Australian TV on India's Maoist Movement

From Dandakaranya, the epicentre of Indian revolution...

People of the Shining Path - An Old Documentary on Peru

This film provides a sympathetic look at the Peruvian revolution and the Peruvian Communist Party before Presidente Gonzalo's capture.

Chairman Gonzalo's Speech from the Cage

It was in 1992, Chairman Gonzalo, the leader of Shining Path was arrested by American puppet Fujimori's army. After arresting Gonzalo they attempted to mock him by putting him into a tiger cage and dressing him into prisoner clothes. Despite this attempted mockery, Gonzalo made an extremely powerful speech. Following this the People's War in Peru intensified. However later the Fujimore regime succeeded in crushing Shing Path. Of late, some reports suggests that the Shining Path is attempting to regroup.

Comrades of the Communist Party of Peru! Combatants of the People's Guerrilla Army! Peruvian People!

We are living historic moments, each of us must be clear that this is the case, let us not fool ourselves. In these moments we should mobilize all forces to confront difficulties and continue accomplishing our tasks and conquering our goals, successes and victory! That is what we must do.

We are here as children of the people and we are struggling in these trenches, it is also about combat, and we do it because we are Communists, because here we defend the interests of the people, the principles of the party, the People's War. That is why we do it, we are doing it and will continue to do it!

We are here in these circumstances. Some think this is a great defeat. They are dreaming and we tell them to keep on dreaming! It is simply a bend, nothing more, a bend in the road. The road is long and we shall arrive. We shall triumph. You shall see it. You shall see it.

We should continue the tasks established by the III Plenum of the Central Committee. A glorious Plenum. You should know that these accords are already being implemented and that will continue. We shall continue applying the IV Plan of Strategic Development of the People's War to Conquer Power, we shall continue developing the VI Military Plan to Build the Conquest of Power, that will continue, that is our task. We shall carry it out because of what we are and because of the obligation we have with the proletariat and the people.

We clearly say that today the democratic road has begun to develop as a road of liberation, as a road of people's liberation, that is the circumstance in which we are developing. We should think with great historic sense, we must stop closing our eyes. Let us look at reality, let us look at the history of Peru. Let us look at the last three centuries of Peru. We should think about it. Look at the l8th century, look at the l9th century, look at the 20th century and understand them! Those who don't understand them are going to be blind and the blind don't serve the country, they don't serve Peru.

We believe that the l8th century was a very clear lesson. Think about this. There was a dominator. It was Spain and where did that bloodsucking domination bring us? To a very deep crisis, as a consequence of which Peru was divided. From there come the origins of today's Bolivia. It is not our question but facts.

Fine, the last century, English domination. Where did this take us in it's rivalry with France? To another big Crisis: 70 of the past century. The result? War with Chile. We must not forget it. And what happened? We lost territory. Our nation suffers defeat despite the blood shed by heroes and the people. We must learn from this!

The 20th century. How are we doing? In the 20th century we are dominated by imperialism, principally North American, this is real, everyone knows it. And where has it bought us? Without remembering the l920's, here and now, to the worst crisis of the entire history of the Peruvian people. Learning the lesson of past centuries, what can we think? Once more the nation is at risk. It can easily be lost, and by interests. This is the situation, this is where they have brought us. But we have a fact, a Peruvian revolution, a people's war, and it is, and will continue to advance. Where have we gotten with this? To a strategic equilibrium. And we must understand this well. It is strategic equilibrium which solidifies itself in an essential situation. What have 12 years served for? To plainly show before the world and principally before the Peruvian people, that the Peruvian state, the old Peruvian state, is a paper tiger that is rotten to the core. That has been proven!

Things being that way, let us think of the danger that the nation, that the country, can be divided, that the nation is at risk. They want to dismember it, they want to divide it. Who wants to do this? As always, the imperialists, those who exploit, those who rule. And what should we do? What is our task now? It is appropriate that we push forward the people's liberation movement and that we develop it through the people's war because the people, always the people, have been the ones who defend the country, who have defended the nation.

It is time to form a People's Liberation Front, it is time to form and develop a People's Liberation Army from the People's Guerrilla Army. That is what we must do and we shall do it! That is what we are doing and that is what we shall do. You gentlemen shall be witnesses.

Finally now, listen to this. As we see in the world, Maoism is marching unstoppably to lead the new wave of world proletarian revolution. Listen well and understand. Those who have ears, use them. Those who have understanding -- and we all have it -- use it! Enough of this nonsense. Enough of these obscurities. Let us understand this. What is unfolding in the world? What do we need? We need Maoism to be incarnated and it is being incarnated and that this generate communist parties to manage, to lead this new great wave of the world proletarian revolution that is coming.

Everything they told us, the empty and silly chatter of the famous "new age of peace." Where is it now? What about Yugoslavia? What about other places? Everything became politicized, that is a lie. Today there is one reality, the same contenders of the First and Second World War are preparing a Third World War. We should know this and we, as the children of an oppressed nation, are part of the booty. We cannot consent to this! Enough imperialist exploitation! We must finish with them! We are of the third world and the third world is the base of the world proletarian revolution, with one condition, that the Communist parties brandish and lead! That is what we must do!

We believe the following. Next year will be the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Chairman Mao. We must celebrate these l00 years and we are organizing it with the Communist parties. We want a new manner, a celebration which will be the conscious comprehension of the importance of Chairman Mao in the world revolution and we shall begin the celebration this year and we shall finish it the next. It will be a grand process of celebration. I want to take advantage of this opportunity to salute the international proletariat, the oppressed nations of the world and the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement.

THIS IS WHAT I WANT. AND: TO COMPLETE THE TASK WELL!

LONG LIVE THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF PERU!

THE PEOPLE'S WAR WILL INEVITABLY WIN!

WE SALUTE FROM HERE THE FUTURE BIRTH OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF PERU!

WE SAY: GLORY TO MARXISM-LENINISM-MAOISM. AND FINALLY WE SAY: HONOR AND GLORY TO THE PERUVIAN PEOPLE.

OPPOSE THE RAOGHAT RAILWAY LINE AND THE MINING PROJECT WHICH WOULD DE-RAIL THE VERY EXISTENCE OF BASTARIYA PEOPLE!

Bannedthought

COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MAOIST)

DANDAKARANYA SPECIAL ZONAL COMMITTEE

Press Release

June 7, 2011

OPPOSE THE RAOGHAT RAILWAY LINE AND THE MINING PROJECT WHICH WOULD DE-RAIL THE VERY EXISTENCE OF BASTARIYA PEOPLE!

CLAIM OF SAVING BHILAI STEEL PLANT IS NOTHING BUT TRICKERY!

ENSURING THE PLUNDER OF BASTAR'S WEALTH BY MULTI-NATIONAL COMPANIES IS REALITY!!

The moment when the process of deploying the Army in Bastar is just underway, the Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), one of the biggest Public Sector Units of India, has declared that the Raoghat mines would be privatized. These two acts not just coincided, but there was a conspiratorial coordination between them. Raoghat hills are located just 25 kilometers away from Narayanpur (in Maad region), a district headquarter town, where the Raman Singh government of Chhattisgarh has given permission to the Army to acquire 750 square kilometers (i.e. 185,250+ acres) of land. Now so many notorious MNCs will rush into this area to rob the iron ore which is known for its best quality. From one side, the Army and from other side, the corporate companies are trying to gulp down the whole Maad region which is the motherland of Mariaand Gond adivasis, the primitive tribal communities of Bastar.

