In the world today, revolution is confronting counterrevolution.

In the imperialist centers, everything is monitored and calmed down, neutralized by the pressure put on the masses in order to isolate the revolutionnaries; the organizations having upholded that "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" have been hunted down and annihilated, militarily and ideologically, in a very accurate way in order to avoid any spreading.

The imperialist exploitation of Asia, Africa and Latin America has allowed this policy, massively breeding opportunism, such as those "maoists" advocating people's war while marching bareheaded and meeting "publicly", thus strictly complying with the bourgeois lawfulness and obeying to the imperialist surveillance.

In the oppressed countries, the counterrevolution tries to isolate the revolutionnaries as well, but does not hesitate to napalmize whole villages if necessary; the imperialist intelligence services monitor, infiltrate, disorganize, strike, kill; the reactionary armies are always in action.

In Peru, Turkey, the Philippines, India, the marxist-leninist-maoist communists face not only those armies, those intelligence services, but also the counter-guerilla units, mostly directly led by the CIA.

Those counter-guerillas command the most modern equipment, are trained by specialists, are used to psychological warfare.

They can disguise as guerillas or paint their dejections not to be located; strategical hamlets are created, communities are incited to clash; the reactionary army operates largely and brutally, armed militias are trained in the villages, etc.

In this international situation of confrontation between revolution and counterrevolution, Nepal is an exception, since the people's war never faced any imperialist genocidal policy; it is a fundamental and great difference, it is an exception.

The Communist Party of Nepal (maoist) was thus fundamentally wrong while broadcasting videos showing mass meetings being flown over by army choppers: in most oppressed countries, it would have been a bloodbath.

Shall we call to mind that the last illegal meeting of the Maoist Communist Party of Turkey / Northern Kurdistan was attacked with chemical warfare?

Shall we call to mind that in Palestine, the zionist State uses drones to "eliminate" leaders of the Palestinian resistance with choppers?

Shall we call to mind that rape is a classical warfare of imperialist war?

This remarkable situation of Nepal certainly led the CPN(m) to the delusion that "legitimacy" on its own is enough to overcome. That party even made a whole ideology of it, which Prachanda summarized this way in an interview granted to The Worker #10, the review of the CPN(m):

"When an anti-feudal and anti-imperialist state is formed, in such a situation, the political parties that represent various classes and ideological beliefs will not need to set up separate armies because there interests will not be antagonistic.

Instead, there begins a people's democratic competition under people's dictatorship, which only further strengthens people's state.

The issue of forming an army might arise only in two completely different situations. The first situation is, if the Party that leads the people's democratic state turns counter-revolutionary and starts exploiting, suppressing and torturing people, any of the competing political forces using people's right to revolt can and should form an army.

The other situation is, if a political Party competing in the name of people stoops to the level of advocating feudalism and imperialism and starts armed activities under their support and instigation, in such a situation the people's state will certainly impose dictatorship on them and solve the problem."

As you can see, Prachanda explains that an armed clash is won because one is "right". If anything is unfair, it is "enough" to "rebel" and all will be cleaned up.

Obviously, such an idealistic argument directly originates from the dramatic spread of people's war in the specific conditions of Nepal.

It goes so far that Prachanda "forgets" the whole issue of the role of ideology, culture, the burden of traditions. He thinks that classes and parties can genuinely be let to compete.

Does he really imagine that the reactionaries openly admit their nature or uphold exploitation and tyranny as a program? Is he so gullible?

Didn't he understand anything about the concept of fascism, a reactionary ideology seeming ultrarevolutionary in order to deceive the masses?

Did he forget all the lessons about the importance and necessity of cultural revolutions?

Of course, his idealistic viewpoint is based on the objective situation of the people's war in Nepal, which is approximatively the same as the situation of the communists of France in 1944-1945, with a dual power and a dual army; Thorez, the leader of the French CP, highlighted the same idea as Prachanda and released a statement summarizing their common position very well: "Democracy, a continual creation, will conclude under socialism."

Eliminating the principles this way and blurring every limit for democracy's sake allowed to defend the surrendering before the French bourgeoisie, to annihilate the structures of the new power originally from the armed resistance, to compete loyally and peacefully with gaullism for over twenty years, to fit into the mould of social- imperialism and then of social-democracy.

Prachanda says almost verbatim the same: "In this way, only the dictatorship based on the development of democracy can finally prepare necessary preconditions for the withering away of the class, Party and the state." (interview granted to The Worker #10).

What Prachanda stands for is thus not new, for anyone having studied but a bit the international communist movement.

Thorez in France, Togliatti in Italy, Browder in the USA, Tito in Yugoslavia, Pieck in the German Democratic Republic, etc., all of them expressed conceptions of "national paths to socialism" based on ultra-opportunist interpretations of people's democracy.

