“Words lead to actions”: Do it all for the Maoist International Conference!
Communist greetings, Comrades
It is with great joy and an inseparable sense of proletarian, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, internationalist duty that we welcome this very important meeting of the international maoist. We are among the growing number of advanced elements, among revolutionary intellectuals and vanguard workers, who recognize the role played by the New Democratic Revolution in India as a strategic anchor of the World Socialist Revolution (WSR). In this century, marked so far by the intensification of class and national struggles resulting from the crisis of the imperialist system (and imperialism is nothing more than capitalism on its deathbed), the most relevant favorable subjective event in the communist field was the founding of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in September 2004. By merging the two main currents continuing the “spring thunder” of Naxalbari in 1967—whose experience, systematized at the 9th Congress in 2007, is a valuable and impressive reservoir of lessons for new generations of communists— the Indian Maoist comrades not only gave new impetus to the revolution in their own country, but also provided the Communist International Movement (CIM) a solid base of ideological, political, and material support in the form of a concrete revolutionary experience to be defended and propagated.
In this century, as in the course of the revolutions of the last century, communists are fighting on two fronts: against imperialism and its machinations and aggressions on the one hand, and against opportunism on the other. There is a path that leads from life to books and from books to life, and it is a fact proven by historical experience that every revolution is preceded by an acute theoretical struggle over which path to follow in order to achieve the initially proposed objectives1. Similarly, counterrevolutions penetrate the ideological plane by proposing all sorts of “shortcuts” or intertwining between proletarian ideology and bourgeois ideology. Of course, the main discernment, the final word in this debate, is given by conscious revolutionary practice, and it is the commitment and ability to carry out its formulations that distinguishes a committed and theoretically relevant debate from a mere scholastic exercise. However, it would be a serious mistake to fall into the opposite error of underestimating the crucial importance of the ideological struggle in the name of escaping empty theorizing. As our Chinese comrades correctly summarized, “we must fully recognize the protracted nature of the class struggle and the struggle of two lines”2. Every new condition generates as a unity the possibility and necessity of new advances in Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionary theory and, alongside it, falsely original forms of its revision.
On the ideological front, we must wage a relentless struggle against both blatant forms of opportunism (in the contemporary world, its most clumsy expression is the so-called “Xi Jinping Thought,” which uses Chairman Mao's slogans to promote imperialism with Chinese characteristics) and subtle, supposedly respectable, and revolutionary forms. No pragmatic criterion could override the need to apply what Lenin constantly emphasized, that “a policy of principles is the only correct policy”3. This applies, of course, not only within the party, but also to the international communist movement. This example of swimming against the tide in defense of principles—which makes the situation of isolation only temporary, because to stand by principles is ultimately to stand with the fundamental historical current that is revolution—was put into practice by Lenin and the Bolsheviks when they denounced the majority of social democratic parties that voted in favor of war credits in 1914. In this extremely difficult context, full of lessons for the present day, as we march toward a new war of division, he said, in defending the founding of a new International regardless of the number of its supporters:
“And if socialists of that type are few, let every Russian worker ask himself whether there were many really class-conscious revolutionaries in Russia on the eve of the February-March revolution of 1917. It is not a question of numbers, but of giving correct expression to the ideas and policies of the truly revolutionary proletariat. The thing is not to “proclaim” internationalism, but to be able to be an internationalist in deed, even when times are most trying. (...) It is better to remain with one friend only, like Liebknecht, and that means remaining with the revolutionary proletariat (...) Let the dead bury their dead. Whoever wants to help the waverers must first stop wavering himself” (Lênin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution”, april 1917).
Whether on the international or national stage, a communist cannot fear fighting in the minority, nor use their momentary weakness as an excuse for inertia and the adoption of a policy of appeasement with opportunistic positions. The crucial point of dialectical materialism is that there is no knowledge outside of practice, no strength outside of intervention in the class struggle. In this sense, it is crucial that we equip the international proletariat with solid theoretical and political principles, as well as solid combat organizations in each country, to face the pressing tasks of rejecting the imperialist war in preparation and taking advantage of all the possibilities that this explosive situation offers for the development of the revolutionary movement. Precisely for this reason, the most subtle forms of revisionism are the most dangerous, because of their ability to deceive, above all, the new and inexperienced generations about their “revolutionary” nature. This is what the master Lenin said about the “sophisticated” attempts to merge Marxism with fideism, against which he waged a relentless struggle in his “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism”.