In 2006, before the Raoghat project is commenced, some accusations were made against the management of BSP that it had illicitly leased out some of the deposits of Raoghat mines to Tata and NECO companies. People believed strongly that the BSP management was acting as paw in the hands of big business houses such as Tata, Essar, Jindal, NECO etc. But then it had cleverly managed it and stated that there was no such thing. But lately the chairperson of the SAIL, Chandrashekhar Verma himself has declared that they are going to privatize Raoghat mines and global tenders would be invited for this. (Source: Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar, May 24, 2011). With this, now the game of hide-and-seek is over! Intentions of the exploitative governments are very clear! With the neo-liberal policies dictated by the imperialist masters getting implemented so openly, the MNCs would capture not just Raoghat mines; they would even buy the BSP or buy the SAIL itself. The recent examples of POSCO, Vedanta etc. of other states also clearly indicate this trend.

It's believed that Raoghat hills are having 7.4 billion tonnes of iron ore which is known for finest quality with 62 percent Fe grade. BSP is supposed to excavate 511 million tonnes of iron ore. Construction of Dalli-Raoghat-Jagdalpur railway line is underway for this purpose. Government has already started grabbing the lands forcefully from the peasants between Dalli and Raoghat. But it's facing stiff resistance from the local people.

This project in fact is an old one. In 1992, government was forced to give up implementing this project due to massive protests of people. In Antagarh, ten thousand adivasis had taken a massive procession to register their strong opposition to the proposed mining project. But the state had responded with repressive methods as always happens. A police camp was set up on the top of these hills. That camp is still present there. Our Party has been actively supporting this just struggle.

Local people are opposing this project because 3,278 hectares of forests would completely be destroyed. Apart from this, large portions of adjoining forests would also be destroyed. River Mendhki and so many other streams flowing through the region would get polluted. The farming will be destroyed so much that it is difficult to quantify. Local people see these mountains as their cultural centers and ritual faith. After the opening up of the mines these will be buried for ever. Many environmentalists believe that environment and monsoon from the perspective of Bastar, Raoghat Mountains are extremely important. With Raoghat mining project the existence of 23 villages will immediately be endangered. Further, 13 villages of adivasis might be uprooted in Chargaon area, next to this mine proposed by a private company of NECO Jaiswaals. (And now if you add the proposed massive acquisition of land by the Army - bloated 750 square kilometers - you can't imagine that the existence of how many villages is going to disappear!)

On the issue of where to setup township for the proposed mines, an ugly tussle is going on amongst the business classes of Narayanpur and Antagarh. These selfish people do not worry at all about how many villages will be destroyed, how many thousands of tribals will be displaced, how much forest will be cut, how many rivers will be polluted and to what extent the tribal culture will be destroyed, when the mining work is started in this region. Overall, they don't bother about the oncoming destruction in this region. They are supporting the government's false claims of 'Bastar development' because they think that their own business will grow with this at the price of whatsoever.

Government still makes the argument in support of railway line and mine that the digging up of Raoghat mines is necessary as the mines of Dalli Rajhara which are supplying the raw material to the Bhilai steel plant are going to end up. It's making dubious propaganda that if the mining will not start in Raoghat, BSP could be stopped due to the scarcity of raw material, threatening the future of the thousands of BSP workers. Thus, such an environment is created that anybody dares to oppose Raoghat mine will immediately be labeled as 'anti-development'. In fact, in the guise of this promotion, the government and administration have put a veil over many realities.

Dalli town today is in a position of almost desolation only because of the wrong policies of the BSP, particularly of indiscriminate mechanization. All rivers and streams of this area have been badly polluted. In Dalli and several surrounding villages, as red dirt coming of mines and roads turned on to the fields of farming, and the farming has been fully destroyed. In Dalli where 16 thousand workers used to work earlier, today the number has decreased drastically to 1200. Can the businessmen of Narayanpur and Antagarh and the contractors sitting in Raipur and Jagdalpur give the guarantee that after 20-25 years this region will not become another Dalli?

If the government is really worried that the 'BSP will be closed if it won't get raw materials supply', then why doesn't it stop selling iron ore of Bailadilla mines to the multinational companies of Japan, China and Korea? In fact, many sponge iron factories in Raipur and Bhilai have closed due to lack of iron ore supplies. They appealed to the government several times for supply of raw material from Bailadilla for them and to stop selling the iron ore to foreign companies. Doesn't this prove that the interests of big and foreign capitalists are paramount for the spineless rulers of our country? Isn't the government's "concern" about the future of BSP workers just a pose? Isn't this just a ploy being adopted to deal with the opposition putting up against proposed the Raoghat mine?

We urge all the workers, employees and other people who are concerned with the future of the BSP, that they should recognize who actually is a threat to the BSP. In 1960s, when the Bhilai steel plant was founded, the annual production was 1.5 million tonnes and the number of workers was 95 thousand. Today, the production has been increased to 4.5 million tonnes, but the number of workers is reduced to less than 37 thousand. Contracting, mechanization and partial privatization process are in full swing in BSP. Many facilities for workers have been taken back. New recruitment and compassionate appointment is closed. BSP is planning to increase the production to 7.5 million tonnes by 2012-13, taking up further modernization and expansion. This means even more layoffs and 'retirements' of workers will take place. And even there is a talk of selling out of BSP to Tatas, Mittals or Jindals! BALCO experience is before us. Overall, the policies of imperialist globalization which have been implemented by governments are responsible for this situation. So, you must fight against the anti-worker and pro-capitalist policies of the governments to protect the BSP. You should not fell prey to the designs of the ruling classes to inflict destruction to the Jal-Jungle-Zameen by opening mines in another area. You should fight against this too. Entire people of Dandakaranya will support your struggles.

The Special Zonal Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) calls upon all the workers and farmers of Chhattisgarh and democratic and patriotic forces of our country to demand the closure of Raoghat project; to register their protest to mechanization, contracting and all other anti-worker policies being implemented in Bhilai steel plant and other industries; to demand to stop selling the high quality iron ore to the foreign companies from Bailadilla; to lend support to the people of Dandakaranya who are fighting for the right over their Jal-Jungle-Zameen; and to oppose the Army deployment in Bastar to suppress their just struggles.

(Gudsa Usendi)

Spokesperson

Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee

CPI (Maoist)

Indian Maoists on the Deployment of Army Troops to Tribal Forest

Bannedthought

COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MAOIST),

CENTRAL COMMITTEE:

Press release

• Deployment Of Army In The Name Of Training Schools Puts The Very Existence Of The Aborigines and Inhabitants Of Bastar In Peril!
• 
  
• Forest Belongs To The Indigenous People (Mulvasis) – The Government Doesn’t Have Any Right Over Even An Inch Of It!
• 
  
• Indian Army GO BACK – Do Not Kill Your Own Citizens!

While the Bastar adivasi peasants are readying themselves for the monsoons to till their lands so that they can feed their children and families throughout the year – unknown to them, silently and stealthily the central and state governments have completed the preparations for another kind of monsoons. These ‘monsoons’ do not rain droplets of water but bullets and shells, rockets and cannon balls and would irrigate their lands with the blood of children, women and men – young and old. These ‘monsoons’ promise a lifelong peace and prosperity. Peace it would – as peaceful as a graveyard could be and lifelong as their longing for life would come to an end. Of course, prosperity it would be – for the imperialists, their running dogs – the ruling classes of India, the corporate vultures, the MNC sharks, the great Indian extended family of the comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie i.e., the chief ministers, ministers, MLAs, MPs, IAS, IPS, IFS, bureaucrats etc as now they could lay their greedy hands on the immense wealth buried under this graveyard.

