Turning in rifles for ballots: against the FMLN, in defense of Comandante Marcial

As Central American Independence Day fast approaches, Red Guards – Los Angeles (RGLA) takes this important time to publicize our position and understanding of the historic Salvadoran Revolution, what is sometimes called the Salvadoran Civil War, but what more accurately should be described as the Salvadoran People’s War. It is a necessary critique of People’s War, as well as a necessary attack on the rightism of the FMLN then and now. The essay was written for the clarification and elevation of the Guiding Thought of Salvadoran People’s War, Cayetano Carpio known as Comandante Marcial, and most importantly as a call to the Salvadoran masses to embrace revolution and bombard the revisionist FMLN.

***

“When history cannot be written by the pen, it must be written with the rifle.” – Farabundo Martí

“This is what happened with the FMLN bourgeoisie and petite-bourgeoisie: they deviated from revolutionary principals and changed their course instead for elections and votes, and they turned in their rifles for ballot boxes filled with millions of dollars.” – the People’s Forces of Liberation – Farabundo Martí – Protracted People’s War – People’s War for Liberation (In Spanish, FPL-FM-GPP-GPL)

***

The Salvadoran masses carry with them wherever they go on earth a revolutionary legacy but also the cynicism and anger of having been ruthlessly betrayed by the former leaders of their heroic armed struggle, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (In Spanish, the FMLN).

In the U.S., the Central American masses in general number approximately 3.4 million [1]. The Salvadoran masses, in particular, number approximately 1.5 million. [2] The big waves of Central American masses, in particular from El Salvador and Guatemala, began immigrating to the U.S., in particular California, fleeing the repressive state’s armed forces during the revolutions of the 1980s [3].

Prior to the merger of all five armed groups into the FMLN on October 10, 1980, after the assassination of Archbishop Monseñor Oscar Arnulfo on March 24 of that same year, hostilities between the proletariat and peasantry versus the big landlords and the bourgeoisie had been raging on for decades. Even prior to the October 15, 1979 military coup, where the reformist camp of the Salvadoran military took hold of the government in order to avoid a mass uprising and established a civilian-military junta. But the feeble government quickly dissolved and state power was usurped by the more reactionary and fascistic elements of the military.

On January 22, 1932, two years after the historic founding of the Communist Party of El Salvador (In Spanish, PCS) by Farabundo Martí, Miguel Marmol, Mario Zapata and Alfonso Luna, after organizing the indigenous peasants and the small proletariat, the Party launched an offensive against the Salvadoran government mostly in the western part of the country.

The indigenous Pipiles made up the majority of the peasants that participated in the revolution. While bourgeois historians claim that the Party had little-to-no influence over the indigenous masses and that it was merely coincidental that they rose up at the same time (!), we affirm that whether or not the Party organized all of the indigenous revolutionaries, they led the call and subsequent short-lived war. In other words, the PCS, principally led by Farabundo Martí, was the country’s vanguard. The vanguard acts in representation and servitude to the proletariat and the masses.

Bourgeois historians and their contemporary anti-Communist dog followers cannot fathom a non-European Communist Party or non-European socialist revolution. This is where their criticism is borne from. And, yet, history shows us that the peasants are the natural allies of the small proletariat in semi-feudal and semi-colonial countries, like in China, Peru, the Philippines, Turkey and India. And such as El Salvador, where almost the entirety of the country’s land was owned by a handful of dynastic coffee farmer families.

During the January Insurrection – which should be more correctly called the First Socialist Salvadoran Revolution the Salvadoran state suffered causalities, replete with attacks on state army barracks, selective annihilation of big landlords and other enemies of the people, attacks on haciendas and even the seizure of small cities and towns. The Party and its armed forces, although small, unleashed the torrent of fury of the masses, especially the exploited and oppressed indigenous peasants. With crude weapons in hand, mostly machetes, the masses and its Party led a heroic and historic attack against the rising bourgeoisie. This was in part, and not independent from, the 1917 Socialist Russian Revolution.

The First Salvadoran Socialist Revolution was an initiation in blood and gunfire. It was the necessary watering of the soil of revolution and socialism. And it did not happen isolated from the subsequent conflicts between the soon-to-be reconstituting armed Communist Party and the masses against the state.

Communist forces certainly retreated after the devastating defeat of the revolution and the massacre of 30,000 workers and peasants, which would later be known as “La Matanza,” the Massacre in English. But the violently antagonistic relationship between the peasants and the proletariat versus the big landlords and bourgeoisie raged on, peaking in the second initiation of armed struggle after the assassination of Oscar Romero, the Second Socialist Salvadoran Revolution.

The Second Socialist Salvadoran Revolution lasted 12 years, finally ending in January 16, 1992, interrupting the completion of its socialist arch. Its ending was not only premature but a complete betrayal with the FMLN, having lost the line struggle to the rightist revisionist camp, turned into its opposite and became a bourgeois political Party. The FMLN and all its five factions signed the treacherous Peace Accords in Chapultepec, Mexico, giving immunity to both guerrillas and the state’s repressive armed forces. The revolutionary war, the Salvadoran People’s War, was betrayed by the FMLN. It was a decision met with protest and struggle, of which continues today even within the FMLN.

A decisive proponent of the Peace Accords was El Salvador’s leading revisionist, Shafik Handal, former Chairman of the PCS. He embraced with open-arms the bourgeois political machinery. It was there he felt at home. He was a staunch opponent of Comandante Marcial and PPW, and he swooped in like a vulture as soon as the commander died to firmly regain the course of the FMLN straight into red capitalism.

Shafik would take the FMLN into the deepest recesses of revisionism, running for president and losing to the rightwing ARENA political party in 2004. While Shafik may not have won the presidency, a member of the Salvadoran national bourgeoisie Mauricio Funes would win it in 2009. After that, the FMLN has enjoyed its stay in presidential power into the present.

In fact, the country’s current president, Salvador Sanchez-Cerén, was a former leader of the most advanced guerrilla organization within the FMLN, the People’s Forces of Liberation (In Spanish, Fuerzas Populares de Liberación – Farabundo Martí (FPL-FM)). El Salvador’s current red capitalist president once fought side-by-side with one of the greatest Communist revolutionary strategists in the country’s entire history, Salvador Cayetano Carpio, also known as Comandante Marcial.

The following will spend a great deal of attention on Comandante Marcial and the FPL-FM as we assert them as the red line within the entire Salvadoran People’s War, beginning in 1932, suffering a long retreat and then again climaxing in the 1970s but ultimately suffering a devastating blow in 1992. Devastating but completely devastated.

But as Maoists we know that things can turn into their opposites. As Maoists, we know that line struggle exists everywhere and all the time, a constant battle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie reproduced by capitalism and its agents. This is true in and outside of the Party.

The FMLN was founded as an eclectic, armed, left-foundationalist coalition with competing political lines. Even before its construction, the five armed forces that joined to make up the FMLN, brought with them different lines. Some were Christian Socialists, hugely influenced by Oscar Romero and Liberation Theology. Others were Marxists-Leninists. And within the Marxists-Leninists, some were more staunch supporters of the social-imperialist Soviet Union and their Cuban lapdog. Others were eclectic leftists who had low-levels of organizational unity.

Each of the five armed groups had a corresponding front or Party:

1.) the Armed Forces of Liberation (In Spanish, FAL) was the armed wing of the PCS, forming in 1980.

2.) the Revolutionary Army of Central American Workers (In Spanish, ERTC) was the armed wing of the Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers (In Spanish, PRTC), forming in 1976.

3.) the Armed Front of the National Resistance (In Spanish, FARN) was the armed wing of the National Resistance (In Spanish, RN), forming in 1975.

4.) the People’s Revolution Army (In Spanish, ERP) was the armed wing of the Party of the Salvadoran Revolution (In Spanish, PRS), forming in 1972.

5.) the People’s Armed Forces of Liberation (In Spanish, FAPL) was the armed wing of the People’s Forces of Liberation – Farabundo Marti (FPL-FM), forming in 1970, the first armed Marxist-Leninist group.

But no other group was more militarily-politically advanced than the FPL-FM, led by its founder Comandante Marcial.

Comandante Marcial is known as the “Ho Chi Minh of El Salvador,” principally for his support of the Vietnamese-style method of People’s War. Comandante Marcial would focus with sharp Marxist precision on developing guerrillas, Support Bases and, as Mao had said, to be like fish and swim among the sea of masses.

Ho Chi Minh was a revolutionary, a Great Leader and liberator of the Vietnamese Nation from French colonialism and U.S. imperialism, who fought tirelessly, brazenly with full support and participation of the masses. Comandante Marcial, similarly, was a great political-military Marxist-Leninist leader, with prophetic visions of unleashing the fury of the militarized masses through revolutionary vengeance, particularly through the heroic and highly supported Revolutionary People’s Bloc (BPR in Spanish).

The RN and FARN had split from the ERP over line struggle on the role of the masses in the revolution, whereas a faction within the ERP, of which revolutionary poet and theorist Roque Dalton was a member, pushed for more incorporation of the masses into a prolonged revolutionary struggle. For this, Roque Dalton would eventually be executed under the orders of soon-to-be-traitor of the revolution and capitalist roader Joaquin Villalobos in May 10, 1975. The Joaquin Villalobos and Alejandro Rivas Mira-led militarist faction were more focoists, focusing primarily on armed actions and a quick seizure of power [4]:

Mira’s vision of the revolution, which was shared by Villalobos’s and Rogel’s factions, was short-term and militaristic. A few spectacular actions, they maintained, timed to coincide with an uprising staged by their allies in the Salvadoran army, would be enough to spark a mass insurrection. The emphasis was on taking power, and doing it quickly. Dalton became the spokesman for the dissident view that the ERP’s priority should be a long-term effort to build a mass movement: they would gain power as a result of a complete social transformation. To that end, Sancho and Ramírez’s faction created a shadow structure within the ERP, the National Resistance, or RN. Though the disagreement about strategy began before Dalton’s arrival in El Salvador, Rivas Mira’s group considered him, in the words of one former militant, Roberto Cañas, to be ‘the brain’ behind all dissent.

Like Roque Dalton, the FPL-FM and BPR understood the mass-line method of Communist leadership as principally the tool for “mobiliz [ing] combatively all the popular sectors in the struggle for their immediate demands, as a means of incorporating the people to war” [5] but juxtaposed dialectically with the prolonged nature of People’s War. This was Comandante Marcial’s battle cry, which would continue to echo long after his death.

The Guiding Thought of Salvador Cayetano Carpio, Comandante Marcial

All class struggle produces leaders. All revolutions, specifically People’s Wars, produce a Guiding Thought. Comandante Marcial was just that. He joined the PCS in 1945 at the age of 28. After seeing his advanced grasp of Marxism and a promising future as a Communist militant, the Party sent him to Moscow to study in 1953, coming back in 1957 with a fiery mastery of Marxism-Leninism [6], heavily influenced by the world’s socialist revolutions. As an indirect pupil of Comrade Stalin, studying all the awe-inspiring revolutionary breakthroughs of Soviet socialist society, Comandante Marcial was forever marked with iron-like and unmovable revolutionary discipline. So much so that the revisionists of now and then have always painted him as an orthodox, sectarian, ideologue and dogmatist. But it is the genuine Marxist-Leninist of then, or the Maoist of today, that is and was called sectarian or orthodox or purist or even cultist. How many of the Red Guards collectives or our mass projects and organs have received this criticism – that we are picky who we work with? These revisionists are mad we don’t unite with them in coalitions or armed defense groups or “collectives,” that we don’t work with them! This is the telling signs of scared revisionists, needing to paint the genuine revolutionary Communists as enemies of reason and all sensibilities. To them, we are too Marxist. Too Communist. Too revolutionary. Too serious. Too determined to spill blood, our and theirs, for the glorious cause of Communism. It is not coincidence that the revisionists’ attacks on Comandante Marcial mirrors the opportunistic criticisms of the actual bourgeoisie. Revisionism is capitalism. Both revisionism and capitalism hate genuine armed Communists.

