Auteur/autrice : IoULeeM0n

Why do religions still exist at the beginning of the 21st century? Because, as well as reflecting class interests, they are a civilizational response to the crisis of human nature. Humanity has been in crisis ever since its historical emergence ‘out of Nature’, as an animal or former animal capable of advanced thought and able of transforming Nature.

An animal that is no longer one, that is what the human being is now. The human race’s emergence from animality is thus contradictory: it has been achieved in practice, but at the same time it is illusory because human beings remain animals. Religions try to provide a general framework for humanity so that we can look at ourselves in the mirror.

This is why Jesus was able to say that ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’. Indeed, people with a major intellectual problem, being ‘simpletons’ or ‘retarded’, do not have to juggle between good and evil like human beings in general, or more precisely with situations that are experienced as really ‘positive’ and others that are experienced as particularly ‘negative’.

So they don’t have the anxiety and worry that plague humanity in general, the positive and negative to-ing and fro-ing that turns our lives upside down.

In pre-colonial America, people with intellectual or mental disabilities were celebrated, for the same reason as Jesus did, as beings in contact with the divine, with goodness, with heaven.

Religions are an attempt to preserve appearances, to neutralize the oscillation between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Religions are an obsession with maintaining a framework for humanity, to escape from the barbarism of the period when humanity lived ‘on the hoof’, with summary institutions established on a small scale.

This is the dialectical paradox: on the one hand, religions say that humanity is bad, but on the other, it is through this non-animal capacity to be bad that humanity can be good. It’s a contradictory message that runs through the whole of religion, as we read in the Koran: “Indeed, We offered the Trust1 to the heavens and the earth and the mountains, and they declined to bear it and feared it; but man [undertook to] bear it. Indeed, he was unjust and ignorant.” Religions are a fiction, because they say that mankind oscillates all the time between good and evil, and yet it is towards them that God would turn. In reality, God is a way of ‘holding on’, of establishing a certain calm.

It is in this sense that it is interesting to look at the dual aspects of what is happening at the beginning of the 21st century. On the one hand, religions are in constant retreat, giving way to everyday capitalist life, which leaves no room for such a spiritual approach. On the other, religions are constantly on the move, multiplying their forms and their attempts to influence the direction of society as much as possible. Hinduism wants hegemony over India, Islam over a whole series of countries, Judaism wants to control Israel, Buddhism wants to shape the countries where it is in the majority, Evangelicalism wants to take the moral lead in the United States, Roman Catholicism wants to be a profound cultural and moral lever, while the Orthodox Church works in tandem with the Russian state.

Religions are dying and, at the same time, aiming to expand in order to anchor themselves in modernity. This is significant, because what is at stake is a complete change in humanity’s vision of the world. The productive forces have developed to such an extent that religions are an anomaly, whose existence corresponds to a humanity of the past. We know too much for religions to have even the slightest credibility. We know too much about the planet’s past in the cosmic context, about the past of animals with the dinosaurs, about the evolution of humanity as a species…

And yet religions still exist. This paradox implies that they must disappear. As we enter the final quarter of the 21st century, a break is about to take place within humanity, with religions being replaced not simply by a ‘social’ reading of things, but by a materialist vision of reality, on a par with the universe. It is Spinoza’s dream that the 21st century will realize, with humanity recognizing Nature as a system and abandoning the vain hypothesis of ‘Man in Nature like an empire within an empire’.

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Dialectical materialism affirms the inexhaustible nature of matter. The universe is only material, and it is infinite. This means that there is no space or time without matter, that matter is everywhere and always present. Whether we look to the infinitely small or the infinitely large, whether we look to the past, the present or the future, we will always have matter and only matter.

This aspect of matter is dialectically opposed to another aspect: that of its continuity. Dialectical materialism asserts that matter forms a whole, a whole in which everything is interrelated. At no point can we find a thing or phenomenon that is indivisible, isolated, irreducibly independent of the rest.

The dialectical paradox of the universe

There’s a dialectical paradox here. On the one hand, the universe is made up of an infinite number of different, and therefore distinguishable, things. On the other, the universe is absolutely continuous, undivided, all part of a single, infinitely rich, yet unified reality.

On the one hand, there is only one determination, that of the universe forming a whole where everything is interrelated, where nothing exists without being related to everything else.

On the other hand, there is an infinity of determinate things, each thing, each phenomenon possessing its own unity and consequently its own identity arising from its own difference from the rest.

However, dialectically, an infinity of determinate things posits an indeterminate infinity, since the identities of its elements are infinite.

On the one hand, then, we have a universe that is determined, because it is unified, uni-total… and, at the same time, a universe whose infinite nature is lost, in terms of definitions, in the infinity of what exists. The resolution of this question is complex.

The attempt at a religious answer
through the one and the many

What dialectical materialism understands as the opposition between the finite and the infinite has in the past been understood as the opposition between the one and the many. This is at the heart of the thinking of what is called philosophy.

The traditional starting point for this is philosophical questioning in Greece before Plato and Aristotle, with two philosophers highlighted here. There’s Parmenides, who says that the universe is one, always the same, and that consequently once we’ve talked about it, we can not speak more, since everything has already been said.

Then there’s Heraclitus, for whom everything is always changing: you can’t bathe in the same river twice. Consequently, we need to speak uninterruptedly, in order to always define things that are in essence always changing.

In one case, the universe is unity, in the other it is multiplicity. The notion of God was formulated intellectually precisely to be able to interpret this relationship between the one and the many.

For Plato, the material world is nothing but an illusion, a pale reflection of the only true reality, which is spiritual and is God. This is the message of the allegory of the cave. For Aristotle, on the other hand, the material world has all its dignity, with God serving merely as a “motionless motor” to set material things in motion in a continuous interplay of cause and effect.

Naturally, religions, which by definition necessarily follow Plato, have had great difficulty in justifying how the divine “one” can give rise to the material “many” (in some cases, the finite “emanates” from the infinite by degrees, other explanations invent an intermediary God playing the role of demiurge, others multiply the intermediate stages between the two or, on the contrary, make God “recede”, etc.).

In all cases, however, a relationship is established between the one and the many, making it possible to grasp the many by means of the concept of “one” (divine), and to establish definitions and determinations.

Religions are precisely those ethical, social, psychological, political, economic and other determinations. It is necessary to submit to the definitions laid down by the “one” (divine), which is the origin of the “many”. In any case, at the end of time, the multiple must give way to the “one”.

The bourgeois attempt at an empirio-critical response

In reality, God has only a conceptual reality, allowing us to posit the relationship between the finite and the infinite in one way or another. Moreover, according to its historical needs, humanity has modulated the relationship between God and the world, the one and the many. Protestantism, by affirming the unity of personal consciousness, thus reformulates the relationship to God in its entirety.

Religious formalism was, and still is, less tenable in the face of the observation of movement, whether in the past with the history of the planet, the history of species, or in the present, with expanding human activities.

As the productive forces grew, religions saw their concept weaken, allowing science to assert itself in human activities.

However, under the weight of bourgeois domination, science has been increasingly reduced to utilitarian pragmatism.

Its vision of the world is summed up in a more or less critical empiricism, combined with a wholly idealistic positivism, a genuine belief in “progress” consisting in the simple accumulation of data.

There would be a linear development of the sciences, as techniques and functional capacities would become more widespread.

In reality, it’s not so much a question of science as of a technical upsurge driven by the development of productive forces.

Under the bourgeoisie, scientists have even become so freewheeling that they can no longer even fight the idea of God, getting bogged down in a blissful cult of experimentation and a relativism presented as materialism.

The dialectical materialist response through cosmology

Dialectical materialism rejects both the religious interpretation of a relationship between the one and the many, and the more or less critical empiricism of a science reduced to techniques and experimentation.

Dialectical materialism posits the universe – i.e., matter – as the basis of any authentically scientific perspective. In so doing, it resolves the problem of the relationship between the elements of the universe and the universe itself.

It is because there is, dialectically, the infinite in the finite and the finite in the infinite, that it is possible to grasp how the universe is a single entity which, at the same time, possesses an infinite nature.

There is no such thing as a definite quantity of matter, which is static and simply “formed” from the outside. Only matter exists, and matter is self-moving. There is no external impulse to matter.

Nor is there any pause in the incessant movement of matter: there is never a halt in the process of matter’s transformation.

The universe is composed solely of matter, and this matter is in uninterrupted transformation, experiencing dialectical leaps based on the internal contradictions inherent in each thing, each phenomenon.

Since matter knows no external impulse or origin, and yet exists, then it has always existed, and always will. Since matter knows dialectical jumps, then it has always existed by knowing these dialectical jumps, and it exists by knowing these dialectical jumps, everywhere and all the time.

Since dialectical leaps take place everywhere and all the time, there is no limit to matter or its development.

The question of the relationship between whole and parts

How do incessant dialectical leaps relate to the unified, uni-total character of the universe? The basic problem is that what is infinite is logically incapable of having parts.

If infinity had parts, they would be finite or infinite. If these parts are infinite, then there would be several infinities, which is not coherent. If the parts are finite, then the infinite would be made up of finite elements, and could not be infinite.

One solution would be to conceive of an infinity of finite parts, which was Spinoza’s solution for expressing the inexhaustible character of the “modes” of existence of the entirely material universe. Here, the universe would be infinite in the sense that it would consist of an infinity of modes that themselves exist infinitely. All modes would be related in their very existence, as they would be of the “nature naturated” by the whole, which is “naturating nature”.

To define a thing or a phenomenon, we must therefore not have a positive reading, starting from “nothing” to get to the thing, but extract the thing from the whole: for Spinoza, “all definition is negation” (in the sense that a thing is not everything else).

However, this is not to posit a qualitative infinity, but to affirm that there is a dimension measurable to infinity, even if this measurement never ceases, quantitatively, going precisely to infinity.

Spinoza’s quantitatively infinite universe, with its concept of negation as the definition of everything, nevertheless paved the way for dialectics.

Negation as determination

It was Hegel who posited infinity as a qualitative leap from the finite. Unfortunately, he saw the movement of the world as passing through the human mind’s grasp of dialectics, rather than through the dialectical transformation of the world itself.

Hegel’s extension of Spinoza (who in turn extended Aristotle, Avicenna and Averroës) nevertheless posited transformation as the key to understanding phenomena.

Dialectical materialism does not consider the finite and the infinite to be separate. There is no irreducible “one” and “many” facing each other. In reality, God has only been the mask for the concept of infinity, and the term multiple has only designated the finite.

And yet, according to the law of contradiction, the finite is infinite and the infinite finite. Hegel understood this based on Spinoza’s definition of negation.

He understood that if a thing defines itself negatively (in the sense that a thing is not something else), then it must also be defined negatively in relation to itself.

Difference then becomes a thing’s identity. Every thing is both itself (because it is not something else) and other than itself, because it carries its own finitude.

Hegel, in The Science of Logic, notes that: “Difference as such is already contradiction in itself; it is in fact the unity of things that are only insofar as they are not one – and the separation of things that are only insofar as they are separated in the same relation.

The positive and the negative, on the other hand, are the contradiction posited, because as negative units they pose themselves, and hence the overcoming of the latter and the positing of its opposite.”

The direct consequence of considering that a thing, a phenomenon, poses itself as difference, is that there is a dialectical identity. This means that in its very existence, every thing posits itself as finite in the infinite, because it differs from the infinity of things. It posits itself as different, and therefore allows itself to be determined by this difference, by this negation of the rest.

Lenin, in his notes on this work by Hegel, makes the following remark on this question:

“[Hegel:] “They” (things) “are, but the truth of this being is their end.”

Shrewd and clever! Hegel analyses concepts that usually appear to be dead and shows that there is movement in them.

Finite? That means moving to an end!

Something?—means not that which is Other.

Being in general?— means such indeterminateness that Being = not-Being. All-sided, universal flexibility of concepts, a flexibility reaching to the identity of opposites,—that is the essence of the matter.

This flexibility, applied subjectively = eclecticism and sophistry.

Flexibility, applied objectively, i.e. reflecting the all-sidedness of the material process and its unity, is dialectics, is the correct reflection of the eternal development of the world.”

The dialectic of finite and infinite

It is from this contradictory relationship between the finite and the infinite that we must understand the inexhaustible nature of matter. Each thing is inherently different, and thus already the basis of a dialectical opposition. What’s more, in its very nature of being finite, it will cease to exist. It therefore carries an internal contradiction: it is, but it also contains its own death.

