>>357434>he thinks Twitter screw caps are proof, stillYes, the opinions of actual Peruvian people are important for a Peruvian matter, I challenge you to find any Peruvians saying anything positive about them without cherryp picking
>What are you quoting here?"Americans are becoming blind, right there at the bottom
>no argumentSeveral statistics suggesting that the ex-Soviet people liked the Soviet Union, same cannot be said for the Shining Path and Peruvians
>Non-sequitur about ChinaThe Sandinistas warranted the Iran-Contra affair, and THE FUCKING US INVADED GRENADA YOU DUMBASS LMFAO
>ChinaChinese Revolution was ML or ML-MZT, Mao was not a Maoist, he did not uphold what Maoists today say is universal, he adapted ML to the Chinese material conditions, the same way Lenin and the Bolchevique revolution were not Marxist-Leninist, you could at best argue that the earliest Maoists appeared after the PRC was established, but the revolution itself was ML
<"At its height in mid-1992, it was believed that Shining Path had between 3,000 and 4,000 armed cadres and 50,000 supporters in various civilian support groups and political cadres…">When All The Evils Come Together, Pablo G. Dreyfus. page 378
<50,000/492,507 (Supporters/Ayacucho Department Population in 1993)=0.10 or 10% of the population of Ayacucho Department Population, 50,000/22,693,443 (Supporters/Total Peruvian Census in 1993)=0.002 or 0.2% of the total Peruvian population in that year, remember that this was their peak, 1992/1993>https://www.inei.gob.pe/estadisticas/indice-tematico/population/ "Población total, censada y omitida, según año censal" "Población censada, según departamento y año censal" Microsoft Excel or https://sheet.zoho.com/sheet/excelviewer
<Officially more than 50% urbanized in 1964, at the beginning of the armed struggle in 1980 urbanization in Peru was at 65% and by 2000, the end of the major conflict, it had become 73%, by 2020 it was 78%, for reference, a country like Germany is 77% urbanized>https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locations=PE https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locations=DE<Chinese Civil War was fought in a country that was 80~90% percent non-urbanized "In 1949, around 80 per cent of the Chinese population is rural. Lacking capital to invest in modern machinery the government decides organising human labour is key to China’s development and begins introducing a system of communes in 1958 to harness the rural labour force to stimulate agricultural and industrial productivity. Each commune is made up of smaller farm collectives and consists of 4,000–5,000 households, while larger communes could encompass up to 20,000 households.", even in 1980 only about 20% of the Chinese population was urbanized, Gonzalo attempted to graft this onto a country with nearly opposite urban:unurban ratios disastrously, and as you can see, during the Peruvian conflict, almost 10% of the population fled to the cities, meaning that about 1/3 of the supposed base left them dry>https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10225706.2018.1476256 Table 1 https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/news/china/article/3139331/ccp-100year-anniversary/index.html
<Gonzalo openly admitted to and expressed no real criticism of the Lucanamarca massacre>"In the face of reactionary military actions… we responded with a devastating action: Lucanamarca. Neither they nor we have forgotten it, to be sure, because they got an answer that they didn’t imagine possible. More than 80 were annihilated, that is the truth. And we say openly that there were excesses, as was analyzed in 1983. But everything in life has two aspects. Our task was to deal a devastating blow in order to put them in check, to make them understand that it was not going to be so easy. On some occasions, like that one, it was the Central Leadership itself that planned the action and gave instructions. That’s how it was. In that case, the principal thing is that we dealt them a devastating blow, and we checked them and they understood that they were dealing with a different kind of people’s fighters, that we weren’t the same as those they had fought before. This is what they understood. The excesses are the negative aspect… If we were to give the masses a lot of restrictions, requirements and prohibitions, it would mean that deep down we didn’t want the waters to overflow. And what we needed was for the waters to overflow, to let the flood rage, because we know that when a river floods its banks it causes devastation, but then it returns to its riverbed…. [T]he main point was to make them understand that we were a hard nut to crack, and that we were ready for anything, anything." https://web.archive.org/web/20071108165711/http://www.blythe.org/peru-pcp/docs_en/interv.htm<Watch and read these to educate yourself, the above is demonstrative of commandism>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms0a7lA_l0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhzifV9AjAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibtw0okgU3w Lucanamarca: Memorias de Nuestro Pueblo https://lum.cultura.pe/cdi/sites/default/files/rb/pdf/Lucanamarca%20Memorias%20de%20nuestro%20pueblo__(p1-150).PDF