However, like the dangerous weed revisionism is, it did not spare the FPL-FM. Revisionism was being spread by one of the top leaders, Felipe Pena, who was pushing a phony Marxism influenced by Herbert Marcuse, Nicolas Poulantzas and other popular revisionists. Pena pushed for “revolutionary Christians” to be allowed into the FPL-FM, and overturning the organization’s commitment to atheism.

Under Pena, while Comandante Marcial was seriously sick and unable to command the FPL-FM, the organization grew quantitatively but suffered from a liquidation of Marxism. This, compounded with the rightism of La Comandante Ana María leading the armed organization’s most powerful mass organization the BPR, created a hegemony of revisionism within the FPL-FM. But luckily Pena died in battle in 1975 and Comandante Marcial was able to regain control.

Comandante Marcial, like both Mao and Gonzalo, was a critical Marxist thinker and even strategist-theorist of the economic-planning of the new socialist state, mastering the laws of contradictions and implementing the correct, concrete countrywide class analysis – the bloc of classes led by the proletariat with the militarized Communist Party at its head – understanding the underdevelopment of capitalism in agricultural-based El Salvador. El Salvador was and continues to be semi-feudal and semi-colonial. He knew that and applied the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist strategy of New Democratic Revolution to be guided principally by the FPL-FM and BPR.

While the PCS embraced a Central American-version of the arch-revisionism of the CPUSA’s Browder Party-liquidation and electoralism line (although they claimed to have defeated the Browderist line within the Party [7]), Comandante Marcial led the red faction and forged ahead with the FPL-FM and its reconstitution of the Communist Party of the New Type, an anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist. Comandante Marcial, while not a Maoist, and it is unsure how, if at all, influenced he was by Chairman Gonzalo and the Communist Party of Peru, was a genuine Marxist-Leninist searching for the cleansing fire of Maoism that was moving toward him – rising up from the Peruvian mountains of the Andes. Unfortunately, Comandante Marcial and the FPL-FM would not survive long enough to embrace it.

There are scant writings by Comandante Marcial or scholars and historians that can cite Mao’s influence on the commander. But some sources do say Comandante Marcial studied and applied strategies of People’s War from Chairman Mao. [8]

But nonetheless, since Maoism is universal and its universalities transcend time and space, it is not strange that some were located within the FPL-FM, and principally Comandante Marcial as the main author and theoretician. As leader, he popularized the militarization of the Communist Party and the masses and the concentric construction of the three instruments of revolution, giving special focus on the people’s militias under the command of the People’s Army:

In a very short period, guided by the science of Marxism-Leninism applied to the concrete conditions of El Salvador and Central America, through the politico-military strategy of Prolonged War of the People, it has been able to develop as a revolutionary organization that moves firmly towards its conversion into a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary political Party of the working class, has been able to create the guerrilla and consolidate it in the Salvadoran territory, as a strategic means for the formation of the People’s Liberation Army, has achieved deep organized influence in broad sectors of the people directing it and orienting it actively in its combative struggles and begins to deepen it in the industrial working class; and has begun to form the armed organizations for -military: militias.

But the FPL-FM is not without fault. In fact, they committed grave errors and upheld revisionist lines. After all, they were never Maoists. In fact, “Maoist” was often used as a “deprecating label” by some guerrillas groups, mostly against the ERP – for their criticism of the Soviet Union and Cuba and Salvadoran nationalism, even though they were against Mao’s China. [9] This disastrous understanding of what Maoism was during the 1980s would seal the fate, not just of the ERP but the entire FMLN – for if a Marxist-Leninist organization does not uphold the universality of PPW, the concentric construction of the three instruments of revolution, the militarization of the Party and the development of Great Leadership and a Guiding Thought, its revolution is doomed to deformity and ultimate failure.

A consistent error maintained by the FPL-FM since its formation in 1970 was its support of the social-imperialism of the Soviet Union, from Khrushchev to Gorbachev. The FPL-FM held the revisionist line that Vietnam was socialist. In tandem, they also remained suspiciously silent on the historic Sino-Soviet split – with Soviet social-imperialism backing the Vietnamese – not even denouncing the Chinese revolutionaries. It’s inexcusable for Comandante Marcial not to have intervened in these line struggles and assert the correct proletarian line over the revisionist bourgeois line. But the commander had his sins and the International Communist Movement can take those errors, look upon them, study them, and learn from them.

Struggle from within the Party: the fight against Salvadoran revisionism

When the stone-cutter
finds his hammer brokern
just before beginning his daily work
he thinks about having a better and more powerful tool
and doesn’t accuse the stone of being ultra-left
because of its restraint and tenacious nature.

-Roque Dalton, “Moral on the tool.”

***

The CP split in two in the face of the situation
the majority who accepted ceased to be ultraleftists
while keeping the name,
the minority who decided to continue being ultraleftists
left the tent led by a baker
named Salvador Cayetano Carpio.

Afterward two ultraleftist organizations rose up
the Popular Forces of Liberation – “Farabundo Marti” –
and the Revolutionary Army of the People – “ERP”-
with the intention that in the future
the authentic Salvadoran ultraleftists
would have what they damn well need, to be ultraleftists
to the end
that is, until the seizure of power
as ultraleftistly as necessary in this country
dominated by the ultraright.

– Roque Dalton, “Ultraleftists.”

After coming back from studying in the Soviet Union, Comandante Marcial rose to leadership of the Party in 1964, becoming General-Secretary, where he developed the thesis of a Protracted People’s War in El Salvador as the only means of constructing socialism. His line, with only a minority of support, was defeated and attacked as “ultraleftist” by the rightist majority. The rightist line was a cowardly call for the peaceful “accumulation of forces” and in waiting for the “objective conditions to change.” Shafik Handal, at that time, was already in several leading positions within the Party, remaining firmly planted in the rightist camp. In 1973 he would be elected the last General-Secretary of the Party [10] and its miserable ending history.

To rightists everything revolutionary and Marxist is “ultraleftist,” just as how Roque Dalton sarcastically portrays it in both poems, “Moral on the tool” and “Ultraleftists.” Comandante Marcial and the red faction left the Party in 1969 but on April 1, 1970, they founded the FPL-FM. This was the first armed Marxist-Leninist guerrilla that would go on to join the five FMLN groups [11].

Due to the lack of internal documents available to the public on the intense line struggle within the Party during that time, we are forced to assume it wasn’t possible, with their particular conditions, to expel or eliminate the rightists from the Party. Since rupture is the basis of all progress and transformation, Comandante Marcial was forced to take on the historic task of reconstructing the highest, most advanced militarized organization for the Salvadoran proletariat, the new Communist Party of El Salvador. Where the revisionist PCS failed to mature into the vanguard for the Salvadoran masses and the proletariat, the FPL-FM would pick up the red banner of Communism and continue the Party building project anew. The Salvadoran Revolutionary Action (In Spanish, ARS) was the country’s first armed leftist group, formed in 1968, but they quickly deviated into militarism and dissolved.

The battle against revisionism is more than a century old but rages on fiercer than ever. Today what is Marxism is more correctly understood as having developed through the historic People’s War and revolutionary struggles of the 20th Century, discovering new universal truths – all encapsulated within the Marxism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but illuminated by the Great Leaders and Guiding Thoughts of the 1917 Russian Revolution, the 1949 Chinese Revolution and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and of course the Peruvian People’s War.

But the revisionism of each epoch claims Marxism while it hides, sometimes better than other times, the hidden capitalism within it. So, today, when it is asked, when we are asked, what does it mean to be a Communist? The Soviet Union and Socialist China are no more. But the People’s Wars of Peru, the Philippines, Turkey and India rage on – without a socialist power. And so it’s tempting for Marxists and so-called Marxists to claim the era of revolution over, our Strategic Offensive. It is easy to retreat into defeatism and claim Marxism as a comfortable, defanged and safe-and-legal ideology, snuggly nestled in the cold graveyard of bourgeois academia.

But today, when we say Communist, when we say Marxist, we mean Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, principally Maoist. We are not Marxists, for that negates the contributions of Lenin and Stalin. We are not Marxists-Leninists, for that negates the contributions of Mao and Gonzalo. We say we are Maoists, and we carry with us all the immortal contributions of our Great Leaders, principally Mao and Gonzalo.

Comandante Marcial and the FPL-FM, even without publically hoisting up Chairman Mao’s immortal contributions, nevertheless applied them to El Salvador – a peculiar revisionism struggling within itself, that of refusing to rupture with the revisionism and social-imperialism of the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death. Comandante Marcial and the FPL-FM are not exempt from some egregious errors and positions, which will be explored shortly.

Through the Maoist strategy of New Democracy all allied and oppressed social classes are subordinate to the proletariat and its Party’s directives. The Communist Party leads the socialist Cultural Revolution with the direct involvement of the militarized masses in eradicating bourgeois ideology lingering on after the seizure of political power through the smashing and restructuring of the bourgeois state. Comandante Marcial knew this. He knew how important socialist education was as a vital component of the New Democratic Revolution:

The intense ideological education and elevation of the level of political consciousness of the masses of their revolutionary initiative; the intense work of revolutionary persuasion for the reeducation towards Socialism of broad masses of small and medium-sized producers of the city and countryside, of small and medium-sized businesses and other small and medium-sized sectors linked to private property; as well as the less advanced sectors of the middle strata to understand the need to move on to the construction stage of Socialism and to collaborate with the proletariat and the poor peasantry in this historic step. [12]

He borrowed much of his military strategy and theories from Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese People’s War, but also forged ahead by elevating and maintaining Marxism-Leninism as humanity’s true proletarian ideology which, if kept in the militarized hands of the masses, if the proletariat’s red flag remains flying, if genuine Communists fight in the life-or-death line struggle against revisionist capitalists within the Communist Party, and if the armed Party commands the Protracted People’s War, victory is guaranteed. Not just for the Salvadoran masses but for all the Central American masses – of which he constantly reaffirmed his undying loyalty! Comandante Marcial was a true internationalist, much like Chairman Mao or Gonzalo who knew of their historic position waging People’s War. Like Gonzalo and Maríategui, Comandante Marcial would pry away Farabundo Martí from the clutches of the revisionist and place him on his rightful place as the founder and Great Leader of the Salvadoran masses. Like Farabundo Martí, Comandante Marcial, would continue what the PCS failed to do: unite all the masses of Central America into one People’s Army:

Agustín Farabundo Martí did not conceive the revolutionary struggle of our people with a narrow chauvinistic criterion, but in all its Central American and Latin American breadth, going in practice to fight in the mountains of Nicaragua. The FPL has, as the basis of its strategy, the historical need to unify the revolutionary struggle of the Central American peoples, until the creation of the Central American People’s Army, for the definitive victory of the Revolution in our peoples.

Comandante Marcial also goes on to say, that:

The figure of Agustín Farabundo Martí inspires the current revolutionary combatants, in the ideological struggle against the pseudo-revolutionary positions of the false Communists, who have abandoned the combative tradition of our people and the principles and methods on which they sustained their struggles [with the] worker-peasant generation of those years. His figure allows the current combatants to resume the tradition of radical struggle of the mass struggles and the tradition of armed struggle of our people, which the pseudo-revolutionaries, opportunists and false Communists, have tried to interrupt by becoming instruments of the bourgeoisie for pacify the rebellion of the Masses.

This was Comandante Marcial. The great unifier of the most progressive social classes and sectors of El Salvador, particularly focusing primarily on the proletariat and then the peasantry. The great torch of anti-revisionist Marxism-Leninism carried through the darkest nights of Salvadoran revisionism. This was and continues to be the red faction’s Guiding Thought since the founding of the FPL-FM, through the Second Salvadoran Revolution up until the present. The revolutionary legacy of Comandante Marcial and his Guiding Thought lives on in the rebellious spirit of the Salvadoran masses who have grown cynical of these false Communists of the FMLN, who have grown angry at the revisionist snakes who do nothing while the most reactionary elements of the Salvadoran bourgeoisie and big landlords continue with their exploitation and oppression, happily striving under the FMLN administration. But wherever there is darkness, there is a light, even if it is but a weak spark refusing to be extinguished.

The lies and treachery against the Salvadoran PPW and Comandante Marcial

On April 6, 1983, the second in command of the FPL-FM Dr. Mélida Anaya Montes better known as La Comandante Ana María, was assassinated in her home in Managua, Nicaragua. A one-time leader of the BPR and member of the FMLN’s General Command, she exerted powerful influence not only over the FPL-FM and its organisms but also within the FMLN.