And this is universal. This means that finitude is infinite. And since, what’s more, everything transforms itself, this means that everything carries the infinite, since what is finite yields to transformation, in a qualitative leap, opening the way to something new, a non-finite within the finite, and thus the infinite.

In his notes, Lenin transcribes the following lines from Hegel:

“The unity of finite and infinite is not an external juxtaposition of these terms, nor an improper connection contrary to their determination, and binding together entities separate and opposed and mutually independent and hence incompatible.

On the contrary, each in itself is this unity, and is so only in transcending itself, neither excelling the other in Being-in-Self and affirmative Existent Being.

It has been demonstrated above that finitude exists only as a passing beyond itself; it thus contains infinity, which is its Other.…”

Lenin writes the following remark next to this quote:

« To be applied to atoms versus electrons. In general the infiniteness of matter deep within…”

Lenin prefigures here, as Mao Zedong did, the non-indivisible character of matter as regards atoms and their components. However, this is true not only in depth, but in all directions.

Infinity, non-infinity, continuity, discontinuity

We need to distinguish between infinity and non-infinity. A thing experiencing a qualitative leap is a finite thing carrying non-finiteness within it, as the new emerges from the old. We could say that, in the qualitative leap, a thing demolishes the limits apparently assigned to it.

Hegel, in The Science of Logic, sums this up by saying that: “It is the nature of the finite itself to surpass itself, to negate its negation, and to become infinite.”

The non-finite extracts itself from the finite. However, the question of the infinite still arises. Hegel has failed to define it here, because he has turned it into an abstract principle that overhangs reality. For him, infinity is the meaning of development, and therefore of the world, and the world no longer counts for him.

Dialectical materialism considers that it is the world which carries movement, development and therefore infinity. This means that infinity is by definition present in matter, as Lenin observed with “the infinity of matter in depth”.

In fact, one of the essential aspects of the process and the most disturbing for a human observer is that the infinite nature of matter combines with its opposite, its finite nature.

However, it is here in relation to the contradiction between continuity and discontinuity. Every phenomenon carries contradiction within itself, and therefore difference, because every contradiction affirms a phenomenon and consequently separates itself from the rest of matter to take on a finite, different character.

This poses a discontinuity in the infinite character of matter, but at the same time this discontinuity implies continuity, nothing being isolated.

An object made by a human being is, for example, inseparable from the productive forces carried by humanity, just as a cloud is inseparable from the general terrestrial system, the Biosphere.

However, if the productive forces of humanity cannot be explained without the terrestrial Biosphere, it cannot be explained without the galaxy, which itself depends on a super-cluster of galaxies, etc.

All this is true for the infinitely large and the infinitely small, to infinity.

There is no “final” level, whether towards the infinitely large or the infinitely small – otherwise, this “final” level would be isolated, independent, even a framework.

The infinitely large and the infinitely small themselves form a contradiction. There is thus both continuity and discontinuity in existence. A thing is both in continuity with the rest of the universe… And, through its internal contradiction, has its own leap.

The universe and its constitution in waves

The universe is a sort of infinite ocean made up of infinite waves responding to each other, transforming each other, to infinity.

Matter transforms matter, deepens it, develops it, and this does the same, to infinity.

The existence in the sense of elements relatively separated from the general movement of the universe is based on the waves of qualitative leaps occurring in matter itself. This in no way means that the contradiction of each thing is not internal, but that its framework relates to matter as a whole. To take an example, the Earth is the product of a qualitative leap in the organization of matter at the galaxy level, and one of the waves produced by the existence of the Earth is the formation of humanity, which itself forms a wave having an impact on its direct spatial environment, etc.

Every echo is infinite

Every qualitative leap has an infinite echo, because however small this echo may be, it is part of the general movement of matter.

Every finite thus carries within itself not only the non-finite of its own leap, of its own transformation, but also the infinite itself due to the fact that it relates to a general movement of matter.

It is not at all a question here of the existence of a simple “limit” pushed back from an expanding finite, but of infinity in the strict sense, that is to say non-measurable and non-divisible.

The slightest material element taken arbitrarily possesses in itself infinity, the infinite extension of matter, since it is part of it. Matter is infinite in its reality and the partial possesses the totality, the finite the infinite, and vice versa. In no case is it possible to speak of “parts” of matter.

If they were parts, then they would have to be given a special status. Their identity would each be opposed to the other parts, and therefore relatively isolated. However, no isolation is possible in the infinite nature of matter, because infinity cannot be finite.

Consequently, the separations that exist within material infinity, i.e. the existence of finite elements within infinity, must be defined as a moment, a stage, a relative situation, proper to the expansion, growth and thickening of matter. They are an aspect of infinity as the eternal movement of matter.

It is this aspect that mathematics observes, fixing and separating arbitrarily, for a momentary photograph of what in reality is in uninterrupted and infinite transformation.

Eternity and the inexhaustible nature of matter

What is finite has as its foundation the qualitative leap proper to the dialectic of the finite and the infinite, for the finite is the product of an infinite expressed in the finite.

The finite thus carries within it its own limit, which produces a leap to infinity; this leap leads to a finite situation which itself carries its limit, which itself produces a leap to infinity, and this to infinity, and therefore eternally.

What exists materially as a relatively autonomous entity – a human being, a tree, a table – has as its foundation the qualitative leap to infinity, and thus the contradiction between finite and infinite.

In this way, eternity is based on the uninterrupted and, so to say, the expanding presence of matter. This is not a mere spatial expansion. It is an extension in the sense of a qualitative movement progressing in an infinity of aspects.

In concrete terms, the contradictory movement of matter results in the production of an infinite number of contradictions, which themselves have an echo in matter. The law of contradiction is universal and it extends eternally through infinity, producing waves with an ever-greater impact in the universe.

The inexhaustible nature of matter

In a certain sense, we can say that matter is not only infinite, but that it goes on to infinity. Its movement of complexification is based on the infinite (as an internal leap resulting from the rupture within the finite) and goes towards infinity.

Matter is both infinite and in the process of becoming infinite – it’s a contradiction.

Dialectical materialism thus affirms the infinite character of matter, both in its finite existence and in its infinite nature. However, this infinite character relates to the infinity carried by the movement of matter in its universality, as its principal aspect. The infinite character of an ‘isolated’ material reality is solely an abstraction freezing the general movement of matter and its qualitative leaps producing cosmic waves consisting of transformations.

The waves in the universe, of the universe, are produced by different contradictions. This means that they are both finite, because they consist of a phenomenon that responds to an internal contradiction, and at the same time infinite, because their number is infinite, because they are part of the general movement of the universe, because their qualitative impact is itself infinite in the future, their source itself being infinite in the past.

The movement of matter, producing a qualitative leap in one phenomenon, which itself acts on other phenomena, other leaps, is therefore characterized by an uneven development, underlining both the identity and the difference of the leaps and the phenomena.

Any isolation of a thing is therefore necessarily arbitrary, at whatever level. And there is no such thing as a fixed matrix in the movement of matter. This is an essential aspect of movement, of the nature of matter, of the inexhaustible nature of matter. There is no fixed determination, because there are no separate, fixed ‘parts’ of matter.

Any focus on a particular aspect is simply a mathematical photograph of a given moment that has its dignity, but lets the internally-carried limit escape, and therefore the break that leads to the leap to infinity.

Matter is therefore inexhaustible, because its dialectical richness is infinite and carries infinity. To have a ‘stock’ of matter, we would need a ‘beginning’ – but this is impossible, because matter by definition carries infinity.

The realization of the law of contradiction

The contradiction between the finite nature of a thing, in the sense of its internal determination, and its finite expression in the world, produces in itself an internal tear, causing the infinite to re-express itself, to reassert itself. This is the law of contradiction: each thing, in existing, uninterruptedly affirms its difference, and thus posits negation.

This is true everywhere and all the time, ad infinitum. It is a consequence of the inexhaustible nature of matter.

The point here is not to confuse what is absolute with what is relative. It is not the finite form that is relative, but the infinite. In fact, the finite form itself carries the contradiction, and it is the contradiction that is universal. The development of the infinite is relative because it expresses contradiction.

Dialectical materialism is the science of the unity of opposites, not the religion of an abstract infinity.

However, the relative and the absolute also form a contradiction. The development of the infinite always prevails, because it is inherent in matter. For this reason, what is finite is only relative and is bound to disappear.

This is why every material entity is obliged to transform itself and can never be eternal. Nothing is eternal, everything is transformed, because only the whole exists, as a whole, but consequently also as an infinite whole, and therefore infinity in extension, expansion and deepening.

The eternity of a finite thing would be the cessation of movement, and therefore of infinity. Consequently, there would be no more movement, and there would never even have been any. Movement does not exist if there is no infinity.

The question is therefore whether the main aspect is infinity, motion or matter. Primitive materialism considers that it is matter, while materialism that recognizes the dynamics of matter chooses movement. Dialectical materialism considers that it is infinity, because matter implies movement, and therefore infinity.

However, dialectically, it is matter that carries infinity. The affirmation of dialectics thus establishes materialism. Dialectical materialism rests on the contradiction between matter and its own finitude, hence infinity, hence dialectic. This is the main aspect.

The infinity of matter

Dialectical materialism does not, therefore, make a fetish of matter in finite form, but celebrates the infinite as the most authentic reality of matter – and at the same time recognizes the full dignity of matter as the only reality, the bearer of the infinite. The universe is not composed of matter: it is matter. What we call the universe is matter in its infinite reality, whose waves propagate its general and particular transformations, in an infinite movement that produces the finite, itself both the carrier and the vector of the infinite.

This is why only dialectical materialism recognizes the dignity of reality. Only dialectical materialism can see the infinite in the finite, and therefore accord fundamental value to the finite. Far from losing itself in the infinite by affirming it, it is enthusiastic about reality and its movement, its transformation.

It is in transforming reality that inexhaustible matter is affirmed, forming the true meaning of life. Dialectical materialism sees movement as transformation (and not as dynamics), and assumes matter as a cosmic, infinite and therefore eternal reality.

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To transform a country through revolution, you need a strategic analysis. Without a strategy, there’s nothing; you can take as many tactical initiatives as you like, they’ll still come to nothing, because quantity is not quality.

Likewise, it’s futile to hope that through a lot of initiatives, quantity will be transformed into quality, because scattered initiatives, with no common thread, are not just a matter of quantity, but of individual quality, with very poor quality.

Only a long-term vision shall enable us to see what this or that thing wants, what impact this or that initiative can have. To get a clearer picture, we need to look at things in terms of periods, historical development, and the requirements specific to those periods and that development.

So, when we do something, we calibrate it according to objectives, historical expectations; if we observe a phenomenon, we assess whether or not it’s in line with historical expectations.

You always have to evaluate what you do, what you observe, by means of a two-lines analysis: what’s the red line, what’s the black line, where does the thing, the phenomenon, stand in relation to these lines.

It’s opportunism to rush into the slightest demand, the slightest strike, the slightest protest. In any case, modern France, from 1945 to 2023, has been full of protests, strikes and protests, without ever leading to a mass protest against capitalism. Civil servant strikist ideology and students spirit of revolt have never led to anything concrete.

French decadence

Let’s take a concrete example. France is a country in decadence. The level of science, culture and ideas among its people has collapsed. There’s a general laissez-faire, idle attitude that reflects France’s parasitic position in relation to the Third World. The French want to keep what they’ve got, and that’s as far as it goes.

If we turn our attention to the modalities and state of mind of the movement against pension reform in 2023, or the Gilets Jaunes before that, then we see very clearly that we’re dealing with reactionary initiatives aimed simply at keeping French capitalism as it is. Nothing good could come of it.

So how should we view the red line? It has to be said that France is a country that is losing positions on the world market; the standard of living cannot be maintained. There is already a real fracture between a bourgeoisie living in a pronounced bubble of conspicuous consumption and the broad masses living on the go, with home ownership as a central consideration. This divide is set to widen, mechanically producing bitterness and resentment.

This last aspect represents the major moral difficulty, since we are in the retrograde attitude of the proletarian of rich countries. Nevertheless, the positive aspect is that it is now possible to affirm civilization as socialist.