The home ministry says it wants to ‘clear, hold and build’ in the ‘Maoist areas.’ In our country words have long ago ceased to have their original meaning, for which they were created in the first place. Here is the new lexicon– ‘clear’ means massacres, mopping up or complete destruction of everything, ‘hold’ means a war of occupation and ‘build’ means absolute loot of people’s resources. All this ultimately results in reducing the people to a slave like existence complete with absolute surrender to the imperialist slave-owners and this has got its own word – ‘development’. And it is not just words, even institutions have changed their ‘supposed duties’ in our country (into their ‘actual duties’ for which they were created, in fact) – the government doesn’t look after the welfare of the people – it bends over backwards and crawls on its fours to protect the interests of those who exploit them; the judiciary doesn’t protect the rights of the people – it shows admirable adroitness in finding ways to deny them; the police think they are the ‘law’ and that ‘ordering around’ restores it; and the Indian Army with impeccable acumen finds ‘enemies’ in the dilapidated huts of poor adivasis, in the empty granaries of the bankrupt peasants or in the stench-filled bastis of workers and of course in every nook corner of Kashmir and North-East.

In the first week of June, a thousand-men strong iron heeled column marched its way to Bastar – physically that is. Because the Indian Army has been breathing down the necks of Bastar people in many more indirect ways since almost a decade. It has been an integral part of all the counter-insurgency operation plans formulated against the Maoists and has been training the mercenaries who do that job in hundreds. In just Narayanpur the land to be allotted for the Army (training school) amounts to 750 sq.kms while the talk is about three training schools and in three districts (Narayanpur, Bastar and Bilaspur). This is not counting the previous allotments to army and air-force.

‘Oh, no, don’t mistake us, all this is just for the training school, the army won’t enter into operations against Maoists, it is just to gain a psychological advantage over the Maoists, to tell them – ‘see a lion is sitting at your door!’ says the army. And pray – may the humble citizens ask His Excellency Herr Manmohan what this ‘training’ is for as it is he who with great insight discovered that Maoists were the biggest internal security threat? Who are you trying to fool? Only a fool would believe that this lion just sits there and roars instead of pouncing on us. Don’t forget, this is a man-eater on the prowl which has tasted human blood in Kashmir and North-East. Let us be very clear – this training is nothing else but counter-insurgency training ‘to fight the guerilla like a guerilla.’ Unable to contain the armed resistance of the most deprived people of Central and Eastern India through their police and paramilitary, the ruling classes of our country have now turned to the army whom they have been ‘grooming’ exactly for such purposes (read for wars on people). What is the need for another ‘training school’ when there are already so many? And more importantly, why in Central India?

It is as clear as daylight – it is no doubt a training school but it doesn’t stop with training, as soon as a batch finishes training it would be ready with its boots and helmets, guns and grenades on to be sent off to its destination to fight the Maoists, and it doesn’t cater just to Chhattisgarh but also to Maharashtra, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Western Ghats, West Bengal, Odisha and last but not least Andhra Pradesh. That explains the location of it.

Following the policy of ‘draining the water to catch the fish’, the central and state governments, with the close guidance of their mentors – the US imperialists – are implementing the ‘Low Intensity Conflict’ (LIC) strategy, applying it ‘creatively’ to the concrete conditions in India. This can be in such ‘indigenous forms’ like – in preparation for the deployment of army and ‘draining water’ – now Maad adivasis do not get to buy rice anywhere nearby their dwellings. They get them only from towns (and only in such quantities so that the Maoists do not take some rice from them) from shops which are actually police camps. Even the namesake schools from the hamlets are being shifted to pucca buildings on the road-side and would exist in the name of that hamlet which would be at least 60 to 100 kms away. Next the army would step in and ‘clear’ the forest of all inhabitants and herd them off to strategic hamlets which are a euphemism for concentration camps. At the higher level, the recent hobnobbing exercises of Indian and US ruling classes for ‘helping each other’ in Homeland Security were done in preparation for the crueler phase of this War on People – the Phase Two of the Operation Green Hunt as it is being called.

No people in this world without a land to claim as their own could wage battles against their enemies. The ruling classes know this truth more than anybody else and this is exactly what it is planning to do. In the name of training schools it is occupying thousands of square kilometers of land and in the name of strategic hamlets it is rendering the adivasis and forest dwellers homeless and everybody knows that forest IS their home. So, revolutionaries, democrats, civil rights activists and particularly the adivasi organizations must realize the whole conspiracy behind the smokescreen of army training schools. It is the need of the hour to assert loudly that Jal, Jungle and Jameen belongs to the indigenous people (Mulvasis) of Bastar, who represent one of the most ancient inhabitants of the world and to theMulvasis of Central and Eastern India.

True, the government must be questioned about land acquisition, throwing to wind all laws and regulations it has promulgated for adivasi areas (5^thschedule, PESA, Forest Rights act etc). Though posing a direct question about its not following its own rules is necessary, one must be careful not to give it legitimacy to occupy the forest ‘if it follows its rules’. In fact, a conspiracy is under way in the name of land acquisition act to hand over the land of the peasants in a ‘legal’ manner to the corporates. It would not result in any peaceful transfer of land from one hand to another but would remain a naked land-grabbing act which would never be implemented without shedding the blood of the peasants and without destroying their livelihoods. The first and foremost thing to be done is to declare that forest belongs to the Mulvasis and that they do not have any ‘elder brother’ named ‘government’ with whom they should share it!

As our party has been consistently saying and as even all genuine democrats have been expounding – all these operation green hunts and clear-hold-build policies are meant to loot the immense mineral wealth and other natural resources in Central and Eastern India. And for this they do not care if a whole community or a civilization is wiped out; it would just be a ‘collateral damage’ as taught by their ex-boss ‘Bush’ or their current master ‘Obama’.

The Central Committee of CPI (Maoist) calls upon the people of Bastar and Chhattisgarh to fight back the Indian Army as they had been fighting back the police, paramilitary and vigilante gangs like Salwa Judum to protect their lives and livelihoods, to secure the future of their children and to save their mother forest and one of the most ancient cultures of this world of which they are the proud inheritors.

Let the slogans – Forest belongs to the Mulvasis – Not an inch of it to the Sonias-Manmohans-Chidambarams and Raman Singhs, not to blood-sucking land grabbers masquerading as chief ministers and ministers, not to MNCs, not to Indian corporate sharks, not to mining mafias – reverberate in every corner of Central and Eastern India. Mobilize to the very last member in the family – children and elders, young and old, women and men with the slogan – Indian Army Go Back, do not kill your own citizens.

We have seen many offensives, but this new offensive using the army puts the very existence of the aborigines and inhabitants of the forests in Central and Eastern India in peril. It is a question of life and death. If we let them prevail, the consequences would be very bleak and may lead to many decades of dark years. Sacrifices and acts of bravery are not new to us. It is a specific characteristic of our history of struggle against colonial rule that the most consistent, continuous, militant armed struggles against the British colonialists were waged by the adivasis of this country. And some of the most glorious chapters in it belong to the Santhals and Bastar adivasis during the Santhal rebellions and Mahan Bhumkal of 1910 respectively. It is this struggle legacy from our fore fathers and mothers which we have to evoke now if we have to save everything that is precious to us, everything that is dear to our heart – everything that makes us breathe free. So let us fight the enemies of the people to the end. Let us fight back everything which seeks to reduce us to a slave-like existence in the name of ‘development’.

