Jan 28
Five Minute Polemic №6: There are Many Kinds of “Socialist” but Only One Kind of Socialist
It is an unfortunate fact any serious adherent of the socialist cause today must face that the majority of people who claim to be socialists are, not simply not socialists, but in fact enemies of socialism. Most dangerous of all is anyone with political-economic or intellectual power in the capitalist economic system and its bourgeois social order who has the gall to lie through their teeth by calling themselves “socialist.” In their mouths the names of working class heroes turn to barbed fangs, and the name of socialism- the true liberation of the exploited and oppressed- becomes instead a ruse by which bourgeois power to exploit and oppress is maintained. Many are the masks of phony “socialism” which the institutions of bourgeois rule wear in their play-act of offering up pittances to distract the proletarian masses and prevent a genuine communist revolution that can bring true freedom, but only one is the true socialist ideological current which can guide the construction of real socialism and true liberty for the masses: Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, which must be applied dynamically with the universal ideas of Gonzalo Thought.
Chairman Gonzalo told us the greatest threat to the communist movement was revisionism, or bourgeois ideology disguised as altered or revised Marxism, and he was right. Just like any other science, the Marxist method of thought has produced only a single cohesive set of correct theories, but its name has been co-opted by many false and reactionary bourgeois ones. The most significant strain of revisionism, and in my view the most powerful and dangerous reactionary ideological current in the world today, is the Chinese Deng Xiaoping-Xi Jinping current. In its own country, it is the ideological justification for a vicious capitalist-imperialist economy that drapes itself in phony red even as it sucks the blood of Africa through the power of debt and semicolonially puppeteers the economies of DPR Korea, Vietnam, and Laos, and moves to do the same in the Philippines. At home too we have this brand of “socialist”: Gloria La Riva and her rapist-sheltering, imperialist military-affiliated PSL are the most prominent but far from the only Dengists active here; others include the FRSO and PFP. Their vision for “socialism” goes no further than replacing US imperialist hegemony with Chinese imperialist hegemony, and they themselves admit this, fantasizing online about a Chinese takeover and cheering on every advance of the imperialist Belt and Road Initiative. These “socialist” imperialist cronies have no concept of the reality of socialism, and no place in the movement to establish it. They only serve the imperialist bourgeoisie of the revisionist Deng-Xi CPC and its bourgeois masters, who spit on the graves of Mao Zedong, Jiang Qing, and all the other great comrades of the Chinese revolution.
Probably the most prevalent “socialists” in the US, though, are the Bernie Sanders-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez types. These charlatans are not only antagonistic to the reality of socialism and the people who fight for it (made clear in their rag Jacobin’s slander of Gonzalo and fawning over Castillo, quite well criticized by Struggle Sessions), but tend not to have any idea what it is. Ocasio-Cortez does not even pretend that her “socialism” is the socialism of Marx, that she has any interest in the abolition of the use of all the value produced by human labour as nothing more than capital to be utilized for its own growth, through the extraction of surplus value from the labour done by workers using the means of production in which capital-value is invested and takes shape, by the bourgeoisie who own it; nor does she even claim interest in the creation of a new order in which said means of production are, instead of becoming vessels for private capital-value to inhabit in its cycle of parasitism, actually held by those who work them, and in which the surplus use values and economic values thereby produced are put to democratic use for the common good. No, Ocasio-Cortez is content with leaving the machinery of capitalism and bourgeois society totally unchanged save for a slight increase in taxation. Now she is in the halls of the bourgeois congress calling for a ban on members thereof holding capital in the stock market, as if this will change the bourgeois character of the institution, never mind that the real powerholders- the financial backers behind politicians, whose financial support of course is derived from the surplus value their capital has gathered to itself by exploitation- will be affected not at all. Though the so-called “social democrat” “socialists” are less explicit in their bedfellowship with fascism than they were in the years preceding World War Two, the function of these phony programmes of “socialism” remains the same as it was when Stalin criticized them as “social fascism”: to distract the masses from the fight for real socialism with phony and worthless pittances and promises, serving by the carrot the same function fascism proper does by the stick- the neutralization of the threat of real proletarian rising. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are as much hounds of the bourgeois master as Trump and Clinton, as much as Hitler and Pinochet. There are quantitative differences in the severity of their antagonism toward the proletariat, but all of them share that antagonism; all of them are bourgeois puppets and none of them even remotely socialists, even remotely on the workers’ side.
