Exactly a hundred years ago, Jose Carlos Mariategui, founder of the Communist Party of Peru, wrote these powerful words: “the attitude of the person who sets out to correct reality is, certainly, more optimistic than pessimistic. They are pessimistic in their protest and condemnation of the present; but they are optimistic in their hope for the future.”
Nine years later, on December 3, 1934, Chairman Gonzalo was born: like Mariategui, he was a pessimist of the present and an optimist of the will. With surgical precision, Chairman Gonzalo observed and described the poverty of the masses under four centuries of exploitation and oppression. At the same time, he saw clearly the ways to correct such a reality, with the seeds of the future germinating from the harsh struggles of the present: the same masses who are creators of history, and the scientific organization of their poverty. In this way, he possessed an inexhaustible faith in the working class, the oppressed people, and the Communists – altogether, they represent the future.
From leading the reconstitution of the Communist Party of Peru, to leading the People’s War, and even after his detention by the class enemy in 1992, Chairman Gonzalo had always stood on the forefront of the struggle to bring about a new world without exploitation and oppression. Through his revolutionary practice, Chairman Gonzalo defined Maoism as the third, new, and higher stage of Marxism and developed it, leaving an immense treasure trove for the working class and people of the world. He provided universal contributions to our ideology, such as concentric construction, the universality of People’s War, and the essential task of constituting or reconstituting Communist Parties in every country. While the world was mired in the myopic “end of history” with the fall of Soviet social-imperialism, Chairman Gonzalo led a People’s War that engulfed over two-thirds of Peru, reigniting the faith that a genuine revolution is not only possible, but necessary. “May the actions speak!” was the slogan. Truly, Chairman Gonzalo was an “imaginative” person in the words of Mariategui.
For two decades, Chairman Gonzalo led the struggle to reconstitute the Communist Party as a militarized Party of a new type, against all forms of opportunists, reformists, and revisionists that rejected the leading role of the working class in the revolution and the necessity of revolutionary violence. Chairman Gonzalo insisted that the Communist Party, the vanguard detachment of the working class, can only be reconstituted and built up in the midst of class struggle, with armed struggle as the highest and primary form. He maintained that a Communist Party is not declared through subjective criteria by self-imposed leaders, but is welded together by the best children of the working class, forged through leadership in the class struggle and living with, working with, and struggling with the masses. Drawing on the life and death struggle between the working class and the capitalist class, the Chairman laid down the principle of secrecy for the process of reconstitution, as “we have to conquer power and overthrow.”
To destroy the old, but most importantly, to build anew – these are the tasks of the Communists, fighters and masses in the People’s War. Chairman Gonzalo established that armed struggle led by the Communist Party is a war of the people, the producers, won mainly through their participation rather than by weapons and technology. Such a war will be protracted in nature: war is only learned through war, from simple forms to complex forms, as the People’s Army grows from weak to strong. People’s War, the highest form of class struggle, destroys the old relations of production, as well as the old State that guarantees it; in their place, it imposes the new relations of production and a new State: the dictatorship of the working class.
Following the teachings of Chairman Mao, Chairman Gonzalo developed the thesis of bureaucrat capitalism as a delayed form of capitalism developed by imperialism in oppressed countries. He corrected the mistakes of many revolutionaries in the third world, who erred in seeing progressive tendencies in the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, those that merely uses the power of the State to extract profit and develop State monopoly capitalism to serve imperialist exploitation. At the same time, he identified semi-feudalism as the basis of bureaucrat capitalism, which continues to exert extra-economic oppression on the back of the peasantry despite having been transformed with the introduction of national and international capital. For revolutionaries in the United States, analyzing the role of US imperialism in developing bureaucrat capitalism is an urgent need and a necessary service to the peoples of the world.
Chairman Gonzalo stressed the importance of self-reliance. He maintained that the working class and people can only win Power for themselves with their own strength, and not by relying on the capitalists, or by revolutionaries and Parties from other countries. For Chairman Gonzalo, the best way to support revolutions abroad is to develop revolution in one’s own country. He pointed out that the Peruvian nation – like all nations oppressed by imperialism – can only be emancipated and formally established with revolution, where a new truly popular and national culture and art will emerge, rejuvenating centuries of work and struggle.
It is in the same vein that Chairman Gonzalo defended the continuation of class struggle under socialism, reemphasizing Chairman Mao’s watchwords that “revisionism in Power is capitalism in Power” and “dare to swim against the tide.” Under his leadership, the Communist Party of Peru was the first Communist Party to recognize the revisionist coup in China. Stressing the omnipotence of revolutionary violence, he raised up the militarization of the people as the effective bulwark against bourgeois right and the inequality it entails.
When discussing the history of the Peruvian revolution, Chairman Gonzalo once remarked, “the revisionists make pilgrimages every year on the day of his [Mariategui’s] death. According to Marxism the day of the birth of the leaders is celebrated.”
These simple words contain an important truth: we celebrate birth because it marked something qualitatively new. Everything in the world, from simple to complex, will grow, mature, and die – all having their source in birth. There will always be those who are born, those who will make revolution and propel the world forward, bringing death to the old world and birth to a new one. With these words, today, on December 3, we celebrate Chairman Gonzalo’s 91st birthday, both for him as a person – a leader, a teacher, and a military strategist – and for his invincible thought, which remains more alive than ever with the others.
In his famous Interview with El Diario, Chairman Gonzalo once said: “It is our ideology that makes us brave, that gives us courage. In my opinion, no one is born brave. It is society, the class struggle, that makes people and communists courageous – the class struggle, the proletariat, the Party, and our ideology.”
It was with truths like these, and the initiation of actions so that these truths could speak, that Chairman Gonzalo gained the respect of the people of the world. By virtue of being one called and illuminated by a higher will, one who took up the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden.
Chairman Gonzalo is immortal because immortal is his thought!
