I think it makes some points. Does anyone more knowledgeable on this subject have a different take?
Maoism is when committing crimes against humanity and terrorism on innocent villages in Peru’s countryside, obviously.
“You won’t let us ransack and pillage your village, steal all your food, and then occupy your houses?”
“Guess we have to shoot all your children, rape your women, and then pillage your village anyways”.
The PCP were a disgusting abomination. On the same level as the Khmer Rouge. Utter garbage and evil. They are a terrorist organization that use Marxist symbols for aesthetics and nothing else. Utter scum.
I highly recommend reading up on the Shining Path. Their founder and leader was a deranged megalomaniac, who was a fascistic nationalist and cared more for his personal cult of personality then Marxism. He has admitted to never even READING MARXIST THOUGHT. The entire history of the organization is insane and I highly recommend the BadEmpenada episode on them.
You said it better than I ever could. A popular people’s movement needs to be actually popular with the people. The Shining Path was absolutely atrocious. Completely unjustified violence and retaliations in order to just get in power.
I feel like the article made some arguments that could hypothetically work if there were proper context, goals, and strategy in mind. Like, sure, in some contexts excesses are expected and accepted, but did you actually do something positive in that work. Sure, the state probably used a lot of violence too, but was the PCP aimed at them in response or mostly targeting civilians? People can do good with hatred as a motivation but can you really say violence is acceptable purely as a manifestation of hatred for the oppressors? (If the tone is not clear these questions are directed as Gonzalists, not you Comrade Salad).
What episode of the deprogram is it? I think I’ve listened to all of them, but I don’t remember one on Gonzalo. Any specific reading recommendations? I don’t want to pick up some random bourgeois book because then I’d be fulfilling the MLM stereotype of MLs being “left anti-communists” not believing lies about Stalin, but believing those about PolPot and the PCP.
My mistake, the video I was referring to was from BadEmpenada. I am very wary of him as a person and his material, but this video is excellently researched and gives a good socialist lens on the horrific nature of the Shining Path and their leader. His description also gives a very long and thorough reading list centered on leftist and South American sources that you might want to look into.
Also The PCP’s violence was aimed at the people. That’s what makes them reprehensible. They commit heinous acts of terrorism against the poor in Peru, are associated with Nacrotrafficking and cartels to make money, they utilize child soldiers as young as 10 to fill their militant ranks, and so on. They are not using “a means to an end”, they are just using a mean that is so vile and reprehensible that every leader and associated member deserves death or imprisonment at the very least.
They accomplished nothing leftist related, and instead murdered trade unionists, feminist activists, Marxist professors, and foreign emissaries. They probably pushed back the leftist movement in Peru by decades if not centuries with their actions.
I’ve seen the BE video, but I’m wondering if there’s a less questionable source I could listen to. I’ll have to check out his reading list I guess.
Honestly, I remember thoroughly crosschecking his video with all the sources available to me, including South American resources, and I really couldn’t find anything wrong with what he said. It was a very well done and researched video.
I would recommend a lot of the books in his sources though. A lot of them are directly Peruvian, but they have good translations available.
Funnily enough, he actually excluded a decent chunk of the acts committed by the organization because it simply would have taken to long to cover them.
He links sources for the claims he makes so you don’t have to second guess about those.
The PCP of Gonzalo did not and does not engage in narcotrafficking. The “Militarized” PCP, which hates Gonzalo and is considered the “third right-opportunist line” in the MPP’s literature, is the group that profits from the drug trade. Again, your accusations are nothing new for communist or even normal progressive groups, as every revolutionary anti-imperialist group has been accused of heinous crimes rather baselessly.
I have seen a disturbingly large amount of Khmer Rouge support from self-proclaimed “Maoists.” it almost seems like some of them love the idea of purging all of the “ideologically impure” from their nation.
The PCP were a disgusting abomination. On the same level as the Khmer Rouge.