The anarchists are another category of “socialist” who must be repudiated. They unlike the others at least realize the futility of working within the state and the need for revolt, so perhaps in a limited capacity they can be worked with; but if they are to be worked with it must only be in a capacity where the proper socialists, the Maoist communists, lead, for in ideological objectives the cause of the anarchists is alien and antagonistic to the interests of the proletariat. Anarchist “socialist” ideas and communist socialist ideas are in antagonistic contradiction and cannot be made nonantagonistic with real socialist ideas because anarchism is essentially concerned with the abstract and isolated freedom of individuals and MLMism with the concrete material liberation of whole classes of people, because anarchism wants to abolish political-economic power (somehow) while MLMism wants to democratize it for the proletarian majority, etc. etc. This contradiction of ideas (which is itself still a material contradiction, as ideas are qualities of the material brain and arise from experiences of material reality) is rooted in a more directly physical class contradiction: communist ideology arises from the proletariat, who being that they are already forced into communal living and labour by capitalist production are prepared to be the banner-carriers for the transition of all humanity into a fairer and more equitable communal way of life; anarchism arises from the lumpenproletariat, the wayward and individualistic social class of outcasts, career criminals, vagabonds, delinquents and starving artists, who are in general antagonistic to any kind of collectivity. This class contradiction, though, is not like its engendered ideological one in that it can be made benign; we must sympathize with the lumpenproletariat and in future facilitate their unification into the socialist proletariat- but this can only come with the total abandonment of the class attitudes that give rise to anarchism and the total repudiation of anarchist thought forever. It is vital to the movement toward socialism to understand that the proletariat are the banner-carriers of historical progress now, that the proletarian working majority are the class which must rule under socialism and into which the rest of humanity must then unify to bring true liberty to all under full-stage communism.
And many more are the “socialists” we can list. The Trotskyists, who do nothing except print newspapers and vote for Dengists; the “socialists of the 21st century,” who in substance are exactly identical to the “social democrats/democratic socialists,” the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez types; the Hoxhaists, who in their dogmatic refusal to acknowledge that Marxism is a science that has grown and changed over time are rather like a “biologist” who refuses to acknowledge Darwin; the “libertarian ‘socialists’” who amount practically to anarchists in disguises of varying cleverness; the Baathists and the “authoritarian ‘socialists’” who are in substance fascists; the phony “Maoists” like Winston and Avakian whose idea of revolutionary work consists only of attacking anyone who tries to do any, et cetera et cetera. There are as many varieties of “socialist” as there are odious parasites and nasty infections. But there is only one variety of socialist in the present world. They are the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, or the student or supporter thereof, and the most advanced form of them is they who recognize the universal applications of Gonzalo Thought. To be clear, it should not be necessary to be a perfect Maoist in order to be called a socialist. Rather, what is true is that a true socialist is an individual who acts in such a way as to advance the proletarian cause, and thus is an individual who acts more or less in accordance with and in the interests of the ideology of the proletariat, which is MLMism(-Gonzalo Thought).