The story of her assassination, as well as her legacy, is contested by many. All the revisionists uphold her as a great leader, despite her rightism and anti-Party politics.

La Comandante Ana María must be remembered for what she was, what she eventually turned into: her opposite. She attempted to liquidate the armed struggle in favor for quick peace negotiations with the reactionary Salvadoran government. Comandante Marcial and her would have intense and sharp line struggle over the central question of PPW and the Communist seizure of political power – whereas Comandante Marcial upheld the line of revolutionary violence and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat through proletarian war, La Comandante Ana María favored capitulation to capitalism.

Many, including leadership within the FPL-FM and FMLN, accused Comandante Marcial of her killing, having masterminded it to continue the PPW and neutralize the rightism within the revolutionary movement. So let us be clear: although Comandante Marcial was proven innocent, it would not have been wrong to have been the mastermind of her assassination. In revolution, there is excess and necessary sacrifice. Friendship can only mean the political position an ally of the proletariat and its organization occupies within an analysis of the concrete conditions. We don’t put friends above politics. We certainly don’t put friends above revolution. Imagine if Chairman Mao were to have asked for the Party and the masses to forgive the rightist of his former friend and comrade-in-arms Lin Biao? We don’t liquidate struggle for the sake of maintaining friendship. We liquidate friendship for the maintaining and advancement of revolutionary struggle!

The bourgeoisie’s official line, which is now the FMLN, is anti-Communist, unscientific and filled with inconsistencies and strange un-Marxist claims – grasping for straws – at making sense of the two tragedies. But that’s giving the FMLN too much credit; they embarked on a character assassination campaign against Marcial, citing so-called video evidence of a confession by the actual killer of La Comandante Ana María, FPL-FM Central Committee member Marcelo, saying he received direct orders from Comandante Marcial. However, this contradicted the actual testimony of Marcelo in court in Nicaragua (where the killing took place) who said Comandante Marcial had nothing to do with the assassination of La Comandante Ana María.

These traitors of the FPL-FM and FMLN, knowing the true anti-revisionist Marxist hegemony of Comandante Marcial, weren’t going to bend for revisionism. Like all great reversals, the rightist within the FPL-FM and the FMLN, which including Shafik Handel co-leading the attack, took this time as an opportunity to conveniently to attack the left and blame the setbacks of the Salvadoran PPW on the FPL-FM and principally Comandante Marcial. They used him as the Marxist-Leninist Boogeyman, similar to how Khrushchev used Stalin’s death as the prime opportunity to attack the construction of socialism and instead build capitalism in its place.

He knew the assassination and subsequent allegations against him was a conspiracy against the revolution because he and the FPL-FM represented the correct Marxist-Leninist line in the entire FMLN. And the FMLN feared and hated it, especially because Comandante Marcial was part of the General Command of the FMLN. His revolutionary leadership and political line, as a Guiding Thought, polarized the country: you belonged only in one of two camps, the revolutionary or the enemy. Revisionism is relegated to the latter, and it was from there that FMLN traitors conspired against Comandante Marcial to effectively liquidate his revolutionary leadership and tear apart his influence. The FMLN traitors knew just how to do this. They couldn’t kill him because that would have enshrined him as a martyr to be avenged by the militarized masses and loyal revolutionaries within the FMLN and FPL-FM to bombard the General Command and cease control. The FMLN knew this. Instead what they decided on was far more vicious and effective: the assassination of his revolutionary character, particularly in spreading the lie that he was this ruthless killer devoid of trust and camaraderie. In other words, the FMLN conspired to destroy Comandante Marcial as the Guiding Thought of the Salvadoran Revolution.

And unfortunately, as part of FMLN’s greater betrayal of the revolution, it worked. On April 12, 1983, Comandante Marcial was driven to commit suicide in temporary-yet-severe political demoralization. After finding out of the treachery of his fellow Central Committee members, who worked in unison with the FMLN rat-traitors, the revolutionary military strategist could not overcome the high-treason committed against him, against Marxism, against the masses, and against the revolution.

Revolutionary Communists are not immune to demoralization, even Great Leadership. Bends in the revolutionary road toward Communism are sure to rise up. They are natural. It would be strange and suspect for the road to Communism to be easy and a straight line. If any one, especially leadership, promises you a frictionless, peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism, they should be shot dead where they stand, right then and there, for they are traitors to the revolution and dangerous peddlers of poison.

It must be understood that the mishandling of the liquidation of La Comandante Ana María , and not her actual assassination, as well as the suicide of Comandante Marcial were the final mortal blows to the FPL-FM. They would never recover and devolve into rightism, eclecticism, anti-Marxism and eventual dissolution and liquidation into the rightist headquarters of the FMLN.

But shortly after his death, a group emerged within the FPL-FM who saw through all the murky revisionism and treachery against the Great Leader Comandante Marcial: El Frente Clara Elizabeth Ramirez (FCER) [13] who would, for a short while, continue with the armed struggle but independent of the FMLN and the surviving and deformed FPL-FM.

April 12 must be a time to remember Comandante Marcial. It should be included in the International Communist Movement as a day of commemoration for the great martyr of the Salvadoran People’s War. It should adorn our political calendars and remind us that it is a time to reflect, to reaffirm Marxism as the proletariat’s guiding ideology – today we call it Maoism – on the march toward Communism.

Today, the vile Salvadoran revisionists continue to commit the highest crimes against the masses and its former vanguard, the FLP-FM, by slandering the name and memory of Comandante Marcial (including the late arch-revisionist snake Handal). They repeat the bourgeois lies about him, that he was an egocentric, power-hungry tyrant. In particular, arch-revisionist professor of philosophy at the University of Central America Ricardo Ribera Sala accuses Comandante Marcial of standard text-book, anti-Communist slander: that he was “sectarianist,” “dogmatic,” “divisive” for the FMLN and revolutionary movement, that he was a confused and bad military strategist, having confusingly applied, seeking to mimic the Vietnamese, the method of PPW.

These revisionist snakes speak with a fork tongue; from one side of their mouth they attempt to praise Comandante Marcial, hoist him up as one of the great Salvadoran Communist revolutionaries, and through the other side of their mouth they, they attack him as viciously at the anti-Communists. This is because revisionists are anti-Communists!

The FMLN’s wartime slogan, like that of the FPL-FM, was “Revolution or death!” but soon after the death of Comandante Marcial and the last anti-revisionist spark of the fire of Communism, it turned into “Revolution or bourgeois integration!”

The FPL-FM today: the potential for revolution or the perpetuation of errors

As of today, the FPL-FM has been reconstituted as the Fuerzas Populares de Liberación – Farabundo Martí – Guerra Popular Prolongada – Guerra Popular de Liberación (FPL-FM-GPP-GPL). Although they are not Maoist and continue to maintain some of the erroneous lines of the first FPL-FM, they remain the most advanced Communist formation in El Salvador.

The FPL-FM-GPP-GPL calls itself the Communist Party of the New Type of El Salvador. They uplift Comandante Marcial as their Guiding Thought and adhere to the Revolutionary Tendency as opposed the hegemonic Democratic Tendency. Their ideological line, as stated on their website, is Marxism-Leninism Salvador Cayetano Carpio Thought [14].

While a lot of information is not public on the FPL-FM-GPP-GPL, enough is available to say that they represent the red line within the country drowning in a sea of rightism and revisionism. They rightfully condemn the capitalist FMLN government. They name the FMLN revisionists – especially Shafik Handal – as enemies of the people. They sharply criticize and condemn the liquidation of the armed struggle and the necessity for a genuine Communist Party leading the Salvadoran masses and proletariat. They envision themselves as being the new Communist Party, but also understand that they are currently in a prolonged reconstitution era.

We cannot succumb to dishonesty and idealistically paint Comandante Marcial and the FPL-FM as Maoists as much as we would wish. No, an honest account and investigation of the Salvadoran Second Revolution, which we have argued was an untheorized and incomplete Protracted People’s War, is needed. We are Marxists. We don’t hide from reality. The FPL-FM represented the correct line in the struggle against rightism, but they, too, suffered from internal rightism and revisionism. They refused to acknowledge the revolutionary shining example of Chairman Mao and revolutionary China and then Peru with Chairman Gonzalo and the PCP.

As mentioned earlier, one huge error of the FPL-FM and Comandante Marcial was dogmatic, mechanical tailing of the “socialist camp” represented by the revisionist Soviet Union. They dogmatically and liberally toted the social-imperialist line of the internationalist revisionist movement. However, the present day FPL-FM-GPP-GPL stands firmly against Cuba and their revisionist national bourgeois government, where once they upheld Cuba as socialist.

Another error was the merger with the FMLN. This effectively liquidated the FPL-FM, as the only anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist line in the entire country, into an eclectic armed revisionism and then capitalist capitulation – although Comandante Marcial would not live to see this end and was not there to lead the line struggle against the rightists in the FPL-FM and FMLN. The FPL-FM’s course, as Comandante Marcial would say time and time again, was to reconstitute the Communist Party of El Salvador. But that couldn’t have been done while sacrificing Communist politics for “leftist” politics as represented by the FMLN – especially when you are literally fighting in the trenches side-by-side with the remnants of the revisionist PCS!

But the FPL-FM, nonetheless, represented the necessary aggressor against Salvadoran revisionism – with Marcial leading that attack. The FPL-FM, under Marcial, would have never signed the Peace Accords. They very well may have liquidated the entire General Command or place them in a People’s Tribunal and unleash the furious militarized masses to rip them to shreds.

And it is that Carpio did not fight for a simple democratic opening but for an anti-capitalist revolution, with ideology. Marxist-Leninist and the strategy of protracted people’s war, based on the worker-peasant alliance with proletarian hegemony. In short: impose a dictatorship of the proletariat as a transition phase to socialism. [15]

Comandante Marcial may have been on his way in becoming El Salvador’s Chairman Mao or Presidente Gonzalo but mortally interrupted by internal revisionism. Comandante Marcial died, not be suicide, but by his slowness (we refuse to say inability) in grasping Maoism. The living mountains of Ayacucho, with fiery Peruvian hammer and sickles burning on their sides, would unfortunately never reach his eyes. And, until this day, Maoism still remains a non-existent current in the country.

Today the FPL-FM-GPP-GPL continues to reconstitute itself, organizing and training daily while they establish and nurture mass links. The FPL-FM-GPP-GPL continues to call on the militarization of the masses and the creation of guerrilla units for the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Liberation Militias, in particular through the FAPL and the Proletarian Popular Progressive Patriotic Front for National Liberation (FPLN in Spanish).

They, according to their “Revolutionary Message on April 1, 2017 [16],” will return in a great and historic entry into the battlefield later on this year (2018), leading the armed militarized masses to socialism through the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which they have named as the worker-peasant aligned Revolutionary Democratic Government (GDR in Spanish).

If the FPL-FM is able to liquidate from its ranks and ideology all the revisionism and embrace the highest proletarian ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism, the new phase within the Salvadoran Revolution is invincible.

The FPL-FM-GPP-GPL should be turned into the Salvadoran’s machine of hate exacting revolutionary vengeance on the class traitors of the FMLN and even former rightist FPL-FM members. For if revisionism is allowed to grow like a weed its roots can grow stubbornly deeper and be harder to remove. The Party and its armed forces will, if guided by Maoism and without mercy, cleanse the country of the treacherous red capitalism of the FMLN.

For now, the FPL-FM-GPP-GPL has retaken the historic task of building the Vanguard for the Salvadoran proletariat, a genuine militarized Communist Party. RGLA looks to them as potential continuators of the Salvadoran PPW, but also warns the Salvadoran masses, abroad and here, to not allow any pre-Party formation to perpetuate the errors of the previous revolution. The time for revolution is now! The time for revisionism is over!

A call to the Salvadoran masses, abroad and at home

Guanacos, the Salvadoran people, in the motherland: we send revolutionary greetings! We wish nothing but the best for our families in El Salvador. We wish nothing but the best for you! Our hearts ache at the treachery you have to live under that calls itself “red” or “socialist” but is only capitalism with the mask of Marxism.

As comrades living in the prison-house of oppressed nations of the United States, we cannot understand fully the contradictions that exist in El Salvador, but we are familiar with much of it because many of us and our supporters were born there, speak to our families in El Salvador often, and have spent time there recently.

We know our older family members are still traumatized from the war. For many, you cannot wear, say, or do anything politically-left without them being reminded of the many casualties of war, pleading for you to stay quiet. We know that the masses were indoctrinated into believing that Communists were devils, mass murderers who would go as far as eating babies and even turn older people into soap – yes, literally soap. Much of this bourgeois propaganda lives on today. Many remember resisting meant massacres, meant decapitation, meant never being seen again, meant the end of living and the beginning of endless death as the state tortured you for the rest of your short lives. This trauma has been passed down to other generations too, even generations who saw no war. We know this is true because the reactionary violence never stopped.

But, we cannot let fear impede us from living and struggling. We know there will be no end to the reactionary violence as long as capitalism continues to exist.

MS-13 and 18th Street have been some of the strongest initiators of day-to-day violence in the country since the end of the war. We understand that disenfranchised proletarian and semi-proletarian youth joined defensive units to protect themselves from harassment, that many grew up without any family to guide them or provide them a loving-humble home, that many were undocumented and had difficulties finding jobs, and that many of the youth who find themselves in this precarious conditions have committed no violent crimes and are victims to their circumstances. But we also know that some of the proletarian and semi-proletarian youth can be won over through class struggle.

In El Salvador, there are neighborhoods you cannot enter without permission. There are neighborhoods with sundown-curfews (a leftover from war), where buses are no longer allowed to commute, where permission needs to be asked if family can visit or if gatherings can be held, where cars must come into the neighborhood without headlights at night or face instant repercussion. There are families who have not seen each other in years for fear of being murdered.

These pockets throughout the country faces so much unheard of reactionary violence that many within the community even yearn for the times during the Salvadoran Protracted People’s War filled with more peaceful moments.

These gangs, these huge drug cartels, have power within many sectors of the government, including the repressive state. They are not low-level thieves. These cartels function as capitalists themselves. Their power is not challenged by ARENA, GANA, or the FMLN; their power, and the fear that comes with it, relies on the state maintaining capitalist hegemony and from keeping the New Power from emerging.

Yes, trauma and fear is alive and well in our country. There is no mistaking it and it must be challenged but only effectively through the class struggle. Their power will go unchallenged as long as the masses of people remain unorganized against predatory drug pushers, pimps and the reactionary state. Their power goes unchallenged as long as anti-imperialists and anti-capitalists continue to think that change can come from within the bourgeoisie state. Have we not learned the lessons of the revisionist FMLN after all these years?

Reactionary violence will not stop as long as capitalism is alive. But, since the end of the war, imperialism has only dug its claws deeper into our country. After the Peace Accords, and especially after the signing of CAFTA, imperialist laws have been implemented left and right leaving our communities in a precarious state. What did the dollarization of our economy accomplish? Who was that change created for? Why do people who make five dollars a day have to pay five dollars for a basic plate of food? None of this makes sense for the masses. These changes were made for the benefit of the bourgeoisie and nothing more.

When those of us in the U.S have gone to see our families we even see similar aspects of gentrification: “Compramos casas”, “Vendan sus casas hoy!” and similar signs are posted in key places throughout the capital of San Salvador and elsewhere where redevelopment is taking place. These changes are not being made for our families or yourself. They are displacing entire communities in order to attract more capital. They are creating pockets of “safe spaces” where tourists can feel comfortable and safe as they look down on our people and admire our culture from afar. None of this is easier to see than in the capital where slums are emerging left and right, where traffic is reaching unforeseen levels and where the bourgeoisie are carving out tourist destinations at the expense of the proletarian communities there. But this applies to the entirety of the country, since its beauty is endless and a bourgeois-vulture will commodify and destroy anything for the sake of money.

“Creating specific tourist destinations while destroying the rest of the country and its nature,” that is the bourgeoisie slogan. The bourgeoisie are literally taking steps to destroy entire future generations in El Salvador. The deforestations and water contamination in our country are at critical levels. In fact, El Salvador is the second most deforested country in Latin America after Haiti and an estimated 90 percent of the water [17] is deemed contaminated and unsafe to drink by international standards. [18]

Where will our future generations live, our children? What will they drink? The transnational companies, the primary reason for these atrocities, do not care about anything besides their wealth. Politicians, even the so-called “leftists,” are bought and sold on the market regardless of intentions. They betray the masses as soon as they become politicians and guide others to believe that change can come from the ballot box. They will preach and preach until the end of time that change will come from within as our families drink, eat, and breathe poison.

The masses understood all this which is why in Cabañas they mobilized to make sure their water was not contaminated any further. They fought and struggled for years, many being targeted by death squads, many being murdered in cold blood, stuffed down old wells, and the rest forced to leave. Yes, some in the government stood against OceanaGold and Pacific Rim, and in the end a law was passed banning mining for metal in the country, and gold mining was also scaled back. But what does it say that this government, regardless of party lines, has put itself in a supposed predicament where millions of lives can be put at risk by the actions of a corporation (we know better: capitalism knows nothing but capital and power, not human life). Due process is what the legal “left” wants. Due process where one corporation has an equal say as millions of lives. This is your government. This is what the FMLN now stands for. To hell with OceanaGold, to hell with Pacific Rim, to hell with the World Bank, to hell with the reactionary state and to hell with revisionists in power!

Revisionists only offer us deception. Their words are empty. Their treaties are with class enemies who never forfeited their power and never will through reasoning. The Peace Accords allowed war criminals, drenched in the blood of our families, to walk free. Through their actions they tell us, “Let us forget these crimes and let us work together with the enemy; let us shout empty words at imperialists and then tell the masses imperialist laws are necessary to build our economy; let us forsake our comrades who would have aimed their guns at us if they had known what we would become; let us tarnish the name of our revolutionary martyrs Farabundo Martí, Miguel Marmol, Mario Zapata. Feliciano Ama, Alfonso Luna and Comandante Marcial and countless others!”

Revisionists, through their actions, show us that they missed the essence of the war and the essence of who their enemy is. The enemy was not a handful of individuals controlling the state – the enemy remains the entire bourgeoisie state! They, by integrating themselves into the bourgeoisie state, have made themselves the enemy to the people. They are now the ones to tell us to hush and stay quiet instead of rebelling – in fact we no longer need to rebel since the government is supposedly socialist and for the people! They are they ones who send the police when we continue to rebel. They are the ones that seek no retribution. They will be the future Sandinistas gunning down rebellious youth as they grasp for a breath of fresh air and proletarian power.

The war, as part of our country’s longer PPW, is at a temporary bend and will not be over until we continue our historic necessity. The bourgeoisie state will not fall unless we hit it. The revolution and our future proletarian state must be guided by a genuine Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, principally Maoist, Communist Party of El Salvador, by the People’s Army, and by the United Front! As Lenin said, “Everything is illusory except power!”

***

To all the Guanacos in the United States, especially here in Los Angeles, to El Departamento 15: the only international solidarity is organizing towards People’s War here and nothing less. International solidarity is not writing an academic paper to be read by other academics disconnected from the class struggle. It is not about working for a nonprofit that attempts to orientate toward the Salvadoran masses, giving them Band-Aids for mortal wounds. It is not having workshops or cultural events disconnected from revolutionary politics. International solidarity is organizing to end capitalism where you are at and that can only be accomplished through waging Protracted People’s War. People’s War until we have Communism everywhere on earth.

All of our families or most of our families came here illegally. Many perished and continue to perish in their journeys to the United States. They have to traverse three borders, evade drug cartels, xenophobic and chauvinist Mexicans who blame all their problems on immigrants, having to make sure they don’t fall off the train and potentially end up under it. Our people have to make sure they are not sold for body parts, that they are not caught and sold into prostitution. The Salvadoran masses cross a dangerous desert of death, and, evade fascists white supremacists and the state in order not be caught. The road is not easy, but each year more of our families join us.

Now, over one-third of our families live outside of the motherland, most in the United States and most in Los Angeles. But what now? The precariousness in the lives of our families never ends. Many are undocumented to begin with, but more will become so once TPS completely ends. The detention center population is increasing exponentially and our families are the target-commodities. These prisons are being run for profit, are being run to show that the government is doing “it’s job on the war on immigrants.” The fear within our families is only increasing. Many are refusing to go to hospitals. Many fear going to their jobs, sending their children to school for fear of never seeing them again. That FEAR. It never ends.

But our community knows how to survive! They find every way possible to survive and live! Not only that, but they find ways not only for themselves, but for their entire families too. It doesn’t matter if they live day-to-day, month-to-month as long as the remittances get sent back home enough for our families to eat.

No calls to “Abolish ICE”, “Abolish Detention Centers,” “Abolish” anything will work (which ironically, essentially, are all reforms). No pleas, no calls, no lobbying, no marching, nothing deemed legal by the state will work. All roads are dead ends, unless they have revolutionary theory to guide their way and put their words into practice.

Now, a new contradiction arises in our communities: gentrification. Our nation’s people, who are forced to flea from its country, is now being evicted again. Rents are going through the roof and now entire families have to find room in a crowded bed, find space on the floor, use those sofa pillows as makeshift beds in order to afford to pay rent. This country treats us like a nuisance, a nuisance it happily shoves into corners as it extorts all the money we make – through exploitation and oppression. It is time we organize, militarize and fight back violently.

The revisionists in the FMLN told us, “We fought the war so that you would not have to.” These revisionists betray us and our families. They missed the essence of the People’s War. The war is not over and neither is our will. The time to organize is now. Learn from Comandate Marcial and the revolutionary FPL-FM, the FAPL and the BPR. Look to Serve the People – Los Angeles and the Unidades de Defensa Populares Revolucionarias. Look to our people and class! Because nothing less than People’s War will bring about the final victory. Nothing less than our courage to stand up for what is right will create the change our communities so desperately need. Come! Salvatruchas, join us! Join us in our vision! Join us as we grow and progress! Join us on this road to Communism! Join us as we fight! Because if you’re not fighting, then you’re already dead.

Long live the Salvadoran masses!

Long live Comandante Marcial!

Long live the Salvadoran People’s War!

[1] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/central-american-immigrants-united-states

[2] http://www.pewhispanic.org/2017/12/07/rise-in-u-s-immigrants-from-el-salvador-guatemala-and-honduras-outpaces-growth-from-elsewhere/

[3] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/central-american-immigrants-united-states-3

[4] https://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigation/2010/06/22/killed-roque-dalton/

[5] http://www.cedema.org/ver.php?id=4447

[6] http://www.elsalvadortimes.com/articulo/politicos/cayetano-carpio-rechazo-cualquier-alianza-militares/20161012182808009584.html

[7] https://www.marxists.org/espanol/tematica/elsalvador/organizacioness.cs/1975/mar/28.htm

[8] https://www.elsalvador.com/opinion/editoriales/142319/el-fmln-la-verdad-y-la-leyenda/

[9] https://www.ecumenico.org/article/the-ideological-origins-of-the-farabundo-martin-li/

[10] https://www.marxists.org/archive/handal/biography.htm

[11] https://www.nytimes.com/1982/03/18/world/salvador-rebels-five-sided-alliance-searching-for-new-moderate-image-leaders.html

[12] Ibid.

[13] https://www.marxists.org/espanol/tematica/elsalvador/organizaciones/index.htm

[14] http://fuerzaspopularesdeliberacionfplfm1970.blogspot.com/2017/04/mensaje-revolucionario-de-1-de-abril.html

[15] http://www.elsalvadortimes.com/articulo/politicos/cayetano-carpio-rechazo-cualquier-alianza-militares/20161012182808009584.html

[16] http://fuerzaspopularesdeLiberaciónfplfm1970.blogspot.com/2017/04/mensaje-revolucionario-de-1-de-abril.html

[17] http://www.borgenmagazine.com/water-quality-in-el-salvador/

[18] https://rainforests.mongabay.com/20elsalvador.htm

Class struggle is everywhere. Throughout history drugs have played an important role in capitalist illegal drug economies, in quelling revolutionary movements and in numbing the masses of the sharpness of capitalist contradictions.

