwards, in the same sentence, the comrades are able to combine the insult with the claim of giving lessons in communist morality:
“Are you really this kind of weak and anxious loosers, basing two-line-struggle on babbling crap, intrigues and lies, scared to death by truth and debate? Comrades, that is not a communist attitude.“
On the other hand, the whole document, starting from its title, has a scorning tone spiced up by insults in a crescendo in which, after the mentioned points, in the final part of the document, beside the insults, there are unacceptable accusations at the limits of hysteria to which they add paranoid arguments disguised as “respect for security” that denote the confusion and unclearness that some Parties and Organizations of IC have about the difference between legal and illegal work.
In particular, among the accusations made against us we mention:
1) That of having “usurped” the ICSPWI (International Committee to Support People’s War in India), when we were the founders and organizers until today, together with all the other committees and forces that want to help to advance the support to the People’s War in India. On the quite debatable accusation of having “manipulated” the assessment of the campaigns, we say to the comrades: let us stick to Chairman Gonzalo’s words: “let the actions speak!”. The actions carried out in the various countries are clearly self-evident, determining the “hierarchy” of their importance: it is evident that to organize Indian immigrants in a protest at the Indian Consulate in Milan is more important for the campaign than spreading a leaflet or writing on a wall and this criterion is not established by us but it is objectively understandable as well as having been explicitly indicated by the PCI(M)!
In the past, for example, when the comrades of Cebraspo organized a demonstration at an Indian consulate, to it was given more importance in that specific campaign at that time. This is how ICSPWI works: without a personalist or subjectivist attitude.
Furthermore, beyond the published report, the photos, videos and information of the actions are all published not only on the site of the ICSPWI, the only website that collects them all, but by the individual sites of the individual support committees, Parties and Organizations. Anyone can objectively evaluate what is being done with the support of the masses and with the participation of the masses or not. On the other hand, the CPI (M) has fully shared such a report by publishing it in the latest issue of People’s March, or do the comrades of IC want to accuse the CPI (M) of not having autonomous instruments to evaluating the events of the class struggle and of the international campaign in support of itself, believing once again to be the only ones to be able to set the standards?
2) We are accused of opportunistically supporting the People’s Wars from time to time, when for the support of them over the years we have aroused the attention of the repressive apparatuses and the mass media of the Italian imperialist bourgeoisie who have set up campaigns of criminalization and in prticular for the support of the People’s Wars in Peru and Nepal. For us, these are medals and awards of our work that are worth 1000 times more than the speculations of IC.
3) Being the comrades of IC severely affected by subjectivism and idealism, they accuse us for wanting to “eliminate with a stroke of the pen” the People’s War in Peru. For the comrades, what exists in their minds also exists in reality and not vice versa. If it is possible to have news of armed actions and in general of the People’s Wars in India, the Philippines and Turkey and of the parties that lead them, for some years now there has been no news of the actual existence of the People’s War in Peru or of the Communist Party of Peru. The desire of every revolutionary that a defeat never happened in Peru (as well as in Nepal) cannot replace the harsh reality of the facts. We cannot uphold something that does not exist, this is dialectical materialism, comrades, deal wth it! What is useful to the ICM, as Marxism (Marx in particular) teaches us, is, on the one hand, to understand the defeat and, on the other hand, to start over even when everything seems lost (as Gramsci said). We wish that the revolutionaries in Peru re-found the Communist Party of Peru and resume the path of the People’s War, strengthened by experience and having assimilated the positive experiences and taking stock of the temporary defeat of the People’s War.
This is evident for any coherent MLM, but perhaps the fraction of IC has an interest in “keeping artificially alive” the People’s War in Peru for their own purposes and being trafficker with a People’s War that does not exist and with a Communist Party of Peru whose sources have been unknown for years, in order to attribute a certain authority to themselves, establishing an erroneous equivalence between a generated organism now devoid of any authority (the so-called MPP) and the generating organism and “transforming” the first into the second with the same mystifying method with which their “criticisms” are written.
The insults contained at the end of the document do not even deserve to be commented on.
Such a style and above all the substance of the arguments contained in “Do you see?” are alien to a critical confrontation, even harsh and tight, among comrades and communist organizations. If the aim of the criticism and the two-lines-struggle the is to expose mistakes and shortcomings, being motivated by the ultimate and higher goal of collectively advancing in the class struggle against the enemy, we do not understand how such false and defamatory statements, not supported by valid arguments, can be at the service of this goal.
IC claims to be the “red fraction” of the ICM, not only having not currently the objective possibility of being it, as we already wrote at the beginning of this document, not only by expressing positions alien to MLM, as we tried to demonstrate in our critical document “Some critical notes on ‘For a Unified Maoist International Conference! ‘- Proposal…’” but not even using a sincere revolutionary method of criticism.
Despite this, this grouping is under the illusion of being able to impose its own subjective interpretations of MLM and of the elaboration of Presidente Gonzalo as a “standard” for the ICM: this is a deviation, if the comrades dot not correct it with genuine self-criticism, it risk to worsen and to converge with the neo-revisionism of Avakian’s RCP US and his “New Synthesis”, who, with a similar attitude, claims to be at the helm of the ICM even if this ideology did not spring from any revolutionary practice, that is, from any People’s War.
International Commission – PCm Italy
1See: https://ci-ic.org/blog/2022/05/27/do-you-see/
Here the statement by MCP Italy: https://maoistroad.blogspot.com/2022/04/may-day-2022-declaration-of-pc-maoist.html
2On correcting mistaken ideas in the party, 1929
3See: https://maoistroad.blogspot.com/2022/04/brevenota-critica-sobre-nuestra.html
4See: https://maoistroad.blogspot.com/2022/05/for-debate-and-two-lines-struggle-some.html
5As it can be seen, in this statement there is an understanding of the developments of the Party and its relationship with the other two revolutionary instruments as theorized by Mao.