Back when I used reddit, there was this weirdo in r/communism who only posted pro-Khmer Rouge stuff. There’s some odd people out there.
for me they completely rejected praxis and established a complete militarization of the party. Unlike the CPC or the maoists in india and the philippines, which establish civilian facilities such as schools, toilets, housing and food, the PCP snubbed this, since the doctrine of the concentric concentration of the three instruments demand the party to act like a militia group. Just violence, pure violence, and the reason for this is they believe that outside revisionist elements will infiltrate the party and corrupt it, despite revisionism actually coming from inside the party politics, such as what we saw during the twilight years of the soviet union, or some chinese “communists” which wanted shock therapy in the country.
The shining path even abandoned Marxist-Leninist-Maoism and just stuck to their deranged ideology of “gonzaloism”. And the PCPs continued path of MLM puts them at odds with other MLs groups. Their broad definition of revisionism lands the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the Communist Party of the Philippines as revisionist, as these groups do not apply elements like the militarization of the party.
If someone said the same things but about Ukraine, the Bolsheviks, and Stalin, you all would rightfully be outraged at such dishonesty and propaganda. But since this is about a party you so staunchly disagree with, you’ll swallow up bourgeois propaganda.
Such revisionists, since they have not expelled their bourgeois mindset and bourgeois class stand, are still prone to getting weepy at the death tolls thrown about by “senderologists,” bourgeois academics, and even sources that are in the direct employment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a State plot most comparable to our COINTELPRO in the US. They study sources like Ivan Degregori, who was one of the top leaders of Truth and Reconciliation. He shared positions in Truth and Reconciliation with reactionary Peruvian Army generals like Luis Arias Graziani, ex-congress members like Beatriz Alva Hart and Rolando Ames, several catholic priests and bishops, and a conservative Protestant church leader, Lay Sun. This assortment of reactionaries were all partisan in the counterinsurgency against the revolution in service of the State, composed of Fujimori endorsers and people who supported Alan Garcia. Degregori, for his part, as an anthropologist, lends academic legitimacy to what amounts to a well-oiled anti-Communist slander campaign. …
These liberal humanists will decry the violence of 1983 and in doing this they decry the PPW in Peru and denounce its leader, Chairman Gonzalo. They insist with no regard to historical materialism or the most accessible facts that this “massacre” alienated the peasant base and actually bolstered the number of death squad recruits, harming the revolution itself. This is nothing but a fabrication. The masses themselves understood this action, supported it, and themselves carried it out at the behest of the Party. This was not the activity of “outside agitators,” shadowy Party agents from alien backgrounds. Much as with the rationale used by other liberals to dismiss the most rebellious activity of the US masses, the liberal mind makes fairytales and conjures ghosts. The Party is, in the liberal mind only, understood as divorced fully from the revolutionary masses, carrying out massacres nearly unprovoked based solely on a metaphysical bloodlust.
Let’s look then at the facts: The People’s War in Peru only grew stronger from 1983 into the 90s. When they began advancing upon Lima and other major cities, the peasant militia and people’s committees grew year by year, and with them grew the EGP and the PCP itself. The revolution spread like wildfire, from the Andes to the jungles and into the slums of Lima, which began choking the city from the countryside. The prisons were organized, and whole areas stopped using Peruvian State currency and began using the currency of the PCP. Such places were the most developed and advanced base areas of modern times and far exceeded any current example. The New State was already functioning throughout large areas of the country.
After the capture of Gonzalo and the establishment of the so-called Truth and Reconciliation Commission headed by Degregori, much was spun to portray the PCP as a bloodthirsty organization that led to the deaths of 70,000 people, half of which are attributed to the PCP. What is not mentioned in these liberal humanitarian reports is the crimes for those “civilians” that ranged from collaborators with the police and Marines, cattle thieves, wife beaters or other rural tyrants. These nuances are left out of course as they serve the ideological justification that rebellion is wrong.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission monopolizes legitimate justice and violence to be only dished out by the bourgeois state, at no point in the commission was a representative of the revolution given equal place, in spite of the Commissions posturing condemnation for the Fujimori government.
https://redlibrary.xyz/works/strugglesessions/enemies-of-the-communist-party-of-peru.pdf
NOOOOOOO ILL DEFEND YOUR HONOR GONZOLO!
You seriously want to blame tens of thousands of rapes, infanticides, murders of prominent leftists and feminists, and countless other crimes on COINTELPRO?
For all I know, Stalin was never accused of fucking boiling babies alive.
Fuck off. How about you start defending Pol Pot next.
Yeah, but have you considered the capitalist nations are just lying about everything bad the Shining Path ever did, and the people just randomly refused to support them for no reason at all?
Also, those same capitalists are totally right when they say that China is lying about their poverty alleviation efforts though, because China is obviously the devil and it is more important to blindly hate on them than actually deal with the imperial core.
What evidence do you have of infanticide? Y’all take Reddit memes too seriously. This is the first time I’m seeing the accusation of rape against the PCP. Did the Bolsheviks not, in their conquest of state power, murder “prominent leftists” such as the anarchists or the right-opportunist Mensheviks and SRs? The PCP similarly had to fight the revisionist (and actually homophobic) MRTA, and it had to combat state-backed forces and groups siding with the genocidal state.
When did I mention COINTELPRO? Can you even read what I said? Are you willing to engage with me honestly? It seems the answer to those last two questions is clearly “no”.
Every communist is accused of such heinous crimes without evidence. Lenin and Stalin are labelled “ruthless tyrants”, and Mao was supposedly a “sex pest” according to his “private doctor”, though many others close to Mao refuted that. Hell, Stalin is accused of deliberately causing a famine, resulting in infant cannibalism. You people are reasonably principled about those leaders and know to refute those lies, but once the same shit is hurled at the PCP, you capitulate.
Also, it astounds me that you’ll trust Bad Empanada on the PCP, but his video on the Holodomor, while not calling Stalin genocidal, still calls it a fault of the government’s mismanagement, and thus still Stalin’s fault. Anti-Stalin propaganda is bad, but anti-Gonzalo propaganda is good.
I thought his “holodomor” video was decent. He exposes Wikipedia’s anti-communist bias and shows how most scholars know there was no genocide done by Stalin. I’m more suspicious of BE for saying the “Uyghur genocide” is real but slightly less bad than Zenz is saying. He does have a bit of a centrism problem where he tries to avoid any strong position (beside criticizing Israel and US troops, which, based).
Well, he still believes the “moderate” bourgeois historians who blame Stalin himself for mismanaging the famine. Was Stalin perfect in handling the ordeal? No, he could not have been, but he was not at fault for the famine. BE is right to say humans have to cause famine in some way (since natural conditions alone cannot do it), but he ignores the role of Western imperialists and internal saboteurs in aggravating the situation. Thus, he still has these anti-communist, petty-bourgeois views that make him worthy of much skepticism.
I’m watching his video on the PCP right now, and the fact that he rather uncritically uses the state-backed “Truth and Reconciliation committee” when other scholars disagree with it says something.
There’s still a difference between telling a liberal “our people say we didn’t do genocide so we clearly didn’t” vs “even anti-communists admit our leader didn’t do genocide.” The source matters for people even if they eventually realize it’s still bourgeois propaganda.
Do you know any liberal refutations of what you call myths about the PCP in this thread like there were of “Private Life of Chairman Mao”?
How’d you find this post? You’re welcome to stay here, our community is a lot better than whatever you’ve got on Quora and IG. Just know most of us don’t support Gonzalo. Just because someone calls themselves communist doesn’t mean they’re worth our support. Should we support Jim Jones? La Rouche? Caleb Maupen? Besides just understanding cults you should understand the line struggle between right and left deviations. It should be clear that the PCP were a pretty far left deviation. I’d rather support a slightly right deviationist China that continues to improve people’s lives and counter US hegemony than a random guerrilla group that killed random people motivated by hatred of people even slightly to the right of them (that failed).
Beside that our ideologies aren’t much different, so I’d hope you’d remain open and converse here.
I searched this site because a sudden rise in traffic to our site, and especially my article which you shared above, came from here. This community doesn’t seem too promising considering all the bourgeois and imperialist myths they believe about the PCP, but I’ll stay here and see how it goes.