We appeal to all the revolutionary, democratic and patriotic organizations and particularly the adivasi organizations in India and abroad to raise your voice against the deployment of army in Central and Eastern India and do everything in your means to expose, to fight back and stop this war of the Indian government on its own citizens.

(Abhay)

Spokesperson,

Central Committee,

CPI (Maoist)

Arundhati Roy: I’m a Maoist Sympathizer, Not Ideologue

The Guardian

The Booker prize-winning novelist on her political activism in India, why she no longer condemns violent resistance – and why it doesn’t matter if she never writes a second novel

This is not an ideal beginning. I bump into Arundhati Roy as we are both heading for the loo in the foyer of the large building that houses her publisher Penguin’s offices. There are some authors, V S Naipaul say, with whom this could be awkward. But not Roy, who makes me feel instantly at ease. A few minutes later, her publicist settles us in a small, bare room. As we take our positions on either side of a narrow desk I liken it to an interrogation suite. But she says that in India, interrogation rooms are a good deal less salubrious than this.

Roy, who is 50 this year, is best known for her 1997 Booker prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, but for the past decade has been an increasingly vocal critic of the Indian state, attacking its policy towards Kashmir, the environmental destruction wrought by rapid development, the country’s nuclear weapons programme and corruption. As a prominent opponent of everything connected with globalisation, she is seeking to construct a “new modernity” based on sustainability and a defence of traditional ways of life.

Her new book, Broken Republic, brings together three essays about the Maoist guerrilla movement in the forests of central India that is resisting the government’s attempts to develop and mine land on which tribal people live. The central essay, Walking with the Comrades, is a brilliant piece of reportage, recounting three weeks she spent with the guerrillas in the forest. She must, I suggest, have been in great personal danger. “Everybody’s in great danger there, so you can’t go round feeling you are specially in danger,” she says in her pleasant, high-pitched voice. In any case, she says, the violence of bullets and torture are no greater than the violence of hunger and malnutrition, of vulnerable people feeling they’re under siege.

Her time with the guerrillas made a profound impression. She describes spending nights sleeping on the forest floor in a “thousand-star hotel”, applauds “the ferocity and grandeur of these poor people fighting back”, and says “being in the forest made me feel like there was enough space in my body for all my organs”. She detests glitzy, corporate, growth-obsessed modern Indian, and there in the forest she found a brief peace.

There is intense anger in the book, I say, implying that if she toned it down she might find a readier audience. “The anger is calibrated,” she insists. “It’s less than I actually feel.” But even so, her critics call her shrill. “That word ‘shrill’ is reserved for any expression of feeling. It’s all right for the establishment to be as shrill as it likes about annihilating people.”

Is her political engagement derived from her mother, Mary Roy, who set up a school for girls in Kerala and has a reputation as a women’s rights activist? “She’s not an activist,” says Roy. “I don’t know why people keep saying that. My mother is like a character who escaped from the set of a Fellini film.” She laughs at her own description. “She’s a whole performing universe of her own. Activists would run a mile from her because they could not deal with what she is.”

I want to talk more about Mary Roy – and eventually we do – but there’s one important point to clear up first. Guerrillas use violence, generally directed against the police and army, but sometimes causing injury and death to civilians caught in the crossfire. Does she condemn that violence? “I don’t condemn it any more,” she says. “If you’re an adivasi [tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.”

Her critics label her a Maoist sympathiser. Is she? “I am a Maoist sympathiser,” she says. “I’m not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism. But right now, when the assault is on, I feel they are very much part of the resistance that I support.”

Roy talks about the resistance as an “insurrection”; she makes India sound as if it’s ripe for a Chinese or Russian-style revolution. So how come we in the west don’t hear about these mini-wars? “I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers,” she says, “that they have instructions – ‘No negative news from India’ – because it’s an investment destination. So you don’t hear about it. But there is an insurrection, and it’s not just a Maoist insurrection. Everywhere in the country, people are fighting.” I find the suggestion that such an injunction exists – or that self-respecting journalists would accept it – ridiculous. Foreign reporting of India might well be lazy or myopic, but I don’t believe it’s corrupt.

She sounds like a member of a religious sect, I say, as if she has seen the light. “It’s a way of life, a way of thinking,” she replies without taking offence. “I know people in India, even the modern young people, understand that here is something that’s alive.” So why not give up the plush home in Delhi and the media appearances, and return to the forest? “I’d be more than happy to if I had to, but I would be a liability to them in the forest. The battles have to be fought in different ways. The military side is just one part of it. What I do is another part of the battle.”

I question her absolutism, her Manichaean view of the world, but I admire her courage. Her home has been pelted with stones; the Indian launch of Broken Republic was interrupted by pro-government demonstrators who stormed the stage; she may be charged with sedition for saying that Kashmiris should be given the right of self-determination. “They are trying to keep me destabilised,” she says. Does she feel threatened? “Anybody who says anything is in danger. Hundreds of people are in jail.”

Roy has likened writing fiction and polemic to the difference between dancing and walking. Does she not want to dance again? “Of course I do.” Is she working on a new novel? “I have been,” she says with a laugh, “but I don’t get much time to do it.” Does it bother her that the followup to The God of Small Things has been so long in coming? “I’m a highly unambitious person,” she says. “What does it matter if there is or isn’t a novel? I really don’t look at it that way. For me, nothing would have been worth not going into that forest.”

It’s hard to judge whether there will be a second novel. The God of Small Things drew so much on her own life – her charismatic but overbearing mother; a drunken tea-planter father whom her mother left when Roy was very young; her own departure from home in her late teens – that it may be a one-off, a book as much lived as written. She gives ambiguous answers about whether she expects a second novel to appear. On the one hand, she says she is engaged with the resistance movement and that it dominates her thoughts. But almost in the same breath she says others have “picked up the baton” and she would like to return to fiction, to dance again.

What is certain is that little of the second novel has so far been written. She prefers not to tell me what it is about; indeed, she says it would not be possible to pinpoint the theme. “I don’t have subjects. It’s not like I’m trying to write an anti-dam novel. Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything.” Has she been blocked by the pressure of having to follow up a Booker winner? “No,” she says. “We’re not children all wanting to come first in class and win prizes. It’s the pleasure of doing it. I don’t know whether it will be a good book, but I’m curious about how and what I will write after these journeys.”

Are her agent and publisher disappointed still to be waiting for the second novel? “They always knew there wasn’t going to be some novel-producing factory,” she says. “I was very clear about that. I don’t see the point. I did something. I enjoyed doing it. I’m doing something now. I’m living to the edges of my fingernails, using everything I have. It’s impossible for me to look at things politically or in any way as a project, to further my career. You’re injected directly into the blood of the places in which you’re living and what’s going on there.”

She has no financial need to write another novel. The God of Small Things, which sold more than 6m copies around the world, set her up for life, even though she has given much of the money away. She even spurned offers for the film rights, because she didn’t want anyone interpreting her book for the screen. “Every reader has a vision of it in their head,” she says, “and I didn’t want it to be one film.” She is strong-willed. Back in 1996, when The God of Small Things was being prepared for publication, she insisted on having control of the cover image because she didn’t want “a jacket with tigers and ladies in saris”. She is her indomitable mother’s daughter.

