LONG LIVE THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF FINLAND 107 YEARS!
On 29th of August was marked the 107th Anniversary of the Communist Party of Finland (SKP). We hereby publish a statement shared by Punalippu which was published in Finnish and English, and we also share a report of actions.
The original statement can be found here:
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
On the 29th of August, 1918, the honorable Communist Party of Finland was founded in Moscow as white terror raged in our country. Many thousands of workers and revolutionaries languished in concentration camps, tens of thousands were buried in mass graves. Despite this, the Finnish communists grasped revolutionary optimism and declared:
“In Finland, the bourgeois butchers reign at this moment. With bloody terror, the bourgeoisie has tried to suppress the aspirations for liberation of the working people. The blood of thousands of our comrades yearns for revenge. Tens of thousands of orphans and widows curse their oppressor as they starve – with anguish they wait for the moment of liberation.
The force of the working people is under a horrible class oppression at the moment, but it is not crushed.
It is to raise again.
Educated by the hard experiences, it will break even the chains of butcher terror.
The bourgeoisie is already fearing for it. It uses all its power and devilish skills to avoid the upcoming day of retribution.
The working people of Finland must carefully consider its actions, not let itself be lured into premature and careless actions which would only weaken its mass power. Instead the working people must assemble and organize all its strenght for the nearing final, decisive battle.
May the ruling classes tremble in the face of the communist revolution.
The poor have nothing to lose but their chains.”
They could say this, because they saw clearly that the victory of the bourgeoisie was only temporary, and that soon from the ground irrigated by blood a new, more powerful wave of revolution would sprout. Masses are the makers of history; an individual can be destroyed, even genocides can be carried out, but at the same time this unjust violence to maintain exploitation and oppression only generates even more powerful popular rebellion. As long as there is even one communist left, he or she can start it all over again.
The Finnish communists could say this in 1918, because they saw clearly that imperialism is dead, rotten capitalism, which struggling in its agony only lengthens its pains. An expression of this agony is the attacks and increasing bloodshed it inflicts on the proletariat and the peoples of the world. Thus, imperialists are, on the one hand true iron tigers which can devour people, but in their essence they are paper tigers who represent the old, rotten society.
This is shown to be true by the heroic resistance of the people of Palestine in the midst of a brutal genocide; it is shown to be true by the murder of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) comrade Basaravaj, which has made the masses in India and all over the world support the People’s War even stronger; it is shown to be true by Chairman Gonzalo, who never surrendered, and despite his cruel imprisonment and murder, Maoism marches forward ever more victoriously in the world and the Communist Party of Peru advances in its process of general reorganization, waging People’s War.
This understanding of the masses as the driving force of history is completely opposite to the bourgeois understanding; the bourgeoisie highlights lonely heroes as the driving force of world history, hiding completely the social context in which these “geniuses” emerged, completely hiding the actions of the masses, the blood and sweat they shed. Individualism corresponds to the private property which is in contradiction with the social mode of production and thus is rotten.
Our Party was born out of the 1918 Worker’s Revolution. It was necessary to make a demarcation to the old social democratic Party which did not correspond to the needs of the revolution. The main reason the revolution failed in those excellent conditions which existed in our country in connection to the international context are to be found within the social-democratic Party. The masses wanted to start the revolution, following their brothers and sisters in Russia, the power of the bourgeoisie was weak and unorganized in the conditions of the fall of Tsarism. Comrade Stalin told the Finnish revolutionaries to take up the revolution, saying “Courage, courage and once more, courage.” The Party however hesitated due to the weakness of the left and the legalist illusions pushed by the right, causing the Party to lose the initiative and separate itself from the masses.
We affirm that without the leadership of the Communist Party the rebellion of the masses will be defeated, no matter how just and sacrificing it would be, and on the other hand, without basing itself on the masses the Party alone cannot achieve anything.
The words of the Communist Party of Finland, that the revolution will rise again, were and still are true. This is clear by looking at the world situation; we see how everywhere, powerful anti-imperialist struggles unfold. We see how the revolutionary movement develops more and more powerfully in many countries, how the proletariat and the peoples of the world increasingly demand their liberation, how ever broader masses also in the imperialist countries take up anti-imperialist slogans influenced especially by the the heroic national resistance of the people of Palestine. The People’s Wars in India, Peru, Turkey and the Philippines strike hard against imperialism and inspire revolutionaries everywhere to take up their tasks. The national resistance of the people of Palestine against the seemingly superior enemy inspires the national liberation movements everywhere and shows true that the people are what count in war, not weapons, shows the reality of imperialism to broad masses, it shows that not even a genocide can break the struggle of the oppressed for their freedom. We see the agony of imperialism increasing, manifested in increasing exploitation, the increasing negation of bourgeois ideals and laws, increasing wars especially against the oppressed nations and in escalating war preparations against other imperialists.
The reason why the revolution did not at that time march forward with force in Finland, was that the left remained weak within the Communist Party and the remnants of the old social-democratic Party were never uprooted. These remnants manifested especially as illusions of legalism – which already in 1918 had been detrimental to the revolution. This weakened the fighting capacity of the Party under the conditions of fascism and paved the ground for the growth of revisionism. After the second imperialist world war the Party was stuck at fighting the last war and lost the initiative. Ultimately, in 1957, after the revisionist Khrushchev clique usurped power in the Soviet Union in 1956, the Party assumed a new, revisionist program and with its revisionism, capitulated from the revolution. Still today this treason must fill us with the greatest class hatred. It shows that in order for the communist Party to lead the revolution, it must sweep away this giant heap of trash.
Revisionism and opportunism are the main danger for the revolution. On the one hand, before the revolution the bourgeois influence, which comes from the old society, is strong also among the Party ranks if it’s not consciously and vigorously uprooted through two-line struggle, but also in socialism the bourgeoisie tries to return to power and from the Party ranks there will rise bourgeois elements who, by using revisionism, try to restore capitalism. These elements will not openly declare they are revisionists; they they will not start by negating Marxism openly but they will do it covertly, hiding behind “Marxism” and smuggling bourgeois ideology into the Party. In the case of our Party, before it became revisionist, the right sowed confusion on the road of the revolution, before after 1957 starting to propagate the “peaceful transition” of Khrushchev. Examples of warning are many – the most notable of them are the experiences of the Soviet Union and China, and from the more recent history, the treason of Prachanda against the People’s War in Nepal. The mighty weapon of Maoism in socialism is the cultural revolutions, through which the degenerating ideological influence of the bourgeoisie will ultimately be crushed. Also the revolutionaries of today must learn from the experiences of our Party and the experiences of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China and launch into ardent ideological struggle for Maoism against revisionism in its own ranks, learning to recognize and crush this bourgeois influence.
Today we must again grasp firmly the revolutionary optimism our Party declared in 1918, which is firmly based in the proletarian world view, which is the ideology of struggle and sees the masses as the makers of history. From the days of the founding of our Party, our class has gained important battle experience and today it has a victorious weapon in its hands, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism, contributions of universal validity of Chairman Gonzalo. It is thus the duty of revolutionaries to firmly grasp Maoism in the struggle against revisionism to reconstitute the Communist Party of Finland, so that it can lead the struggle of the masses in this world situation which is more than favorable for revolution.
Reconstitute the Communist Party of Finland!
Learn from Chairman Gonzalo!
Death to revisionism! Long live Maoism!
The Editorial Board of Punalippu,
29th of August 2025
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Additionally actions were carried out in Helsinki, Tampere and Kokkola:
