The several-week-long war against the population of Gaza is indicative of a qualitative leap in the intensity and extension of the fascist and colonialist policy of the State of Israel as a Middle East’s outpost of Western imperialism, particularly the US.
This is a situation of no return which, on the side of the State of Israel, seeks to develop towards the extermination and deportation of the population of Gaza and which imposes, on the side of the resistance of the Palestinian people, an adequate development of the popular, democratic and national war. This perspective requires the support of oppressed peoples, democrats, true communists and anti-fascists all over the world.
The large and widespread solidarity mobilizations with the Palestinian people in recent weeks have a great political importance, especially because of the broad and combative participation of the Arab peoples but, regarding the opposition forces and movements within the imperialist countries, they highlight the weakness of the genuinely communist forces and the profound insufficiency of real work directed to the mobilization and organization of workers and youth.
At the same time, it should be denounced how a relevant part of these forces and movements are working to prevent international solidarity from escaping the narrow margins of an opinion movement that makes flimsy appeals to the same reactionary imperialist ruling classes that are involved in the immense massacre taking place.
The genocidal war against the Palestinian population is a fact that largely transcends the Middle East itself. It is a manifestation and a consequence of an international situation characterized by increasingly acute contradictions that are tending toward the irreversible rupture of political and strategic arrangements which are already deeply in crisis. The Palestinian question, as well as the heroic resistance of this people, are only one of the many sides of a new historical phase now fully taking place. A phase of confrontation between two irreducibly opposed sides. On one side there is the advance of fascism, the development of war against oppressed peoples and the extension of the inter-imperialist war (already ongoing in Ukraine); on the other side there is the development of national liberation struggles, New Democracy revolutions and popular, democratic anti-fascist revolutions in the perspective of the establishment of socialism.
In this sense, the current situation contains many aspects comparable to that of the 1930s, where the rise of Nazi-fascism, with its wars of aggression against the Spanish republic, China and other oppressed peoples and small nations, marked the actual beginning of World War II. A war during which the revolutionary struggle developed impetuously in various parts of the world, with a historic advance of the socialist camp beginning with the victories of the Red Army and Stalin’s USSR, the development of partisan wars, the establishment of people’s democracies and the great achievement of the Chinese revolution led by Mao.
However, we have a difference from the 1930s. The rise and historical development of proletarian revolutions and thus of the struggle for socialism on a planetary scale does not follow a linear movement, does not coincide with a gradual advance toward communism. Like any other movement, the development of the world proletarian revolution takes place in a spiral dialectical movement. In this way the world revolution, in order to secure new developments, appears to retreat sometimes in order to take all the necessary momentum required and imposed by new problems and obstacles emerging. Such was the case, for example, when in 1914 all the parties of the Second International switched their support to imperialism and counterrevolution. In reality, behind the complete disintegration of all the “socialist” parties of the time, which consciously handed over tens of millions of proletarians and peasants to imperialist slaughter, the world proletarian revolution was progressing powerfully through the initiative of what was then the small Bolshevik party led by Lenin, which, within a few years, was able to win the revolution and establish the USSR, developing revolutionary struggles of various countries around the world and building the Third Communist International.
Today, compared to the 1930s, the Soviet Union, the Socialist State led by Stalin, is missing, the Communist Third International is missing. If we then look at the end of World War II and the years immediately following, we see that the red base of Mao’s China is also absent.
The fusion of imperialism and modern revisionism, and in particular the devastating role played by the latter, is the real underlying cause of the current absence of a socialist countries’ camp.
After Stalin’s death, the revisionists, which were present in force in the Communist Party and the socialist state, launched a fascist and anti-communist coup by repressing and persecuting genuinely communist forces. The USSR was transformed into a social-imperialist and social-fascist country, a yoke for most of the Soviet republics, an enemy of oppressed peoples, a fomenter of warmongering policies, engaged, then, in constant political and military provocations against Mao’s socialist China.
However, modern revisionism had already made its appearance in many communist parties during World War II and had established itself in the communist parties of the U.S., France, Spain and Italy, blocking the development of the people’s democratic revolution toward the establishment of socialism, where popular anti-fascist resistance was ongoing.
It was the Chinese Communist Party under the leadership of Mao, and it was Maoism that, by organically solving the theoretical and strategic problems posed by the Third International, developing Marxism and Leninism, continuing and advancing with the work begun by Lenin and Stalin, was able to identify the new problem that had arisen, was able to unmask the new enemy that had appeared on the scene of the class struggle, “modern revisionism.” An enemy that develops no longer, like the old social democracy, by attacking Marxism, the proletarian revolution and the red flag but, conversely, by raising this glorious flag in order to better scuttle it and thus help defeat socialism and the proletarian revolution.
Maoism pointed out the true nature of modern revisionism that is inherent to the development of the imperialist economic system itself. Thus, Maoism highlighted how in the development and crisis of private and public state capitalism, both in the Western imperialist countries and in the former socialist imperialist countries, there is a close connection between the irrepressible tendency to fascism inherent in dying capitalism and modern revisionism’s role in preparing the ground and paving the way for the full expression and manifestation of fascism itself. In this way, Maoism gave a characterization of modern revisionism as “socialfascism.” Definition ultimately valid as early as the end of World War II for revisionist parties in countries such as US, France, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, etc.