The PCP was not a cult like Jim Jones’s group was. There’s a clear difference between a party working to liberate the people in a place where most parties turned electoralist and capitulated to the state, and a government that has turned bourgeois rather than simply being “slightly right deviationist”. The US “improved people’s lives” for quite some time because that’s how development works; China could have continued on the socialist path with a planned economy and worked just fine, just as the Stalin era saw the most massive improvement in development for the USSR, but the bourgeoisie seized power and reversed that trend. The PCP was not a “random guerrilla group”; it was a revolutionary party with support from the oppressed masses.
Here’s a document with even more sources than what I used in my article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16bue8TQo-knWAKlkpuNBnePOs7j7KDh11aDoNa_dPO0/edit
I also have a playlist with some decent documentaries that Bad Empanada would never show: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1otLYuSiLBdsx6Wu0hRxdT_T2RLKpGAY
A bourgeois government would not eliminate poverty. The US has more poverty than China at this point. Global poverty’s on the rise if you take China out of the statistics. They are the only reason it’s going down. I didn’t point to Jim Jones as the same kind of thing, I just meant don’t believe everyone when they tell you they’re a communist. Honestly Jones probably wasn’t even some random dude who got a following, but an op. I’ll take a look at your sources.
Our Gonzalite friend is wrong about an number of things, but there is real criticism to be made about Deng radically increasing poverty by undercutting the systems installed under Mao that brought poverty to low levels. The “Chinese miracle” was in many respects solving problems that it itself caused and is a sort of liberal historical revisionism, though of course the more contemporary extreme poverty eradication initiative made real headway that was not made under Mao.
The same statistics that say China’s poverty is reducing claim that people under Mao lived in poverty. Poverty is defined as lacking basic needs, and while Mao-era China was still relatively underdeveloped, the people were not poor because they got basic needs met. Deng Xiaoping commodified things that used to be decommodified, ended subsidies for goods, and overall caused inflation of most prices and a decline in wages. Speaking of wages, Deng re-commodified labor-power, and now China has a higher unemployment rate than the US; what sort of socialist society has the purchase and sale of labor-power?! Commodity production is inevitable in underdeveloped socialism, but there are also plenty of de-commodified goods and services; the capitalist-roaders eliminated them. If you’re not a fan of Khrushchev, you cannot support Deng.
Capitalist production is the highest form of commodity production. Commodity production leads to capitalism only if there is private owner-ship of the means of production, if labour power appears in the market as a commodity which can be bought by the capitalist and exploited in the process of production, and if, consequently, the system of exploitation of wageworkers by capitalists exists in the country. Capitalist production begins when the means of production are concentrated in private hands, and when the workers are bereft of means of production and are compelled to sell their labour power as a commodity.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch03.htm
Poverty is defined as lacking basic needs, and while Mao-era China was still relatively underdeveloped, the people were not poor because they got basic needs met.
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one here who is suspicious of the metrics used to prop up the 800 million lifted out of poverty narrative. IIRC the data used to justify the claim is a World Bank report that shows the population making over a certain threshold of income increasing. As you touched on, this data says nothing as to whether or not their needs are actually met.
I’m definitely pro-Mao. Just because I support later leaders’ further improvements to the Chinese people’s wealth doesn’t mean Mao didn’t lay the groundwork and vastly improve from fuedalism. I never said China was socialist, but they’re on their way. Also aren’t you the one who posted the meme that said both leftcoms and libertarians say “capitalism is trade?” The same argument is sort of being made by saying China’s bad for having commodity production. Also here’s a sourced YT comment I saw a while ago that seemed convincing:
spoiler
1 mean, here’s a master post I typically drop in “Is China Socialist” questions, although many of your critiques will not be addressed in it. This IS a complex topic with a thousand facets. "If we actually want to know if China is socialist or capitalist we have to take a look at the internal dynamics of the country, and it’s clear that the bourgeoisie are not the ones with the dominance on political authority.
So there are several things to establish. First, is that the public sector dominates over the private, and that the second, is that the public sector actually represents the working masses’ interests. Both have to be established. If we are Marxists, then we should understand that political authority originates from control over the means of production, and the Chinese state is not just, by far, the largest enterprise in China, but the largest on the entire planet. The biggest company in the world in terms of net revenue is Apple, and yet Apple’s net revenue is not even a tenth of the net revenue of China’s SOEs. No company even comes close. State-owned industry is an absolute
behemoth in China that towers over everything else.