<Shining Path was largely comprised of white and mestizo members, Central Commitee was largely very light skinned, most cadre were most likely petit-bourgeois mixed or white college kids, not indigenous people, who were largely relegated to farming and didn't have access to upper education, race and class are more or less one and the same in Latin America>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6hFiLlV7nI https://peru.com/actualidad/mi-ciudad/procuraduria-embarga-oficina-martha-huatay-abogada-sendero-luminoso-noticia-91351<"The data set compiled by the Turth Commission shows that a minority of the 921 inmates had an indigenous mother tongue (29 percent in the Shining Path, 14 percent in the MRTA) (CVR 2003a, statistical annex, dataset dec_pen_est) although the percentage of Sendero's inmates with an indigenous first language was higher than in the general population (29 percent vs. 19 percent).">Civil Wars and their Consequences, The Peruvian Armed Conflict in Comparative Perspective, Livia Isabella Schubinger & David Sulmont. page 60<Regarding the language or language with which they learned to speak in their childhood, 63.6% of people aged 5 and over stated that it was with Quechua, 35.6% Spanish, 0.1% the Aymara, among the main ones. At the provincial level, in Vilcas Huamán 91.7%, Cangallo 90.6%, Víctor Fajardo 87.1%, Huanca Sancos 84.0%, Sucre 82.1% and La Mar 78.6%, the majority learned to speak in his childhood with Quechua. In Lucanas 47.6%, Paucar del Sara Sara 43.9%, Huamanga 43.6% and Parinacochas 43.5% with Spanish. Responding to the census question on ethnic self-identification, applied to the population over 12 years of age, 81.2% recognize themselves as Quechua, 13.1% as mestizo, 2.0% as white and 0.8% as black, brown, zambo, mulatto / Afro-Peruvian or Afro-descendant people.>http://censo2017.inei.gob.pe/censos-2017-departamento-de-ayacucho-cuenta-con-616-176-habitantes/
<Alberto Fujimori ran on a right-populist and "tough on terrorism" campaign in 1990, you can see how from there on out both the president and congress are completely filled with almost pure neoliberals, even during the "Pink Tide," and just recently, a mild socdem, Pedro Castillo, only won by 0.26% against Fujimori's daughter, who is essentially just a political clonePeru also has rather high election turnout at 82.27%, placing above liberal countries like Sweden, Australia or Denmark where you'd expect such shit, 97% of the population voted in 2000, so the "Voting no, People's War Yes" evidently didn't really get through to the population, demonstrating how they weren't really into the whole movement to begin with
>https://www.electionguide.org/countries/id/170/ https://www.electionguide.org/countries/id/170/>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Peruvian_general_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_Peruvian_general_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Peruvian_general_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Peruvian_general_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Peruvian_general_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Peruvian_general_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Peruvian_general_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Peruvian_general_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Peruvian_general_election
<I implore you to either look up anything vaguely related to the conflict or to come over here yourself, as plane tickets are cheap, and attempt to ask people (like the man in the videos) about the conflict, and I guarantee you that 99.99% of the time, we will have something negative to say about Sendero
>"No, don't support these states the imperial core has sanctioned in the past and heavily propagandizes against, instead, support statistically insignificant premature terrorist groups that their respective countries are either apathetic or antagonistic towards who have all voted in fascists to wage a low-effort war that keeps them at bay for 40+ years!!!!!" Ah yes, not the states which are fear mongered about, but irrelevant (even in their own countries) terrorist groups surely must be the ones that are not CIA, that's why they preach a sectarian and dogmatic message and isolate themselves while not making gains for several decades in any form
>"HAHAA YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD IT, WELL IF YOU SHIFT AROUND SOME NUMBERS THEY DIDN'T ACTUALLY KILL 45% OF THOSE IN THE CONFLICT, BUT AKSHUALLY 38% GOTCHA LIBERAL(I'm going to pretend like Peruvian people also totally care about this and even know about this study)"
>the CVR was flawedAlright, fair point, but do you have a better source? Would love to see it
>"It is crucial to remember that survivors of the violence made decisions about what they would and would not share with the CVR."I am shocked, that's unfathomable, I never knew that poor people would make decisions based upon how much they would benefit materially off of their choices. By the way, no one is denying that they did or did not have initial support in some places of Peru, it would be expected that any movement that promises the moon and seems roughly competent initially will succeed, but given that they failed overall and Gonzalo will die in the jail he has been in since 1992, what are you going to do? Force the peasants to confess how they opted for a movement that seemed good in the moment given their situation but ended up fucking up (something they could not control). This goes into the realm of unfalsifiability and making assumptions, when all you're getting out of them is what they said.