Mao led the struggle against modern revisionism in the international communist movement and comprehensively countered its presence in the Communist Party of China and the Chinese socialist state. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, guided by the ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, fostered the development of revolutionary struggle in various countries around the world, led to the formation of parties that would later fully embrace Maoism, and fostered the struggles and movements during the 1960s and 1970s in imperialist countries. With the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Mao affirmed a new law of the struggle for communism, the law that new proletarian cultural revolutions, new people’s wars, are needed in socialism to defeat attempts to restore capitalism.
Until his death, Mao warned the sincere communists, the proletariat and the masses of the people against attempts to restore socialism carried out by modern revisionists and indicated the need for the preparation of people’s war against such attempts. Nevertheless, the danger of modern revisionism was once again underestimated by the Chinese Communist Party’s left itself, and the best communists in the Party and State fell under the fascist coup of 1976, and since then China’s heroic Maoists have been forced to operate in the strictest secrecy. China was thus also transformed into a fascist and social-imperialist state in 1976.
During the 1960s and for a part of the following decade, mass protests and struggles developed in various countries of the imperialist West that were often large-scale and characterized by, among other things, various forms of the exercise of proletarian violence. These vast and combative struggles, fueled in part by the growing decomposition of modern revisionism and the influence of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, however, fell under the hegemony of workerist, eclectic and Trotskyist forces which opposed the construction of a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist communist party of a new type to impress a revolutionary direction on the class struggle, arguing that revolution is made by radicalizing economic struggles, denying the centrality of revolutionary theory and ideology, and propagating an irrationalist and post-modern worldview. The crisis and fragmentation of the political forces that had led the movements of those decades resulted, as early as the second half of the 1970s, in the rise of economism, movementism, leftist populism and anarchism within the reformist and “revolutionary” left and the so-called communist movement.
The crisis of the opportunist groups and forces of the 1970s thus combined and merged with the old remnants of the decomposition of modern revisionism, giving rise, in countries such as Italy, to a series of forces that, despite their sectarian fragmentation, were largely hegemonic in the extreme left, opposition movements and alternative trade unionism. A situation that has been perpetuated to this day. A situation that also prevents the development of a real movement of struggle in support of the Palestinian people’s own resistance.
So if we look back to the 1930s, we have decisive differences from the current situation. At the same time, however, all the contradictions of the terminal phase of imperialism together have become even more pronounced. It appears evident how under the sea of chaotic phenomena marked by the apparent omnipotence of imperialism, social-imperialism and the world-scale advance of fascism, the discontent, indignation, protest, and rebellion of the oppressed peoples, popular masses and proletarians all over the world are developing. Ultimately, the tendency for world proletarian revolution is the main one, and the reactionary offensive of imperialism, social-imperialism and fascism is only the attempt to prolong the life of the dying capitalist system. At the same time, the revolutionary ideology of the proletariat has not stopped developing and solving the problems posed from time to time by new difficulties, such as that of the emergence and role of modern revisionism. Not only has Marxism-Leninism developed into Maoism, but also Maoism has continued to move forward to the point where today, not only ideologically but also politically, it represents the only real alternative to imperialism, social-imperialism and fascism.
This has been able to happen thanks to the work of Mao and the revolutionary experiences and people’s wars of New Democracy (from the revolutionary struggles of various countries in Latin America and Central America to the people’s wars in Peru, India, the Philippines, and Turkey) led by the Maoist parties. Only Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism, is today at the height of the necessities of the struggle against the various forms of revisionism and opportunism and can thus escape their influence and counter them adequately.
The struggles and experiences of the oppressed peoples of Latin America, Central America, Africa and Asia, as well as the often bitter experiences of the struggles of the proletarians and popular masses of Western imperialist countries, Russian imperialism and Chinese social-imperialism have been demonstrating for several decades now that only the proletariat as the hegemonic class, in the form of an effectively communist and revolutionary party, is capable of leading national liberation struggles, democratic, popular and anti-fascist revolutions and socialist revolutions towards victory and towards the development of the world proletarian revolution.
It thus becomes necessary to oppose the positions of those organizations of the radical left or the far left which oppose the struggle against fascism and the building of an effective communist party, limiting themselves to providing marginal solidarity or advancing proposals that are empty of content, among other things without being in any way able to express effective leadership in the various demonstrations that turn out to be often characterized by a majority presence of Arab or non-partisan mass sectors. Against these positions it must be asserted instead that an effective opposition to the current fascistization and the construction of the party are ultimately the only ways that can guarantee real support for the world anti-imperialist struggle, and consequently also for the struggle of the Palestinian people. The self-styled “communist” organizations that consciously or unconsciously choose to ignore these problems thereby fall into movementism with no real political outlet, if they do not become, indeed, a support for those reactionary sectors of the marginal bourgeoisie that often try to put themselves at the head of the squares.
At the present stage of dying imperialism, of the sharpening of all economic and political contradictions, of the beginning of inter-imperialist war, only genuine communist parties guided by the ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism can consciously develop and organize the protest and rebellion of the masses, by merging the struggle for democracy with the struggle for socialism.
Only Maoist parties can prevent, as it has been the case to date, pieces of bureaucratic capitalism in oppressed countries, sectors of the reactionary classes shifting from Western imperialism to Russian or Chinese imperialism, marginalized or marginalizing sectors of the ruling classes in the imperialist countries themselves, from being able to place themselves at the head of the protest and rebellion of the masses in order to use them for their own reactionary purposes, with the inevitable outcome of contributing to their defeat.
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