PEOPLE'S WAR IS UNIVERSALLY APPLICABLE PROLETARIAN STRATEGY (II)

[hariette@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (hariette spierings)]

(Continues from previous posting)


WHAT IS THE PEOPLE'S WAR?

The People's War is the highest and most concentrated expression of
proletarian politics.  "War is the continuation of politics by means of
violence".  And politics themselves are an expression of the struggle of
classes.  This is simple ABC.

The reason why the "proletariat must establish its own class political
independence is precisely in order to express its class struggle in the
political arena.  To constitute itself into the party of "overthrow", the
Party of the Revolution, a party with the unflinching aim of the seizure of
power and thus establishing its class dictatorship. It is in this sense in
which Engels spoke of the "class turning into the Party" as the "decisive
hour nears".

Moreover, the People's War is concentrated expression of the democratic
politics of the proletariat. The most concrete and necessary expression of
its character as leading class of the people, of the semi-proletarians,
petty bourgeois, peasants, etc. The democratic leader of all the oppressed
and exploited classes against the handful of big bourgeois parasites who
prey on the body politic of the masses.

By means of the People's War the proletariat aims at educating, organising
and mobilising the wide masses of the people to accomplish the social
transformation.  Not only for the seizure of power, but for the whole period
of construction and socialist development until the abolition of classes and
the communist society.  It is not merely a tactical question.  It is the
PROLETARIAN STRATEGY developed and perfected in the course of its
revolutionary experiences, from the Paris Commune, the October Revolution,
the Chinese Revolution, up to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as
we shall also see in due course.
The People's War is expression and concretion of the uninterrupted and
PERMANENT character of the revolution, as correctly understood by ALL the
Classics: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Chairman Mao, and today Chairman
Gonzalo, the leader of the PCP and the Peruvian revolution.  There in an
unbroken and continous theoretical thread which precisely defines this issue
as the central issue of proletarian politics.


THE MARXIST GROUNDING OF THE PEOPLES WAR

1.  REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE IS A NECESSITY AND NOT AN 'OPTION'

In the closing paragraph of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels say:

"The proletarians disdain to conceal their views and aims.  They openly
declare that their ends can be attained ONLY by the FORCIBLE overthrow of
all existing social conditions".  "Let the ruling classes - and I may add,
our erstwhile leftists - tremble at a Communist revolution".

Marx himself, on many occassions, praised revolutionary VIOLENCE as the
midwife of history.

Lenin in the State and Revolution quotes Engels in relation to this point,
daubing it a "panegyric on violent revolution":

"...That force, however, plays yet another role (other than that of
diabolical power) in history, a revolutionary role; that, in the words of
Marx, it is the midwife of EVERY old society which is pregnant with a new
one, that is the instrument with which social movement forces its way
through and shatters the dead, fossilised political forms".

And note, that Engels adds: ".....of this there is not a word in Herr
Duhring.  It is only with sighs and groans that he admits the possibility
that force perhaps be necessary for the overthrow of an economy based on
exploitation - unfortunately, because all use of force demoralises, HE SAYS,
the person who uses it. And this in spite of the IMMENSE  MORAL AND
SPIRITUAL IMPETUS which has been given by EVERY victorious revolution!".

And concludes:  "And this parson's mode of thought - DULL, INSIPID AND
IMPOTENT - presumes to impose itself on the most revolutionary party that
history has known".

And Lenin in the same work states without reservations of any kind:

"....the theory of Marx and Engels of the INEVITABILITY of a VIOLENT
revolution refers to the bourgeois state.  The latter CANNOT be superseded
by the proletarian state (dictatorship of the proletariat) though the
process of "withering away", but, as a general rule, ONLY THROUGH a violent
revolution".

"The panegyric Engels sang in its honour, and which FULLY corresponds to
Marx's repeated statements (see the concluding passages of The Poverty of
Philosophy and the Communist Manifesto, with their proud and OPEN
proclamation of the INEVITABILITY of a violent revolution: see what Marx
wrote nearly thirty years later, in criticising the Gotha Programme of 1875,
when he mercilessly castigated the opportunist character of that programme)
- this panegyric is by no means a mere "impulse", a mere declamation or a
polemical sally.  The NECESSITY of SYSTEMATICALLY imbuing the MASSES with
THIS and precisely THIS view of violent revolution lies at THE ROOT of the
ENTIRE theory of Marx and Engels".

And Lenin a few lines later repeats:

"The suppression of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is
impossible without a violent revolution".

(to be continued)



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