Hello!
In reading “Criticism and Self-Criticism: Red Guards or Iron Guards” and listening to “Swampside Chats” it’s clear that there is a very obvious bias against Maoism that comes from the Marxist Center milieu. I don’t know whether you’d share this (or not), but I’d like to address some of the claims made in your article.
“The Red Guards and many other Maoists uphold this organization as the pinnacle of “revolutionary science” and seek to emulate it despite its failure to overthrow the Peruvian government.”
This reads like Ice T in Law and Order doing some pop psychology to explain some deviants behavior. Maoists are Maoists because there is an emphasis on how the superstructure can become the primary contradiction, an emphasis on monist opposites, an emphasis on the unity of theory and practice, an understanding contradiction as the fundamental law, advancements in political economy that emphasize the role of the masses in changing the base, the mass line, seeing the strategy of people’s war as universal, an understanding of the possibility of restoration and revisionism as being at the frontline of defending captialism, seeing the necessity of continuing class struggle through creating an armed sea of the masses and mass mobilizations against bureaucracy, Gonzalo looked at all this 1988 and urged the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement to recognize it as a qualitative leap in Marxism, which some genuinely adopted but others (like the RCPUSA) only haphazardly assumed the label of only to discard it years later. Likewise Gonzalo forwarded his own contributions, mainly an understanding of Unified People’s War, an expanded thesis on fascism, bureaucratic capitalism, militarization, concentric construction, revisionism as the main danger in certain situations, an expanded thesis on the relationship between individual and collective leadership, and seeing Maoism as a monism instead of a triplism.
The rest of this paragraph is just strange. You say Peru’s Communist Party had a “manichean” view of violence. That is hard to dispute: they launched and led a revolutionary war and that definitely creates one side, and the other, with very little gradient in between one and the other. Is it damnable for revolutionaries to struggle for power, but excusable when oppressive governments fight to defend their unjust power?
“Chaired by Abimael Guzmán, who the party called Presidente Gonzalo, the PCP left a deep scar across the face of Peruvian society. Responsible for atrocities against indigenous people, rival communists, and urban civilians, the Pathists rapidly fell apart when their leader was captured in a government raid.”
One of the particularities in Peru is that a swath of “left” forces had developed ties to the Peruvian military (during the pro-Soviet military rule in the 1970s), and quite a few of them worked with the military against the Maoist revolution that grew during the 1980s. Maria Moyano, who many left anticommunist Senderologists like Robin Kirk uphold, was an NGO organizer working among the people in a “glass of milk program” who was using the networks built through such social welfare operations to build her political networks (that both served as informers for the military, and as “left” reformer support for the government). Moyano was warned to stop her activities, and then killed for being an informant. And because she was a “community organizer,” an NGO-type activist, and a black woman — her death became a bit of a cause celebre of religious and liberal forces opposed to the Maoist revolution in Peru.
When people like Sir Peter Archard, a leading member of Amnesty International’s Secretariat responsible for Peru affairs, came forward after this, he endorsed a series of accusations against the Shining Path (in an interview he gave with the Lima news magazine, Caretas) which suggested that “Marxists” were being targeted. Even when by his own report El Diario reported that 15 shanty residents were killed by the Peruvian Army after she handed their names over to them.
Perhaps there is less a “Manichean” view of violence at play here than there is an understanding that, once an actual armed struggle for power erupts, it is necessary to actually break (disrupt, disperse, isolate and decimate) the organized networks of the other side. Otherwise victory is impossible. In rural guerrilla warfare in particular, where the villages are often controlled by the armed forces by day and the guerrillas by night — there is an acute need to disrupt government networks of intelligence gathering (because the army can relatively easily round up those they identify for death squad torture and murder). It is common for guerrilla forces (throughout history) to execute informants and also (in some case) also those in the villages who agree to openly serve the government (as official village chiefs, or as counterinsurgency “village defense” forces, or other forms of open collaboration). This was the case during the Vietnamese liberation struggle, during the anti-Nazi resistance in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and in China’s protracted revolutionary war… and it was the case in Peru.
Some of the first ronderos were organized by liberation theology priests (who also had a history of pro-military connections going back to the 1970s military dictatorship). Ronderos were armed pro-government “village defense forces’ assigned to kill Shining Path organizers and sympathizers — they were often gangs of village bullies armed and trained by the government who carried out their own reign of terror over the people (and were backed up when needed by regular army forces).
And so the identification and punishment of informants and ronderos got reported (internationally) as “Shining Path guerrillas execute villagers and rival leftists.”
That narrative was often just a crude lie, and almost always a crude distortion. And, as someone who watched the anti-Shining Path disinformation campaigns happen — it was carefully focused. In trade union and social democratic leftists circles, it was said “Shining Path simply kills trade unionists.” In liberal catholic circles it was said “The Shining Path kills priests and nuns.” (And little was said, interestingly enough, of the Catholic left forces who joined the Shining Path at key moments.) And in the organized left it was said “The Shining Path killed other leftist forces in a murderous sectarianism.” And so on.
“This won them considerable popular support and loyalty, at least initially, but they were unable to make inroads with the labor movement or many pre-existing indigenous organizations.”
In the late 1980s the PCP had considerable control of three of the four main trade union federations through their mass organization, which served as a sort of open caucus, Movimiento Obrero de Trabajadores Clasistas. Likewise Senderologist Michael Smith notes that Sendero “controlled the two national teachers’ union (SUTEP) public school locals on the Central Highway. In just the last year of the García administration, Sendero placed one hundred teachers in the isolated schools of Central Highway shantytowns.” Through their control of these organizations significant general strikes and industrial stoppages would cripple the government. In The Peruvian Labyrinth the depth of their activity in the industrial sectors is described well:
“The pressures were enormous on existing sectors to adopt violent tactics. Many popular sector organizations faced strong competition on their left flank from Sendero. Through “clasista” front groups, Sendero promoted tactics such as indefinite strikes and factory takeovers as alternatives to those followed by IU [Izquierda Unida, or United Left]-linked groups. The quandary many unions, peasant communities, and shantytown organizations faced was to either radicalize and adopt confrontational strategies or face the possibility of having their influence reduced.”
Of course bringing up the JRA makes absolutely no sense. Unlike the PCP which spent 17 years organizing in the slums and, mostly, in the rural villages (leaving the Rand Corporation to even admit that, in contrast to their counterparts MRTA, their influence was even deeper and broader) the trajectory of the JRA went from being part of a militant anti-imperialist to being a focoist formation that acted on behalf of the world revolution, with no connection to the Japanese working class at all.
Whatever one has to say about the Kansas City disruption and their attacks on the DSA, which were dumb and contained zero use value in terms of propaganda, your inferences to fascism and LaRouche are strange and don’t really match the development of the former Red Guards collectives. Placing them in the camp of the FBI and police (when the DSA literally is having a debate right now on the Discussion Forums, pointing out that the bylaws should not contain any exclusion for police officers since many of them can be “won over,” when a CLEAT union organizer was elected to their NPC and the NPC wouldn’t even vote him out) is absolutely irresponsible and wrong. While I appreciate the content you’ve taken the time to write as well as the podcast, and see it as proof of someone who is intellectually capable of coming to correct conclusions, you should feel embarrassed for producing such a poor piece. It allows younger leftists who are being steered into campaigning for Democrats to just presume any contemporary revolutionary movement that has yielded revolutionary violence is just “larping” when people like “Comrade Dallas,” who has a newborn child and a partner who is also an organizer, are rotting in jail. Shame on you!
Signed,
Cabbage Baby
