3) The problem of universal validity of people's war

In this matter, the following is said in the Congress Documents: "Understanding that the People's War is valid only in semi feudal-semi colonial countries would be an incomplete understanding of it as it is endorsed by our Party's Ideological document. The People's War is also valid for capitalist countries. This may take different forms in every particular capitalist country. We do not find the static formalism as the only way a correct approach."(p. 97)

It is indeed a Marxist proposition that violence is the essential condition of every revolution. Along the same line, Mao indeed defined it as a principle that every revolution's main task is to seize the political power by the force of arms. In the hands of the MKP, however, this principle is "adjusted" in order to fit it to its bogus theory. What Mao had considered as a universally valid principle, applicable both for China and all the other countries, was the achieving the revolution, sooner or later, through the means of force - nothing further than that. In other words, Mao had made it clear that as to how and in what forms this principle would be applied in each particular country would depend on that country's conditions. We had gone more into details about this point in the previous sections. As for specifically people's war, however, Mao had underlined that it would be applicable only in countries such as China; and that in capitalist countries, revolution would follow the line of mass uprising.

The MKP is blatantly distorting the revolution strategy of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism by distorting Mao. According to Mao, protracted people's war strategy is applicable to semi-colonial, semi-feudal countries, not to capitalist countries. With their theory of socialist people's war, however, the MKP, on the one hand, claims that this strategy is applicable in capitalist countries as well, while on the other hand skipping the mass uprising strategy by attempting to adopt people's war strategy in capitalist countries. By doing so, the MKP comes up with a fit-all formula for the entire world; disregarding the common-sense that path of carrying out the revolution in each country shall be decided according to each country's particular conditions. This makes people's war strategy only a universal dogma. What is more is that the MKP has turned its back on people's war so brazenly that it has labelled those who consider people's war strategy applicable to semi-colonial, semi-feudal countries and not as a world-wide applicable strategy as "static formalists".

The MKP is imposing a single universal key on a problem that should be locally [in each country according to its particular conditions] decided upon. The fact that each country or each economic groups of the country possess a particular economic, political, historic, geographic, cultural, national, etc. properties, development levels, and formation, already leaves out the possibility of a uniform strategy. What the MKP does is just filling up the content of people's war with a bunch of groundless nonsensical words and rendering the strategy useless. As Lenin had so succinctly described it, "For any truth, if ‘overdone’ (as Dietzgen Senior put it), if exaggerated, or if carried beyond the limits of its actual applicability, can be reduced to an absurdity, and is even bound to become an absurdity under these conditions."(Selected Works, Volume 10, p. 119) [https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch07.htm]

For those who take the easy way out by over-generalization; who cannot bother with solving particular and complex problems and suffering from mental drought and intellectual laziness, Marx has a very appropriate passage: "[B]ut one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical. (K. Marx, F. Engels Pre-capitalist Economic Formations, p. 275) [https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm]

Obviously, wandering along the shores of extremism, the MKP has got its feet tangled up in its own theory, which it sees as the summit of wisdom, apparently. In fact, it is nothing other than a revision of Maoism dressed up in people's war.


Newsletter

Forum

For open discussion of topics (including other topics of interest not necessarily related to any one article or the view of a specific author), a separate moderated discussion forum is being made available here that will allow threaded discussion and submission of views of our readers.

Note

All articles published on the red-path.net website are the sole views and opinions of the authors and thus each author is responsible for their own views. However, if you wish to discuss the points raised in any published article you may leave your views, comments or criticisms for public view and study, at the bottom of each article page. Please see our notes on "comments rules".

We reserve the right to moderate these comments and remove any that may be deemed to be abusive and harmful to a healthy and constructive discussion, irrespective of the views presented in such comments.