Drugs and alcohol are, by their use and application in capitalist society, to the objective benefit of capitalism-imperialism, but even going as far back as British and Spanish colonialism. They serve the bourgeoisie in their fight against the conscious proletariat and proletarian revolution.

But drugs and alcohol alone are only one part of the problem. The implementers, the pushers, the dealers, are the ones who produce and circulate the poison. One cannot exist without the other. The harmfulness of drugs and alcohol are accelerated by their respective economies.

Drug dealers are merchants of death

Drug dealers, whether conscious of it or not, continue national oppression against the oppressed nations. They also play an accelerant role during the regular crises of capitalism[1] when scores of the masses turn to the numbness of distracting drugs and alcohol. The unemployed proletariat or the precarious position of the semi-proletariat, losing their home, their family, their well-being – without a revolutionary guiding organization with a correct line on sobriety and drugs and alcohol – will succumb to so-called “self-medication,” but what in reality is better described as drug and alcohol domination.

Another dimension to drug and alcohol domination is the psychological trauma and mental and emotional re-adaptation of the user from early childhood who must, seldom without revolutionary (let alone professional) guidance. Capitalist society breeds bourgeois nihilism and reactionary self-hatred. It breeds bourgeois-individualism. It breeds reactionary violence and self-destruction. Bourgeois ideology is constant violence against the masses.

Drug domination is not mostly a problem of individuals who made bad choices. It is not merely a choice, as the bourgeois lies are constantly repeated.  Drug domination is a combined external and internal attack. Externally, it is a highly-systematized web of oppression akin to population control that takes on almost a life of its own during economic crises and interpersonal problems among the masses, reproducing itself like a vicious cycle. Drug domination even has the power to remove the proletariat from their class, trapping them into the grim and bleak world of the lumpenproletariat, a de-classefication.

If drugs are the flames eating at the proletariat and the revolutionary movement, then economic crises is the gasoline accelerating the fire.

It is commonly acknowledged that historically capitalist states have played a fundamental role in introducing drugs into society, such as the U.S. Government under fascistic anticommunist President Reagan with crack cocaine in the 1980s. The CIA financed and defended two rightwing Contra supporters/members of Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense during the Nicaraguan Contra Wars, Oscar Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses, as they sold “tons of cocaine[2]” to Ricky Donnell Ross, better known as “Freeway Rick Ross.” Reporter Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News wrote a series and eventually published a book called “Dark Alliance” which documents this. Although some of the allegations are contested – not surprisingly by the U.S. Government and the CIA (it would be far more surprising for the bourgeois government to accept it as the damning truth it is)[3]. The money made from the selling of cocaine, to then be turned into crack cocaine by drug dealers, was funneled back to the rightwing guerrillas during the Contra Wars. Whether intentional or not, the objective reality became an organized, violent and bourgeois government-sponsored war against the masses of the country as Los Angeles as its epicenter and with a hyper-focus on Black proletarian/semi-proletarian neighborhoods. To this day, many Black and Chicano communities are left ravaged by crack cocaine domination while the only justice being that the corpse of fascist Reagan has been slowly devoured by the graveyard’s worms and beetles.

A narcotic with near-apocalyptic ramifications on the country’s masses is heroin. Arguably heroin’s mass consumption either began or was made known to the public in 1971 during the last few years of the Vietnam War. Soldiers were so addicted that they were forced to take a drug test before boarding a plane back to the U.S. “Approximately 15 percent of active soldiers were heroin addicts,” according to U.S. representatives in that same year[4].

Heroin remains one of the most popularly destructive narcotics in the Chicano Nation[5]. It is one, if not the most, popular narcotic that ruins families and destroys lives. Studies have even followed and documented the hereditary nature of alcohol, narcotics and drug domination, including heroin addiction – which families pass it down from one generation to the next[6]. Heroin is a bullet that never stops but shoots through father, mother, son, daughter, grandchildren, until all are in the streets, behind bars or in the grave.

But it is not simply only a moral issue – but of course that can’t be ignored. It is a method of domination of the masses like population control, of capitalist domination.

Drug and alcohol domination doesn’t just affect the masses. It also infects and poisons, and even neutralizes, revolutionary movements.

We are made stupid, spiritually crushed, and deadened by drug and alcohol domination. As we experience the political demoralization that occasionally creeps its way in, we are at risk at becoming destroyed by it. The masses absolutely already know this. Even the drug addicts and alcoholics know this. Revolutionary Communists, Maoists, must catch up en mass with the correct ideas of the masses on this question. You will seldom find any member of the basic masses arguing that drug and alcohol domination isn’t an antagonistic issue. The cemeteries have been collecting the bodies of the masses for generations. To them, there is no room for the postmodernist “left” who argues for hedonism as a revolutionary autonomous, anticapitalist alternative. To them, it is of great offense to talk about drugs and alcohol as liberatory devices – even if their families occasionally drink or smoke marijuana. Younger member of the masses with petite-bourgeois dispositions may occasionally defend drug and alcohol usage and even its abuse but their reality paints a grim picture in unison with our analysis.

The roles and three types of drug dealers

Everything under capitalism is stratified. There are hierarchies in everything. For drug dealers, they can be divided into three categories: big, medium and small. It is important to differentiate between the three different levels of drug dealers since all three categories have very different types of people and must have their own distinct methods of dealing with those contradictions:

1. Big drug dealersBig drug dealers are enemies of the people who prey on the proletariat – this is how their industries and economies are reproduced (not like the proletariat’s relationship to the bourgeoisie’s means of production); these are the heads/leaders of local big gangs and big cartels; they are antagonistic to the proletariat and the people.In the present, where possible, the masses should be organized and armed to defend their communities and families against the big drug dealers – in the near future carrying out selective annihilation, people’s tribunals, etc. But this must be an undertaking part of a larger mass movement. Because the revolutionary forces are small and we are outnumbered, this is not going to be something we will do at the present.
2. Medium drug dealersMedium drug dealers are smaller leaders of small-to-middle gangs and cartels; they are not beginners or recent members so it’s wrong to think they are less-guilty or less-dangerous. Most aspire to rise up in the ranks and make it to big dealer status. These are capitalist dreams. They see the drug economy as the capitalist enterprise that it essentially is. These dealers, however, are easier to encircle and mobilize against. The masses must be organized to expel them out of neighborhoods, to also take part in selective annihilation, people’s tribunals and armed propaganda when our forces are more advanced and the objective conditions correspond accordingly.
3. Small drug dealersSmall drug dealers are addicts and new recruits in all the above formations, but mostly in small-to-middle drug cartels and gangs. They are mostly redeemable. They can be won over, away from gangs and drug dealings. They are either fully lumpenproletariat, with an incredibly small minority being semi-proletariat – functioning addicts. They have no other recourse. No jobs, no families, no future – supposedly. But they have a good grasp that they are oppressed, even exploited to some degree. They know that probation or parole is a self-fulfilling sentence, constantly being violated at the whim of reactionary pig parole or probation officers, going in and out of jails and prisons. They want escape but they also want recognition, even revindication, validation – that is absent in their families, schools and jobs. They need to be respected and paid attention to and loved. They also need to feel strong and powerful. All of this can be done with their reintroduction into the proletariat and class struggle, guided by Communist cadre and mass-line organizations. Whether or not the focus of the mass initiative is specifically anti-drug domination or if it is part of the larger mass initiative is not immediately clear, but it should be under the guidance and organizational body of the proto-People’s Army.

The struggle against drug and alcohol domination needs the active participation of the advanced section of the intermediary, and as many of the outright advanced, both to win over the more friendly and progressive elements of the backwards – the small drug dealers.

Colonization and capitalist domination fueled by alcohol

Alcohol domination, or alcoholism, began with the conquest by the colonizers of the indigenous nations and groups, especially of North America. An example of its deadly and genocidal effects can be seen as early as the 18^th century. But it lasts to the present with natives suffering from alcoholism-related death six times more than any other population in the U.S. from 1992-1994[7].

The circulation of alcohol was an economic enterprise early on by European settlers, which of course eventually expanded into profitable, popular and global industries. Alcohol was a perfect weapon for the domination and subjugation of the rebellious natives who were fighting for their land and very existence. But the natives, before, during and after conquest, were also the colonizer’s clientele. In North America, researches highlight the extreme newness of alcohol to indigenous communities which caused the adverse effects. Europeans and others have had hundreds of years in perfecting and using alcohol, even though there surely was reckless drunkenness and alcoholism, but natives had no social practice or learned behavior – there were no “social controls” with its usage; Natives would often drink without moderation, consuming all alcohol available to them in the present moment; Native, like the colonizers, would often blame the alcohol – in some cases known as “Demon Rum” – and not hold each other accountable; there was learned behavior that alcohol would treat illnesses, in many cases substituting regular drinking water; In short, alcohol as colonization and capitalist domination was both intentional and unintentional.[8] There was no alcohol-alcoholism separation since early on. Alcohol meant domination and abuse. That is why we argue so strongly that Communists, especially Maoists, must be sober – alcohol is a volatile reactionary weapon, nearly if not entirely impossible to control.

On and off the reservation, in and out of the native-populated (North American or from Latin America) barrios and ghettos, Chicano, indigenous and New Afrikans are in a fight for their lives against alcoholism. There is no room for alcoholism, and possibly alcohol, under the transitional period from capitalism to communism. Certainly, there is no room for alcoholism in the ranks of the pre-Party cadre formations and the coming Maoist Communist Party, our People’s Army and new proletarian state.

Oppose alcoholism, love the masses, fight for their lives and the lives of our comrades!

On prostitution, briefly

Drug and alcohol domination and prostitution is heavily interconnected. Like the stratification and hierarchy of drug dealers, we say the prostitution economy shares some similarities but is also different. There are no meaningful big or middle prostitutes, as even the renegades – the ones without pimps – are in a horribly precarious position often ending with beatings, rape and even death. It is highly probable that prostitutes in general can be reintroduced into the proletariat and the class struggle, but we will most likely be more successful with small prostitutes. But of course, like drug dealers, it is immediately unclear if this should be its own campaign or an aspect of another mass project. Prostitution is always a last resort for proletarian and semi-proletarian women, especially fueled or accelerated by drug and alcohol domination. It is a shameful and bourgeois myth that prostitutes are empowered “sex workers” regaining autonomy over their bodies as a method of anti-capitalist resistance. It is false consciousness at its most ugly and misogynist, even if the ideology is owned and reproduced by proletarian women. It mostly exists in imperialist countries where postmodernism, especially Michel Foucault’s petite-bourgeois sex positivism bio-politics that justifies this capitulation to backwards self-serving/destructive ideology at the expense of the class struggle. Prostitution stifles the revolutionary fury of proletarian women. It is an attempt at turning oppression into a weapon of the proletariat. But it is more akin to a dagger with no handle, cutting both the proletariat wielding it and the proletariat being stabbed by it.

We should unleash the fury of proletarian women upon pimps, upon drug dealers and other enemies of the people – but squarely from the ranks of the proletariat and its vanguard, and not from petite-bourgeois or lumpenproletariat positions.

Prostitution is a type of an economic exchange (and not “work”) involving a client, the john, the prostitute and the pimp (when applicable). The john is often of proletarian background and so the addiction/domination doesn’t simply exist within the prostitute herself/themselves. Drug and alcohol domination is almost totalizing here. Everyone suffers, but the prostitute is at the bottom of course. The higher-end johns of course exist and come from petite-bourgeois backgrounds, but typically their prostitutes are escorts and we think that necessitates a slightly different analysis because escorts are a more legitimized industry with a more solidified and formalized relationship where the pimp is a company with supervisors and the prostitutes are petite-bourgeois small independent contractors. It’d be wrong to say there is no aspect of a worker-owner relationship here but it is much like the stripper-club-owner relationship; they are still given economic autonomy (under the guise of political power) with scheduling, the right to refuse clients/services/price setting to a certain degree.

