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Gonzalo
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this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse
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The western leftist need for moral purity in their political strain that serves as little more than a religious effigy. Because we're so far from actually gaining any sort of power as a communist in the imperial core, people attracted to communism right now basically just have the "at least I'm on the right side of history" as one of the few benefits of becoming a communist. And if you're going to be on the right side of history, you want to be on the most right side of history.
Many western leftists see politics as a personal quest for atonement and personal virtue, and have little concern for things like pragmatism or seizing power. In fact, doing those things would sully their general utopian purity by marring it with specific pragmatic actions and imperfect policies
Babies are pure reactionary id. Only through studying marxism can you not become counter-revolutionary.
Those little kinder kulaks and their comprador mothers, hording the Pokemon Trading Cards from me at the Target... Just because I wish to resell them at a profit, marxistly.
While the Peruvian revolution failed, the PCP (CPP is usually Communist Party of Philippines) are notably the one of the only communist parties to have successfully organized and waged a people's war after the 80s (the only other one I can think of is Nepal, who were MLMaoists themselves) and deserves to be studied in the spirit of scientific socialism.
There's a current among Maoists of elevating the PCP and Gonzalo in particular above any of the other active Maoist movements in what's referred as "Gonzaloism". Gonzalo himself has an arguably important place within communist history, but I would not say he's of the particular importance of Marx, Lenin, or Mao like Gonzaloist adherents claim.
I'm not sure you understand scientific socialism then. The scientific part requires communists to apply dialectical and historical materialism to improve their revolutionary methods. If you only look at the successes you don't see what not to do or patterns of failure your movement might be falling into.
What you're saying is tautological, why bother attempting any revolution if there's a chance of failure? Surely living under oppressive bourgeois and semi-feudal regimes is acceptable if you can't guarantee you'll win, right?
You're 100% correct about assessing the conditions and the gravity of guerilla warfare, but I don't think any of the extant maoist movements have made presumptions about their progress. The Naxals and CPP-NPA didn't launch their PPWs on a whim and while there's discussions to be had about the length of their PPWs the fact they haven't lost yet is notable when you compare them to how the PCP waned after Gonzalo's arrest. Even the underground group behind Austin Red Guard never had delusions that they were ready to launch a people's war.
Cuba, Vietnam, and Korea were/are not MLMaoist because MLM did not exist at the time and they don't identify as such now, so Maoists don't claim them when discussing the international Maoist movement. That's why the PCP, CPP, CPN, CPI(m), TKP/ML, etc gets brought up as common examples, because those are parties that directly contributed to the development of MLM and have adopted it as their ideology. Also Maoism is more than just PPW (and even that is still in debate), so Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, etc are all contextualized as part of the MLM continuity, but not as examples of the ideology which evolved after them.
The average Maoist is not an 18 year old white college student, they are from the third world of various ages and backgrounds. I think it's extremely dismissive of ongoing communist movements to call them romanticist and idealizing struggle after stating how heavily revolution weighs on you while people are choosing to continue their revolutions. If you're talking about your perception of western Maoists, sure, there's probably a fair number of MLM romanticists same as there are in anarchist and ML circles. I don't think it's fair to tar one particular tendency with something that's symptomatic of all western leftists to some degree.
In science you use a null hypothesis to determine like, is the thing I'm proposing even worth doing? Is my hypothesis completely wrong?
To give an example because my plain-english attempts to explain stuff are usually cruddy: I see two doors, 🚪A and 🚪B. One door, 🚪A is of average width and height and the other, 🚪B is about 2/3rd's the height, same width.
People walk through the 🚪doors, I look and think I see a pattern. What I think is that people who are tall, will not go through 🚪B, why? Yeah maybe because tall people really really don't like it. Maybe they are entitled since they are generally viewed favourable in terms of dating on average at least. Maybe tall people just don't see the 🚪B, they only see things at a certain height.