I insist she tell me more about her Fellini-esque mother. She is, says Roy, like an empress. She has a number of buttons beside her bed which, when you press them, emit different bird calls. Each call signals to one of her retinue what she requires. Has she been the centre of her daughter’s life? “No, she has been the centre of a lot of conflict in my life. She’s an extraordinary women, and when we are together I feel like we are two nuclear-armed states.” She laughs loudly. “We have to be a bit careful.”

To defuse the family tensions, Roy left home when she was 16 to study architecture in Delhi – even then she wanted to build a new world. She married a fellow student at the age of 17. “He was a very nice guy, but I didn’t take it seriously,” she says. In 1984 she met and married film-maker Pradip Krishen, and helped him bring up his two daughters by an earlier marriage. They now live separately, though she still refers to him as her “sweetheart”. So why separate? “My life is so crazy. There’s so much pressure and idiosyncrasy. I don’t have any establishment. I don’t have anyone to mediate between me and the world. It’s just based on instinct.” I think what she’s saying is that freedom matters more to her than anything else.

She chose not to have children because it would have impinged on that freedom. “For a long time I didn’t have the means to support them,” she says, “and once I did I thought I was too unreliable. So many of the women in India who are fighting these battles don’t have children, because anything can happen. You have to be light on your feet and light in your head. I like to be a mobile republic.”

Roy has in the past described herself as “a natural-born feminist”. What did she mean by that? “Because of my mother and the way I grew up without a father to look after me, you learned early on that rule number one was look out for yourself. Much of what I can do and say now comes from being independent at an early age.” Her mother was born into a wealthy, conservative Christian community in Kerala, but put herself outside the pale by marrying Ranjit Roy, a Hindu from West Bengal. When she returned to her home state after her divorce she had little money and was thus doubly marginalised. The mother eventually triumphed over all these obstacles and made a success of the school she founded, but growing up an outsider has left its mark on her daughter.

Roy says she has always been polemical, and points to her run-in with director Shekhar Kapur in the mid-1990s over his film Bandit Queen – she questioned whether he had the right to portray the rape of a living person on screen without that woman’s consent. It may be that the novel is the exception in a life of agitation, rather than the agitation an odd outcrop in a life of fiction-writing. But has she sacrificed too much for the struggle – the chance to dance, children, perhaps even her second marriage? “I don’t see any of these things as sacrifices,” she says. “They are positive choices. I feel surrounded by love, by excitement. They are not being done in some martyr-like way. When I was walking through the forest with the comrades, we were laughing all the time.”

Blazing Trail: A Journey Through the Indian Revolution

An awe inspiring video documentary from the Red areas of India. This film documents the emergence of the Indian revolutionary process, coming as it is in a world of struggle, mass upheaval, rebellion and revolution! This film includes footage of the Vietnamese people's defeat of the US imperialists, the victory and success of the Chinese People's Revolution and massive street rebellions shaking the citadels of imperialism. It shows the overall dialectical development of revolution, both in the oppressed and oppressor nations, shaking the imperialist system's foundations. Today in India, the communist forces are stronger, united within the Communist Party Of India (Maoist), leading the Indian revolution by developing People's War. A must own for anyone who is seriously considering a whole new world. This movie is a saga of heroism and sacrifice in the face of a brutal enemy masquarading as the World's "largest democracy", foundations are being laid for a New Democratic India.

Statement of Maoists of Afghanistan: “Forward towards Initiating and Carrying Forward the People’s Revolutionary War of National Resistance!”

Sholajawid.org

The actual pretext for America and its allies’ imperialist military onslaught to invade and occupy Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 was to kill or arrest Osama bin Laden, who was suspected as the real mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. During the past ten years of the war of aggression, and the presence of the occupying forces in Afghanistan that have continued under this pretext or others, tens of thousands of people have lost their lives and thousands of the poor huts of the wretched villagers have been destroyed.

But finally it became clear that bin Laden was not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan, close to this country’s capital, Islamabad, and beside the country’s biggest military training center––a training center for a military that is a vassal of the American imperialists and their allies. Apparently, a small group of 14 American special forces with three helicopters–and definitely with the close cooperation of the Pakistani armed forces–attacked bin Laden’s residence on the early morning of May 1, 2011 and killed him, along with one of his sons, and some of his close associates after a limited fire-fight. Immediately after this assault, Barack Obama announced the “American victory” with tympani and cockalorum.

American imperialists and their allies consider bin Laden’s death a big victory for themselves. Now they show off their power even more than before, pretending that no force can resist them. If we look at this claim from a short term tactical perspective then there is no doubt that it possesses some truth. They have eliminated one of America’s current “dangerous enemies” and so cannot avoid boasting about this victory. If we take a deeper look at this issue, however, the imperialists’ strategic weakness and fault can clearly be seen within their current tactical triumph.

First, it should be said that bin Laden was the product of their work: he was trained, organized and armed by them. His benefactors should have been able to easily eliminate such a rebellious one-time agent, just as the Soviet social-imperialists were easily able to eliminate Hafizullah Amin. Spending hundreds billions of dollars and enduring thousands of casualties in a prolonged effort, that stretched over a decade, just to kill a rebellious ex-agent cannot be a sign of strategic strength and power.
Over the past decade hundreds of al Qaeda operatives and leaders have been arrested or killed in Pakistan; the murder of bin Laden is the latest incident in a long process that no doubt will continue. And yet, all through this period–except from the start of the war on October 7, 2001 until the end of the operations in Tora Bora–very few of al Qaeda’s well-known leaders or operatives were killed or arrested in Afghanistan. Therefore, we can confidently say that the occupying forces in Afghanistan were not truly busy in directly combating al Qaeda. The murder of al Qaeda’s leader in Pakistan more than ever illustrates the fact that the decade-long presence of the invading and occupying imperialist forces in Afghanistan are not about the September 11, 2001 incident and in fighting against the leading organization of that incident and the leader of that organization. That accident was only used as an excuse and cover for the imperialist aggression and the occupation of Afghanistan.

Now after the death of bin Laden in Pakistan we can – and must – intensify and expand the struggle and resistance against the occupiers, specifically the struggle against the American imperialists’ plans for establishing permanent military bases in the country. Now the support for the struggle and resistance against occupiers can and must increase more than before, nationally and internationally, including in the public opinion within the imperialist countries.

Unquestionably, the murder of bin Laden will, to a certain extent, result in the global weakening of al Qaeda and the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. But this will be the weakening of the reactionary resistance against American imperialism and its allies. We should strive to use such a development in the service of expanding and strengthening the different forms of the national resistance and struggles centered on initiating and carrying forward the people’s revolutionary war of national resistance against the occupiers and their satraps in the country. Only then can we decrease the impact of bin Laden’s death in the outbreak of the national capitulationist tendencies within the ranks of the Taliban and only then we can intensify, broaden and deepen the resistance against the occupiers.

Down with imperialist occupiers and their puppet regime!

Forward towards Initiating and Carrying Forward the People’s Revolutionary War of National Resistance!

Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan

May 4, 2011

LCP Brazil demonstration in support of Indian Maoists

On May 1 in São Paulo, Brazil, the Liga dos camponeses pobres (League of poor peoples) led a demonstration in solidarity with the CPI(Maoist) and the adivasi peoples of India.

