Proletarians of all countries, unite!
LONG LIVE THE 177TH
ANNIVERSARY OF THE MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY BY MARX AND ENGELS!
“It is only
with The Manifesto of the Communist Party, which is its full name, that the
communists first set out their position and their program and it is the
starting point, the cornerstone or the first stone on which our entire building
is built, all that is the great Marxism-Leninism-Maoism; it is from The
Manifesto that it remains a valid banner until communism, not as Khrushchev
said: that he had completed his mission with the program of the CPSU of 1961,
taking away our class position and introducing a rotten bourgeois conception, a
complete and thorough revision of all Marxism.”
(PRESIDENT
GONZALO, FIRST CONGRESS OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF PERU, 1988)
The
Manifesto is our starting point, the first milestone, a milestone because it
will last thousands of years and when there is communism it will continue to be
considered as that great beginning that led to the new humanity.
There are
177 years of struggle by the international proletariat and the peoples of the
world that have given us great milestones in the conquest and defense of the
New Power through revolutionary violence, which today can only be a people's
war, where the Paris Commune of 1871, the Great October Socialist Revolution in
Russia, the triumph of the Revolution in China and the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution in China and currently the people's wars in Peru, India,
Turkey and the Philippines stand out.
President
Gozalo established that "we communists are components of a single class in
the world, the international proletariat, and that it is scattered with unique,
identical class interests, with an indissolubly welded destiny and it follows
that we must be guided by proletarian internationalism, raising, defending and
applying the motto established in "The Manifesto." A specific
revolution must always be considered within the world revolution. Even more so
if we develop in the new era that began with the Great October Revolution in
1917. Communism will not occur in a single country, we all enter it or no one
enters. That is why we developed the revolution and the people's war in Peru as
part of and at the service of the world revolution."
Brief History:
C. MARX, F.
ENGELS MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY, written by C. Marx and F. Engels
in December
1847-January 1848. The original is in German. First published as a pamphlet in
London in February 1848.
The
Manifesto of the Communist Party is the largest programmatic document of
scientific communism. "This short pamphlet has the merit of a whole
volume. To this day, its spirit inspires and guides the entire organized and
fighting proletariat of the civilized world" (Lenin).
The
Manifesto, as a programme drawn up by Marx and Engels for the Communist League
from December 1847 to January 1848, first appeared in February 1848 in London
as a 23-page pamphlet. From March to July 1848 it was reprinted serially in the
Deutsche Londoner Zeitung, the democratic organ of the German emigrants. In the
same year a German edition of the Manifesto was reprinted in London as a
30-page pamphlet. This edition served as the basis for subsequent editions
authorised by Marx and Engels. In 1848 the Manifesto was also translated into
numerous European languages: French, Polish, Italian, Danish, Flemish and
Swedish. The names of the authors were not mentioned in the 1848 editions. They
were initially mentioned in the editor's preface written by George Harney for
the first English translation of the Manifesto, in the Chartist journal Red
Republican, which was a Chartist weekly publication from June to November 1850
by George Harney. In its issues 21-24, November 1850, the first English
translation of the Communist Manifesto appeared under the title: Manifesto of
the German Communist Party. On the initiative of the editors of Der Volksstaat
(The People's State) a new German edition of the Manifesto was published in
1872, with a foreword by Marx and Engels and minor corrections in the text. It
was called the Communist Manifesto, and that is how the later German editions
of 1883 and 1890 appeared.
The brief
history of the Manifesto, with which we begin this document celebrating the
177th anniversary of its publication, has been rewritten according to the notes
of the Chinese edition of the Manifesto translated into Spanish, published by
the People's Publishing House, Peking.
With the
Manifesto of the Communist Party, the ideology of the international proletariat
arose as Marxism
With the
Manifesto of the Communist Party of Marx and Engels, the ideology of the
international proletariat, in the crucible of the class struggle, arose as
Marxism, becoming Marxism-Leninism and, later, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Thus,
the all-powerful scientific ideology of the proletariat, all-powerful because
it is true, has three stages: 1) Marxism, 2) Leninism, 3) Maoism; three stages,
moments or milestones of its dialectical process of development; of the same
unity that in one hundred and forty years, starting with the
"Manifesto", in the most heroic epic of the class struggle, in fierce
and fruitful two-line struggles in the communist parties themselves and the
immense work of titans of thought and action that only the class could
generate, with three unfading luminaries standing out: Marx, Lenin, Mao
Tse-tung, through great leaps and three great achievements have armed us with
the invincible Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism of today.