In the 1960s, 1980s, 2000s… the bourgeoisie was still educated, well-bred and capable of framing things. It had the prestige of tradition, of moral and civilizational continuity. Who was going to trust leftists or trade unionists to go off on their own adventures? Nobody, of course.

The proletariat no longer faces such a strong enemy. But it still has to transform itself, massively and profoundly, to assume its role as the ruling class.

Do the syndicalists of 2023 or the Gilets Jaunes converge with this need for proletarian self-criticism, with the idea of a socialist civilization? Not at all. The syndicalists and the Gilets Jaunes aligned themselves with the illusion of capitalism as infinitely redistributive, as long as you can “scrape away” gains.

Instability and war

How should the PMD see things? It must start from the premise that French capitalism is not static, but evolving. It’s evolving because of its internal contradictions, and it’s also evolving in relation to the global competition between powers, large and small. The internal evolution is decadence; the relationship with global competition is war. France goes to war because it has to in order to maintain its position in the global balance of power, and also to try and strengthen its own positions.

The internal shrivelling thus combines with a tendency towards war, which will bound to provoke upheavals in society. We tend to a revolutionary situation, which Lenin describes as follows:

“The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions and especially by all three Russian revolutions in the twentieth century, is as follows: for a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way.

It is only when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph. This truth can be expressed in other words: revolution is impossible without a nation-wide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters).

It follows that, for a revolution to take place, it is essential, first, that a majority of the workers (or at least a majority of the class-conscious, thinking, and politically active workers) should fully realise that revolution is necessary, and that they should be prepared to die for it; second, that the ruling classes should be going through a governmental crisis, which draws even the most backward masses into politics (symptomatic of any genuine revolution is a rapid, tenfold and even hundredfold increase in the size of the working and oppressed masses—hitherto apathetic—who are capable of waging the political struggle), weakens the government, and makes it possible for the revolutionaries to rapidly overthrow it.”

Analytical grid and criteria

For each thing or phenomenon, the PMD must ask not simply for a “class position”, but how it relates to the New or the Old. In what way does the thing or phenomenon contribute to decadence, or, on the contrary, hinder it? In what way does the thing, the phenomenon, contribute to the tendency towards war, or, on the contrary, hinder it?

Then comes the question of placing ourselves historically: in what way does the thing, the phenomenon, converge with and reflect proletarian consciousness, the dialectical materialist worldview? For without dialectical materialism, there is no sufficient solidity.

It’s an analysis of the two lines first, then of alignment with the historical demand for socialist civilization. This is the driving force of the Party, which is why Mao Zedong says that holding a class position is not enough in itself. You have to align yourself entirely with the Party, which expresses the new in its historic, complete character.

“We stand on the positions of the proletariat and the masses of the people. For Communist Party members, this implies the need to stand on the Party’s position, to conform to the Party spirit and Party policy.”

The new drives out the old, the Party carries the future.

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Dialectical materialism is the study of contradiction, the identity of opposites. Lenin sums it up in his « Notes on Hegel’s Science of Logic »:

« Dialectics is the theory that shows how opposites can be and usually are (and become) identical – under what conditions they are identical by converting into each other -, why the human understanding must not take these opposites to be dead, petrified, but to be alive, conditioned, mobile, converting into each other. »

Idealism doesn’t grasp contradiction; indeed, it doesn’t even know the principle of contradiction. It looks for relationships, particularly of the cause-consequence type. In the end, what idealism talks about is abstractly constituted.

What Mao Zedong says about myths and children’s stories applies to the chimeras of idealism:

« In myths or children’s stories, the aspects constituting a contradiction do not have a real identity, but an imaginary one. Marxist dialectics, on the other hand, scientifically reflects identity in real transformations. »

Idealism does the same thing as myths or children’s stories, it looks for different aspects, but without grasping the real identity, the driving force, without delimiting the phenomenon. Idealism picks and chooses from different things, it invents realities, all in an attempt to explain or justify things.

Dialectical materialism does the opposite: it starts from the very substance of general reality, of the universe.

The first thing to note when studying dialectical materialism is that it is a total thesis: everything that exists is called nature, and nature obeys dialectics.

This is why Lenin remarked:

« Marx’s dialectic of bourgeois society is only a special case of dialectics. »

Dialectics, in fact, is the principle of absolutely all movement. There is no matter without contradiction, without unity of opposites, without movement. Consequently, to be scientific is to seek out the dialectical process in a phenomenon, in a thing.

As Lenin puts it:

« Thus, in any proposition we can (and must), as in a « cell », bring out the embryos of all the elements of dialectics, showing that dialectics is inherent in all human knowledge in general [that it is possible to acquire].

And the science of nature shows us (and, again, this is what must be shown on every simplest example) objective nature with the same qualities, the change from particular to general, from contingent to necessary, the leaps, the modulations in leaps, the mutual binding of opposites.

Dialectics is precisely the theory of knowledge (of Hegel and) of Marxism: this is what « aspect » of the story (and it’s not an « aspect », but the substance of the story) Plekhanov, to say nothing of other Marxists, didn’t pay attention to. »

Every process is dialectical, but we need to find its core, its driving force.

It’s wrong to think you can pick and choose, or to be satisfied with different examples.

To do so is to attempt to describe a phenomenon with movement, without seeing that the very material existence of the phenomenon and the movement are part of the very substance of the world, as eternal matter in dialectical motion.

As Mao Zedong puts it in On Contradiction:

« In all things and phenomena, the interdependence and struggle of the contradictory aspects inherent in them determine their life and animate their development.

There is nothing that does not contain contradictions. Without contradictions, there is no universe.

Contradiction is the basis of simple forms of motion (e.g. mechanical motion), and a fortiori of complex forms of motion. »

This universality doesn’t just apply to today’s phenomena, it is eternally valid: there is no matter without contradiction, and so all matter is necessarily in motion, and must transform itself, its contradiction giving way to a new contradiction, within the framework of a new phenomenon.

Mao Zedong notes therefore:

« Contradiction is universal, absolute; it exists in every process of the development of things and phenomena, and permeates every process from beginning to end.

What does the appearance of a new process mean? It means that the old unity and its opposites give way to a new unity and its new opposites, which succeeds the old one. The old process comes to an end, the new arises. And as the new process contains new contradictions, it begins the history of the development of its own contradictions. »

Dialectical materialism does not take phenomena at random: it circumscribes them and studies their inner core: the unity of opposites.

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When the bourgeoisie set out to conquer power, it came up against the ideology of the former ruling class, materialized in the Church and the Catholic religion. The Enlightenment was the culmination of the ideological conflict with the superstructure of the ancien régime, bringing to the fore the figure of the individual endowed with reason and free will.

The bourgeoisie’s dual historical task

The establishment of the capitalist mode of production, or rather the consolidation of the bourgeoisie’s power over the whole of society throughout the 19th century, led to a transformation of values and lifestyles. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had already noted this in their 1847 Manifesto, saying of the bourgeoisie that

« The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ―natural superiors, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ―cash payment.

It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.

It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe.

It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”

This transformation of the way of life was well described in the works of Honoré de Balzac, with a critical focus on a romantic idealization of the past. Marx and Engels called this ideology « feudal socialism », which justified a return to the ancien régime, and which would recombine in the 20th century in fascism and its corporatist ideology.

In any case, the historical role of the bourgeoisie was that of the most complete dissolution of all the moral standards of the ancien régime.

In France, the bourgeoisie’s historical mission spans two centuries, between 1789 and 1989.

Between 1789 and 1917, the bourgeoisie fully asserted its claim to control society in the face of the social strata of the ancien régime. Naturally, this involved a predominantly political struggle, particularly over institutional, educational and clerical issues.

It was a time of trial and error for the bourgeoisie as it sought to form the political regime best suited to asserting its domination and leadership.

Thus, in 1875, the republican form of the regime was established, followed by school as central institution, the influence of the Church being historically set aside in 1905 in the « inventory quarrel », until 1913, when the obligation of secret voting in the polling booth and by envelope was enshrined in law, putting an end to the hegemony of the parish priest-worthy people tandem in the countryside.

The First World War was the culmination of the process: there was no crack in the political edifice, the mobilization for war was full and complete, at all levels of society. The bourgeoisie appears as the ruling force, having completely triumphed over the former ruling class.

But this does not mean that the bourgeoisie has completed its historical tasks, for it still has to train and consolidate a proletariat that is still far too immature, not what it is concerned itself, but in relation to the necessities of capital accumulation.

It’s important to understand that, up until the 1920s, France’s population was still massively rural, with a sea of self-sufficient domestic producers and an industry still fragmented and run by professional workers with skills inherited from the guild. Similarly, until the 1970s, the figure of the « worker-peasant » persisted in many industrial regions of France, just as some working-class homes in the most isolated rural areas had no toilets or running water.

And so, at the very heart of capitalism’s first general crisis, the bourgeoisie’s second mission began: to transform the peasantry, itself shaped by the ancien régime, into a proletariat that did not exist within capitalism, but through the accumulation of capital.

With the benefit of historical hindsight, we can safely say that France saw the formation of a proletariat in the period 1920-1970, at the very moment when the capitalist mode of production experienced its first qualitative break.

The proletariat as a historical force, born in the first general crisis

From this point of view, the following must be affirmed: the first general crisis of capitalism is not the space of confrontation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but rather the space of affirmation of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.

The proletariats of each country were still too immature to pose as positive protagonistsagainst a bourgeoisie that had only relatively decomposed, since it had been victorious on one side, that of its confrontation with the old feudal regime, still so pervasive across the globe.

Nor should we forget the emergence of the United States, a vast country with unhindered capitalism, spreading a way of life perfectly adapted to capitalist needs, without having to confront the historical situation as it exists in Europe.

The socialist experiments of the 20th century appear to be an attempt by a nascent proletariat to take charge of the universal, historical movement to raise the productive forces. This is a major contradiction: a historical social force still in its chrysalis was called upon to lead the major scientific process of industrialization.

This process was all the more difficult to manage through planning, as the proletariat itself was maturing within the process. This contradiction materialized in the debates on the modalities of the new socialist state apparatus and the trial-and-error implementation of planning.

It was only after this period of economic establishment that the proletariat of these countries – 1930-1940 for the USSR, 1950-1960 for People’s China – came to a full understanding of its own ruling vision, dialectical materialism.

But it was also at this turning point that the proletariat failed against revisionism, for the bourgeoisie was still on the move, not having fully achieved its second task, having entered into decadence only relatively.

While the proletariat « completed » the bourgeoisie’s two missions in backward countries, thus revealing its historical superiority, it remained on the threshold of realizing its own mission. The affirmation of socialist-communist ideology was thus confined to the proletariat as the pole opposed to the bourgeoisie, illustrated by its emblem of the hammer and sickle.

Dialectical materialism, the affirmation of proletarian maturity

When the proletariat aims for (and achieves) the conquest of power in the twentieth century, it does so first and foremost to direct the productive forces towards the full satisfaction of society’s needs.

The aim is quantitative production based on harmonious planning.

Socialism is about putting an end to pauperism, but also to the individual-king exemplified by the triumph of the private entrepreneur who decides on the lives of workers as well as of the consumers.

From this point of view, the proletariat is not confronted with the consequences of capitalist industrialization in terms of consumer society. Consumer society is the historical culmination of the capitalist mode of production, opening the way for the proletariat to grasp itself, for itself and with its own historical mission.

The reason is simple: the grip of the commodity had to be generalized to all aspects of human life, and the subsumption of the worker had to be superimposed by the subsumption of the consumer as the culmination of the capitalist mode of production.

It’s not for nothing that Marx begins Capital with an analysis of the commodity, and his well-known assertion that « the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production reigns is announced as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’ ».

Let’s take an image. If we make a worker in the 1920s read « The fetish character of the commodity and its secret », he will perceive its dimension, but not with the same depth as the proletarian of 2023. The worker of the 1920s is marginalized in terms of consumption, and lives a restricted life in this respect; he is not as familiar with commodities as the proletarian of 2023, whose consumption is everywhere.

If you make a proletarian of 2023 read « The Working Day », he’ll grasp its substance, but not with the same intensity as the worker of 1936. Not that the proletarian of 2023 works less, but the psychic and psychological implications of work prevent him from having the same distance from work as the worker in 1936.

We are witnessing the completion of the bourgeoisie’s second historical mission, with the existence of a proletariat that participates fully in capitalism, both as producer and consumer.