Our Word is our Weapon

SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS READS HIS WORK IN ENGLISH

We are the Zapatista National Liberation Army. For ten years, we lived in these mountains, preparing to fight a war. In these mountains, we built an army. Below, in the cities and plantations, we did not exist. Our lives were worth less than those of machines and animals. We were like stones, like weeds in the road...This is who we are..The voice that arms itself to be heard.The face that hides itself to be seen.The name that hides itself to be named. The red star who calls out to humanity and the world to be heard, to be seen, to be named..."

Bella Ciao by Chumbawamba

The world is waking outside my window
Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao
Drags my senses into the sunlight
For there are things that I must do
Wish me luck now, I have to leave you
Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao
With my friends now up to the city
We're going to shake the Gates of Hell
And I will tell them - we will tell them
Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao
That our sunlight is not for franchise
And wish the bastards drop down dead
Next time you see me I may be smiling
Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao
I'll be in prison or on the TV
I'll say, "the sunlight dragged me here!"

And here are the original lines...

One morning I woke up O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao One morning I woke up And I found the invader Oh partisan, carry me away, O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao Oh partisan, carry me away, For I feel I'm dying And if I die as a partisan O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao And if I die as a partisan You have to bury me But bury me up in the mountain O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao, But bury me up in the mountain Under the shadow of a beautiful flower And the people who will pass by O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao, And the people who will pass by Will say to me: "what a beautiful flower" This is the flower of the partisan O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao This is the flower of the partisan Who died for freedom

People want revolution, Proletarians want the Party of the Revolution, Communists want internationalism and a new international organization

This year’s May Day comes at a time of unprecedented protests and uprisings all around the world. In the Arab world and Persian Gulf, the youth, the proletarians and the broad masses took to the streets and toppled or tried to topple, one after the other, the dictatorial regimes subservient to imperialism.

In the heart of the imperialist countries, working class struggles, general strikes, rebellions of students and youth are opposing the policy of reactionary governments and the development of a modern fascism aimed at shifting the burden of the crisis on to the backs of the masses, bringing layoffs, job insecurity, intensification of exploitation and attacks on education, health care and basic social services.

Struggles and rebellions are ranging from China to the US, from Russia to Latin America. Particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq, imperialism, mainly U.S. imperialism, is suffering blows that prevent it from realizing its plans of occupation, invasion and geo-strategic control on important areas of the world. Its plans to sanctify Zionist occupation in Palestine through sell-out leaders have been checked.

People’s wars are the strategic reference for the proletarians and peoples of the world. The people’s war in India successfully withstands unprecedented attacks by the enemy and is able to expand and advance. The people’s war in Peru persists and recuperates. The people’s war in the Philippines advances. In Turkey, revolutionary struggles led by the Maoists advance along the people’s war strategy. In other countries of South Asia it is being prepared, for initiations and new advances.

In Nepal, 10 years of people’s war have created the conditions for the advancement of Nepali revolution. This revolution is now at a complex crossroads and must be supported against the counter-revolution waged by internal and external enemies as well as against the reformists who try to undermine it from within.

The protracted people’s war is necessary to defeat the enemy both in countries oppressed by imperialism and the imperialist countries themselves, according their own specificities. It represents a new and sharpening phase of the class struggle that expresses the revolutionary aspirations of the proletariat and the world peoples.

All this indicates that the main contradiction at the world level is that between imperialism and oppressed people, while the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and as well as inter-imperialist contradictions are sharpening. In the context of the spreading crisis, the revolution emerges more and more clearly as being the main trend in the current world.
The economic crisis of imperialism, far from being resolved, widens and deepens according to the laws of uneven development and as a result of the contention on the world market and the tendency towards a maximal extortion of surplus value. The “financialization” of the economy— the main immediate cause of the crisis — tends to reject any control. The use of surpluses from China’s, India’s and Brazil’s economies can’t ensure more than a temporary recovery, which opens the door to new and even more distressing crisis.

The struggling and uprising proletarians and popular masses demand the building of revolutionary parties at the height of the current clash of classes; and that process of organization is developing. We need communist parties based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism able to lead the class struggle in all fields and aimed at seizing the political power without which it is not possible for the proletarians to overthrow the capitalist and imperialist system. Maoist Communists strive to answer this need for a scientific and decided leadership for the proletarian class struggle, by fighting all kinds of revisionist, reformist and dogmatist deviations. Our class can rely on the huge amount of experience through 140 years of struggles and revolutions, from the birth of the Glorious Paris Commune through the peaks of the October Revolution, the Chinese revolution and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. We must learn from both our victories and defeats, as well as from our mistakes.
Within that wave of struggles, uprisings and people’s wars, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist communists should put proletarian internationalism into practice in order to unite proletarian struggles and those of the oppressed peoples against imperialism in crisis and remain firmly united with masse, as they make history.

Communists must achieve a new unity of the international communist movement based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and build the international organization that we need today.

Imperialism has no future!
The future belongs to communism!

• Communist Party of Bhutan (MLM)
• Communist Party of India (maoist)
• Communist Party of India (ML) Naxalbari
• maoist Communist Party, France
• maoist Communist Party, Italy
• Maoist Communist Party, Turkey and North Kurdistan
• Revolutionary Communist Party, Canada
• Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)
• Committee of People’s Struggle “Manolo Bello”, Galicia, Spain

Long Live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!

The 1993 Document of RIM

Introduction

In 1984, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement was founded, groupingtogether the nucleus of the Maoist revolutionaries the world over who weredetermined to carry forward the fight for a world without exploitation andoppression, without imperialism, a world in which the very division of societyinto classes will be overcome-the communist world of the future. Since theformation of our Movement we have continued to advance and today, on theoccasion of the Mao Tsetung Centenary, with a deep sense of our responsibility,we declare to the international proletariat and the oppressed masses of theworld that our guiding ideology is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

Our Movement was founded on the basis of the Declaration of the RevolutionaryInternationalist Movement adopted by the Second Conference ofMarxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations in 1984. The Declarationupholds the proletarian revolutionary ideology and on that basis in the mainit correctly addresses the tasks of the revolutionary communists in differentcountries and on a world scale, the history of the international communistmovement, and a number of other vital questions. Today we reaffirm theDeclaration as the solid foundation of our Movement upon which weare building a new clarity and deeper understanding of our ideology and themore solid unity of our Movement. The Declaration correctly stresses"Mao Tsetung's qualitative development of the science of Marxism-Leninism"and affirms that he raised it to "a new stage". However, the use of the term"Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought" in our Declaration reflecteda still incomplete understanding of this new stage. In the last nine yearsour Movement has been engaged in a long, rich and thoroughgoing discussionand struggle to more fully grasp Mao Tsetung's development of Marxism. Duringthis same period the parties and organisations of our Movement and RIM asa whole have been engaged in revolutionary struggle against imperialism andreaction. Most important has been the advanced experience of the People'sWar led by the Communist Party of Peru which has succeeded in mobilisingthe masses in their millions, sweeping aside the state in many parts of thecountry and establishing: the power of the workers and peasants in theseareas. These advances, in theory and practice, have enabled us to furtherdeepen our grasp of the proletarian ideology and on that basis take afar-reaching step, the recognition of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the new,third and higher stage of Marxism.