Marxism was
born complete with its three integral parts: Marxist philosophy, Marxist
political economy and scientific socialism. The President tells us, like a
child comes into the world with a head, body and limbs and then goes on
developing. As Lenin said: We base ourselves entirely on the doctrine of Marx:
it was Marx who for the first time transformed socialism from a utopia into a
science, laid the solid foundations of this science and outlined the path it
was to take, developing and elaborating it in all its details” (From “Our
Program” (Second half of 1899). Where did Avakian get that Marxism is a set of
truths or thoughts of Marx, Lenin and Mao? This eclectic position could only be
the product of the fateful movement of his head, to present himself as the
“distiller of Marxism”, which led him to fall into revisionism with his
grotesque “New Synthesis” .
The
document (PCP, 1988), says: “The ideology of the international proletariat, in
the crucible of the class struggle, arose as Marxism, becoming Marxism-Leninism
and, later, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Thus, the all-powerful scientific ideology
of the proletariat, all-powerful because it is true, has three stages: 1) Marxism,
2) Leninism, 3) Maoism; three stages, moments or milestones of its dialectical
process of development; of a single unity that in one hundred and forty years,
starting with the “Manifesto”, in the most heroic epic of the class struggle,
in fierce and fruitful two-line struggles within the communist parties
themselves and the immense work of titans of thought and action that only the
class could generate, three unfading luminaries stood out: Marx, Lenin, Mao
Tsetung, through great leaps and three great achievements have armed us with
the invincible Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism of today.
It is
necessary to emphasize that it is the ideology of the international
proletariat, because there are those who speak of science as opposed to Marxist
ideology, forgetting that our ideology is scientific. When Engels dealt with
the problem of ideology in his famous letters from 1990 to 1995, he told us
that all the classes prior to the proletariat had an inverted reflection of reality.
What does this mean? Like a camera, it inverts the figure, what is in the head
is placed on the feet and vice versa. In this way, all non-proletarian ideology
twists reality, deforms it and therefore cannot understand the essence of
reality, cannot understand the truth as it is, cannot grasp the contradiction
as it is; therefore, non-proletarian ideologies are deformations, they are not
scientific and the root is one, very concrete: they are based on exploitation.
Or, to generalize and include all, it is based on private ownership of the
means of production, while the proletariat is not based on ownership of the
means of production or exploitation; its historic mission is precisely to
destroy private ownership of the means of production in order to sweep away all
exploitation and existing differences.
Thus, we
must reclaim the term ideology in the understanding that our ideology, which is
that of the international proletariat and only of that class and not of any
other, is scientific. Yes, it is scientific, but that does not take away its
character of ideology. When one insists on replacing the term ideology with
scientific or science, one is falling within bourgeois criteria, within
bourgeois philosophy centered on the theory of knowledge, that is what is at
the bottom.
The
revisionists always reissue the old revisionists, like Kautsky, who maintained
that Marxism had no philosophy and that Marxist philosophy was Kantianism; That
is, he placed bourgeois philosophy as the basis of our conception, which is
ultimately an agnosticism, that is, an inability to know.
We, says
Chairman Gonzalo, have to go to the heart of the matter and take the
substantive things and have a high critical spirit, to judge many or all of the
things that are written in the world about our conception. One could ask, and
what does conception mean? It is the understanding of everything that exists,
that means understanding of the material world, understanding of the class
struggle, that is, of the social world, and it means understanding of knowledge
as a reflection of matter in the mind, which is another form of matter. That is
what conception means.
Our ideas
of the international proletariat are therefore the product of a very high level
of elaboration, they are more than 2,500 years of knowledge that has been
reworked from the position and interests of the international proletariat.
Marxism is a combative, revolutionary break with all previous knowledge. It is
all-powerful because it is true, Lenin's thesis proven to the point of satiety.
The
document of the Communist Party of Peru "On Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!"
(1988) makes a great statement that is
essential: there are three stages, one Marxism, two Leninism, three Maoism,
that is what it defines. But note that it says stages of a dialectical process
of development, of course, it is a dialectical process of development, and why
is it so? Because being a process of knowledge, a reflection of the mind or in
the mind, a reflection of matter in the mind and matter being movement, being
dialectical, knowledge is so and not by simple method as some say, but by
essence. No one, neither Marx, nor Lenin, nor the President do so; if they
speak of methods they never refer to reducing all of Marxism to a simple
methodological question, it would lose its quality of conception; being a
conception it has the method as a derivative, as a derivation; in the end,
method is procedure, nothing more.
It is an
important dialectical process, because it is reality itself and its laws
correctly grasped through practice, because it is impossible for there to be
knowledge without practice, there could not be any; precisely this separation
of theory from practice is another concession to the bourgeoisie, it is a
strictly bourgeois thought, narrow empiricism of the 18th century.