Dialectically, it’s also the consecration of the proletariat’s maturity. You can’t have a consumer proletariat, i.e. one that is alienated, without having a proletariat that is subjectively active in making consumer choices.

Consumer society corresponds to a stage of advanced development of the productive forces which, in its capitalist framework, gives rise to multitudes of markets valorizing heaps of subjective identities. This requires a certain cognitive disposition as a consumer, but also a degree of intellectual enrichment as a producer.

In this sense, the working class can grasp science, no longer simply as a modality for analyzing each sector of life (biology, chemistry, neurology, etc., etc.), but as a universal principle that takes the name of dialectical materialism. This understanding is made all the easier by the legacy of the 20th century’s long and vast experience.

Consumer society enshrines multi-dimensional connections

Until the development of consumer society, the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie posed a framework that could still be said to be formal. There were bourgeois on one side, proletarians on the other.

The understanding of dialectical materialism was still marked by residues of « one-sided » conceptions: if it wasn’t bourgeois, it was proletarian, and vice versa. The real content of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as classes faded into the background, leading to the triumph of economist, syndicalist and reformist tendencies.

Even when refusing to abandon the cause, it was reductive to consider that dialectics had to be « applied » in such and such a field, each field being seen separately, as if they had a life of their own with no logical connections between them in the general whole.

This is why, even with the best will in the world, the social democracy of pre-1914, the Communist movement of the first half of the 20th century, and even the People’s Republic of China in the second half of the 20th century, always had to blindly chase after problems to try and solve them. The ability to take a global view was lacking.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) was precisely the understanding of this lack of global vision. Before the GPCR, the Party was seen as a center that had to support and steer in the right direction. With the GRCP, the Party was seen as the hard core radiating its approach throughout the country.

The People’s Republic of China called this « Mao Zedong Thought », believing it to be an ideology, an ideology applied to concrete Chinese conditions, a state of mind, a mentality.

This is absolutely right, and every country does indeed need a guiding thought, a historical synthesis of national reality that exposes its contradictions.

Nevertheless, the GPCR is not only the expression of the need for a guiding thought, it is also the consideration of ideology as irradiating the whole country from its hard core, the Party.

It’s obviously easier to understand this vision in the 21st century than in 1966. In an underdeveloped country, and even in the second half of the 20th century in general, there was a tendency to separate things, to consider that each thing existed separately, forming a separate domain.

With the development of productive forces, on the contrary, it is immediately apparent that everything is linked: it is no longer possible to do economics without mathematics, physics without philosophy, geography without physics, archaeology without astronomy, law without history, architecture without aesthetics, mechanics without computer science, sport without biology, etc.

In the past, there were few goods and a hint of craftsmanship was still present, or we imagined a few large factories for the most massive goods, such as cars. Nowadays, we know that there are a variety of industries in different countries, designers in other countries, sellers, carriers, deliverers and so on.

The very existence of the Internet as a global network implies multiple connections. Naturally, this network is fragmented, separated by countries and their possible blockages, monopolies monopolizing its use, the lack of technical access in certain countries of the world, etc. Nevertheless, a human consciousness that has experienced the Internet is fundamentally different from one that has not.

In short, we can now see how everything is connected. Unfortunately, this rise in the level of knowledge is taking place within the framework of capitalism, in parallel with widespread consumerism. All intelligence serves capitalist competition and the systematization of commodification at every level.

Dialectical materialism is the way to understand this contradiction between developed productive forces and a reading of things demolished by consumer society. Dialectical materialism brings together where capitalism divides, and separates where capitalism artificially brings together.

End of prehistory, beginning of history

In concrete terms, what is at stake is not simply a new material distribution within humanity, but the re-establishment of the human being as a social animal, after a detour begun with agriculture and animal husbandry. Human civilization ceases to live « beside » reality, in the illusion of omnipotence.

The Dialectical Materialist Party takes it upon itself to put forward this essential thesis for the 21st century: the proletarian class struggle is not simply situated in human space-time, but takes place within the framework of cosmological development itself.

Put another way, the proletarian revolution is not simply the reconciliation of humanity with itself, but the harmonious unification of humanity with all living matter, with the planet as Biosphere.

As the opposite pole to the bourgeoisie, the proletariat not only brings about a social revolution, but also a qualitative leap forward for humanity as a whole.

This concept of the proletarian revolution as a vector for the extension and enrichment of civilization was well understood by the founders of dialectical materialism. The well-known thesis of communism as the « end of prehistory » is to be found in Marx’s 1859 Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, made famous by Stalin himself, who strove to present this text as the general classic of dialectical and historical materialism.

Here’s what Marx writes:

“The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism.

The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.”

Historically, this thesis has been understood as the end of the exploitation of man by man, and more generally of all oppression. This is absolutely true, but to put it this way is to limit it to a single dimension.

We must insist on the fact that we’re talking about « prehistory » and not simply « history »: there’s a reading of mankind’s development not just by and for itself, but in the context of Matter as a whole, of which mankind is only a part. To understand this, we need to read the passage from Capital analyzing « the fetish character of the commodity and its secret »:

“The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.

The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.

This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.”

The socialist mode of production is humanity which grasps itself, and, grasping itself, can only grasp its own nature as a living being acting within the great whole of matter in motion.

Dialectically, it was necessary to arrive at this epoch of commodity generalization for the proletarian revolution to be a point of culmination for Humanity, that of the passage to a new Civilization enabled by the dialectical materialist worldview.

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Dialectical materialism considers that every phenomenon forms a unity of opposites, the latter being in struggle, in opposition. This is the law of contradiction, the universal law of eternal and inexhaustible matter on the road to Communism. In this context, the term « contrary » is often equated with « opposite ». In his philosophical notes, Lenin said:

« Strictly speaking, dialectics is the search for contradictions in the essence of things themselves. »

« Development is the ‘struggle’ of opposites. »

The terms contrary and opposite are easily interchangeable, and in fact it is easy to switch from one term to the other, with the idea that they are equivalent.

In the French language, there is a great deal of ambiguity in the definition of the two terms; we tend to define something contrary as opposed, and something opposed as a contrary, even if there are nuances, depending on the context.

The basis of these nuances is as follows. “Oppose” is a term from Latin, meaning to place towards, in front of, i.e. to place opposite, against. There is an idea of face to face. Contradiction is what contradicts; the term also comes from Latin. There is an idea of cancellation.

The Latin languages and Russian follow the same pattern; in German, the term contradiction is widerspruch (wider meaning against, spruch meaning to say); the term gegensatz, opposition, in the strict sense means counter-sentence or anti-sentence. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels use the term widerspruch, but in the sense of gegensatz; the distinction is not operative.

Mathematical language, on the other hand, makes an apparently clear distinction, but we can see that it comes to the same thing.

The opposite of 1 is -1, -2 for 2, -3 for 3, and so on. The opposite is set against, and we find the idea of face to face: facing1 is -1, facing 2 is -2, and so on.

The contradiction is called the « inverse ». The inverse refers to a number that can be multiplied by itself to arrive at 1: 0.2 is the inverse of 5, because 5 x 0.2 = 1; 0.01 is the inverse of 100, because 0.01 x 100 = 1, and so on.

This inverse actually contradicts a number, because it prevents it from reaching 1, i.e. it prevents it from forming a unit, from being itself. The inverse annuls the number, annihilates its identity, contradicts it. Here we find the idea of a counter-affirmation to an affirmation.

However, if we think in terms of tension and conflict, it’s hard to see at first sight any difference between contrary and opposite, even in the mathematical language. There are always two aspects facing each other, and one cannot exist without the other.

The terms of opposite and contrary are thus closely related, even interchangeable, because they have in common the fact that they signify negation. The existing nuances have to do with the modalities of this negation, but their substance is common: their dialectical relationship, both linked (and therefore positive) and negative.

These negative nuances are found again and again in any language that seeks to describe material processes. For example, we speak of a headwind [in French a “contrary wind”] to say that the wind intervenes and opposes the initial movement, forming a cancellation.

The word “opposed” implies the idea of resistance, of an obstacle: we say that we have faced opposition. There is a strong idea of tension. However, we can interchangeably say “on the contrary” or “in the opposite direction”.

It is useful here to turn to the Chinese language. The term of contradiction originally chosen in Chinese by Mao Zedong, Mao-dun, is made up of 矛, meaning spear, and 盾, meaning shield. It is based on an old story told by Han Fei Zi (280 – 233 BC):

« A person, eager to sell his spear and shield, praised the excellence of the latter in these terms: ‘Its resistance is such that nothing can dent it. This shield is absolutely impenetrable ».

Turning to the spear, he continued: « Its point is so sharp that there is nothing it cannot pierce. It is omnipenetrating.

– How can your spear penetrate your shield?

The man didn’t know what to say. He had contradicted himself. Logically, an absolutely impenetrable shield and an omnipenetrable spear cannot go together.”

Here we have a contradiction, something contradicts something else, there is a cancellation, even though the idea of spear and shield also implies tension, and therefore opposition.

There are other Chinese expressions worth noting, such as 一分為二, yifenweier, meaning one becomes two, each thing has two sides, etc. 对 立 统 , duili tongyi, meaning the unity of opposites; 相 反 相 承, xiangfan xiangcheng, meaning to oppose and promote each other; 两點論, liangdian lun, which can be translated as the theory of two points.

All these expressions were used in People’s China during the time of Mao Zedong, particularly at the time of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. They are useful for showing that the term contradiction does not in itself adequately capture complementarity and tension; conversely, the notion of opposite does not capture the unity of the two poles, which is much more apparent with the term contradiction.

In concrete terms, contradiction and opposite form two aspects of the same contradiction/opposition, the two terms coming together and repelling each other.

If we want to avoid such back-and-forth, the expression « two-point theory » seems more abstract at first sight, but it allows us to set out the dialectical operational framework. The expression was used in an article for the fiftieth anniversary of the Communist Party of China, published simultaneously in the Renmin Ribao (the People’s Daily), the Hongqi (the Red Flag, the theoretical organ) and the Jiefangjun Bao (the Daily of the People’s Liberation Army).

This 1971 document retraces the history of the Party, with the struggles of two lines, between the red line and the black line at each stage, from the revolutionary war to the construction of socialism and the struggle against the forces of capitalist restoration, including the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution launched in 1966, while stressing that several such revolutions were needed.

The long conclusion deals with learning well and mentions the importance of the two-point theory:

« We have to follow the two-point theory, not the one-point theory. While focusing our attention on the main trend, we need to take note of the other trend that may be masked.

We must take full account of and firmly grasp the main aspect and at the same time resolve one by one the problems raised by the non-main aspect.

We need to see the negative aspects of things as well as their positive aspects. We have to see the problems that have already arisen and also anticipate the problems that we haven’t yet perceived, but which could arise. »

Hsueh Li clarified this in a 1972 article, The Two-point Theory, where he explained from the outset that:

« What is the theory of the two points? It is what we usually call dialectical materialism; it is the Marxist-Leninist theory of the fundamental law of the universe.

Chairman Mao gave us a comprehensible and penetrating explanation in his On Contradiction ».

After recalling the fundamentals of dialectical materialism, he concludes as follows:

« Managing to carry the two-point theory and go beyond the one-point theory is not simply a question of method, but of worldview. The two-point theory belongs to the proletarian world-view and the one-point theory belongs to the world-view of the bourgeoisie and all the exploiting classes.

Without exception, the thinking of people living in a class society is marked by class and is invariably influenced by the political orientation of the class to which they belong.

Even if people do not belong to the exploiting classes, they are inevitably affected by the idealism and metaphysics universally existing in class society.

This is why every person in the revolutionary ranks must see to it that every idealistic and metaphysical point of view is eliminated from his mind, and must make constant efforts to reshape his subjective world while changing the objective world.

Only in this way can the two-point theory be sustained and the one-point theory overcome. »

The expression « two-point theory » allows us to avoid focusing on the idea of annulment that the term « contradiction » may abstractly imply. – and it’s worth noting that the Chinese revisionists went so far as to say that it was necessary to accept the existence of contradiction, to accept negative things, and so on.

The expression « two-point theory » also avoids the use of the term « opposition », which loses sight of unity and runs the risk of refuting even the unity of opposites, in a leftist mode.

What’s more, the expression « theory of two points » immediately underlines the existence of two aspects, which is important at a time when the bourgeoisie seeks to deny dialectics, as evidenced by the nihilistic refutation of the existence of man and woman.