Sobriety is not the answer but a necessary tool toward Protracted People’s War

Sobriety must be a first step for the cadre as part of building the Maoist Communist Party in the U.S. prison house of nations. We must be the revolutionary examples to the masses, especially to the colonized masses. Through our actions and prestige, we must proclaim, “We are not like the others. We are different. For us, as it is for you, revolution is serious. We are not playing games, posturing as heroes. We are becoming soldiers who must always be on alert, on call. There is no room for foolishness or self-harming drunkenness and drug domination. We rise up against the capitalist and colonizer’s poison but we won’t leave you behind. You are coming with us and together we will make revolution, to eradicate drug and alcohol domination from the earth!”

But sobriety is only one step, albeit a big one for some, a smaller one for others. There must be absolutely no arrogant sobriety; no attacks on the struggling masses must be allowed. We must weaponize it but in a revolutionary and not reactionary way. Individualist boastfulness is petite-bourgeois. Pre-Party, and future Party, cadre and mass organization members found to be rude or condescending to the struggling masses should be severely punished and made an example of to the masses. Sobriety is only a tool. It is not the end-result. Capitalism will not allow a dual socialist society before the Strategic Equilibrium of PPW. Sobriety must mainly and only be seen as an indispensable armament for a soldier’s arsenal.

Maoists must do everything in their power to ensure that our comrades are as healthy as they can be and that they maintain revolutionary sobriety. This can only be done through revolutionary rehabilitation programs guided by Party initiatives, as opposed to the bourgeois rehabilitation industry. While there is some good in bourgeois rehab centers (getting addicts sober is obviously good and many people’s lives can be saved and have been saved because of rehab, including revolutionaries), they ultimate serve capitalism – even if there are one or two progressive or radical doctors or staff. The program’s entirety, if it isn’t guided by communist politics, succumbs to the ideological-reproducing machine of the bourgeoisie.

Substituting self-destructive practices that addicts retreat to and reproduce often in isolation with healthy, communist-led militarized initiatives in collective settings will aid and sustain revolutionary sobriety. Regularly checking in with comrades on the road to sobriety, intensely studying revolutionary warfare and applying Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism, to all aspects of one’s life will replenish good morale in the comrade. The road to revolutionary recovery, if it is to be effective, must take place within the class struggle. And that road can only lead to Protracted People’s War as the peak arena of transformation. It is in revolutionary warfare that the people and communists are truly tested.

This general approach is not exclusive to communists, but it will be the communists who initially carry it out. But the masses also deserve revolutionary sobriety. Once communists perfect revolutionary rehabilitation programs they should implement them for the masses. The masses, then, must take these revolutionary sobriety programs over and reproduce them but orientating toward the masses.

There are two contradictory worlds we are living in, the old and the new; but the old one is primary and the new one is secondary for the time being. Prostitution and drug and alcohol domination are two systems relegated to the old bourgeois world which we have to annihilate, two industries whose ideology must be attacked – but guided by Communist leadership and reintroduction of the progressive, allied groups into the proletariat and class struggle. Class struggle – and especially Protracted People’s War – transforms people into revolutionary soldiers. Class struggle is the fire that cleanses the earth from the poisonous rot of the bourgeoisie. Cast away old ideas, break the chains of capitalist exploitation and accumulate forces for PPW! Militarize the masses and the pre-Party collectives! Apply Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism, to the conditions in the U.S! The only method of defeating drug and alcohol domination is through revolutionary violence and unleashing the violent and redeeming torrents of the masses. Who are we to hold in their rage? Who are we to deny their revindication? Who are we to get in the way of their emancipation? We are but humble servants of the masses, revolutionary soldiers in the ranks of the becoming Party, People’s Army and the new proletarian state!

[1] http://time.com/money/4244536/drug-abuse-economy-relationship/

[2] https://oig.justice.gov/special/9712/ch01p1.htm

[3] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/special/cia.html

[4] https://www.cnn.com/2015/12/21/health/vietnam-heroin-disrupting-addiction/index.html

[5] https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/129171NCJRS.pdf

[6] https://www.addictionsandrecovery.org/is-addiction-a-disease.htm

[7] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1446168/pdf/10705850.pdf

[8] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1446168/pdf/10705850.pdf

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PDF is available here for download.

Recently, Fourth Sword Publications released a book on the growing Maoist Movement in the U.S., “Documents on the U.S. Maoist Conference for Line Struggle.” The book, a collection of position papers written for and presented at the conference, is nothing short of historical.

Red Guards – Los Angeles, for several years, has been working on various political lines and theoretical positions. One of which is the Chicano Nation. So much study and research has gone into this that the following document is merely an abridged version of a much larger work – due to be published by Fourth Sword Publications soon.

Prior to the conference, our line on the Chicano Nation was that it would move toward a national liberation revolution prior to socialist integration with its own distinct Maoist Communist Party. The Chicano national liberation would consolidate itself with the establishment of an Indigenous Republic of the Southwest governed by a Joint Dictatorship of the Proletariat of the Indigenous & Chicano nations. During the conference we received a lot of criticism, of which we united with the majority. After the conference we continued line struggle with comrades in Austin and also united with much of their criticism. We have, since that time, changed our position to uphold RGA’s “Sunbelt Thesis,” which calls for a countrywide Maoist Communist Party, with a launching of Protracted People’s War in the Sunbelt region of the U.S., principally in the Black Nation.

Because “Documents on the U.S. Maoist Conference for Line Struggle” has already been released (and is currently sold out) and being read and studied, we feel obligated to release the updated paper in its entirety available as a downloadable PDF. This version will be available in the second edition of the book.

Below we post our updated theses on the Chicano Nation, as it appears in the larger document:

 

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… But most importantly, and our gravest error, was that the Chicano Nation would move toward national liberation prior to or during socialist integration into a countrywide dictatorship of the proletariat. While we did not idealistically wish for a Communist Party of the Chicano Nation or Aztlán, we now warn that it would be dangerous to the countrywide socialist revolution – precisely because it would abandon the rest of the oppressed nations within the prison house U.S.

We say that the fundamental and antagonistic contradiction of national oppression exists and continues to rack up national casualties, deaths, imprisonments, deportations, economic and political repression.

RGLA operates in the Chicano Nation. We understand our national context. We are part of the Chicano Nation’s up-and-coming leading Maoist revolutionary organizations. We have consistently maintained Chicano leadership in the organization and in all mass projects and organizations. There is a growing Maoist presence and leadership growing. Inside our nation there exists intense line struggle, with nationalism representing the capitalist line and Maoism representing the proletarian line.

We take lessons away from the Kurdish national liberation movement and the liquidation of proletarian theory and leadership (at the time Marxism-Leninism) and the capitulating to petite-bourgeois leadership by the PKK (which now calls for democratic federalism). We must uphold and represent a Communist line. Nationalism poses a reactionary threat to the national liberation movement of the Chicano Nation. The nationalists would lead the nation through a bourgeois national liberation movement. Like revolutionary China with its Communist Party leading their national liberation movement, so to must the countrywide Maoist Communist Party led but not exclusively focus on one nation at the expense of others.

Precisely because of the criticisms we have received, namely from RGA over our subjectivism and incidental chauvinism – of putting the Chicano Nation as the center of our analysis without contextualizing its relation to the Black Nation – both nations making up the country’s Southern Sunbelt region – we have revised our position on Chicano national liberation by theorizing two possible scenarios or theses as detailed below, one of which is RGA’s “Sunbelt Thesis,” of which we unite with. We are not laying out two options but rather possibilities as a warning and urgent push into immediate theorizing and struggling over the countrywide national question.

For Chicanos, as a colonized nation, self-determination is of the utmost importance. The question of national self-determination, at its most profound essence, is really a question of freedom. There are several positions on the national question and specifically the Chicano Nation, but generally there are two possible outcomes, or theses, in the movement toward Chicano national liberation. They are:

1. The separatist line: that the liberation of the Chicano Nation may exercise its right of secession from the U.S. and establish an indigenous republic of the Southwest governed by its own national Communist Party before, during or after countrywide PPW.With this trajectory of the Chicano national liberation struggle, the nation could take the form of an independent indigenous republic of the Southwest. But even though it could be governed by the proletariat of the oppressed indigenous nations and the Chicano Nation of the Southwest, it would effectively abandon the entirety of the rest of the internal colonies such as the native nations outside of the Southwest and especially its immediate neighbor to the east, the Black Nation. That sort of prioritizing of Chicano national liberation over all other oppressed nations – even if governed by the proletariat of the Chicano and indigenous nations – is counter-revolutionary for its abandonment of the countrywide proletariat. We would effectively abandon revolutionary (continental) internationalism and say with this secession and construction of the independent republic, you are all on your own, come what may.The size of the indigenous population and nations in the territory and their kettled reservations must factor into any national analysis, even if it’s only speculation. Educated and informed speculation is not a hindrance to a revolutionary movement. It enables revolutionaries to strategize for possible outcomes – even though those ideas are truly only tested when applied.

   Indigenous revolution is part and parcel to the history of the Chicano Nation and its Southwestern territory, but revolutionary class struggle also has a place in the heart of the Chicano Nation history, as laid out in the book – miner, port workers, railroad workers, and agricultural and industrial proletariat struggles in and out of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Colorado, Utah, and parts of Kansas, Oklahoma ad Wyoming.

   However, we are against a federation model giving separate oppressed native nations complete autonomy without a centralized body of leadership. We are against federalism, not for wanting to dominate the Chicano, Black or native nations or its people (contrary to what nationalists or Third-Worldists would idealistically criticize us for) but rather for arming them – us – with the weaponry to guard the revolution and defend it against counter-revolutionary forces.

   The secession of the Chicano Nation, while a right for any oppressed nation in exercising self-determination, would support a dividing up of oppressed nations in the country and not uniting the oppressed nations as the strongest weapon against their principal enemy: U.S. imperialism.

   An enemy surrounded by one army under one centralized command is far easier to topple rather than several autonomous armies surrounding the enemy. War calls for discipline and hierarchy – especially the greatest war on earth, PPW against the U.S. – an army capable of annihilating the enemy from the face of the planet with revolutionary vengeance.

   As Communists, especially operating within the Chicano Nation, our aim ultimately is to unite the people and the proletariat, not to delineate unnecessarily oppressed nations from one another. That would be bundism, which we reject. The principal national enemy of the Chicano Nation, other indigenous nations and the Black Nation is the oppressor White Nation, the U.S. So, then, a more effective strategy is uniting the proletariat of all oppressed nations against the U.S.

   The Chicano Nation is oppressed by the U.S. Our complete freedom, beyond national freedom, will only come when the U.S. is destroyed and reconstructed under socialism administered by the dictatorship of the countrywide proletariat.

2. RGA’s sunbelt thesis as generally summarized in “Condemned to Win”: That PPW will initiate in the sunbelt region – the Southern half of the U.S. mostly following the Northern borders of both the Chicano and Black nations – specifically in the Black Nation region; that both the Chicano and Black nations will not secede but integrate, without their own separate national parties, into the countrywide project of socialist construction under one multinational Communist Party. The multinational countrywide Communist Party is a necessity for the destruction of the S. and the liberation of all people, all oppressed nations, from national oppression and capitalist-imperialist exploitation. To advocate for one oppressed nation to be liberated while the rest are still being held captive in the prison house of nations is treacherous. The nationalist line is: we matter firstly. The Communist line is: all of us or none of us – but not as a moral choice, rather a political-military strategy.National liberation is not being liquidated in this thesis but rather it is integrated into the socialist revolution because anything other than a centralized militarized Maoist Communist Party leading a countrywide PPW will guarantee colossal failure. The Party’s role would be to form and lead national liberation-specific organizations to win over and militarize the oppressed nations’ masses under a Communist line and reject a nationalist line. Nationalism leads to capitalism. Internationalism leads to communism.

   In the past, the national question has been poorly theorized – with either capitulating to Great White Nation Chauvinism and liquidating national liberation struggles entirely or abandoning socialist revolution in favor of nationalist-capitalist segregation. These two lines have been well documented in the New Communist Movement. But even as far back as the 1940 and 50s, the arch-revisionist CPUSA led by Earl Browder had pushed the liquidation of oppressed nations, namely the Black Nation as theorized by Harry Haywood, in favor of a more patriotic American (chauvinism) trajectory toward socialism. This has plagued the national Communist movement into the present and is embodied in the revisionist Chicano national minority line.