>"b-b-but if you don't like my pet group in a country I couldn't point out that means you must love Fujimori"No lmfao, but cool attempt at deflection and tu quoque, it doesn't work on non-schizos though
It's been said by others, and I think many would be inclined to agree, that the modern day "Maoist" movement, i.e. adherents to the school of "Marxism-Leninism-Maoism", which preaches the cultural revolution, and so forth (we will study their characteristics in a moment), is the reflection of the Trotskyist movement of the past; dogmatic and revisionist at the same time, preaching both economism and terrorism, flaunting revolutionary slogans while stubbornly – at times proudly – submitting to subordination by bourgeois interests and ideology. Whereas the Trotskyists of the past decried "Neither the USA, nor Soviet Union!" the "Maoists" of today protest, "Neither the USA, nor China!"
"Maoism" vs Mao-Zedong-Thought: More Than Semantics
To begin with, I want to briefly dispel confusion that often arises over this subject. It isn't necessary to dwell here, but this is a distinction which many comrades mistake as mere semantics, a difference over name, and not a definite difference within the ideological makeup of these two movements.
Mao-Zedong-Thought (MZT) is the official ideology of the Communist Party of China (CPC). It is in main a system of study, upholding such principles as "No investigation, no right to speak" and "Seek truth from facts". It remains the official ideology of the CPC along with Marxism-Leninism. Adherents to MZT refer to themselves merely as Marxist-Leninists, or MLs.
Maoism, or Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM) is an ideology which was first synthesized by the Peruvian revolutionary/terrorist Abimael Guzmán, also called Chairman Gonzalo, in the latter part of the 1900s. It upholds such principles as the universality of the "Protracted People's War" (PPW), and the "Cultural Revolution"; however, Maoists – especially those leading figures in Maoist thought, Chairman Gonzalo, Joma Sison, and so forth – insist in their adherence not only to Maoism, but to Mao-Zedong-Thought as an integral part of Maoism.
It is also important to note that, while Maoists do adhere to these principles as a general rule, they do not always support the people who thought of them: not every Maoist is fond of Gonzalo, for instance; I will touch on that in a minute. Whether or not this is the case, though, it is still important to make a distinction between Maoists who do this, and MLs who adhere to Mao-Zedong-Thought.
What is 'Social-Revolutionary Primitiveness?'
Lenin described revolutionary primitiveness briefly but accurate in What is to be Done?:
We have noted that the entire student youth of the period was absorbed in Marxism. Of course, these students were not only, or even not so much, interested in Marxism as a theory; they were interested in it as an answer to the question, “What is to be done?”, as a call to take the field against the enemy. These new warriors marched to battle with astonishingly primitive equipment and training. In a vast number of cases they had almost no equipment and absolutely no training. They marched to war like peasants from the plough, armed only with clubs. A students’ circle establishes contacts with workers and sets to work, without any connection with the old members of the movement, without any connection with study circles in other districts, or even in other parts of the same city, without any organisation of the various divisions of revolutionary work, without any systematic plan of activity covering any length of time.