It allows you to change its own state of mind while at the same time transforming reality: have I followed the two-point theory correctly, have I seen the two aspects correctly, using the main trend to see which way to go?

In this way, the expression puts the emphasis on practice: it’s a good equivalent to the terms contradiction and opposition, which are themselves « two points ».

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Marxism was born with the workers’ movement; it consists of the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but also of their political action, with the First International and the birth of German social democracy. What we are talking about here are particular people, in a particular country, with particular ideas. And because of the dimension of these ideas of these people in this country, it is the universal that has prevailed and throughout the world, Marxism has been recognised as right by the workers’ movement. As right, not just for Germany, but for all countries.

Other ideas appeared and were added to Marxism, placing themselves within it, developing it through obstacles, difficulties and conflicts. Similarly, ideas developed in Russia and China have been recognized as having value not just for those countries, but for all countries. Lenin and Mao were references throughout the world.

Is it so then that we have to consider that the process could go on like this ad infinitum, that others could be added, that Marxism would continue to develop in this way? Of course, but then we have to recognize that this is no longer Marxism. Marxism would still be the basis, but there would be so many additions, so many deepenings, that Marxism would be unrecognisable.

It would be Marxism, but transformed. Already at the time of Lenin, Marxism had been profoundly transformed compared to the time of Marx, and it’s the same with Mao.

There was an interesting discussion on this subject in the 1990s between French Maoists and representatives in France of the Communist Party of Peru. The latter explained that to understand Marxism, you first had to understand Maoism, because Maoism was the most advanced form of Marxism. For the French communists, it seemed to be the other way round: it was by understanding Marxism well that one arrived, quite naturally, at Maoism. In a sense, both are naturally right, because it is a contradiction. However, if it is a contradiction, then it is a productive one.

It is precisely by turning towards this productive nature that we can overcome the separations between Marxism, Leninism and Maoism and grasp the unity of substance, which allows us to see that they are one and the same thing, and not three things with which we have to « come to terms ».

Mao Zedong had already foreseen what we must call the death of Marxism, not in the sense that it would be outdated, useless and had had its day, but in the sense that it was now material that had become part of something more developed.

Mao Zedong said with profound accuracy and a far-reaching historical perspective that:

« The world is infinite.

Both in time and space, the world is infinite and inexhaustible. Beyond our solar system, there are many stars that together form the Milky Way. Beyond this galaxy, there are many other galaxies.

Viewed globally, the universe is infinite, and viewed narrowly, the universe is also infinite.

Not only is the atom divisible, but so is the atomic nucleus, and it can be divided ad infinitum (…).

All individuals and all specific things have their births, their developments and their deaths.

Every person dies because he is born. Human beings must die, and Chang San (editor’s note: equivalent to Smith) being a man, he must die.

No one can see Confucius, who lived 2,000 years ago, because he had to die.

Humanity was born, and therefore humanity must also die. The Earth was born, and so it too must die.

However, when we say that humanity will die and the Earth will die, that’s different from what Christians say about the end of the world.

When we talk about the death of humanity and the death of the Earth, we mean that something more advanced than humanity will replace it, and this is a higher stage in the development of things.

I said that Marxism also had its birth, its development and its death. That may sound absurd.

But since Marx said that all things that develop have their death, how could that not be applicable to Marxism itself?

To say that it will not die is metaphysics.

Naturally, the death of Marxism means that something higher than Marxism will come to replace it. »

The death of Marxism that Mao Zedong is talking about here is the birth of dialectical materialism. Does this mean that dialectical materialism itself will die, disappear? Of course it does; dialectical materialism will suffer the same fate as Marxism: it will fade away to make way for a deeper understanding of the world. It will be dialectical materialism that has undergone a qualitative leap.

When will this happen? Most certainly in the decades following the unification of humanity and the systematisation of dialectical materialism at world level. There will be then such a deepening, such a development of nuances, that differences will appear and the law of contradiction will apply to dialectical materialism itself.

But we are not there yet, of course. What we need, for the time being, is for humanity to assimilate the fundamentals of dialectical materialism and to know how to apply them in practice, or rather: for dialectical materialism to be taken up as a world view by more and more people, until it is generalized throughout society.

Socialism will triumph when the proletariat understands the contradiction which both binds and opposes it to the bourgeoisie, and when the law of contradiction is grasped in everyday life, in scientific experimentation and the sciences, in industrial production and its conception, in the arts and letters.

This is a new era in which, the more connections are understood, the more connections are developed, the qualitative leap reaches maturity and is realized.

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1. Dialectical materialism is the affirmation of the inexhaustible nature of eternal matter, which obeys the law of contradiction.

2. « Marxist philosophy considers that the law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law of the universe. This law operates universally in nature, in human society and in human thought. Between the opposing aspects of contradiction, there is both unity and struggle, and this is what drives things and phenomena to move and change ». (Mao Zedong, On Contradiction)

3. The PMD’s raison d’être is the systematization of dialectical materialism in all fields, at the personal level and throughout society, in a unified humanity living in harmony with planet Earth recognized as a Biosphere.

4. Dialectical materialism is carried forward by the proletariat, the class that transforms reality and unifies humanity, generating the socialist mode of production that abolishes all exploitation and oppression.

5. The PMD represents the vanguard of the proletariat, and its main activity is to generate and direct class struggles for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of the working class as the ruling class, systematizing the dialectical materialist vision of the world.

6. The PMD’s main theoretical references are Stalin’s Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism and Mao Zedong’s On Contradiction.

7. The PMD’s main historical references are the historical existence of the USSR from the October Revolution of 1917 to 1952, that of the People’s Republic of China from its foundation in 1949 to 1976 (mainly with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution), that of the Communist Party of Peru from 1980 to 1992 (with the affirmation of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism).

8. The PMD stresses that the beginnings of humanity, with agriculture and animal husbandry, established an unequal relationship with Nature and placed women in a situation of inferiority: this implies cultural revolutions to liberate the female psyche and correct the relationship with Nature, particularly with animals.

9. The PMD’s approach is the two lines struggle, in all areas: recognising the contradiction, asserting the red line against the black line, and strengthening the red line until it wins.

10. The PMD stresses the importance of collective optimism, historical enthusiasm, personal self-sacrifice and revolutionary romanticism; it combats pessimism, anti-social isolation, selfish vanity and insensitive indifference.

11. The PMD is a revolutionary organisation; membership is by co-option of at least three of its members. The compartmentalisation of its structures is the rule, the secrecy of the organisation the principle. To be a member of the organisation means to be active in a PMD organisation, to apply the resolutions adopted and to observe its own discipline.

12. The PMD operates according to the dialectic of centralisation and democracy. This democratic centralism implies that the leading bodies at all levels are elected by democratic consultation at congresses and that between congresses, the member of the PMD must submit to the organisation, the minority to the majority, the lower level to the higher level and the whole Party to the Central Committee.

13. If a member commits an offence against Party discipline, the Party organisation of the echelon concerned, within the limits of its powers and according to the case in question, will apply one of the following sanctions: warning, reprimand, removal from Party duties, observation, exclusion from the Party.

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On the occasion of this new first of May, the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Center of Belgium and the Communist Party of France (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) express their confidence and enthusiasm for the growing affirmation of the second wave of the world revolution.

The first wave had given birth, a hundred years ago, in March, 1919, to the Communist International; the second will realize the objective of this one: the world unification and the realization of socialism on all the planet.

The formation of a World Socialist Republic is unavoidable in the 21st century. The realization of the complete unification of Humanity, on the basis of socialist relations in the economy and throughout society, is certain. There can be absolutely no doubt about it.

The resolution of the environmental problems, by establishing dialectical relations of humanity with the planet considered as a biosphere, is inevitable. The understanding of the nature of living matter and its respect goes hand in hand with the dialectical materialistic understanding of the general evolution of the eternal and infinite universe.

We affirm that the mastery of dialectical materialism and its fundamental theses on the universe are the very basis for understanding reality and transforming it.

It is undeniable that this still requires formidable initiatives. Mao Zedong had spoken in the 1960s of the next fifty to one hundred years, when humanity would experience upheavals like never before. We are precisely in this period and it is about being on the front line. We are as the vanguard of the working class in Belgium and France.

We say: there will be no capitulation, no turning back, no modification of the ideological fundamentals, nor revision of the main principles. We are fully aware of the complexity of the tasks incumbent upon us, but we will be able to assume them, with vigor and the greatest sense of responsibility. We are full of optimism about the future: the triumph of Communism corresponds to the movement of the universe itself. The proletariat is the most revolutionary class in history.

It is true that in the imperialist metropolis, the recomposition of the proletarian fabric is still an ongoing process, which does not follow a linear path and still requires an extremely important substantive work. There is still a titanic job to do in this area. We believe, however, that we have grasped the necessary general guidelines. In this sense, our two organizations are fully engaged in this struggle to ensure that the proletariat recovers itself and goes back to the reconquest of its identity, which has undergone profound changes due to the increase of the productive forces, beyond deep deformations, significant errors.

This process of recomposition of the proletarian fabric corresponds to the emergence of the second wave of the World Revolution. And the capitalist mode of production, both in Belgium and in France, experiences such internal problems, because of its historical limits, that it is less and less able to freeze social relations by means of the apparatus of State and corruption of a large part of the proletariat. This had led, since the 1950s, to the displacement of the main contradiction in the zone of storms: Africa, Latin America, Asia. We are now in a new period.

There is also the reaffirmation of the communist ideology that arises historically, through the maturation of class conflicts and especially the driving role of diffusion played by our organizations. Here we affirm very clearly that the explanations we provide of dialectical materialism are the decisive weapons to have the necessary tools, in the theoretical and practical, intellectual and material fields, to make advance the Cause. It is not a question of a side aspect or a philosophy accompanied by simple demands, but of the hard core of the communist affirmation.

It goes without saying, however, that it would be wrong to consider unilaterally that the proletarian-bourgeois contradiction has already resumed its natural course. It is very far from being the case. The ideological, cultural, social and political remains of the 1950-1980s are still widely present. The years 1990-2010 were also marked by a strengthening of many aspects of the capitalist mode of production, due to technological progress, the collapse of the bloc dominated by Soviet social-imperialism and integration into the capitalist world economy of China which became social-fascist.

In this sense, it is incorrect to consider a movement like the « yellow vests » in France other than as an expression of the capitalist crisis in general and the petty bourgeoisie in particular. There is a scissors phenomenon where everything between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is crushed. This phenomenon is also parallel to many others who, similarly, express the fear of seeing capitalism not being longer able to ensure social peace, to give free rein to small capitalists, to neutralize the working class.

Petty-bourgeois interpretations of the massive ecological crisis and the terrifying ecocide it causes, the catastrophic aggravation of global warming, the dramatic animal condition, are also the terrorized expression of the middle layers of capitalism taken between the hammer of proletarian demands and the anvil of capitalism. They are actually phenomena corresponding to the historical limit of capitalism. The time of its world overtaking has arrived.

Discourses on a « finite world », on the need to move to « sustainable » economic development, to adopt a more « sober » way of life, are nothing more than an attempt to curb the wheel of History. Fascism also reappears more strongly as a requirement for a step back in time. Calls to be more « reasonable » are always more numerous within the parasitic intellectual layers. All this catastrophism is fundamentally foreign to who has understood the magnitude of the changes underway, their scale.

In reality, matter is inexhaustible and we know a time of general transformation, both of social life and of humanity’s relationship with the rest of matter. In order to live up to this process, we must liberate the productive forces by adopting the principles of socialism in all fields. This is what will establish productive dynamics for the whole of life in the Biosphere that is the planet, announcing in the medium term the process of spatial colonization and the ever greater diffusion of life.

This requires a great capacity for self-criticism, in relationship to the old way of life. Only collectivism is able to break the individualism and selfishness that characterize the initiatives and dominant values in the capitalist mode of production. Only a perspective based on the notion of totality, of the whole, of universalism, can allow society not to fall under the blows of ultra-individualism, of its capricious consumption, of its contempt for all morality and all social requirement.

The capitalist mode of production, in perdition, also produces only cultural horrors and ideological poisons. Contemporary art, moral relativism, the most outrageous cynicism, the cult of excessive egos and futile appearance, subjectivist literature, dissonant music as a value in itself or repetitive and simplistic music with simple harmonies… Capitalism takes advantage of the overproduction of capital to overrun ever more aspects of everyday life.