   And so a line must be clearly demarcated by Maoists that we must not liquidate the right to self-determination of oppressed nations, in our outside of the U.S. The oppressed nations/internal colonies of the U.S. require painstaking dedication of theoretical study – especially the native nations lightly touched upon in this book. Failing to treat the right of self-determination for oppressed nations seriously is a rejection of Leninism. Maoists must not tail national liberation struggles; when we are nationals of those oppressed nations in question, we mustn’t merely be critical supporters but instead be active participants – to win over a proletarian line from a nationalist-capitalist line.

Whatever scenario is to come to fruition, a central truth that cuts through the two theses presented is that the Chicano Nation has played and will subsequently play a crucial role in the coming PPW in some resemblance of unison with the Black Nation. The Maoist forces within these nations, namely RGLA in the anti-gentrification movement and RGA in the antifascist movement, have already planted the seeds to grow the most advanced pre-Party formations in the Sunbelt region. Following that premise, a Communist Party must be leading the Chicano national liberation movement ensuring that a nationalist hegemony capitulating to capitalism does not win out. Whereas the first thesis called for a separate national Maoist Communist Party of Aztlán, the second thesis still gives priority to Chicano national liberation but working in unity with the Black Nation and all-around priority given to concentric construction of the countrywide Maoist Communist Party, the People’s Army and the United Front.

Because each of the two theses uphold the Chicano Nation as an oppressed nation and internal colony and does not dispense with its necessary liberation and freedom, these theorized trajectories all fall under the Chicano National Liberation line. The theses are not options. We are not arguing that we can pick and chose one over the other; we are theorizing of a future where the possibilities revolving around the oppressed Chicano Nation and a Maoist Communist movement will produce one of these two possible outcomes, and we will move toward the realization of the second thesis, that is, formally adopting RGA’s Sunbelt thesis.

National liberation is a permanent aspiration of an oppressed nation throughout its continued oppression; but if the oppressor nation – in our case, and most of the world, being the U.S. – is destroyed, then the oppressed nation ceases to be oppressed. Both theses are predicated on a revolutionary war – PPW – intended on destroying the U.S. For our people, our class and our nation to be free, the U.S.’s domination over our lands must cease to exist.

We are experience a growing hegemony of the Maoist movement in the country, but principally in the Chicano Nation with RGLA and Red Guards Austin, the latter being the principally-Maoist leading pre-party force. We must seize the time.

Once upon a time, May Day used to be the most significant day for the international proletariat. From its 1886 origins from the streets of Chicago, turned red with the blood of the Haymarket Martyrs, in the fight for the eight-hour workday, May Day gave the proletariat a fighting spirit in the U.S. It gave our class some of its first communist and anarchist martyrs in this country.

May Day gave fear to our enemy, the capitalists and their lapdogs, with their historically-sealed fates growing nearer.

The first drop of blood spilled was at the expense of the proletariat, but the last drop of blood will not come from our veins. 

May Day has been co-opted by supposed “communist” and “leftist” organizations. It has turned into a police-permitted, capitalist-sanctioned-and-celebrated parade. 

In fact, just last year we even saw well-known populist pan-nationalist and fake socialist organizers follow the liberal #resist march, not to mention the rewarding speech by bicyclist-gentrifier Mayor Eric Garcetti himself at the end. The same capitalist mayor that has ushered in destructive gentrification throughout Los Angeles!

How dare any of these organizations and capitalists use this march – this day! – as a rallying call for their reformism, for their revisionism, for their labor aristocratic arrogance!

We must fight tooth and nail to free red May Day, the fighting spirit of the proletariat, from the clutches of the pro-imperialist, pro-gentrification, pro-settler-colonialism liberals!

May Day was never meant to be a parade with police escorts and city permits. The first May Day was illegal!

No more are we waiting for permits to take over streets. No more are we going to succumb to the liberalism and danger of having police escort us. We don’t need the pigs, we have each other.

We call on proletarians and the oppressed – the undocumented proletarian immigrants, the oppressed nation’s working-class women and trans militants, the working-class renters – to join supporters of Red Guards – Los Angeles and rally at Mariachi Plaza and march with the red flag! Time and route will be disclosed later today due to pig surveillance on Boyle Heights organizers and revolutionaries. 

Join us today, May Day, as we make it red again, in Boyle Heights. Please keep an eye on our Facebook event page where we will be posting important updates today.

We must dare to struggle, dare to win! We must pave the way for the proletariat and the oppressed to follow our path toward Protracted People’s War and communism!

Come angry, wear a mask! Bring red flags! Bring the ruckus! 

Long live International Workers’ Day!

Long live Red May Day!

 

Intro: rectification and conference

Earlier this month Red Guards – Los Angeles’ (RGLA) gender rectification project “Unlearning Patriarchy,” now known as “Arming Ourselves Against Patriarchy: Creating the Women’s Guerrilla Defense Unit,” was invited to and participated in the conference “#HowIWillChange: A Conference for Men to Deal With Our Sh!t.”

RGLA, with the guidance of Red Guards Austin, initiated a gender rectification campaign approximately two years ago when it was discovered that a member at the time had physically assaulted a woman. Leadership expelled the person and constructed an internal gender rectification campaign for the main task of transforming the men in the organization into proletarian feminists, and to better their understanding of gender and practice. Approximately one year ago, RGLA’s gender rectification campaign took on a semi-public character when we started hosting monthly workshops on patriarchy and capitalism, Unlearning Patriarchy. The workshops, the series overall, had a dual character: 1. to continue on with the internal gender rectification campaign – each RGLA member or supporter had their own particularities for their own specific gender rectification, 2. to politically bring up the men in our social and activist circles who also have bad gender practice and theory, with many women in their lives suffering because of this.

The conference, largely inspired by the #MeToo Movement, was organized around the idea of men dealing with their misogynistic behaviors, ideas, tendencies, etc. The conference was organized by men in the community and was hosted at a community center in Vancouver, Canada. Speakers and participants came from various parts of Canada and even the US, including many community members from indigenous nations in the regional area. Although the conference did focus on men speaking, engaging, transforming themselves and each other, women and trans people also participated.

Facilitators and leaders of Unlearning Patriarchy, as a project reaching its end, saw this as a good opportunity to engage with different community members regarding the history, present, and future of the project. RGLA saw this as a good way to reflect, self-criticize on the projects shortcomings, and engage in good-faith criticism on multi-tendency spaces that speak of transforming society by transforming the individual, especially on “challenging, unlearning, countering, decolonizing” patriarchy, but do not build revolution nor do they know how to get there.

The conference was a big umbrella space for leftist and community members looking to end misogyny in society and within ourselves. But the conference, like all bourgeois institutions and manifestations, was incidentally about how to continue operating capitalism, and how to continue surviving under capitalism.

Like the reformist nature of the state’s nonprofit suger-coated bullets, all manifestations of supposed solutions to the contradictions and problems of capitalism, patriarchy and settler-colonialism that do not uphold and reaffirm revolutionary war as the method of resolving the principle antagonistic contradiction, that between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, is actually counter-revolutionary in essence.

The conference was devoid of revolutionary politics, Marxism. There was no guiding ideology or analysis exposing the contradictions of capitalism, its relation to patriarchy and how to destroy it. Of course, aspects and sub-aspects of patriarchy were discussed but not sufficiently analyzed and struggled over theoretically (e.g. defining terms, violence in homes, what causes individuals to become violent, how violence is around us all the time, etc.). While settler-colonialism was only vaguely discussed as a principle cause for much of the sub-aspects of patriarchy like misogyny and objectification, there was no scientific correlation as to how patriarchy predated the European conquest and settlement of present-day Canada, its development through private property and the ascension of the family economic unity and the state. There was no analysis as to how patriarchy gets reproduced in capitalist society or the type of character – antagonistic or non-antagonistic – of the relationship between proletarian men and women.

It was a space for men to openly talk about what was wrong in the dominant capitalist culture, how culture reproduces misogynistic ideology and actions, how men themselves do so too in their daily lives, and how to better combat that as individuals. But here the conference speakers perpetuated a line that RGLA had adopted early on, which was fundamentally incorrect. That is, a flattening of all men, regardless of class or nationality, who perpetuate equally patriarchy against women. Secondly, as mentioned earlier, the conference and RGLA had upheld a political line that interpersonal relationships between men and women under patriarchal capitalism – as opposed to the incorrect “capitalist patriarchy,” which puts patriarchy first as the principle contradiction – can be “unlearned,” while not completely, to a lower more bearable level. It is of little to no concern about the individual’s concept of gender or patriarchy; it is far more important to adopt a collective, in our present state the pre-party formation, political line on the position of proletarian women, in and outside of the internal colonies/oppressed nations, under capitalism and to strategize a resolution to the contradiction between the sexes.

We assert, now, that the contradiction between proletarian men and women is not generally antagonistic and therefore does not require a revolution between men and women to resolve this contradiction. The non-antagonistic contradiction between proletarian men and women however may, at times, become antagonistic and often results in violence and even murder of women. However, there is a direct correlation between the contradictions of capitalism and the precarious economic position the proletariat occupies. Violence exits in proletarian neighborhoods. Violence against women exists in proletarian neighborhoods. Violence against women exists in the oppressed nations in proletarian neighborhoods. This violence does not exist constantly but rather under regular peaks of sharpen imperialist economic crises like recessions, massive job loss, offshoring, outsourcing and state policies that heightens the exploitation of the proletariat and increases the level of national oppressed by the white nation against the internal colonies/oppressed nations like mass housing displacement (gentrification). Capitalism perpetuates violence, not the other way around. The former is explained by Marxism, the other is upheld by postmodernism and revisionist “Marxist”-feminism and other non-Marxist feminist schools of thought.

After the revolution the socialist construction of the dictatorship of the proletariat with a reconstruction and collectivization of domestic/reproductive labor will initially resolve the contradiction between men and women. Subsequent cultural revolutions can also resolve the more aggressive residue patriarchal ideas that linger on as the dying old ideas of a dying old world.

Thoughts on the conference: the good and the bad

Most conference speakers came from nonprofits and many were members of indigenous nations, and/or had academic backgrounds. A lot of the focus could be narrowed down to acknowledging settler-colonialism, intersectionality, and self-transformation by individuals.

Again, we repeat, if the goal is to end patriarchy, simply put, we argue that you cannot end patriarchy without destroying the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; and only a revolutionary movement led by a militarized Communist Party guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism, can destroy the capitalist state. Patriarchy came about with the advent of private property, the state and correlating social classes. We can only move closer to its elimination with the destruction of social classes. That is not an end all, by any means, but it is fundamental. It is the fundamental political line, and within the line contains the steps, to destroy the state and doesn’t exist in the idealist, un-Marxist world in which patriarchy will eventually crumble under its own weight; it must be destroyed through revolutionary violence, through a revolutionary war. Within this, however, we find unity with many non-Maoists organizations, movements and people. So to speak of destroying one without the other – capitalism and patriarchy – is to uphold both, just like how revisionism pretends to be Marxist and anti-capitalist when in reality to uphold revisionism is to uphold capitalism and/or its restoration.

Some thoughts on the tactics from the conference:

1) On nonprofits: Nonprofits are not revolutionary, nor do many claim to be (but some do, and ought not to lie to themselves and the masses). Many acknowledge their limits, but still they see the necessity of creating a better world. Beyond the fact that many nonprofits have contradictory roles within communities, like Self-Help Graphics & Art in Boyle Heights that works with the bureaucratic bourgeoisie actively displacing/gentrifying the proletarian community, as well as receiving money from the comprador bourgeoisie that make their wealth through exploiting other communities, what role do nonprofits generally play in society?

Nonprofits generally focus on issues that affect working-class families living under capitalism but look to put band-aids on them – that is, soften the contradictions of capitalism. Because of this they are only bourgeois instruments. Nonprofits who orientate to urban proletarian students receive a sub-par education, especially oppressed nationality youth. Nonprofits look at this national oppression or capitalist exploitation and says, “Let’s give them art classes, tutoring programs, mentors, healthier spaces to grow and learn.” Nonprofits who orientate to working-class families struggle to eat looks at this and says, “Let’s give them free food, help them find employment, provide amenities to survive the realities of capitalism.” All this, without a class analysis, sounds nice, is nice, and is subjectively morally good. But it keeps the proletariat comfortable in their shackles, the colonized subjects able to bear colonization. There is no freedom without violent confrontation. There is no proletarian emancipation, of men or women, without an ending of the political economic relationship to the means of production. There is no emancipation of the colonized, oppressed and exploited without the seizure of power. As Lenin and the Bolsheviks and Presidente Gonzalo and the Communist Party of Peru have asserted, “Everything is illusory except power!”