True, from the historical point of view, the primitiveness of equipment was not only inevitable at first, but even legitimate as one of the conditions for the wide recruiting of fighters, but as soon as serious war operations began, the defects in our fighting organisations made themselves felt to an ever-increasing degree. The government, at first thrown into confusion and committing a number of blunders, very soon adapted itself to the new conditions of the struggle and managed to deploy well its perfectly equipped detachments of agents provocateurs, spies, and gendarmes. Raids became so frequent, affected such a vast number of people, and cleared out the local study circles so thoroughly that the masses of the workers lost literally all their leaders, the movement assumed an amazingly sporadic character, and it became utterly impossible to establish continuity and coherence in the work. The terrible dispersion of the local leaders; the fortuitous character of the study circle memberships; the lack of training in, and the narrow outlook on, theoretical, political, and organisational questions were all the inevitable result of the conditions described above. Things have reached such a pass that in several places the workers, because of our lack of self-restraint and the inability to maintain secrecy, begin to lose faith in the intellectuals and to avoid them; the intellectuals, they say, are much too careless and cause police raids!
We will see that these very errors, this exact primitiveness, has plagued nearly every Maoist movement in existence, and doomed it to fail. Rather astonishingly, we can see this exact mistake being made without shame by the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and New People's Army (NPA), together the CPP-NPA. Let's investigate their statement, Great Achievements of the CPP in 50 Years of Waging Revolution:
The NPA is the main weapon of the people for defeating the enemy and winning the revolution. Without it, the people have nothing. It carries out three integral tasks: revolutionary armed struggle, agrarian revolution and mass base building…
Under the direction of the CPP, the broad united front has twice succeeded in overthrowing the reactionary regime. First, it succeeded in fighting, undermining and overthrowing the Marcos fascist dictatorship from 1972 to 1986 and in ousting the corrupt Estrada regime in 2001. Even without as yet deploying units of the people army in the cities aside from armed city partisans, the broad masses of the people rose up to show their hatred for the ruling clique and subsequently the reactionary armed forces refused to follow orders to attack the people but decided to withdraw support from the hated ruler.
What we have here is the blatant admission not only that they see the armed forces of the party, and not the party itself, as the "main weapon of the people for winning the revolution", but also the admission that they are waging a struggle without the support of the proletariat. That the "units in the cities" are not "yet deployed aside from armed partisans", but the "broad masses of people" have risen up – does this not mean that the CPP-NPA, these Maoists, are completely alienated from the movement they represent? Either the proletariat has risen up, in which case the "city units" should be as well, or the proletariat has not risen up, in which case – why has the party?
In essence, they have declared themselves merely a spontaneous peasant uprising, and by their own analysis have rendered their armed struggle mere terrorism.
Let us take Lenin in Revolutionary Adventurism:
We are not repeating the terrorists’ mistakes and are not diverting attention from work among the masses, the Socialist-Revolutionaries assure us, and at the same time enthusiastically recommend to the Party acts such as Balmashov’s assassination of Sipyagin, although everyone knows and sees perfectly well that this act was in no way connected with the masses and, moreover, could not have been by reason of the very way in which it was carried out—that the persons who committed this terrorist act neither counted on nor hoped for any definite action or support on the part of the masses. In their naïveté, the Socialist-Revolutionaries do not realise that their predilection for terrorism is causally most intimately linked with the fact that, from the very outset, they have always kept, and still keep, aloof from the working-class movement, without even attempting to become a party of the revolutionary class which is waging its class struggle. Over-ardent protestations very often lead one to doubt and suspect the worth of whatever it is that requires such strong seasoning. Do not these protestations weary them?
I think this describes our Maoist friends most perfectly. Why such strong protestations about the "rising masses" when your "city units" are "not yet deployed"? Why such enthusiastic proclamations about the armed struggle, about captured weaponry, about assassinated policemen, when the proletariat are not only passive, but even weary, and when it is clear that these actions are the will of a few petit-bourgeois intellectuals who think they know what's best for the working class, and not the actions of the working class itself?
There is distinct historical precedent for this. To understand our modern "comrades", we must explore the case of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the left party in Russia that opposed the Bolsheviks on the grounds that the Bolsheviks were too passive, and too conciliatory towards capitalism and the bourgeoisie.
The Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs), were, in a sense, the original Maoist movement. True, they predate even Mao himself. But, much like Mao first learned his political consciousness from the likes of Kropotkin and other anarchist theory before he made the change to sincere revolutionary marxism, the SRs found their roots in the peasant Narodniki of the century prior, a rural anarchist movement which in particular highlighted the terrorist struggle as a means to liberation.
What reason do we have for studying the SRs? Because their class-interests and class-composition, the very essence of every political movement, is identical to that of the modern "Maoist" movement. Citing again Revolutionary Adventurism by Lenin:
The revolutionary movement continues to grow with amazing rapidity—and “our trends” are ripening. On the other hand, trends expressing only the traditional instability of views held by the intermediate and indefinite sections of the intelligentsia try to substitute noisy declarations for rapprochement with definite classes, declarations which are all the noisier, the louder the thunder of events. “At least we make an infernal noise”—such is the slogan of many revolutionarily minded individuals who have been caught up in the maelstrom of events and who have neither theoretical principles nor social roots.
It is to these “noisy” trends that the “Socialist-Revolutionaries,” whose physiognomy is emerging more and more clearly, also belong. And it is high time for the proletariat to have a better look at this physiognomy, and form a clear idea of the real nature of these people, who seek the proletariat’s friendship all the more persistently, the more palpable it becomes to them that they cannot exist as a separate trend without close ties with the truly revolutionary class of society.
We will see it very clear, if not undeniable, that the "Maoists" of today belong to this particular group of petit-bourgeois intellectuals, who are aware their existence lies entirely on their culpability to the growing revolutionary movement, and who try in vain to attach themselves to this movement and, as a result, appeal to the only class of small-proprietors who's interests align with the petit-bourgeoisie's: the peasantry.
Maoism's Socialist-Revolutionary Take on Peasantry
Characteristic of these petit-bourgeois intellectuals, from the Socialist-Revolutionaries to the CPP-NPA (Philippines), is their intentional marring of the distinction between peasant and proletarian. Through this slight of hand, they then attempt, as petit-bourgeois – a class which historically shares many of the same characteristics, interests, and even social relations as the peasantry – to disguise themselves as this mangled "proletarian-peasant", which exists only as a mask used to subvert the interests of the working movement to petit-bourgeois liberalism, to anarchy in production.
The Social-Democrats [Bolsheviks, in this case] maintained that the proletariat and the peasantry were distinct classes in capitalist (or semi-feudal, semi-capitalist) society; that the peasantry is a class of petty proprietors that can “strike together” against the landlords and the autocracy, “on the same side of the barricades” with the proletariat in the bourgeois revolution, and that in this revolution it can, in certain cases, march in “alliance” with the proletariat, while remaining quite a separate class of capitalist society. The Socialist-Revolutionaries denied this. The main idea in their programme was not that an “alliance of the forces” of the proletariat and the peasantry was necessary, but that there was no class gulf between them, that no class distinction should be drawn between them, and that the Social-Democratic idea concerning the petty-bourgeois character of the peasantry, as distinct from the proletariat, is utterly false.
On what grounds do we have for claiming the Maoists of today repeat this mistake?
Since the "Maoist" movement is not one distinct movement, but several, oftentimes opposing movements, it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what Maoists believe. As per dialectics, it is important we take things not only as they currently exist, i.e. their form; we need to analyze their essence, the origins of the movement, the trends it exhibits, and where its developing towards. As such, we will study first an example of this Socialist-Revolutionary mistake being repeated by none other than Chairman Gonzalo, the ideological founder of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the one who "synthesized" Mao's teachings with those of Marx and Lenin.
Something important to note: not all Maoists support the Shining Path in its actions, per se, seeing as so many of them are quite literally impossible to defend. Room must be made for the usual pseudo-denunciations. But the modern Maoist movement unmistakably bears the stamp of Gonzalo's influence as the founder of this movement, in particular due to his role as the founder of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (a sort of Maoist 4th International), which states in its founding decleration:
The parties and organisations of our Movement and RIM as a whole have been engaged in revolutionary struggle against imperialism and reaction. Most important has been the advanced experience of the People's War led by the Communist Party of Peru which has succeeded in mobilising the masses in their millions, sweeping aside the state in many parts of the country and establishing the power of the workers and peasants in these areas.