Often, the counter-argument is to point out that state-owned industry is 40% of the GDP, but private is 60%. But this fails for obvious reasons.
First it ignores that almost none of these are large-scale enterprises. Nearly half of all employment in China is self-employed and about half of businesses are micro-enterprises. Not only is it silly to even suggest something like this should be nationalized, but it’s not even a legitimate threat to the authority of the DOTP. A mom-and-pop shop or someone who is self-employed does not have the capital to actually threaten the authority of the DOTP.
Second, it ignores that, again, there is an enormous gap in even the largest enterprises in China and the SOEs. Chinese state enterprises have a net revenue exceeding $280 billion, the closet is Tencent which has a net revenue of about $35 billion.
Third it ignores that not all industries are equal. Not everyone needs bouncy balls, but most every business needs rubber at
some point, including the bouncy ball manufacturing business. So controlling rubber production gives you much greater influence in the economy than controlling bouncy ball production, since with the former, you’d control something many businesses rely on, while in the latter, you would not.
Fourth, it ignores that there is no private ownership of land. This is pretty massive as is it means any business, even if it is a private business, cannot own the land it is standing on, which allows the government, both national and local, to plan out development by denying land to enterprises it doesn’t think are going to be beneficial to the community, favoring land to ones that are, and also using the rents charged to these businesses to fund public services and infrastructure rather than being pocketed by land lords.
[How the land system with Chinese characteristics affects China’s economic growth](https://www.emerald.com/insight/ content/do/10.1108/CPE-05-2020-0009/ full/html)
Fifth it ignores that there is a spectrum between “private” and “public” and that
many enterprises in China exist between this spectrum. For example, there are forms of soft control in China like opening up party branches within private businesses. Nearly half of all private businesses have party branch within them, and almost every single large enterprise does.
[Influence without Ownership: the Chinese Communist Party Targets the Private Sector](https://www.institutmontaigne.org/ en/blog/influence-without-ownership-chinese-communist-party-targets-private-sector) There’s also forms of partial ownership, such as, the public sector owning only a percentage of a private enterprise, such as, 10% of McDonald’s is owned by the public sector in China.
But this form of soft control isn’t just for show. We can see, for example, Alibaba created a party app promoting the Communist Party. [Alibaba is the force behind hit Chinese Communist Party app] (https:// www.reuters.com/article/us-china-alibaba-government/alibaba-is-the-force-behind-hit-chinese-communist-party-app-sources-idUSKCN1Q70Y7) Compare a DOTB like the US to a DOTP like China and the difference is stark. In the USA, Amazon pays $0 taxes. In China, not only do big companies pay taxes, but they “voluntarily” give up enormous amounts of their profits in donations to the state to fund social programs. China’s Tech Giants Are Giving Away Their Money
In fact, the amount of money Tencent has pledged to give away freely without even formal taxation, to just donate to the state for social programs, is roughly 3/4th of its entire 2020 profits. [Tencent Doubles Social Aid] (https:// i.imgur.com/KztMXf6.png) Insisting that it is the private sector in control when we see things like this just comes off as extremely absurd to me. Take another example, with COVID recently, and hai the lIC let 1 million+ die while the Chinese government protected its people first, and people who were under lockdown also received free food deliveries and other services like free pet care. [Xian delivers free groceries to residents in COVID-19 lockdown](https:// english.news.cn/ 20211230/1d0ebadbc0f3449bafcd6716b37f 3eb2/c.html)
The government has also been fighting to reduce inequality, which the GINI coefficient in China has been declining for years now while rising in comparison to the USA. The rural-urban gap has also been closing for over a decade now. [Gini Indez](https://i.imgur.com/ WflfOEs.png) [Inequality gap closing in China as rural income rises ](https://news.cgtn.com/news/ 32597a47a597a6333566d54/ share_p.html) With Evergrande, if it was any capitalist country, the state would’ve bailed Evergrande out. Instead, the state has chosen to expand the influence of state-owned developers instead. [China property market faces more nationalisation](https://www.reuters.com/ markets/asia/china-property-market-faces-more-nationalisation-2021-12-06/) China also has a large co-operative sector, in agricultural, roughly half of all rural families are part of a farming cooperative, and part of the Xi administration’s poverty-alleviation program has been to promote the expansion of various kinds of co-operatives to increase the income of the rural poor.