The
Manifesto is the starting point, 140 years have passed since its appearance.
There were attempts before and there are precedents, yes there are; in the work
of Marx and Engels we have their participation in the League of Communists, but
that league of communists was a hodgepodge of diverse ideas, it was not a clear
expression of the proletariat. It is only with The Manifesto of the Communist
Party, which is its full name, that for the first time the communists set out
their position and their program and it is the starting point, the cornerstone
or the first stone on which our entire building is built, everything that is
the great Marxism-Leninism-Maoism; it is from The Manifesto that it remains a
valid banner until communism, not as Khrushchev said: that he had completed his
mission with the program of the CPSU of 1961, taking away our class position
and introducing a rotten bourgeois conception, a complete and thorough revision
of all Marxism. That is why the Manifesto is our starting point, the first milestone,
a milestone because it will last for thousands of years and when there is
communism it will continue to be considered as that great beginning that led to
the new humanity.
It is a
heroic epic of the class struggle, because only the class struggle could
generate our conception, our ideology; only the proletariat with its great,
incessant transformation of material reality in productive practice, or in the
class struggle whose center is politics as the conquest and defense of power
for the class, overthrowing other powers, only as a research practice, could
the class, generating titans of thought and action, shape itself as the great
ideology that we uphold and will always uphold. What is there behind this of
titans of thought and action that is linked to “three unfading luminaries
standing out: Marx, Lenin and Mao Tsetung”?
Engels is a
founder of Marxism, and, moreover, if we get down to it, it was Engels who
first established a scheme for understanding the basis of society, of the
relations of exploitation, that is, of Political Economy, it was he, as Marx
himself recognized. But it was Marx who, with that prodigious talent and
capacity for action that he had, who embodied the first great summit,
recognized especially by Engels; it was Engels who proposed that Marx should
base the new ideology.We have five classics, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin,
but it is a galaxy, a considerable group of great figures, titans of thought
and action. But, let it be clear that there are three great figures: Marx,
Lenin, Chairman Mao Tsetung.
And how is
it that our ideology is going to develop as a dialectical process? Through
great leaps; Through great leaps and three great, three great qualitative
leaps: Marx, Lenin, Chairman Mao Tsetung. But these three great qualitative
leaps could not be understood without other great, medium and even small leaps
and with these incessant leaps. It is in this way, then, through a great
dialectical process, generated by the proletariat producing men that only the
class can produce, that we have arrived at Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly
Maoism.
In essence,
what does it mean not to recognize “ism”? Not to recognize “Maoism.” “ism” has
a clear meaning; “thought” is nothing but a set of ideas, nothing more, while
“ism” is a doctrine that fully interprets all matter in its various ways of
expressing itself, which are the three aforementioned: nature, society,
knowledge and so on, there is nothing else. God, then, comes from the head,
through social product; Satan, from the head, through social elaboration. You
see, there is nothing, nothing escapes that. I said “doctrine,” I emphasize, I
did not say “system.” Be careful, do not say “system,” you would fall into a
gross error. Engels already analyzed this point expressly. The correct thing is
to say “doctrine” understanding it as we have just specified.
So that is
the essential point, it is “ism.” We are told, for example, what is the
difference between Maoist thought and Maoism? If the same truths are upheld or
defended, why fight over that term? It is not just a question of the term, what
is at stake is whether it has universal validity or not, and if it is an “ism”
then it has it and if it is not an “ism” it does not have it. That is the
problem, then it is not a question of the term, is it not? Well, if things are
the same,
Finally,
from the document of the First Congress of the PCP we quote:
The
Communist Party of Peru, through the fraction led by Chairman Gonzalo who
promoted the reconstruction, assumed Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought in
1966; in 1979 the slogan of Raising, defending and applying
Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought!; in 1981: Towards Maoism!; and, in 1982,
Maoism as an integral part and superior development of the ideology of the
international proletariat: Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. It is with the people's war
that we have understood more deeply what Maoism implies and assumed the solemn
commitment to raise, defend and apply Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism!;
and, to tirelessly strive to help put it as the command and guide of the world
revolution, the only red and unfading flag that is a guarantee of triumph for
the proletariat, the oppressed nations and the peoples of the world in their
inexorable combative march of iron legions towards the golden and forever
resplendent communism.
GLORY TO THE INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAT!
LONG LIVE THE WORLD PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION!
LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE'S WAR IN PERU, INDIA,
TURKEY AND THE PHILIPPINES!
RAISE, DEFEND AND APPLY
MARXISM-LENINISM-MAOISM,
PRINCIPALLY MAOISM!
Peru People’s Movement
January-February
2025