New, Third and Higher Stage of Marxism

Mao Tsetung elaborated many theses on a whole series of vital questions ofrevolution. But Maoism is not just the sum total of Mao's great contributions.It is the comprehensive and all-round development of Marxism-Leninism toa new and higher stage. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is an integral whole; itis the ideology of the proletariat synthesized and developed to new stages,from Marxism to Marxism-Leninism to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, by Karl Marx,V.I. Lenin and Mao Tsetung, on the basis of the experience of the proletariatand mankind in class struggle, the struggle for production and scientificexperiment. It is the invincible weapon which enables the proletariat tounderstand the world and change it through revolution. Marxism-Leninism-Maoismis a universally applicable, living and scientific ideology, constantlydeveloping and being further enriched through its application in makingrevolution as well as through the advance of human knowledge generally.Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is the enemy of all forms of revisionism and dogmatism.It is all powerful because it is true.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx first developed revolutionary communism almost 150 years ago. Withthe assistance of his close comrade-in-arms Frederick Engels, he developeda comprehensive philosophical system, dialectical materialism, and discoveredthe basic laws which shape human history.

Marx developed a science of political economy that revealed the exploitationof the proletariat and the inherent anarchy and contradictions of the capitalistmode of production. Karl Marx developed his revolutionary theory in closeconnection with and to serve the class struggle of the international proletariat.He built the First International and wrote, together with Engels, the CommunistManifesto with its resounding call "workers of all countries, unite!" Marxpaid great attention to and summed up the lessons of the Paris Commune of1871, the first great attempt of the proletariat to seize state power.
He armed the world proletariat with an understanding of its historic mission:seizing political power through revolution and using this power -- thedictatorship of the proletariat -- to transform social conditions until thevery basis for the cleavage of society into different classes is eliminated.
Marx led the struggle against the opportunists in the proletarian movementwho sought to confine the struggle of the workers to improving the conditionsof wage-slavery without challenging the existence of this slavery itself.
Together, the stand, viewpoint and method of Marx came to be called Marxism,and represents the first great milestone in the development of the ideologyof the proletariat.

V.I. Lenin

V.I. Lenin developed Marxism to a whole new stage in the course of leadingthe proletarian revolutionary movement in Russia and the struggle in theinternational communist movement against revisionism.
Among many other contributions, Lenin analysed the development of capitalismto its highest and final stage, imperialism. He showed that the world wasdivided between a handful of imperialist powers and the great majority, theoppressed nations and peoples, and showed that the imperialist powers wouldbe forced to go to war periodically to redivide the world amongst themselves.
Lenin described the era in which we live as the era of imperialism andproletarian revolution. Lenin developed the political party of a new type,the Communist Party, as the proletariat's indispensable tool for leadingthe revolutionary masses in the seizure of power.
Most importantly, Lenin raised the theory and practice of proletarian revolutionto a whole new level as he led the proletariat in seizing and consolidatingits political power, its revolutionary dictatorship, for the first time withthe victory of the October Revolution in formerly Tsarist Russia in 1917.
Lenin waged a life-and-death struggle against the revisionists of his daywithin the Second International who had betrayed the proletarian revolutionand had called on the workers to defend the interests of their imperialistmasters in World War I.
The "guns of October" and Lenin's struggle against revisionism further spreadthe communist movement throughout the world, uniting the struggles of theoppressed peoples with the world proletarian revolution, and the Third (orCommunist) International was formed.
Lenin's all-round and comprehensive development of Marxism represents thesecond great leap in the development of proletarian ideology.
After Lenin's death, Joseph Stalin defended the proletarian dictatorshipagainst enemies from within as well as from the imperialist invaders duringWorld War II, and carried forward the cause of socialist construction andtransformation in the Soviet Union. Stalin fought for the international communistmovement to recognise Marxism-Leninism as the second great milestone in thedevelopment of the proletarian ideology.

Mao Tsetung

Mao Tsetung developed Marxism-Leninism to a new and higher stage in the courseof his many decades of leading the Chinese Revolution, the worldwide struggleagainst modern revisionism and, most importantly, in finding in theory andpractice the method of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship ofthe proletariat to prevent the restoration of capitalism and continue theadvance toward communism. Mao Tsetung greatly developed all three componentparts of Marxism -- philosophy, political economy and scientific socialism.
Mao said, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Mao Tsetungcomprehensively developed the military science of the proletariat throughhis theory and practice of People's War. Mao taught that people, not weapons,are decisive in waging war. He pointed out that each class has its own specificforms of war with its specific character, goals and means. He remarked thatall military logic can be boiled down to the principle "you fight your way,I'll fight my way", and that the proletariat must forge military strategyand tactics which can bring into play its particular advantages, by unleashingand relying upon the initiative and enthusiasm of the revolutionary masses.

Mao established that the policy of winning base areas and systematicallyestablishing political power was key to unleashing the masses and developingthe armed strength of the people and the wavelike expansion of their politicalpower. He insisted on the need to lead the masses in carrying out revolutionarytransformations in base areas and to develop these politically, economicallyand culturally in the service of advancing revolutionary warfare.

Mao taught that the Party should control the gun and the gun must never beallowed to control the Party. The Party must be built as a vehicle capableof initiating and leading revolutionary warfare. He emphasised that the centraltask of revolution is the seizure of political power by revolutionary violence.Mao Tsetung's theory of People's War is universally applicable in all countries,although this must be applied to the concrete conditions in each countryand, in particular, take into account the revolutionary paths in the twogeneral types of countries-imperialist countries and oppressed countries-thatexist in the world today.
Mao solved the problem of how to make revolution in a country dominated byimperialism. The basic path he charted for the revolution in China representsan inestimable contribution to the theory and practice of revolution andis the guide for achieving liberation in the countries oppressed by imperialism.This means protracted People's War, surrounding the cities from the countryside,with armed struggle as the main form of struggle and the army led by theParty as the main form of organisations of the masses, mobilising the peasantry,principally the poor peasants, carrying out the agrarian revolution, buildinga united front under the leadership of the Communist Party to carry out theNew Democratic Revolution against imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratcapitalism and establishing the joint dictatorship of the revolutionary classesled by the proletariat as the necessary prelude to the socialist revolutionwhich must immediately follow the victory of the first stage of the revolution.Mao put forward the thesis of the "three magic weapons" -- the Party, theArmy and the United Front -- the indispensable instruments for making revolutionin every country in accordance with its specific conditions and path ofrevolution.
Mao Tsetung greatly developed the proletarian philosophy, dialecticalmaterialism. In particular, he stressed that the law of contradiction, theunity and struggle of opposites, is the fundamental law governing natureand society. He pointed out that the unity and identity of all things istemporary and relative, while the struggle between opposites is ceaselessand absolute, and this gives rise to radical ruptures and revolutionary leaps.He masterfully applied this understanding to the analysis of the relationshipbetween theory and practice, stressing that practice is both the sole sourceand ultimate criterion of the truth and emphasising the leap from theoryto revolutionary practice. In so doing Mao further developed the proletariantheory of knowledge. He led in taking philosophy to the masses in their millions,popularizing, for example, that "one divides into two" in opposition to therevisionist thesis that "two combines into one".
Mao Tsetung further developed the understanding that the "people and thepeople alone are the motive force in the making of world history". He developedthe understanding of the mass line: "take the ideas of the masses (scatteredand unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them intoconcentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate andexplain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fastto them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of theseideas in such action". Mao stressed the profound truth that matter can betransformed into consciousness and consciousness into matter, further developingthe understanding of the conscious dynamic role of man in every field ofhuman endeavour.
Mao Tsetung led the international struggle against modern revisionism ledby the Khrushchevite revisionists. He defended the communist ideologicaland political line against the modern revisionists and called upon the genuineproletarian revolutionaries to break with them and forge parties based onMarxist-Leninist-Maoist principles.