Really I know it's physically possible, I just need to start somewhere, so I put people into two bins, tall and not-tall. I count 100 people walking through the 🚪doors and my null hypothesis, is something I can be confident in saying is not true. Like the opposite of what I want. My null hypothesis then is that no tall people go through 🚪B
Ok let's look at the data to see if we can reject my null hypothesis or not. Excuse the table formatting
Oh wow look at that! Ok now I can move on to my real question, which is, do people who are tall like to go through 🚪doors which are of lower height? This is much harder. Maybe I'll say if there is a preference of like 90%, so 90% of tall people go through regular height 🚪doors that means that they don't like going through shorter height 🚪doors. I also need to know how many people generally like to go through 🚪doors of shorter height. Because if tall people prefer regular 🚪doors as much as non-tall people, then height of the individual, tall or not, would not play a role in the difference.
Since I was able to eliminate the idea that tall people do not go through shorter 🚪doors, I can move on to other questions which depend on the initial null hypothesis to be false. Because, why waste time if our hunches or guesses (i.e our _hypotheses) are not on the right track?
Ok, does this relate. I'm skipping stuff for brevity, and I think you can still get it bcuz of scientific socialism & all that goodness. These 'failures' can tell us what not to do. And more importantly, these 'failures' failed in a specific way! Why that specific way? Because the overall 'failure' is the result of a ton of smaller 'failures' and 'successes' and we will say stuff that didn't really affect anything. Did the weather during a specific guerrilla attack lead to the end failure? Did a comrade in a mid-level position decrease the fighting power of the fighters? Are guerrilla tactics different in the 80s (I think it was the 80s?) and because tactics from the civil war in China were used, that was what ultimately led to failure?
The thing is there is likely some useful information. You're not wrong when you say it is a failure and thus not worth studying or that there is no point considering it. And others with different knowledge may find something useful. The trick is–you cannot know until you try. Because a presumption or prediction is a model, or something in your head. And as dialectical materialists we must accept that what is in our head is not the same as the external world, i.e. the stuff _outside of our head.
Again it's not that you are wrong; it's only, that is a difficult, perhaps impossible thing to know without actually putting in the work and effort.
One other way, think of these as experiments, not all experiments succeed, and why they fail helps you figure out how to run the experiment next time.
Speaking purely personally, "the most advanced form of scientific socialism" is because this is the main tendency attempting to grapple with failures of past and present communist movements (including it's own). Most of the time I get in conversations with MLs about these MLM parties, especially the ones involved in armed struggles, there's often heavy resistance to paying them any sort of mind or any because the PCP lost or the CPP haven't won yet or the CPI(m) call China imperialist. I just want some comradely critical analysis instead of "Gonzalo personally ate one million babies, checkmate ultra" 😔
well, we at least ought to study them to see what went wrong and why they thought it would work
I think Ansarallah in Yemen is more socialist and revolutionary in character than either of those. Same with Hezbollah and the axis of resistance writ large
Absolutely not the case. They are very leftwing
You just said “for the region”. Yemen used to be communist and split like Korea. They collapsed with the USSR. Nowadays the Shia population is very progressive and non-sectarian “for the region” much like Hezbollah. Much of the socialist base remains.
Basically everyone that was in the South was driven out during the civil war, it's all mixed up now. You can't think in fixed geographic borders, ideas and people were shattered and scattered about
I've not really investigated the socialist character of Yemen, so I can't speak on that. The PCP, CPP, and CPN did/are waging active people's wars so I'm not sure it's worth comparing how revolutionary they are when that's a common feature. I'm not aware of Hezbollah having any socialist stances either, is that a historical thing or has there been some shift?
There are good Maoist groups, like the guerillas in the Philippines or India (whatever might be said of the inefficacy of the latter), but it seems like all the worst groups that claim ML heritage all call themselves Maoist, including several different cults in the US (Austin Red Guard, Black Hammer, and Avakian's cult)
How do you feel about the Palestinian resistance groups, and their strategies? Failed, stalled, indeterminate after nearly 100 years? Are there better strategies that they're opting not to take, given the circumstances?
You could have said this before October 7th but it’s absurd to argue the Palestinian resistance is stalled or doomed now. The entire region is moving into revolutionary and de-colonial footing and movement is happening to destroy Israel. The axis of resistance is extremely pragmatic and non-utopian, so critiques of MLMs don’t apply here
You think so?
Tell me more plz
Ansarallah (Houthis), Hezbollah, Iraqi resistance, Syria and Iran are boiling the frog. The axis of resistance is past the point of no return and they will not let off the pressure until the Palestinian question is resolved. They are receiving military support from Russia and DPRK and diplomatic support from China.