This is vain, however. The masses feel fundamentally alien to all this decadence, even if some sectors being more or less important may be fascinated or momentarily disoriented. The masses are on the side of transformation and culture, openness and development. Fixations on identity, material fetishism, superficiality, are essentially foreign to them. Here, the future opposes itself to the celebration of an idealized past, Socialism to the decadence of « culture » in capitalism, to that anticapitalist romanticism that is fascism.

In Belgium and France, the battle is therefore the one to free the initiatives of the masses, to raise their consciousness and their organizational capacities. The avant-garde opens here spaces and, starting from workers’ centrality, forms the movement bringing the emergence of the People’s Democracy as a strategic proposition. It is a question of making falter the dominant system, of shaking it, go to its assault for the establishment of a new State. We must be certain of victory here.

Long live the working class, the most revolutionary class in history!

Long live its ideology: dialectical materialism, today Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!

People’s war up to Communism!

Long live the second wave of the world revolution!

Marxist Leninist Maoist Center of Belgium

Communist Party of France (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) 

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This First of May of this year has a particular significance : 50 years ago happened the student revolt of May 1968 in France, which produced a popular movement all around the country which brought more than ten millions workers to go on strike.

It produced also numerous revolutionary organisations – which historically are summed up onto the label of “Leftism” – trying to relaunch the revolutionary process broken by the triumph of Revisionism, following the Coup in the Soviet Union in 1953. It stood in full convergence, as the revolt of the youth, as the call of Revolution, with the Great Cultural Proletarian Revolution in China.

The value of May 1968 in France – and also in others countries, with different forms -, the value of the revolutionary experiments of the 1970’s in general, the negative aspect of the ideological influences of the petty-bourgeois and the universities (with the students but also the teachers), must be understood in a proper way.

On this First of May 2018, we call to learn the lesson from the past. The historical value of May 1968 is a part of the world revolutionary heritage, as it shows that, how strong a bourgeois modern society can be in organizing its institutions and its ideological-cultural controls, it is condemned to fail.

There is always a way to break the system maintaining the masses into a passive attitude; there is always a way to open spaces for the revolutionary conscience. In this sense, the main lesson from May 1968 is the workers autonomy, i.e. the autonomy of the working class, the non-dependence to the institutions and in particular of the trade-unions.

The main trade-union, the CGT, dominated by the Revisionist “Communist” Party, played a major role to block the alliance between student and workers, to reduce the struggle to an economical one. It was a part of the institutions in itself. This is the great lesson of May 1968, which corresponds to the changing of form of the bourgeois society since the productive forces have been developed after 1945. This stresses of course the subjective aspect.

The ability to break with the forms of thinking and acting spread by the bourgeoisie requires a high ideological-cultural level. This was a new situation for the Communists in the imperialist countries. If May 1968 had such an echo, it was also because the Russian October revolution of 1917 and the Chinese Democratic Revolution of 1949 belonged to societies which were not that much developed, both in the biggest country of the World and the most populous country of the World.

May 1968 in France appeared, therefore, as a major rupture in a bourgeois modern society, something of a new kind. We must never forget that the rebellious youth understood then that the question was the one of everyday life. Class struggle was not reduced to an economical question, but was understood as it is really : a struggle concerning each aspect of life, because the revolution touches the mode of production, of organizing society, of permitting the faculties of each person to develop themselves.

This is why we say that the key of May 1968 is that the revolutionary Party interacts with the wide masses through the workers autonomy : this was understood in the genuine Maoist experiences after May 1968, in France, in Germany, in Italy, in Belgium. This is the way to build the new state, to organize the rupture at the scale of society with the ruling ideology. This is the real sense of Maoism.

And this real sense was carried by the Red line, on the contrary of the Black Line, which pretended to be anti-Revisionist insofar as it proposed the revolutionary model of the 1920’s, when in fact it was a Trade-unionist, Legalist, formalist trend. On this First of May 2018, we call to understand this fact : because of the temporary failure of the Red Line in the 1980’s-1990’s, the last remains of the Black Line still existing today pretend to have formed in the 1960’s-1970’s the correct line, to be the real Maoist movement.

This is not true and there is still the need for a “back to the roots” proletarian movement, recuperating the heritage from the past and the Leading Thought which emerged then. We say : there won’t be any revolutionary process in any country, if is not understood the two-line struggle from the 1960’s-1970’s.

Even if often the Red Line tended to move to subjectivism, it was on the correct path ; the Black Line has nothing to propose but a Neo-Syndicalist, formal, strategy, full of clichés, with absolutely no cultural and ideological value. The French example from May 1968 is here very clear, as there was :

– a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of France -PCMLF, which was Legalist, Neo-Syndicalist, moving more and more across a lot of splits to Reformism, Hoxhaism, a pro-Deng Xiaoping line ;

– a Union of Young Communists (Marxist-Leninist) – UJC (ml), which became the Proletarian Left – GP, being the most famous organization from the 1960’s-1970’s because of its activity, its quest for the worker’s autonomy.

This two line struggle existed in fact all over the world, for example through the contradiction between the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India (MarxistLeninist), the Türkiye İhtilalci İşçi Köylü Partisi and the Communist Party of Turkey / MarxistLeninist, the Revolutionary Youth Movement II and the Revolutionary Youth Movement I, etc.

It was during this two-line struggles that emerged Siraj Sikder, Akram Yari, Ibrahim Kaypakkaya, Gonzalo, Charu Mazumdar… as Guiding Thoughts in their own country.

As we know, the Red Line was not able to succeed in its initiative, even if it marked the history of its country, on the contrary of the Black Line. It is obvious, for example, that even if they failed, the Black Panther Party and the Weathermen marked American History, whereas the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, did not. The reason for the failure can now be correctly understood, fifty years afterwards.

The Red line, then, overestimated the question of the subjective aspect, believing that the revolutionary process would only be a question of a few years ; it was not before the beginning of the 1980’s that appeared the understanding that the revolutionary process would be protracted in itself. The Red Line, also, was not able to recuperate correctly Dialectical Materialism.

The continuity of Marxism-Leninism defined by Stalin through the Great Cultural Proletarian Revolution, through Maoism, was not apprehended in a proper manner, permitting leftist-subjectivist and rightist-liquidationnist to emerge.

The history of the Red Line is, therefore, often marked by instability and the brutal triumph of liquidationnism. We have to understand that it was the price to pay to discover the new situation.

For this reason, there is no fetishism to be made, neither of May 1968 nor of the experiences made then and afterwards. This would bring in the hands of subjectivism again, even if the main risk, still today and because of the development of the productive forces, is still the loss of the subjective aspect. Here, we have to remember that numerous actors of May 1968 became part of the institutions, especially in the intellectual and cultural fields.

And the modernist part of the bourgeoisie used also the shaking from May 1968 to promote liberalism, individualism, the refusal of any “conservative” value which means of any value at all, etc. Each sequence of class struggle must be properly understood in relationship with the sequences before and after it, and of course with the main goal : the conquest of power.

We say for this reason : let’s learn, on this First of May, 2018, from May 1968!

Marxist Leninist Maoist Center of Belgium

Communist Party of France (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) 

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This 7th of November 2017, we celebrate the hundred years of the October revolution, which in 1917 led Russia to socialism, through an armed insurrection followed by a civil war between the red and the white armies.

We say that this path is still valid today ; in each capitalist country, a revolutionary upsurge must be led by the avant-guard revolutionary party, mobilizing the masses so that they take the power in destroying the old state in a necessary violent way.

The insurrection, i.e. the taking of the central power, is the revolutionary task of the real communists; the goal is not to reform or to ameliorate capitalism, but to overthrow it. The old state can not be amended, it has to be destroy and replaced by the power of the soviets, the socialist state.

The nature of the work of the Communists, therefore, must be conform to this revolutionary goal. The aim of the work of the Communists is to mobilize the masses for the global upsurge! The people in arms must be the New State!

The communists must therefore be aware of the capacity of repression of the old state and its allies, like the fascists and the mafia; they must understand the characterization of each period to work properly along the dialectics of legality and illegality. Moreover, and we say that this is the main key of the question, each aspect must be seen in relationship with the goal of taking power, which means that each revolutionary process has to be evaluated from the point of view of the People’s War: the confrontation old state/masses.

It is not a question of finding a “magic” tool of intervention, be it armed propaganda or electoralism. It is always a question of evaluating each situation according to the strategic goal of the armed insurrection, with the taking of the central power.

Each “victory” which does not correspond to this task is incorrect, on any fields (economy, politics, culture, etc.). A victory means moving forward in direction of the strategical goal. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. It means also that the way is a political one. Revolutionary politics is only possible through a guiding thought, i.e. a correct position on the history of a given country, to show the correct path to realize the revolutionary contradiction.

We wish to stress here that the specific conditions for the October Revolution certainly won’t repeat itself, as the People’s War happened only after the insurrection, through the civil war. What shall happen more surely is a revolutionary process in which the taking of the central power occurs only at the end, like for the Chinese revolution.

When we say : “the goal is still the insurrection !”, we don’t mean by that that the insurrection would be the beginning of a revolutionary process, but only its climax. The revolutionary activity does not consist in the accumulation of forces, to organize a “coup”. The revolutionary activity exists only as a general process, in which a New Power is build, replacing by violence the old one.

With this in mind, we want to stress the importance of understanding the principle of People’s Democracy, which consists in the broad alliance of the anti-monopolies force, against war and fascism. The revolutionary goal of taking the central power belongs to the strategical offensive of the revolution, but a strategical equilibrium may be historically necessary in the situation where fascism and war are the main political aspect. In fact, this may be even the rule for the revolution in the imperialist countries.

A last point we wish to stress, is that it is impossible to separate the October Revolution from the USSR under the leadership of Stalin. Stalin was the leader of the socialist construction in the first socialist state in the world; defending the October revolution is defending Stalin, defending Stalin is the defending the October revolution.

The reason for that is that the very sense of the October revolution is the foundation of the new socialist state. Revolution means the victorious emergence of a new state. This is a basic learning of dialectical materialism. This is why, as the very nature of the state is depending of the revolutionary process, it is not possible to understand the question of the state without understanding that it is a practical one.

That’s why historically Karl Marx had to wait the Commune of Paris of 1871 to understand the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat; that’s why Lenin understood the form of the new socialist state through the revolutionary process itself.

In August 1917, Lenin explains, in the preface to the First Edition of The state andrevolution, the actual nature of the topic he’s studying then, in the period between the February  revolution and the October revolution to come :

“First of all we examine the theory of Marx and Engels of the state, and dwell in particular detail on those aspects of this theory which are ignored or have been distorted by the opportunists. 

Then we deal specially with the one who is chiefly responsible for these distortions, Karl Kautsky, the best­ known leader of the Second International (1889­-1914), which has met with such miserable bankruptcy in the present war. 

Lastly, we sum up the main results of the experience of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and particularly of 1917. 

Apparently, the latter is now (early August 1917) completing the first stage of its development; but this revolution as a whole can only be understood as a  link in a chain of   socialist  proletarian revolutions being caused by the imperialist war. 

The question of the relation of the socialist proletarian revolution to the state, therefore, is acquiring not only practical political importance, but also the significance of a most urgent problem of the day, the problem of explaining to the masses what they will have to do before long to free themselves from capitalist tyranny.”

Lenin Thought is born as expression of the Russian revolution and permitted to have a better understand of the nature of the state. As Stalin explained it in The Foundations of Leninism :

“Some   think   that   the   fundamental   thing   in   Leninism   is   the peasant question, that the point of departure of Leninism is the question of the peasantry, of its role, its relative importance. This is absolutely wrong. 

The   fundamental   question   of   Leninism,  its   point   of   departure, is not the peasant question, but the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the conditions under which it can be achieved, of the conditions under which it can be consolidated.  The peasant question, as the question of the ally of the proletariat in its struggle for power, is a derivative question.”

What Stalin points here is the universal aspect in the particular situation of Leninism as expression of the Russian revolution. This is because of this correct understanding that Stalin follows directly, as leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Lenin in guiding the new state in the socialist construction.