Thus, the real socialists, the real banner-carriers of history who shall drive us as a species forward toward justice and equity by the power of class struggle, are the Marxist-Leninist-Maoists and the masses and others who share their causes and work alongside them; MLMist Party leaders and cadre, Maoist militants, comrades of revolutionary mass organizations supported by Maoists, Gonzalo Thought intellectuals, communists developing along the trajectory of Marxist science toward Maoism and acting in revolutionarily correct ways even if not yet fully developed into Maoists (like much of the CPP), anti-imperialist and progressive national liberation fighters, and New-Democratic peasants’ liberation fighters all belong to this list, not recorded exhaustively here. It is the duty of progressively minded people everywhere, those concerned with the liberation of the proletariat and the liberation of all oppressed peoples through proletarian and other exploited-class liberation, to support these genuine socialists and condemn all “socialists” who oppose the MLMist programme. Thusly, in our country the banner-carriers are the serious Maoist publications and organizations, like the PWM-MFP and CPUSA(CR) and Tribune of the People, and the mass organizations which support and are supported by these publications like the STPs, PSSFV, numerous student groups, etc.- the beginnings of a revolutionary United Front, once there is a Party for them to unite around. In our immediately neighbouring countries, we must salute the Mexican CdP-Sol Rojo and the Canadian CWF(OC). In the southern part of the Americas, we must support the revolutionary communist parties, including of course the great PCP (and their international support mass-organization MPP) and the PCE-SR (and their associated United Front mass organizations), as well as the Mapuche national liberation guerrillas in the Mapuche territories occupied by Chile and Argentina, and peasant liberation forces like the LCP in Brazil. Internationally, we must support publications like Communist International (though the Swiss communists were quite right in recently publishing a criticism of CI/IC’s publication of a transphobic and asinine article from some reactionaries in Germany), and hope for the future prospect of a new Comintern built on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the universal applications of Gonzalo Thought. With the guidance of MLMist thought, we must build a single strong international socialist and communist movement and stomp down all phony “socialists!”
An addendum on the front of Gonzalo Thought: I must report with optimism and enthusiasm that it appears to me that those currents within the ICM which I described in “On Diverging Lines in the International Communist Movement” are almost uniformly moving closer to recognition of the universal validity and utility thereof. The theories of Gonzalo Thought may have been forged in the fires of Peru’s specific conditions, but the weapons made for that specific battle are increasingly being understood (as those of Mao Zedong Thought were) as ones that Marxists anywhere can employ. Publications like the Tribune here in the US, which I identified with the center line on the “Gonzalo’s role question,” have moved leftward and forward in the midst of the campaign to avenge Gonzalo’s death, writing “With his death, the campaign is flourishing to honor Chairman Gonzalo, his all-powerful thought, and the People’s War in Peru, which still continues undefeated against the Peruvian state{1}” and joining in with the international cry of LONG LIVE CHAIRMAN GONZALO AND HIS ALL-POWERFUL THOUGHT! The US communist movement may not recognize the special significance and importance of the universal application of G.T. as clearly as for instance the comrades in Canada, but strides are being made in the development of the US communists’ understanding of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and this will lead to the synthesis, built upon the universal application of Gonzalo’s guiding thought for Peru, of a guiding thought for the US- which will surely lead us to socialism, for, as Lenin said, “without [a] revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”
Those I identified with the right line have seemed to move toward the center, with statements acknowledging Gonzalo’s role in synthesizing Maoism published in the widely-read (and endorsed by several of those organizations) Communist International. Only the CPP, under the persistent influence of Sison (and others, e.g. Valbuena), still won’t acknowledge Gonzalo’s contributions to Maoism or the universal aspects of Gonzalo Thought (and indeed not so long ago had flirtations with the MOVADEF traitors, one of the two major traitorous factions to split from the PCP along with the MPCP of drug-lord José). We must continue being critical in our support of the CPP, NPA, and NDF and hoping their line improves (which it no doubt will if they continue to fight for revolution). But these holdouts do not change a fundamental trend about which we must be optimistic: the trend of the ICM toward recognition of the role of Gonzalo, a trend of theoretical advancement that shall guide physical advancement of revolutionary campaigns, as surely as revolutionary theory guides revolutionary practice. Of course, I should note, terminology remains an area of dispute- but not a terribly important one. Words are less important than the ideas they express, those ideas less important than the actions they guide. It has been my observation that the most theoretically advanced groups of communists- which include PCE-SR, CWF(OC), and of course the PCP & MPP- recognize Gonzalo Thought, as a distinct and further stride in MLMism beyond the initial synthesis of Maoism as third stage, as both the guiding thought of Peru and several theories of universal significance derived therefrom which should be studied and applied in addition to the three core parts of MLMism. But if a party does not share the same analysis, yet still acts in revolutionary ways guided by these theories, it is my view that that party is nonetheless on the right track. Still the truth remains: the one true socialist ideology is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the only true socialists those who act and struggle in the ways it guides, working towards revolutions in every country like those being presently waged in Peru, India, the Philippines, and Turkey.
CITED DOCUMENTS