Mao Tsetung undertook a penetrating analysis of the lessons of the restorationof capitalism in the USSR and the shortcomings as well as the positiveachievements of the construction of socialism in that country. While Maodefended the great contributions of Stalin, he also summed up Stalin's errors.He summed up the experience of the socialist revolution in China and therepeated two-line struggles against revisionist headquarters within the CommunistParty of China. He masterfully applied materialist dialectics to the analysisof the contradictions of socialist society.

Mao taught that the Party must play the vanguard role -- before, during andafter the seizure of power -- in leading the proletariat in the historicstruggle for communism. He developed the understanding of how to preservethe proletarian revolutionary character of the Party through waging an activeideological struggle against bourgeois and petit bourgeois influences inits ranks, the ideological remoulding of the Party members, criticism andself-criticism and waging two-line struggle against opportunist and revisionistlines in the Party. Mao taught that once the proletariat seizes power andthe Party becomes the leading force within the socialist state, the contradictionbetween the Party and the masses becomes a concentrated expression of thecontradictions marking socialist society as a transition between capitalismand communism.
Mao Tsetung developed the proletariat's understanding of political economy,of the contradictory and dynamic role of production itself and of itsinterrelationship with the political and ideological superstructure of society.Mao taught that the system of ownership is decisive in the relations ofproduction but that, under socialism, attention must be paid that publicownership is socialist in content as well as in form. He stressed the interactionbetween the system of socialist ownership and the other two aspects of therelations of production, the relations between people in production and thesystem of distribution. Mao developed the Leninist thesis that politics isthe concentrated expression of economics, showing that under socialist societythe correctness of the ideological and political line determines whetherthe proletariat actually owns the means of production. Conversely, he pointedout that the rise of revisionism means the rise of the bourgeoisie, thatgiven the contradictory nature of the socialist economic base it would beeasy for capitalist roaders to rig up the capitalist system if they cometo power.
He profoundly criticised the revisionist theory of the productive forcesand concluded that the superstructure, consciousness, can transform the baseand with political power develop the productive forces. All this took expressionin Mao's slogan, "Grasp Revolution, Promote Production."
Mao Tsetung initiated and led the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution whichrepresented a great leap forward in the experience of exercising the dictatorshipof the proletariat. Hundreds of millions of people rose up to overthrow thecapitalist readers who had emerged from within the socialist society andwho were especially concentrated in the leadership of the Party itself (suchas Liu Shao-chi , Lin Piao and Deng Xiao-ping) . Mao led the proletariatand masses in challenging the capitalist roaders and imposing the interests,outlook and will of the great majority in every sphere that, even in socialistsociety, had remained the private reserve of the exploiting classes and theirway of thinking.
The great victories won in the Cultural Revolution prevented the capitalistrestoration in China for a decade and led to great socialist transformationsin the economic base as well as in education, literature and art, scientificresearch and other parts of the superstructure. Under Mao's leadership themasses dug away at the soil which engenders capitalism -- such as bourgeoisright and the three great differences between town and country, between workerand peasant, and between mental and manual labour.
In the course of fierce ideological and political struggle, millions of workersand other revolutionary masses greatly deepened their class consciousnessand mastery of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and strengthened their capacity towield political power. The Cultural Revolution was waged as part of theinternational struggle of the proletariat and was a training ground inproletarian internationalism.
Mao grasped the dialectical relationship between the necessity of revolutionaryleadership and the need to arouse and rely on the revolutionary masses frombelow to implement proletarian dictatorship. In this way, the strengtheningof the proletarian dictatorship was also the most extensive and deepest exercisein proletarian democracy yet achieved in the world, and heroic revolutionaryleaders came forward such as Chiang Ching and Chang Chun-chiao who stoodalongside the masses and led them into battle against the revisionists andwho continued to hold high the banner of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in the faceof bitter defeat.

Lenin said, "Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the classstruggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat." In thelight of the invaluable lessons and advances achieved through the GreatProletarian Cultural Revolution led by Mao Tsetung, this dividing line hasbeen further sharpened. Now it can be stated that only he is a Marxist whoextends the recognition of class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorshipof the proletariat and to the recognition of the objective existence of classes,of antagonistic class contradictions, of the bourgeoisie in the Party andof the continuation of the class struggle under the dictatorship of theproletariat throughout the whole period of socialism until communism. AsMao so powerfully stated, "Lack of clarity on this question will lead torevisionism."
The capitalist restoration following the 1976 counter-revolutionary coupd'etat led by Hua Kuo-feng and Deng Xiao-ping in no way negates Maoism orthe world-historic achievements and tremendous lessons of the Great ProletarianCultural Revolution; rather this defeat confirms Mao's theses on the natureof socialist society and the need to continue the revolution under thedictatorship of the proletariat.
Clearly, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution represents a world-historicepic of revolution, a victorious high point for the world's communists andrevolutionaries, an imperishable achievement. Although we have a whole processahead of us, that revolution left us great lessons we are already applying,such as, for example, the point that ideological transformation is fundamentalin order for our class to seize power.

Marxism-Leninism-Maoism: The Third Great Milestone

In the course of the Chinese revolution Mao had developed Marxism-Leninismin many important fields. But it was in the crucible of the Great ProletarianCultural Revolution that our ideology took a leap and the third great milestone,Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, fully emerged. From the higher plane ofMarxism-Leninism-Maoism the revolutionary communists could grasp the teachingsof the previous great leaders even more profoundly and indeed even Mao Tsetung'searlier contributions took on deeper significance. Today, without Maoismthere can be no Marxism-Leninism. Indeed, to negate Maoism is to negateMarxism-Leninism itself.
Each great milestone in the development of the revolutionary ideology ofthe proletariat has met with bitter resistance and has only achieved recognitionthrough intense struggle and through its application in revolutionary practice.Today the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement declares thatMarxism-Leninism-Maoism must be the commander and guide of the world revolution.
Hundreds of millions of proletarians and oppressed masses of the world areincreasingly propelled into struggle against the world imperialist systemand all reaction. On the battlefield against the enemy they search for theirown flag. Revolutionary communists must wield our universal ideology andspread it among the masses to further unleash them and organise their forces,in order to seize power through revolutionary violence. To accomplish this,Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties, united in the Revolutionary InternationalistMovement, must be formed wherever they do not exist and existing ones mustbe strengthened in order to prepare, launch and carry through to victoryPeople's War to seize power for the proletariat and the oppressed people.We must uphold, defend and, most importantly, apply Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

We must step up our struggle for the formation of a Communist Internationalof a new type, based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. The world proletarian revolutioncannot advance to victory without forging such a weapon because, as Mao Tsetungtaught, either we all go to communism or none of us go.
Mao Tsetung said, "Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but in the finalanalysis they all boil down to one: it is right to rebel." The RevolutionaryInternationalist Movement takes the rebellion of the masses as its startingpoint, and calls on the proletariat and revolutionaries the world over totake up Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. This liberating, partisan ideology mustbe brought home to the proletariat and all the oppressed because it alonecan enable the rebellion of the masses to sweep away thousands of years ofclass exploitation and bring to birth the new world of communism.

Hold High the Great Red Banner of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!
26 December 1993