The west can do nothing against this Eurasian superbloc. They will have to fold and withdraw from the region, leaving Israel isolated and alone. Israel will make desperate moves like invading Lebanon that will result in their eventual downfall.
Yea the nukes are a concern but they always have been. Give nuclear weapons to genocidal fascists and it’s never going to end well
So the options are: Take down Israel and risk a nuclear incident, or stand by and let Israel genocide Palestine and then spread throughout the Levant into Greater Israel, absorbing Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. Let them become the next USA of the Middle East, genociding and colonizing with the backing of the US keeping the hegemonic empire alive.
The axis of resistance is choosing option 1, and hopefully allah will be with them
Absolutely nothing. But at the end of the day, you have to have the audacity to risk it all for the sake of freedom. As Mao said, "dare to struggle, dare to win."
Well conservative Islam seems to have worked for the Taliban. I think its more that national liberation movements align themselves with what will gain them the most or the best foriegn and domestic support.
What options would you say Peru had but didn't take? Castillo dressed up like a western cowboy but that still wasn't good enough - do you think those recent events vindicate somewhat the armed struggle?
I doubt the communists there were completely alienated from the people, or else the conflict would have been over very fast - in fact it is still ongoing. Its difficult to assess however, being illegal to show support for them there.
Armed struggle occurs between class enemies, once you have the majority of the working class and (if it exists) peasantry on your side. If you are fighting a de-colonizing war or anti-imperialist war, then you may also need the national bourgeoisie in a temporary alliance against comprador classes and imperialists. It's a war, of the masses. Socialists do not support all armed struggle just because it's armed and a struggle. It's often adventurism, it's often intellectual and disconnected from the masses and the working classes. That is not the phase of active armed warfare, and if you do start to have armed cells of socialists struggling it should be against the state, the bourgeoise and fascists, not against peasantry and other left factions. That's the difference with the path of the Shining Path, it's ultraleftist and doomed because it's minoritarian and elitist. It never had the broad support of the people, it waged terrorism and adventurism and actually attacked all other factions.
Compare that to the red army. The broad coalitions of all the socialists. The peasantry's support of Mao or of Ho Chi Minh or Fidel.
Perhaps - personally, I support many independence movements even if they're not socialist or communist, because often its impossible to progress while occupied or colonised, so its a necessary first step. Afghanistan is a good example of this - its objectively better having the Taliban back in control than the US occupation and their pet warlords.
I see what you mean in a strategic sense - its not a good idea to fight against too many opponents at once. I'm not sure that Shining Path did attack those who they should have allied with however - all the sources I can find are dubious, and I wasn't there, so I can't really make a good judgement about who did what and the types of people they are alleged to have killed, only apply the usual rubric that if the US says one thing about communists, the opposite is probably the case.
From what I've read, it seems like they did have a lot of support (and what they did achieve would be frankly impossible without that). The difference I can see between them and the Maoist case, is that Peru wasn't being occupied by another power at the time, and the urban centres didn't like them so much (except in the very poor areas). But then Peru isn't/wasn't particularly industrialised, being a resource extraction colony, so I wonder if there was even a significant urban proletariat to really bother trying with.
If there isn’t an urban proletariat, and you don’t have support of the peasant class, then what are you even doing playing at a “revolution”? It’s unserious adventurism that gets people killed with no hope of victory.
I don't think there is anything 'unserious' about an armed conflict with a state, and I don't think you can be serious about portraying it that way - its a flippant thing to say.
Again, I don't think its true that they didn't have support from the peasants. Certainly that's been claimed by the anti-communists, but they always say that about their enemies.
I don't think conflicts occur on somebody's whims, there is always a reason. A long (and ongoing) conflict of this kind could not have occured without there being a good reason for it, and also a possibility of victory.
It's like declaring "I'm useless in my local context"
maybe they (in the west) yearn to be in a position to do more than they're able or is wise to do in their circumstances. Some people are desperate or eager and impetuous and don't have much faith in, or find their circumstances too pressing for a slow approach the fruits of which they'll never personally see, the Unionise/organise/electoralism/protest stuff that has also of course manifestly failed in the west.
it'll come down to armed conflict in the end, there's no other way, so I guess some people just kind of jump the gun.