By: Daniel Kanmuang
The People’s War in Peru, initiated in 1980 and continuing up until this day despite many difficult bends in the road, is a great world-historical event. Millions of workers, peasants and indigenous people rose up to struggle against their exploitation and seize their land, inspiring workers and peasants the whole world over. In the course of their struggle, the Peruvian revolutionaries led by Chairman Gonzalo enriched and developed the ideology of the working class, defended our principles against capitalist and revisionist (i.e. fake socialism that serves the capitalists) attacks, and made the road ahead more clear for all workers and oppressed peoples alike.
In the past ten years, more and more people have begun to learn about the revolution in Peru and its contributions. In relation to this, many works of C. Gonzalo have been translated into English by well-intentioned but amateurish individuals and organizations. While this is an overall development, at time—whether due to sloppiness or a bad grasp of Spanish—there have arisen many almost comedic translation errors that have created real harm in the revolutionary movement, especially here in the United States.
One such example is the word “faction” and how it is translated between Spanish and English.
The Peruvian comrades used the word “faction” throughout their history. In fact, when leftists within the Communist Party of Peru (PCP) first organized themselves in the struggle against revisionism, they called themselves the “Red Faction,” or “Fracción roja” in Spanish. This term was then borrowed by other revolutionaries in Latin America.
However, in translating this and other texts, some people raise a bizarre claim. When they see the Spanish word, “fracción,” they translate it into English as “fraction” and say a “fraction” is different from a “faction,” which Lenin and Stalin devoted great efforts to fight against. After all, Stalin once said, in his pamphlet Foundations of Leninism:
“The Party as the embodiment of unity of will, unity incompatible with the existence of factions.”
But when we open the Spanish translation of the same pamphlet by Stalin, this same exact sentence is written as:
“El Partido como unidad de voluntad incompatible con la existencia de fracciones.”
Throughout the Spanish version of all volumes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, every time they spoke about “factions” or “factionalism,” one finds either the word “fracción,” or “fraccionamiento”. In fact, in the Russian original, this word was “fraktsiya,” the exact same word as “fracción.” This is further clarified by simply looking up “fracción” in the Diccionario de la lengua española, which gives as one definition of “fracción”: “Each of the groups of a party or organization, which differ from each other or from the whole, and which may become independent.” That is, a group that we would understand as a political “faction” in English.
While the word “facción” may be also used as a synonym for a political or social “fracción” in Spanish, in more than 150 years of world revolution, Spanish-speakers has typically translated “faction” as “fracción ” in revolutionary texts. Why? It is because unlike the English equivalent, “fraction,” which is only a term in math and natural sciences, in Spanish the term is more widely used (including for the divisions of political organizations). That’s just how the language works: the term “fracción” that Stalin denounced is the exact same term that Chairman Gonzalo supported.
However, these confused “revolutionaries” don’t stop at inventing a new word in English, they go further and elevate their translation error into a new theory of their own creation. Apparently a “faction” is bad while a “fraction” is good. They claim that a “fraction” remains principled and avoids making factionalist errors. A “faction,” however, has its own separate organs, its own distinct chain of command, and carries out its own program, is a minority against the majority, and thus is unprincipled and bad.
At this point, we don’t even need to talk about how Cde. Lenin and C. Gonzalo both had their own separate organs or were a minority at times —this whole theory becomes like an SNL sketch when one realizes it’s based on a translation error. In Bible studies, this is often called “hermeneutics,” meaning to interpret the holy book simply by the specific wording or grammar. Our confused “revolutionaries” thus replace Marxism, which is supposed to be a guide to action, with a religious textualism that would make a bishop blush!