With a class analysis we see that nonprofits generally only exist and thrive off the contradictions of capitalism. They do not seek to destroy the root causes of the issues they actively work around; they do not see the need of destroying capitalism in every way, shape and form. They see the need of transforming individuals and helping them out in their basic needs to make capitalism more bearable and survivable for them. They, in practice, reinforce capitalism by putting band-aids on contradictions that should be used to sharpen revolutionary moments and movements in aiding and ushering the destruction of the old, sepulchral capitalist world.

2) On the performativity of Unlearning Patriarchy: This is a criticism and self-criticism. You cannot unlearn patriarchy. An attempt to do so is, at its best, an exercise in performative, empty posturing. At its worst, it is actually treacherous to the emancipation of the proletariat, especially proletarian women. Patriarchy is inherent in every aspect of society and it is reinforced every second we live on this earth under capitalism. That is one of the functions of society’s superstructure. And to merely “unlearn” something prior to a hit to the economic base of society, or in absence in striking a hit against the economic base of society, is metaphysical.

At the start and much throughout the gender rectification campaign, we de-prioritized Maoist politics in favor of more immediate and interpersonal feminist politics. That is, we suspended Marxism. We put non-Marxist feminist politics in command. We did so because we saw the urgency in fighting relentlessly against the men of the cadre and supporters’ rampant patriarchal behavior, which included physical abuse against women but also included emotional/psychological abuse. We eagerly dove into publications by bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Silvia Federici and others, grasping for any semblance of male feminist practice. We found some good and correct ideas, but we also found many bad and incorrect ideas. We attempted to distill the good from the bad, see Silvia Federici’s immense research on the development of patriarchy and primitive accumulation or read about bell hooks upholding the need for multi-gender formations (she used concepts like spaces or convenings, but formations would be better said and applied). This wasn’t a total failure, however. We struggled internally and externally with allied women and men who were welcomed into the rectification campaign. It was during ideological struggle on questions of gender that Marxism began to rear its head in opposition to certain lines – such as the radical feminist assertion of the man-woman contradiction being antagonistic instead of the Marxist position of it being a secondary non-antagonistic one. However, the fact that Unlearning Patriarchy lasted as long as it did without enough fundamental changes to its mission and outcome means it was more a failure than a victory. Nonetheless, RGLA and our supporters did take away great lessons and mental transformation – which can only mean developing a militarized communist discipline and adherence to a life of revolutionary service and revolutionary prestige.

This is a path we have already embarked on and we cannot be removed from it; our feet are firmly planted and our resolve is growing harder and harder like communist soldiers – becoming.

This – patriarchy’s hegemony – will not change, no matter how many bell hooks reading groups we are a part of; it will not change, no matter how many more self-care books are published; it will not change, no matter how many feminist seminars are conducted – even if they call themselves anticapitalist or even Marxist; it will not change, no matter how many men’s circles gather to learn how to be emotionally available and vulnerable with their intimate partners; it will not change, no matter how gender-diverse your organization is in its membership. Healing is impossible. Representation is not power. It, alone, is identity politics. Revolutionary war – principally Protracted People’s War – is the only solution.

Patriarchy’s violent hegemony will only begin to be chipped away when the global proletariat, with a special emphasis on proletarian women from the oppressed nations of the world, are no longer under the subjugation of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

No longer will we suffice with the concept of unlearning – yes, men need to improve their gender practice but without an analysis as to why sexism exists and who benefits from it, unlearning becomes performative. Performative is generally radical in speech and reformist in action. One must literally arm themselves against patriarchy and build a revolutionary movement! If one commits to fight against patriarchy but not destroy the economic base that produces patriarchal ideas and relations, what was accomplished?

3) Lifestylism: Lifestylism focuses on an individual transforming themselves. That’s it, mainly. And this is generally what the conference was about. The environment is being destroyed by the amount of commodities we consume, so we must consume less. The amount of energy taken to grow beef, chicken, and pork drains natural resources, so we need to eat less meat and become vegan. Misogyny is rampant in society, so we must be genuinely nicer and smile more when walking around. That one company is fucking up a community, so then we must boycott it. Water is becoming more scarce and needs to be preserved, so we need to drink less, hah! We jest on this last point, of course, but that is where this line leads. It does not address the root of the problem or seek to transform it. Many tactics under lifestylism (which only are choices) might need to be taken up under revolutionary movements, but the revolutionary movement seeking to destroy that which treats life as a commodity must remain primary in every instance – otherwise capitalism is the end of the world and the human species.

4) “Check your privilege-ism”: The conference also brought awareness to settler-colonialism. Statements like, “this city is founded on violence by settlers” and “I identify as a settler” were made by presenters. Acknowledging settler-colonialism and the role it plays within patriarchal capitalism is very important, of course, but only acknowledgment so as to form a political analysis for revolution. To check your privilege is not only not enough, it is performative and politically stupid.

The postmodernist concept of “decolonization” is liberal political trickery that only preserves the colonizer’s world and their capitalist economy. The need to fight back against decolonization’s meaninglessness posturing and reassert revolutionary national liberation, primarily around the question of land, as Frantz Fanon originally had theorized it, is essential. There is no talk of fighting against colonization without fighting for the recapture of native land, of the homeland of the oppressed nations within the US and Canada. Otherwise, how can we talk about settler-colonialism existing without talking about how to materially end it?

Our political economic system in North America is settler-colonialism capitalism-imperialism. Patriarchy is a secondary contradiction, but one that can become and is mortal for women. But patriarchy is best studied from a class analysis. Bourgeouis women share very little with proletarian women. Proletarian women are alienated from their labor. They are abused, raped, brutalized, killed and left discarded in public parks like here in Boyle Heights and other parts of Los Angeles. Bourgeois women, as the gender of the dominant class in power, do not face that same reality.

A system such as ours, imposed upon the native, Chicano and Black nations, having colonized and genocided countless groups and even entire native nations – can we really talk about merely unlearning, checking privilege or decolonizing or deconstructing such a system without the use of revolutionary violence and vengeance?

Moving forward with the Women’s Guerrilla Defense Units

We are thankful that our supporter was invited and able to participate in the conference in Vancouver. As Maoists we will reflect on participating in future similar conferences that are multi-tendency and not revolutionary. Our proletarian communities, especially proletarian women of the oppressed nations, need and die each day that there is not a revolutionary vanguard. We cannot, they cannot, afford more academic and reformist conferences with no material revolutionary solutions and strategies. We are not fooling ourselves in thinking that that will be provided outside of revolutionary formation.

Proletarian women will be part of the leadership of this revolutionary struggle and it will be crucial for men to transform and become better comrades, not for personal gain, but as a necessary step toward ending all forms of injustices on this earth.

The Women’s Guerrilla Defense Units is still in its nascent steps but we are putting a heavy emphasis on political development and political struggle so as to lay down a concrete foundation capable of supporting nothing short of the towering project of continued preparation for the great revolutionary war against capitalism.

The masses die each day the militarized Party, People’s Army and United Front continues not existing. Proletarian women of the oppressed nations continue to die each day the Women’s Guerrilla Defense Units continues not existing fully. We must build as if the lives of the masses depended on it, for it does. We must build with the noble revolutionary abandonment that our lives are guaranteed to be laid down in service of revolution and the emancipation of proletarian women. We are invincible with the revolutionary development of a militarized proletarian feminism! We are unstoppable with the becoming-militarized masses full support and participation! We are immortal under the red banner of Maoism!

Long live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism!

Long live the proletarian women of the oppressed nations, and the world!

Women hold up half the sky!

Long live all immortal proletarian women who fight and give their lives to the revolution!

 

Red Guards – Los Angeles (RGLA) sends its deepest solidarity to our comrades in Austin and in particular comrade Dallas who is, as we type this and as you read this, sits in a jail cell fighting for his freedom and to return as a die-hard supporter of the revolutionary communist movement.

We unite with the international outpouring of support for our comrade, from Turkey to Paris, from Norway to Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Houston, and now here in the eastside of Los Angeles. Boyle Heights lifts up the bold and daring communist character of comrade Dallas! Selflessness, revolutionary, always ready to give his life to the masses and the revolution!

We, too, are affected and moved to action and solidarity with our comrades resisting state repression in Austin. RGLA will not rest, will not spend a single hour or day without contemplating seriously on the release and well-being of Dallas and the growth of the revolutionary movement. The two are permanently connected.

The comrades in Austin were instrumental in the political development of our organization, and in particular Dallas and his comrade-fiancée – both facing serious jail time on suspicious charges most likely in cooperation with liars.

So many memories were shared with comrade Dallas and his comrade-fiancée. From sitting around a living room, drinking too much coffee, smoking too many cigarettes, line struggling over key questions of the movement, theorizing ways in which to stop their dog from shitting on the comrade’s carpet – analyzing whether or not it was a passive-aggressive treacherous act. Our revolutionary love and bond was cemented with dark and psychological-taxing situations that we inevitably persevered. Communism may not be love, but it is an invincible and immortal power that, like electricity, surges through the veins and molecules of its loyal soldiers and the masses.

Los Angeles swells with pride at the memory of our proletarian soldiers, comrade Dallas and his comrade-fiancée! We are sadden but as calculating as scientists with this sadness, turning it into revolutionary resolve and invincible motivation.

Long live comrade Dallas!

• Write to him at freedallas@protonmail.com 
• Send PayPal donations to avantiguzman@gmail.com 
• Please continue to buy T-shirts, which directly fund the struggle to defend Dallas. Some of them feature his original artwork: https://teespring.com/stores/urban-guerrilla-outfitters 
• Please keep sharing his story far and wide. The article about him has been translated into French, German, and Danish. Keep it going! http://www.redspark.nu/en/political-prisoners/defend-comrade-dallas-and-fight-for-his-freedom/

Nothing strengthens our resolve within ourselves and with each other better than state repression. The state feeds us daily and will feed us till it or we die. We are ready for what’s to come.

If you are serious about ending exploitation of one by another, of ending the oppression of imperialism, of patriarchy of the diseased parasitic capitalist system that takes its toll on the working poor every day, if you wear the title ‘communist’ because you are honored to sacrifice yourself for the emancipation of the working class and all oppressed people, if you know all this, then you know you are condemned to give up your freedom, to die and to win.

Dallas, as a principle Maoist, understands this to its core. He grasps the duty of the communist and his selflessness. (Link at the end)

The state is cracking down on our comrades in Austin but all Maoists, revolutionary anarchists and others who are actually putting their theory into practice, await their turn. You need to accept this.

Support the comrade in whatever way possible – financial donations, making this go viral, becoming Maoists, building and training people’s soldiers!

You need to accept that when you give your freedom or life, a dozen or hundred others will rise up to take your place in the coming Party and Army and Front.

You need to train your replacements. You need to spread Maoism like the prairie fire it is. Light up all the fields on this earth so that they can be seen from any corner of the world!

We must think of ourselves as not belonging to ourselves. We are grains of sands. We are made up of millions, across the globe. Under extreme conditions, we can change shape and form. And right now, I think it is fair to say we are currently under that transformation. We have to think of ourselves as only belonging to the people as their permanent comrades and defenders. An individual can be crushed, but their realization, that which is outside of them, that they are part of millions, that can never be destroyed.

We are immortal because we are the martyrs becoming!

As one falls, dozens and hundreds shall now rise up!

Death to the individual, life to the masses, the becoming party and revolution!

Free Dallas!
Long live Red Guards Austin!
Long live the Red Guards!
Long live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism!

—

Donate to the fundraiser: fundedjustice.com/free-dallas

Buy a T-shirt—all proceeds will be used for this struggle: http://teespring.com/free-dallas
https://redguardsaustin.wordpress.com/2018/03/14/defend-comrade-dallas-and-fight-for-his-freedom/