Bearing in mind the unmistakable ideological, if not material, influence Gonzalo had over the RIM, it is important to study the viewpoint from which the Maoists originate:
EL DIARIO: How do the workers and peasants participate in the People's Guerrilla Army?
CHAIRMAN GONZALO: The peasantry, especially the poor peasants, are the main participants, as fighters and commanders at different levels in the People's Guerrilla Army. The workers participate in the same ways, although
the percentage of workers at this time is insufficient.source
In just two sentences Gonzalo himself has revealed the bare truth: that the Shining Path is primarily a peasant movement, and not a worker movement. That such a movement would be the result of a petit-bourgeois intellectual, the founder of a Maoist debate club that eventually abandoned the university and took up arms, is no surprise. Further, Gonzalo damns himself horribly when he says:
In the economic base, under the New Power we are establishing new relations of production. A concrete example of this is how we apply the land policy, utilizing collective work, and the organization of social life according to a new reality, with a joint dictatorship where for the first time workers, peasants and progressives rule–understanding this to mean those who want to transform this country by the only means possible–people's war.
I say he damns himself horribly because, as it would turn out, Lenin attacked these exact words almost a century in advance:
To counter Marx’s doctrine that there is only one really revolutionary class in modern society, the Socialist-Revolutionaries advance the trinity: “the intelligentsia, the proletariat, and the peasantry,” thereby revealing a hope less confusion of concepts.
It is this very mistake that Gonzalo, as well as his party, the Shining Path – and with them, all other "Maoist" parties to date, from the CPP-NPA in the Philippines to the original Maoist Red Guards even – have repeated without hesitation or reflection.
What is the error? It is that, due to their nature as petit-bourgeois intellectuals, who have no bearing or relation to the actual working class movement, they find sympathy for their individualistic posturing, their self-interested pseudo-socialism, only in the peasant class which historically provides the basis for petit-bourgeois ideology. The petit-bourgeoisie are, historically speaking, urban peasants, and the majority of peasantry are the rural petit-bourgeoisie.
Maoists cannot bear a society wherein the proletariat is truly given supremacy. They need to hide their subversion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, their subordination of the proletariat to petit-bourgeois interests, by disguising the petit-bourgeoisie as peasants, and the peasants as proletarians. We see a similar trick played by CPP-NPA's "Joma" Sison, when he says:
In the national united front, the proletariat and the Party rely mainly on the basic alliance of the workers and peasants, to win over the urban petty bourgeoisie.
Note, it is not the peasants who must rely on the alliance for guidance, no; it is the proletarians and their party who must rely mainly on it. And to do what? To win over the urban petty bourgeoisie, in other words, to appeal exactly to the interests of petit-bourgeois intellectuals like Sison himself!
Protracted People's War: Maoism and the 'Universal Applicability of Violence'
We are approaching now the biggest topic in regards to this matter. The one tactic/principle which finds itself remunerated in all Maoist movements, to such an extent that it may be the defining characteristic of Maoism, is the Protracted People's War (PPW) as a universally applicable method of struggle.
What is the Protracted People's War? This question will prove elusive. For Mao, it meant something very specific: the people's war was the method of combining guerilla struggle, done by willing partisans and supporters of the Communist Party, and conventional struggle, done by the PLA. The tactic was useful because, in China, where the CPC had garnered overwhelming support among rural peasants, and had its urban based members massacred by the Goumindang, it allowed the proletarian armies to seemingly disappear into the countryside, where they could reorganize before attempting to mount offensives.
Why did this strategy do so well in China? There are a couple reasons, in main:
It was a defensive tactic, prompted at first by the massacre of CPC by Goumindang, and then prompted by the Japanese invasion, and then prompted once more by another attempt at massacre by the Goumindang. It relied on the enemy making mistakes, acting out of retaliation, inflicting terror and thus turning the population against it, etc. What modern Maoists too often fail to understand is that this was not formulated as a universal solution to the seizure of state power.