So what is a “faction” as it used by the Peruvian comrades? C. Gonzalo explained it like this: it is “a group of like-minded persons solidly united in action around principles in their purest form.” When we understand this, the meaning becomes clear as day. In certain periods of Lenin and Gonzalo’s work, having a principled faction took on importance when a Party had not yet been constituted or reconstituted, and it was important for like-minded people, i.e. the left, to struggle together against the large revisionist and opportunist trends in the revolutionary movement. However, in the context of a principled democratic-centralist organization—whether it be a mass organization or a Party organization—or when revolutionary leadership as well as the correct line had emerged in theory and practice in the form of a center, to continue in the form of a faction (or a “fraction”) would become negative and only harm the cause of the working class. It would also be harmful in any situation to engage in the error called “factionalism”, which means to engage in splitting and opportunism in order to preserve ones factional leadership rather than struggle to unite with or submit under correct revolutionary leadership. This is the reason why Stalin and Gonzalo had seemingly different views—because they are speaking about different periods in the revolutionary process. In fact, Stalin himself took part in a faction! It was called “the Bolsheviks” which was the majority “faction” of the broader Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.
Unfortunately, this is far from the only case of this trend of mistranslation as theory. Another notorious case is the word “militante” in Spanish.
C. Gonzalo and the PCP always talked about the word “militante” to refer to the basic force of a Communist Party. In English, for the past 150 years and more, the term for the most basic layer of a Communist Party was translated as “member.”
To any Spanish native speaker, the word “militante” means something very different from the English word “militant.”. Merriam–Webster defines “militant” as:
“Aggressively active (as in a cause).”
While the Diccionario de la lengua española defines “militante” as:
“Affiliate, associate, component, participant, or partner.”
To be a member of the Conservative Party of Colombia, or any other political party in the Spanish-speaking world for example, is to be called a “militante” of that political organization.
But because of their own lack of Spanish proficiency, certain “Maoists” in the US take the word too literally and try to pretend a “militant” is a new rank invented by the Peruvian revolutionaries that is different than being a member. We end up with whole papers explaining this novel concept, including sentences like “Lenin mastered underground work as a militant for revolution,” which could pose real problems for any Latino workers to understand.
Needless to say, the word “militante” has been in use by Spanish-speaking activists since the time of the First, Second, and Third International. And in English, it was always officially translated into the simple “member.”
Just like how debates on the exact wording of the Trinity led to great Christian schisms, these mistranslations, although comedic, have become theoretical justifications of bizarre revisionist theories by factionalists and opportunists. The reason is simple: when you take theory and practice out of Marxism, it is reduced to just a set of dogmas, like Lenin said. What has plagued the revolutionary movement, and especially those that call themselves “Maoists” in the US for the past few decades, is a total philosophical and practical amateurishness. Very few “Maoists” have seriously studied the stand, worldview, and method of the working class, let alone led mass struggles that mobilized for the masses’ political and economic demands. In place of actually understanding revolutionary theory (much less correctly putting it into practice!), these “Maoists” obsess over questions of form and translation because they cannot grasp at the essence of what comrades like Chairman Gonzalo, Stalin, and Lenin were trying to explain.
While certain factionalists and opportunists claim to be the “reddest,” the most loyal defenders of the Peruvian revolution, they end up completely going against its lessons and essence because they can’t really comprehend what was going on. The creative, consciously world-changing role of Marxism is reduced to an irrational and dogmatic one.
It is a question of linguistics and history as to how and why English uses certain words of Latin origin differently compared to how they are used in Romance languages. But what we can see in these cases, even on the most surface level, is the complete ignorance of the more than a hundred years of practice of the US Communist Movement. In its stead, poorly-understood Maoism from Peru is artificially transplanted onto US soil, along with all the particular customs and words derived from the synthesis and historical solidarity of Peruvian national culture and conditions. What’s missing in this transplant is the organic link with the masses and their struggles and conditions here in the US.
A problem of translation may at first sound insignificant, but it reflects a much bigger problem. Comrade Mariategui, founder of the PCP, once remarked: “Certainly, we do not wish that Socialism in America be a tracing and a copy. It must be a heroic creation. We must, with our own reality, in our own language, bring Indoamerican socialism to life.” We cannot fall into the error of American exceptionalism, but we also cannot uncritically fall into the error of dogmatism through book worship and mistranslation. We must struggle to overcome these errors and open a new chapter in the history of the US Communist movement that rejects all petty-bourgeois dogmatism and book-worshiping tendencies.
