Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!

LONG LIVE THE XL ANNIVERSARY OF THE INVINCIBLE PEOPLE’S WAR IN PERU!
UPHOLD THE UNIVERSAL VALIDITY OF THE PEOPLE’S WAR, MILITARY THEORY OF THE INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAT!

“In a period of civil war the ideal party of the proletariat is a fighting party. [...] In a period when the class struggle has become accentuated to the point of civil war, Social-Democrats must make it their duty not only to participate but also to play the leading role in this civil war. The Social-Democrats must train and prepare their organisations to be really able to act as a belligerent side which does not miss a single opportunity of inflicting damage on the enemy's forces.”

(V.I. Lenin – Guerrilla Warfare)

“According to the Marxist theory of the state, the army is the chief component of state power. Whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army. Some people ridicule us as advocates of the "omnipotence of war". Yes, we are advocates of the omnipotence of revolutionary war; that is good, not bad, it is Marxist. The guns of the Russian Communist Party created socialism. We shall create a democratic republic. Experience in the class struggle in the era of imperialism teaches us that it is only by the power of the gun that the working class and the labouring masses can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed.”

(Chairman Mao Tse-tung – Problems of War and Strategy)

“On May 17, 1980, the People’s War in Peru was initiated. It 'was a defiant political blow of transcendental significance, deploying rebellious red flags and hoisting hammers and sickles, that proclaimed: ‘It is right to rebel’ and ‘Power grows from the barrel of a gun.’ It called the people, especially the poor peasantry, to stand up in arms, to light the bonfire and to shake the Andes, to write the new history in the fields and hidden features of our tumultuous landscape, to tear down the rotten walls of the oppressive order, to conquer the summits, to storm the heavens with guns to open the new dawn. The beginnings were modest, almost without modern weapons. Combat was given, it was advanced and it was built from the small to the large and from the weak material and initial fire came the great turbulent fire and mighty roar that grows, sowing revolution and exploding into ever more impetuous People’s War.”

(PCP – Military Line)

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the initiation of the invincible people’s war in Peru, the Peru People’s Movement, generated organ for the Party work abroad, expresses its firm, conscious, voluntary and unconditional salute and subjection to our Great Leadership Chairman Gonzalo, center of Party unity and guarantee of triumph until communism; to our ideology Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Gonzalo Thought, principally Gonzalo Thought; to the heroic combatant the Communist Party of Peru, its Central Committee and its whole system of Party leadership. Likewise we express our salute and subjection to the Basis of Party Unity; the ideology, the Program and the General Political Line with its center the Military Line, and to the 1st Party Congress, the III Plenum and the Masterful Speech of Chairman Gonzalo. We solemnly salute the People’s Liberation Army, the backbone of the New Power, and to all the combatants and masses who are examples before the world in giving one’s life for the Party and the revolution.

The initiation of the people’s war in Peru on May 17th 1980 marks a milestone and a decisive leap not only for the Peruvian proletariat and people, but for the whole international proletariat and the oppressed peoples of the world. This Initiation of the Armed Struggle, ILA80, and then the development of the people’s war in Peru produces a historic leap in the development of the International Communist Movement, decisive for the definition of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism, as the third, new and higher stage of Marxism and for the implacable struggle against revisionism on world level. Today, the PCP continues to lead the people’s war omnimodally under the complex conditions of the bend in the road, continuing the process of the reorganization of the Party and mobilizing and leading the masses to retake what was lost in struggle to the death against the revisionist and opportunist lines, the revisionist and capitulationist ROL and the LOL with its armed revisionism. The experience of the PCP and the people’s war in Peru is a shining and powerful example of the necessity of the militarized vanguard of the proletariat in order to maintain the course of the revolution; and today the Party continues to maintain the course by applying Gonzalo Thought to solve the new problems under complex conditions.

Under the Great Leadership of Chairman Gonzalo, the Party was reconstituted as a Party of the new type, a Party that is militarized for its central task of preparing, initiating and developing the people’s war in order to conquer the power in the whole country, culminate the democratic revolution, without any interruption proceed with it as socialist revolution and then continue with proletarian cultural revolutions until our final goal, the forever golden communism – all with people’s war. In this way, the Party was simultaneously forged to assume its role as red faction of the International Communist Movement, driving forward and leading the struggle against revisionism on world level; crushing the new revisionism of Avakian and Prachanda and today continuing the struggle against every convergence and conciliation with it.