It is not possible to separate Lenin from Stalin and Stalin from Lenin, as Stalin is the successor, the one who noted that Leninism was a development of Marxism, the one who led the Party in the deepening of the socialist construction, of the socialist state. We find here the background the basic difference between Marxism and anarchism, Marxism and opportunism. The state is neither to negate, nor to reform. The state is to be built on a new foundation.

This is the principal aspect of the teaching coming from October 1917. It is not only a question of overthrowing the old state, which is a revisionist reduction of Leninism to a mechanical
conception of power. It means : from the avant-guard opening the ideological revolutionary space, being able to synthesize antagonism, organizing the most advanced elements seeking class autonomy, generate revolutionary mass organisms, build the new power, until the insurrection!

Marxist Leninist Maoist Center of Belgium
Communist Party of France (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist)

November 2017

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Genuine revolutionaries don’t commit suicide, they struggle for life, defending the revolutionary evolution of society, the dialectical development of matter. Full of joy and happiness, they carry a fighting spirit, the will of the upsurge, the revolutionary thought carrying a systematic criticism of the reactionary aspects.

This is also the reason why Gonzalo, as he reconstituted the Communist Party of Peru, rejected the principle of hunger strike. The proletariat does not commit suicide ; it is the future of the word !

There is never no reason for any capitulation – the struggle continues until victory !

For this reason, we wish to stress here the historical signification of the murders of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe, political prisoners of the Red Army Fraction, in the night of the 17th of October, 1977. Those murders form a major political event in the frame of the struggle between revolution and counter-revolution in the imperialist metropoles.

It was a major reactionary blow against the upsurge that appeared after the anti-revisionist struggle which followed the movements of the year 1968 in France, in Italy, in Germany, in the United States, for the retaking of the revolutionary path with the goal of overthrowing the bourgeoisie.

The Red Army Fraction contributed in a major way to this process, putting the revolutionary identity at the center of the struggle. No acceptance of the daily imperialist order can be made by the Communists ; the hostility against the values of the capitalist system is a duty.

Even if the Red Army Fraction went too far in this question of identity and fell in subjectivism, it understood the nucleus of something really important when it said in 1972 :

“The exploitation of the masses in the metropole has nothing to do with Marx’s concept of wage labourers from whom surplus value is extracted.

It is a fact that with the increasing division of labor, there has been a tremendous intensification and spread of exploitation in the area of production, and work has become a greater burden, both physically and psychologically.

It is also a fact that with the introduction of the 8-hour workday—the precondition for increasing the intensity of work—the system usurped all of the free time people had. To physical exploitation in the factory was added the exploitation of their feelings and thoughts, wishes, and utopian dreams—to capitalist despotism in the factory was added capitalist despotism in all areas of life, through mass consumption and the mass media.

With the introduction of the 8-hour workday, the system’s 24-hour-a-day domination of the working class began its triumphal march—with the establishment of mass purchasing power and “peak income” the system began its triumphal march over the plans, desires, alternatives, fantasies, and spontaneity of the people; in short, over the people themselves!

The system in the metropole has managed to drag the masses so far down into their own dirt that they seem to have largely lost any sense of the oppressive and exploitative nature of their situation, of their situation as objects of the imperialist system. So that for a car, a pair of jeans, life insurance, and a loan, they will easily accept any outrage on the part of the system.

In fact, they can no longer imagine or wish for anything beyond a car, a vacation, and a tiled bathroom.

It follows, however, that the revolutionary subject is anyone that breaks free from these compulsions and refuses to take part in this system’s crimes.

All those who find their identity in the liberation struggles of the people of the Third World, all those who refuse, all those who no longer participate; these are all revolutionary subjects—comrades.”

This vision is one-sided and the Red Army Fraction orientated itself in the direction of Third-Worldism instead of taking the direction of a general criticism of capitalist everyday life.

The RAF didn’t understand, for example, the contradiction between cities and countryside, the ecological signification in the relationship between humankind and nature, the importance of the animal question.

Nevertheless, the reason for this is of course lying in the historical situation then, as a main aspect. Moreover, the RAF leaders were murdered really quickly, having not the time to develop their reflections about imperialism.

In fact, the West-German state didn’t nothing else than proceeding of the physical liquidation of revolutionary cadres and leaders. The thesis of “suicide” was, accompanying those murders, an operation of psychological warfare, to negate the political identity of the RAF prisoners, to block the formation of a revolutionary line.

Another very important revolutionary figure, Ulrike Meinhof, was already killed in her prison cell on the 9th of May, 1976, with the West-German state already speaking of suicide to mask its counter-revolutionary murderous activities.

The murders of the 18th of October 1977 followed this liquidation line, in a tradition which is the one of National-Socialism against the democrats and the revolutionaries. And it is to note that the RAF prisoner Irmgard Möller was found stabbed by a knife in that night ; she always denied that she tried to suicide herself.

There are also many facts underlining the absurdity of the West-German thesis : Andreas Baader was killed by a fireweapon from a distance of between 30 and 40 centimetres, there was no gunpowder traces on Jan-Carl Raspe’s hands, there were neither no fingerprints on either Andreas Baader’s or Jan-Carl Raspe’s gun, etc.

Moreover, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were subjected at that time to a total isolation in the the Stammheim Prison near the city of Stuttgart, in West-Germany.

This difficult situation followed the kidnapping by the Red Army Fraction, at the beginning of September, of Hanns Martin Schleyer, former SS Untersturmführer, main secretary of the president for the economical integration of the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” into Nazi Germany, then President of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations and the Federation of German Industries.

This kidnapping was itself followed with the hijack of Lufthansa Flight 181from Palma de Mallorca to Frankfurt by a Palestinian armed group on the 13th of October, 1977, which led to a military failure ; Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe are pretended to have killed themselves following this, this even if they were in total isolation and placed under total supervision.

But, as we said, genuine revolutionaries don’t commit suicide. They fight because they know that the New become more powerful, the Ancient weaker. This is a law of history, the law of matter itself in its dialectical movement.

And the murdered prisoners of the Red Army Fraction were at that time leading a very aggressive defence strategy on trial. This is precisely what was considered as a main danger by the West- German state.

It was the strategical proposal of the revolution that the West- German state tried to kill with the murders of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe.

We wish to precise here that it doesn’t mean that we endorse the totally erroneous hijacking of a plane and the killing of the pilot Jürgen Schumann. Such an action has nothing to do with genuine proletarian politics ; it is an expression of the non-correct third-worldism vision of the world, which we already criticized in a joint document.

And this is also an argument against the counter- revolutionary thesis of suicide : the Red Amy Fraction was always very proud of the support made by a Palestinian armed unit by hijacking of the plane, and this until the end in 1998 ; the RAF understood it as a convergence of the world revolutionary struggle. In this sense, even a military defeat wouldn’t be a reason to considered as a significant blow on the side of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe.

This was indeed a subjectivist error ; the RAF tried to find at another level what was to search in the national frame, moving from Proletarian Internationalism to subjectivism. But this tendency to subjectivism should not hide its contribution about the question of underlining the revolutionary identity in the imperialist metropoles!

Marxist Leninist Maoist Center of Belgium

Communist Party of France (marxist leninist maoist)

18th of October 2017

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“We humans are mere fragments of time and heartbeats, but our deeds will remain for centuries stamped on generation after generation. We will people the Earth with light and happiness.” Gonzalo

History produces revolutionary leaders, people who breaks with the ideology dominating their epoch, denouncing injustice, studying the roots of the problems, paving the way for a revolutionary solution. They are the synthesized product of class struggles, like they synthesize class struggles.

Those leaders are not interesting as individuals in such, even of course respect is to be done for their accomplishment and their human ability to carry a break that others were not able to make.

Those leaders are interesting as they express the correct Thought to follow to be able to change the situation. It is the principle of the Guiding Thought, which we explained in an historical common document in Spring 2013.

In November 2016, we explained also the basis of Lenin Thought, which are carried notably in the following documents of Lenin : Guerrilla Warfare (1905), Lessons of the Moscow Uprising (1906), Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution (1908), The Development of Capitalism in Russia (second preface).

Lenin Thought was the direct expression of the Russian situation, of the understanding of the Russian society, of its historical needs. In 1934, as 29 volumes of Lenin works were published, the following writers were for example quoted by Lenin : Mikhaïl Saltykov-Chtchedrine 320 times, Nikolaï Gogol 99 times, Ivan Krylov 60 times, Ivan Tourgueniev 46 times, Nikolaï Nekrassov 26 times, Alexander Pouchkine 19 times, Anton Tchekhov 18 times, Alexander Ostrovsky 17 times, Gleb Ouspensky 16 times, Ivan Gontcharov 11 times.

It is a good expression of the connection with the Russian culture and situation. The October Revolution was, in 1917, the expression of Lenin Thought.

In the same way, the Chinese revolution was the expression of Mao Zedong Thought. And in each country, history produced revolutionary leaders who begin a revolutionary process.

For this reason, we wish to stress the importance of rejecting the double attack on Gonzalo which happened ideologically in France those last few days.

As leader of the Communist Party of Peru, which launched a Peoples’s War, Gonzalo understood the principle of the Guiding Thought. It permitted him to explain that Maoism was a third stage of Marxism, after Leninism.

There is no other “Maoism” that has been defined. All others attempts are without any sense, a weak construct. Historically, the concept of “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism” comes directly from Gonzalo.

There is therefore no historically sense in translating in French and publishing, like it was done those last few days, a translation of a “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Basic Course”, made by people who joined afterwards the Communist Party of India (Maoist).

This can only be an attempt to negate the role of Gonzalo and the signification of its teachings. Gonzalo’s name doesn’t even appear in this document. But what appears is the concept of “MLM Thought”, which is of course an attempt to skirt the question of the Guiding Thought based on a national frame.

It is any way well known historically that in India, like in the Philippines, there is a huge tradition of refusing Maoism in name of Mao Zedong’s Thought, the main parties in those both countries participating for this reason for a long time to the international congresses organized by the revisionist Workers’ Party of Belgium.

It shows very well that a Maoism, not accepting the only definition of Maoism, the one of Gonzalo, is only “Mao Zedong’s Thought”. When the Communist Party of the Philippines hails North Korea, it show that its Maoism is incorrect.

It is also erroneous that the Marxist–Leninist Communist Organization – Proletarian Way produced a document against Gonzalo, accusing him of capitulation, whereas he is in jail since his arrest in September 1992, 25 years ago.

Such an accusation, published those last days, is based only on what the enemy accepts to say about him, and this is for this reason a clear break with the revolutionary tradition of not criticizing an arrested comrade in the hands of the counter-revolution.

There is also a great naivety to explain that Gonzalo is a traitor, when he’s still in total isolation, in a tiny cell. When somebody capitulates, he’s put forward by the reaction.

The production of fake letters of capitulation is nothing new either : it was already made for the revolutionary leader Thomas Münzer in Germany in 1525.

As said, it is basic teaching of the revolution that the reaction is not to be trusted.

And in its accusation, the Marxist–Leninist Communist Organization – Proletarian Way affirms that the Communist Party of Peru said that Gonzalo Thought would be a new stage of marxism. This is of course not true at all and it shows that the Marxist–Leninist Communist Organization – Proletarian Way doesn’t know or understand the Communist Party of Peru.

And how can it be else, when the Marxist–Leninist Communist Organization – Proletarian Way believes that all countries in the world are capitalist (and not capitalist or semi-feudal semi-colonial), that Stalin was a counter-revolutionary, rejecting the universal character of People’s War ?

It’s also strange to see the Marxist–Leninist Communist Organization – Proletarian Way denouncing the “capitulation” of Gonzalo, when it has itself supported Prachanda, the revisionist leader of Nepal, until the end of its capitulation.

This is here good example, because genuine revolutionaries have foreseen Prachanda’s errors at a very early stage. There is no such thing like a genuine revolutionary leader who, suddenly, capitulates.

This is why we can’t trust the German state when it says that Ulrike Meinhof killed herself in her prison cell, or when the social-imperialist USSR said that the great Greek leader Nikos Zachariadis killed himself in exile. These are lies.

In the same way, it is a question of trust in the movement of History not to believe in Gonzalo’s capitulation. His arrest, like he said, is only a “bend in the road” for the Peruvian revolution.

Such a bend can take time, exactly like the revolution in the imperialist countries is knowing a strategical retreat since the wave of the 1960’s-1970’s, when anyway Asia, Africa and Latin America became the “storm centers of world revolution”.