China at the time, owing to its lack of development and huge landscape, had no fast transportation between the various cities. This meant that it was possible to isolate the cities so that they could not receive outside support, and then coordinate with the communists already in the cities. The favorable conditions enjoyed by Chinese revolutionaries at the time were very specific, and very hard to come by. It is arguable that no such society exists today where the cities can be cut off in such a way by guerilla armies, owing to the existence of high-speed travel and long-distance instant communication.
The CPC already had a large base of support when it picked up the armed struggle. It was not a mere clique of revolutionaries, who decided that the armed struggle was ready to be taken up and who promptly picked up their rifles and headed to the countryside. The party spent years of slow, steady preperation, building the consciousness of the masses, and collaborating with the Goumindang before the massacre and subsequent fleeing to the countryside, where they already enjoyed a sympathetic population.
The CPC, under People's War, practiced guerilla warfare, not terrorism. In cases where the political consciousness of the masses was not yet high enough to wage an armed campaign, they conducted a political struggle in order to educate the masses on why this was necessary. But they did not press the masses into armed struggle before they were ready to commit to it:
All work done for the masses must start from their needs and not from the desire of any individual, however well-intentioned. It often happens that objectively the masses need a certain change, but subjectively they are not yet conscious of the need, not yet willing or determined to make the change. In such cases, we should wait patiently. We should not make the change until, through our work, most of the masses have become conscious of the need and are willing and determined to carry it out. Otherwise we shall isolate ourselves from the masses.
Unless they are conscious and willing, any kind of work that requires their participation will turn out to be a mere formality and will fail.source
How, then, was the "protracted people's war" applied in Maoist movements since, and how well does it conform to Mao's own definition of just what this war should entail?
CHAIRMAN GONZALO: With regard to violence we start from the principle established by Chairman Mao Tsetung: violence, that is the need for revolutionary violence, is a universal law with no exception. Revolutionary violence is what allows us to resolve fundamental contradictions by means of an army, through people's war… The way we see this question is that when Chairman Mao Tsetung established the theory of people's war and put it into practice, he provided the proletariat with its military line, with a military theory and practice that is universally valid and therefore applicable everywhere in accordance with the concrete conditions.
This is blatantly untrue from a Marxist standpoint. It was Lenin who did best to trample the phrasemongering peddled by petit-bourgeois intellectuals and show it for what it really was: blient subservience to failure. As he states in The Importance Of Gold Now And After The Complete Victory Of Socialism:
True revolutionaries will perish (not that they will be defeated from outside, but that their work will suffer internal collapse) only if they abandon their sober outlook and take it into their heads that the “great, victorious, world” revolution can and must solve all problems in a revolutionary manner under all circumstances and in all spheres of action. If they do this, their doom is certain.
What grounds are there for assuming that the “great, victorious, world” revolution can and must employ only revolutionary methods? There are none at all. The assumption is a pure fallacy; this can be proved by purely theoretical propositions if we stick to Marxism. The experience of our revolution also shows that it is a fallacy… We must try to do as few foolish things as possible, and rectify those that are done as quickly as possible, and we must, as soberly as we can, estimate which problems can be solved by revolutionary methods at any given time and which cannot. From the point of view of our practical experience the Brest peace was an example of action that was not revolutionary at all; it was reformist, and even worse, because it was a retreat. The proof that our tactics in concluding the Brest peace were correct is now so complete, so obvious to all and generally admitted, that there is no need to say any more about it.
Violence is not a universally applicable principle, which solves all things. And, though I've taken care not to allow this analysis to devolve into the usual incessant reminders of the horrible atrocities committed by the Shining Path under Gonzalo, and by the CPP-NPA in the Philippines, and so forth, I think it's important to note the very clearly admirative tone Gonzalo takes towards violence, as if its some sort of key he's found to all political problems. He shows this especially clearly in this following:
We see the problem of war this way: war has two aspects, destructive and constructive. Construction is the principal aspect. Not to see it this way undermines the revolution–weakens it.
How could such a blatantly untrue be argued? That war is principally constructive – says who? What does war construct, aside from means of destruction?