Today, millions of workers and peasants in the world, inspired and guided by the people’s war in Peru, develop their heroic struggles to sweep away this rotten system of exploitation and oppression, imperialism. On every continent there are communists who are for assuming and applying Maoism and build or reconstitute their Parties by learning from Chairman Gonzalo and the PCP; and the armed struggles and people’s wars are developing under the banner of Maoism in India, in Turkey and in Philippines in the midst of a life-or-death struggle against revisionism within and outside the Communist Parties.

As part of this struggle, the Communist Party of Peru together with the Marxist-Leninist-Maoists of the world uphold and defend steadfastly the universal validity of the people’s war, the highest military theory of the international proletariat, that is valid for all types of countries, oppressed and imperialist. The rejection and questioning of its universal validity is one of the central positions of revisionism in general, and particularly of the new revisionism with a “Maoist” label.

Denying the universal validity of the people’s war – defining it simply as a “peasant war” in order to deny its validity in the imperialist countries – is a revisionist position fundamentally connected to reformism. Like all revisionists, the followers of Avakian (and some who today converge or conciliate with them) put forward “first convince the majority of the population, then make the revolution”; thus portraying themselves as “revolutionaries” but in reality denying the principle that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun”:

“’First let the majority of the population, while private property still exists, i.e., while the rule and yoke of capital still exist, express themselves in favour of the party of the proletariat and only then can and should the party take power’ - so say the petty-bourgeois democrats who call themselves socialists but who are in reality the servitors of the bourgeoisie.
    ‘Let the revolutionary proletariat first overthrow the bourgeoisie, break the yoke of capital, and smash the bourgeois state apparatus, then the victorious proletariat will be able rapidly to gain the sympathy and support of the majority of the non-proletarian working people by satisfying their needs at the expense of the exploiters’ - say we.”

(V.I. Lenin – The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1919)

We reaffirm ourselves in the position of our Party, the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist position, that with the people’s war we develop the revolutionary situation and prepare the insurrection: “the very development of the bases, the development of the People’s Guerrilla Army and of the people’s war, will generate the greater impulse and unfolding of the revolutionary situation.” (Interview with Chairman Gonzalo).

We emphasize what Chairman Gonzalo established about the four fundamental points to keep in mind in order to carry out the people’s war: 1) The ideology of the proletariat, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, which must be specified in a guiding thought, 2) the need for a Communist Party to lead the people’s war, 3) defining the road of the revolution and 4) support bases or new power. We call the communists of the world to unmask and crush the revisionist politics of “making people’s war without building the new power”, as we have seen in Nepal. Chairman Gonzalo teaches us: “We see the question of war this way: the war has two aspects, one of destruction and one of construction; construction is the main one, and to not see it in this way is to undermine the revolution, to weaken it.” (Ibid.)

We also emphasize the indispensable importance of the implacable struggle against revisionism for the initiation, the development and the triumph of the people’s war. If we learn the lessons of the whole world proletarian revolution, and today especially of the people’s wars of the last 40 years, they confirm overwhelmingly the Marxist truth that revisionism is the main danger for the revolution. Every leap, every step forward in the people’s war will generate its opposition, its revisionist and opportunist lines or positions, and without defeating and crushing them, mobilizing the militants and the masses against revisionism, it is not possible to bring the revolution to victory. We call all the communists to follow the example of Chairman Gonzalo and the PCP, reject conciliation and liberalism and firmly take up the struggle against revisionism with rectification campaigns, the Central Committee being the eye of the storm in this struggle.

Finally, today when three imperialist superpowers – Yankee imperialism, Russian imperialism and Chinese imperialism – and the other imperialists and their lackeys try to save their dying system and get out of their general and final crisis through a new redivision of the world, preparing for a new imperialist world war, we once more reaffirm ourselves in the position of Chairman Gonzalo and our Party: that “the world people’s war is the main form of struggle that the proletariat and the oppressed peoples must uphold to counter the imperialist world war”. Hence the urgent need to build or reconstitute the Communist Parties – Marxist-Leninist-Maoist and militarized – in each country to prepare, initiate and develop the people’s war, applying it to the specific conditions of each country, because we are in the strategic offensive of the world proletarian revolution, and imperialism finds itself in its general and final crisis, within the “50 to a 100 years” in which imperialism and world reaction will be swept away and we enter the period in which the proletariat will establish and consolidate its power, continuing the march with people’s war until communism.

LONG LIVE THE XL ANNIVERSARY OF THE PEOPLE’S WAR IN PERU!
LONG LIVE CHAIRMAN GONZALO AND HIS ALL-POWERFUL THOUGHT!
PEOPLE’S WAR UNTIL COMMUNISM!

Peru People’s Movement
May 17th 2020