What counts, in such situation, is that the revolutionaries unite themselves in avant-garde parties in each country, defending the revolutionary traditions and struggling against Revisionism and subjectivist interpretations coming from outside the historical revolutionary current.

This, to be ready for the next great wave of the World Revolution.

Marxist Leninist Maoist Center of Belgium
Communist Party of France (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist)

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This May 1, 2017 is marked by the historical strengthening of the tendency to imperialist war. Each camp polishes its weapons, strengthens its capacity for action, promotes nationalism.

The United Kingdom tumbles to the exit of the European Union with the Brexit; in India, Narendra Modi organizes a regime in which Hinduism turns to fanaticism.

In the United States, it is Donald Trump, that coarse, narrow billionaire who took the lead ; in Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has reinforced, in a generalized manner, his prerogatives as president relying on religion.

China is strengthening its armaments, having just launched an aircraft carrier built in complete independence; North Korea is multiplying missile tests with the aim of endowing them with nuclear warheads. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte leads the country with extreme nationalist populism; Japan increased its military budget for the fifth time in 10 years, reaching a record 1% of GDP.

This tendency is general, both in the capitalist-imperialist countries and in the semi-colonial capitalist bureaucratic countries. The crisis inherent to capitalism can not be resolved and the conquest of profit requires more exploitation within and more tendency to interventionism.

There is no other way out except a rush forward, the march towards war.

The price to pay, in case of incapacity to assume this orientation, is the collapse: countries like Libya and Iraq already do not exist any more, dismembered by the others; Afghanistan and Venezuela are swinging into chaos, while between 2011 and 2015, Brazil experienced more deaths by voluntary homicide than in Syria, which is experiencing a widespread war.

Given this background, on the first of May 2017, we therefore call the masses of Belgium and France to be constantly and thoroughly vigilant about the electoral progression of Marine Le Pen.

Its electoral success in the first round of the French presidential elections, with 7.7 million votes, reinforces indeed a double trend of historical importance.

There is in France a tendency towards nationalism and corporatism, that is to say the complete submission to capitalism in the name of the economic efficiency of the country.

But there is also a tendency to expansionism, to the strengthening of the capacity to project outwards – which is the basis of imperialism.

And the historical situation of the Belgian nation is known: it is marked by weaknesses in terms of its cultural unification. Consequently, France inevitably tends to seek to satellite a part of Belgium: Wallonia, even Brussels itself.

There is a convergence of interests between French imperialism and the Flemish fare right, which would both benefit from a negation of the Belgian nation, dismembering it to form real fiefs.

We would like to emphasize that it is not a question of seeing a plot or of imagining a French invasion, but of grasping a fundamental tendency which is based, on the one hand, on the expansionist needs of French capitalism in crisis, on the other on the attempt of Flemish capitalists to form fiefs, where nationalism would grant them political supremacy.

There is here an explosive situation, and this is even truer as the European Union, this capitalist utopia of a pacified Europe, collapses ever more under the blows of the selfish national interests, which is typical of imperialism.

Capitalists have promised progress and peace, but each national capitalism in crisis knows only one, inevitable, way out : fascism internally and war on the outside, whereas the world has already seen the destructive consequences of this historic law, with the First and Second World Wars.

The Belgian question does not attract the attention of Marine Le Pen alone: it can be seen that in the first round of the French presidential elections of 2017, all the « sovereignist » or nationalist candidates already had expressed a favorable opinion on the integration of Wallonia into France.

Marine Le Pen has already frankly approached the issue in July 2011, and this was especially easy as the Flemish far right Flemish is very close to her:

“If Belgian is going to split, if Flanders pronounces its independence, which seems more and more credible a possibility, the French republic would do well to welcome Wallonia into its heart. The historical and fraternal ties which unite our two peoples are too strong for France to abandon Wallonia.”

In 2010 already, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan spoke of “daring to clearly tell to our Walloon friends that France would welcome them with open arms”; Jean-Luc Mélenchon explained that he was “a “rattachiste” as they say. If the Flemings leave, if Belgium evaporates, then, let the Walloons come with us.”

It is also the case of François Asselineau (“in the hypothesis – at present not very probable, but not improbable either – in which the “rattachiste” (or “reunionist”) current ended by rallying a majority of French-speaking voters, French should accede to this majority demand”).

It goes without saying that the French expansionist attempts to profit from the profound Franco-Belgian friendship to justify themselves historically. It is very important to unmask such an undertaking, in order to truly strengthen genuine encounters between peoples, in a long process that will ultimately lead to the World Socialist Republic.

However, it is clear that, in any case, no progressive process can exist on the planet without being carried by the working class, without breaking with the growing power of the monopolies, without being able to break the forces that develop fascism.

The Communists must therefore be at the forefront of the anti-fascist struggle, knowing that the inevitable evolution of capitalism led to the formation of two camps: the camp of fascism, the camp of popular democracy, the latter being the natural terrain for the Communists .

Of course, this demands the ideological capacity not to yield to the pseudo-revolutionary demagogy of leftism, which is opposed to anti-fascism considered here as a “compromise” protecting bourgeois institutions.

Leftism is mistaken here, for nothing is static in society, because of the inherent instability of capitalism in crisis. The battle for democracy carries within it, inevitably, the break with the power of the monopolies, which is being strengthened in an ever more tyrannical way.

During this process, it will be a historic task for the Communists to organize the masses in general on the democratic ground of anti-fascism, with the unavoidable military confrontation of reaction and revolution.

For this reason, there is the task for the Communists to know the historical heritage of anti-fascist struggle, in particular the Spanish, Greek, Italian, German, Belgian and French experiences.

The war of the people against fascism will inevitably be the historical sequence to come, which will sweep away the attempt of capitalism to maintain itself in spite of its entirely decadent and destructive nature.

It is evident, therefore, that the question of the environment will be a particularly important detonator in the mobilization of the masses. This is part of the process of dialectical materialistic understanding of the world that the masses will experience in their ever more frontal opposition to capitalism knowing only the path of confrontation and destruction.

It is a whole new era that opens here, allowing a new undeniable impetus to the revolution, on the condition of grasping reality adequately, of knowing well the historical characteristics of its own country.

That is why, on the first of May, we affirm that the future belongs to the masses, not to fascism, and that the organized masses will be able to wage war against the anti-democratic forces seeking to prevent them from mastering their destiny, to establish the socialist society which corresponds to their needs.

Marxist Leninist Maoist Center of Belgium

Communist Party of France (marxist leninist maoist)

First of May 2017

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Ten years ago, on November 21, 2006, the World Revolution knew a setback with the capitulation of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), which ceased its People’s War to accept a “comprehensive Peace Agreement” with the government.

At the time of the capitulation, the People’s War in Nepal began indeed to be world known. It controlled up to 80 percent of the country, after ten years of armed struggle where the Revolution presented itself as strategic proposition for the entire masses. The People’s Liberation Army, strong of 30, 000 combatants, went on from victory to victory.

Maoism, as leading ideology from the People’s War, was in a process of spreading all over the world, with in the background the historical advances made by the Communist Party of Peru, whereas in India there was a strong reorganization which brought the founding of the Communist Party of India (Maoist).

The capitulation was a terrible betrayal from this situation in development. Deeply influenced by the eclectic tendencies of the Maoist current called Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) fell into a pragmatic-machiavelic line.

This was strongly intensified by the decadent way of life of its leadership, corrupted by the imperialist lifestyle, what brought a spirit of acceptance of the social and democratic “improvement” by imperialism considered as a unified globalized system.

The idea of a general victory was abandoned, as it was thought that both India and China, and also the USA, would block any further development. The city of Kathmandu was not considered as possible to be taken; the army, on the contrary of the police, seemed supposedly unbreakable.

Therefore, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) precipitated itself in the possibility of an alliance with the parliamentarian political parties which, in the situation of crisis where the Monarchy took all the control of the country, accepted to form a Republic, in exchange of the end of the People’s War.

This was just a new laying out of the semi-feudal semi-colonial nature of the country, but the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), hoping for a quick integration, self-intoxicated itself, with the “people’s revolt” as phantasmagoria.

In fact, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) already imagined that it found a new method combining insurrection and people’s war.

After the capitulation, it continued its idealist innovations with the revisionist theory of a multiparty constitution, where all political parties were considered as anti-feudal, because they were opposed to Monarchy, where therefore the destruction of the old state was conceived as not possible and even not necessary, as the general democratization, with the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) being the major force in the country, would be unavoidable.

This concept of “democratization” was not new: it was a mere renewal of the revisionist thesis of Karl Kautsky and Maurice Thorez in the imperialist countries.

More precisely, it is what was professed by all the revisionist currents in the third world during the 1960’s-1990’s period, pretending to make a front with the national bourgeoisie to reform the country, when there were in reality trying to build a new bureaucratic bourgeoisie serving Soviet Social-imperialism.

Nowadays, as there is no Soviet Social-imperialism any more, such a tendency can only lead to the subordination to imperialists or expansionist semi-colonial powers. In Nepal, it is easy to see that Prachanda became the lackey of India.

And of course, as the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) became a part of the world system of exploitation and oppression, it was strongly supported in its capitulation.

Naturally, the electoral victory of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) was greeted all over the world by all the revisionist forces. The calls to support the Nepal Revolution grew always more as soon as the peace agreement were signed. There were even groups appearing calling to support the People’s War in Nepal, when it was already over.

Revisionists won prestige of this and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) profited from this in keeping being considered as revolutionary.

But this was sadly not all. The vast majority of the forces upholding Maoism supported this process.

Instead of considering that the peace agreement was the end of the process transforming the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) in a revisionist party, it was considered that it was only the beginning of it.

Years after the peace agreement, it was still spoken of a “complicated” situation and it was explained that still everything was possible, that a “red line” was growing, a new party in constitution, etc.

Ten years after the peace agreement, we can see that this was fully erroneous. There was no such thing like a “red line” in the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) which became revisionist, because the black line entirely won precisely with the “comprehensive Peace Agreement”.

A proof of it is the fact that all the tendencies and splitter movements which quitted the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) still thought that it was correct to reach such an agreement.

The “people’s revolt” was only a false dream masking the capitulation; it was a trick to occupy the radical sectors of the masses, to estrange them to scientific socialism. The calls for a “red line” in the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) formed an impediment to this understanding.

The forces who have pretended to “defend” the achievements of the Nepalese Revolution, the possibility of its continuation, have in fact helped to block any self-criticism in Nepal. They prevent a dialectical materialist perspective of the history of Nepal, of the conditions of class struggle.

It was correct to denunciate what consisted historically in a capitulation. Prachanda was not only an opportunist, he was a revisionist and the systematic criticism of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) should have been done immediately at the time of the “Peace Agreement”, to liberate the forces in Nepal wanting to move to a scientific socialist understanding of the situation.

This was also very important to protect Maoism. The situation in Nepal helped widely the Revisionist currents, in particular Hoxhaism, to maintain the accusation that Maoism was an “armed struggle without perspective”, a petty-bourgeois trend. Rejecting these slanders was only possible with a general Maoist condemnation of Prachanda and the position of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) with the “Peace Agreement”.

That’s why we say, ten years of the Nepali capitulation, that it is important to learn from it. It helps to understand the Maoist teachings on the question of the state, on People’s War, on the principle of bureaucratic bourgeoisie. It shows the nature of forces pretending nowadays to be Maoist, when they were converging with the revisionist line of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist).

This is particularly the case of the Maoist Communist Party of Italy and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada. Both were at the very heart of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement and very close to the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). They accompanied the process to the “Peace Agreement”: it is easy to see from their positions at that time.

It is important to see that there was in Nepal in December 2006 , in presence of many Maoist parties, an international Seminar “on Imperialism and Proletarian revolution in the 21st century”. Nevertheless, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) had then already signed the “Peace Agreement” and developed all its theories about “multiparty democracy”.

Was it then not already time to denunciante the revisionist line of Prachanda, the capitulation of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)? Ten years after, it is clear that yes.

Learn from the defeat in Nepal, which is only a bend in the road of the World Revolution!

Defend Maoism against Revisionism, but also against connivance and convergence with Revisionism!

Uphold the principle of the armed ocean of the masses! People’s War until Communism!

Organization of the workers of Afghanistan (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, principally Maoist)
Marxist Leninist Maoist Center of Belgium
Communist Party of France (marxist leninist maoist)
November 2016

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