[How Village Co-ops Are Remapping China’s Rural Communities](https:// www.sixthtone.com/news/1004505/how-village-co-ops-are-remapping-chinas-rural- communities) & [Xi Jinping turns to Mao Zedong-era system to lift millions of China’s rural poor out of poverty] (https:// www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy article/2184810/can-china-get-its-farmers-back-track-us400-million-fund-state) As Mao put it, you can tell if a country is socialist or capitalist by the direction it is moving. China has not only been strengthening co-operative ownership but also state ownership. [Xi Jinping calls for China’s state-owned enterprises to be ‘stronger and bigger’ despite US, EU opposition ](https:// www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/ article/3108288/xi-jinping-calls-chinas-state-owned-enterprises-be-stronger) Of course, you probably already know that the vast majority of people in China view their government positively. We also see China embracing sustainable development, transforming deserts into forests, and being the biggest investor into green energy in the world, working towards being carbon neutral by 2060. [Taking China’s pulse] (https:// news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/ long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/) and [How China Turned DEADLY Desert Into Green Forest | China’s Green Wall] (https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApSP5apZEfk) and [These are the strategies behind China’s ambitious clean energy transition] (https://www.greenbiz.com/article/these-are-strategies-behind-chinas-ambitious-clean-energy-transition)
If it’s possible to have a version of capitalism that places people above profits, that can plan for long-term sustainable development goals, that can invest massively into public industry and infrastructure, where inequality can go down rather that go upwards, where approval ratings for the government are nearly universal, all while not having to go to war or couping any countries, all while maintaining consistent and fast and rapid technological and industrial development, with the standard of living constantly improving…if this is possible, then you’re making capitalism not sound too bad. If you consider this to be “capitalism” then what do we gain from moving to “socialism” in a real, material sense?"
Why would communists commit crimes against the working class villagers? I think that point alone is a good enough reason to not support them
The PCP is the most advanced political party of our time
Imagine saying that after Gonzalo’s death 😬
Personally I’ve never heard claims that the PCP-SL was homophobic so I won’t comment on this and move straight to the bulk of the essay which is explaining the massacre at Lucanamarca which I suspect is what the author was really driving at.
Lucanamarca was just one dot in the PCP’s many doings. It’s also the only one that supporters of the SL have to contend with because it’s one Gonzalo admitted to.
I think the position towards the PCP starts at figuring out who they were. When you see that Guzman was a college prof and that right around the time he started the SL, the CIA was distributing Quotations from Chairman Mao in South American unis to exacerbate the Sino-Soviet split… is when you start to put 2 and 2 together.
As for whether the claims made against the PCP-SL are bourgeois propaganda, I’m not convinced on the sole basis that we are able to trudge through the slandering done on Stalin and Castro for example, despite much more bourgeois historiography trying to slander Stalin. But claims against the SL come up again and again with only a fringe group trying to defend their legacy.
Frankly it’s a dead party that has left no impact outside of Peru (and in online communist discourse in this area specifically), I don’t care to look much more into what they might have done or not. I don’t follow their line because I hold Marxism-Leninism as the most advanced ideology of the proletariat, not because they committed crimes.
Dead party? What part of Protracted people’s war don’t you understand? They’ve got an infinity +1 shield that means their movement can never be defeated! Who cares if they’re down to like, 300 official members and are only still out there because the government can’t be bothered to actually send in troops to finish them off, they’re still the most active and advanced movement in the world today! And no, I won’t define either “active” or “advanced” and you’re a horrible revisionist for even suggesting I do so!
(Sorry if this is too unserious or inflammatory for this community, let me know and I’ll remove it.)
Nothing you said is more unserious than
The PCP is the most advanced political party of our time
So you’re probably good
I could’ve added a bit about how it is ok to boil right-deviationist babies, but that felt like it was too much of a low hanging fruit.