War is loathed by the masses, both revolutionary and reactionary. That does not mean the masses cannot be moved to warfare, to civil war and revolution, or that the masses always reject war as a solution: but war is destructive, it has a destructive effect on social relations, leading them to revert to primitive forms, and to attempt to whitewash war as "constructive" is to demonstrate a serious disconnect between the petit-bourgeois intellectual Gonzalo and the actual proletarian masses; it's to display a view only able to be held by a petit-bourgeois who stands to gain from war.
Again, it's hard to elaborate on the theoretical positions of Maoists since there is so little thereotical substance to their movement, owing to the fact that it is mostly a movement of phrase-mongering, of sloganeering, and intellectuals flaunting obscure books by Chinese-American professors at any curious onlookers and shrieking at them about revisionism.
The Fruits of Maoism
Having investigated the theoretical positions of Maoists, we now must investigate where these theoretical positions inevitably lead. Dialectics holds that time is, after all, always moving, and thus, it is inevitable for every movement to pass through its various stages of development. And history has shown, without fail, that the Maoist movement has been thoroughly unsuccessful in every regard at realizing the supremacy of the proletariat, that the Maoist movement has devolved in every instance to, at the best, a group of irrelevant intellectuals, and at worst, a terrorist movement kicking and screaming against destruction.
Gonzalo and his Shining Path ended in spectacular failure. Whereas Gonzalo screeched blue the validity of his conclusion on Mao's theories, he would eventaully find himself in prison by the turn of the 2000s, with the Shining Path existing only as various copycat groups using the old name. Among other terrorist attacks, the Tarata Bombing demonstrated the Shining Path's clear inability to reconcile the interests of the petit-bourgeoisie and peasantry with the truly revolutionary class, the proletariat. Similarly, the Lucanamarca attack showed the Shining Path was not the party of the peasantry, but a party intending to subvert it. Guzman not only confessed to the attack, but defended it.
In the face of reactionary military actions… we responded with a devastating action: Lucanamarca. Neither they nor we have forgotten it, to be sure, because they got an answer that they didn't imagine possible. More than 80 were annihilated, that is the truth. the principal thing is that we dealt them a devastating blow, and we checked them and they understood that they were dealing with a different kind of people's fighters, that we weren't the same as those they had fought before. This is what they understood. The excesses are the negative aspect… If we were to give the masses a lot of restrictions, requirements and prohibitions, it would mean that deep down we didn't want the waters to overflow. And what we needed was for the waters to overflow, to let the flood rage, because we know that when a river floods its banks it causes devastation, but then it returns to its riverbed.
There is a clear and distinct lack of not only remorse, but even self-criticism; he shows complete absence of competence, of ability to self-reflect, a complete lack of ability to grasp that the action he committed not only did not advance the revolutionary cause, but landed him in prison, and turned the masses against him. This is a common trend: in the Philippines, the CPP-NPA has been fighting an armed struggle for 50 years, and are not an inch closer to power than they were then; in fact, they're arguably further from power than they were then. Their leader is a petit-bourgeois intellectual, Joma Sison, who fled in the 90s and has since been directing the (overwhelmingly student youth) members of his "party" to commit acts of terror on the Philippine population, which echo the Shining Path in brutality (rapes, murdering children, decapitations, etc.). It's an attitude tracable back to the red guards, and even before them, to the Socialist-Revolutionaries of the Russian Revolution.
In short, "Maoism" has failed to be a practical tool for the proletariat in any country where it's sprouted up, and has on the contrary served imperialism to quite some extent, often pitting self-described Maoists on the side of international capital and against their own countries' proletariats. They are the Kautskys, the Trotskys, of today's era. It is clear to the class-conscious masses of the world that Maoism is little more than a new word for the same old clique of tired intellectuals, furiously and adamantly attempting to sell capitalism as socialism, to sell imperialism as sovereignty, and to sell petit-bourgeois as proletarians.
I have no clue if this post is of any quality. It's mostly rambling. For an idea of why I wrote it, see this. Either way, I think it's useful we remain vigilant of petit-bourgeois wearing the cloak of socialism and attempting to bastardize it with philosophical sophistry in place of theory; and terroristic, Social-Revolutionary primitiveness in place of concentrated revolutionary activity.