Thereafter, those revisionists dropped sooner or later the classics, and besides, Prachanda is historically moving away similarly from the classics; he even openly attacks those refusing it by calling them "dogmato-leftists" wanting to "vulgarize marxism as an inert entity".

Always in the same historical prospect, he plays off, like Thorez, democracy against imperialism, and considers imperialism as one bloc, without any internal contradiction: "The main specificity of today's imperialism has been to exploit and oppress the broad masses of people of the earth economically, politically, culturally and militarily in the form of a single globalized state." (interview granted to The Worker #10).

One could confuse it with an antiglobalization work, such as Toni Negri's "Empire".

And there is no doubt that Prachanda's understanding of imperialism is not deeper than Hassan Nasrallah's from Hizballah or Hugo Chavez's, and that he likewise " forgets " the France-Germany-Russia bloc.

Yet all of this can have nobody convinced, because the petty bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries and the national and middle bourgeoisies of the oppressed countries already have their ideologists and lackeys: Chavez, Morales, Lula, etc.

Therefore, Prachanda has to break with the main hurdle against liquidation and pacification: people's war in Peru.

Thereby, one can doubtless play off the hysterical frenzy of the imperialist propaganda having aimed at the "shining path", a concept launched by the CIA to attack the Communist Party of Peru, against the comparatively well-pleasing image of people's war in Nepal in the imperialist media.

It is thus very telling about Prachanda, that he charges the marxists- leninists-maoists of Peru, who lead people's war in Peru and take part in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement just like the CPN (m), of "idealizing Comrade Gonzalo as a supernatural leader who never makes a mistake and of placing him above the whole Party and the Central Committee by asserting his leadership as Jefetura."

Under the pretext that the CPP never spoke about Gonzalo as an individual (with details about his age, pictures, i.e. all that apolitical and fascistic shit), under the pretext that the CPP does precisely not set Gonzalo above the party by individualizing him (whereas Prachanda's picture is everywhere), Gonzalo is said to be considered as a "supernatural" being!

Therefore, Prachanda has understand nothing, since Gonzalo himself spoke about "Gonzalo thought" without any connection with a personal issue; on the contrary, Gonzalo's analyses and the directions he stated to be followed to lead the revolution were always pointed up.

One year before Gonzalo's arrest, the PCP clearly said : "The leadership could be wiped out, in part, not all, but the leaders who remain must and will follow the plans, the struggle, the People's War. We are forged in the struggle and resolutely believe that the revolution can't be stopped (...).

Any of us can fall, but the Party will continue, our immolated lives will encourage those who remain, and the path will continue until communism is imposed on Earth. This is our conviction." (Communist Party of Peru, Building the conquest of power in the midst of the people's war)

Prachanda shows no respect for a comrade haing been shown off in the guise of a convict in a cage, and who, despite abasement and torture, delivered a genuinely revolutionary speech, calling of course to continue the struggle until victory.

Much more seriously, Prachanda, as well as this criticism, repeated the imperialist mudslinging about Gonzalo's betrayal.

Gonzalo has been held in total isolation since September 1992, when he made his last TV appearance and precisely stated that people's war would continue, that his arrest was but a bend in the road. From that time on, nobody has heard of him, except people linked to the CIA, it is only known that he is held in a tiny cell in a military jail on a naval base.

The fascistic Peruvian rulers thereafter pretended that Gonzalo advocated peace agreements, that he held hunger strikes (a practice always rejected by Gonzalo), but there is no evidence at all, nothing, nothing but a few renegades sold to reaction.

However, Prachanda cannot help saying that "sufficient indications that Chairman Gonzalo himself is the main spokesperson of the two- line struggle developed within the Party after his arrest, as well as of the right opportunist line that argues for peaceful conciliation with the enemy by abandoning war."

This is an open attack against the campaigns led by the comrades of Peru against the CIA propaganda.

It is an obvious support for the capitulationists of Peru who say that Gonzalo sold himself, but mainly sold themselves to reaction.

It is a clear contribution to counterrevolution.

Let us be straight: Gonzalo first defined the notion of "marxism- leninism-maoism", the Communist Party of Peru first opened people's war, based on this ideology.

By attacking the marxists-leninists-maoists of Peru and Gonzalo, Prachanda wants to resolve marxism-leninism-maoism into an "anti- stalinian maoism", the very banner under which all the phoney maoists of Europe operated during the 1970s to liquidate all, to transform within the Greens party (bourgeois environmentalists), into intellectuals, journalists, officials, etc.

Those phoney maoists did the same as Prachanda is doing today, they extolled relativism: Lenin was not so good, Stalin had no concrete outcome, the cultural revolution got nowhere, all must be begun anew, ideology is often redundant regarding to the democratic principles, etc.

It is the classical idea of the intellectuals playing at "applying maoism to maoism", dialectics to dialectics, splitting hairs to eventually liquidate all.

How many leaders were there in Europe, who thought themselves to be new theorists, new Hegels, new Lenins, new Maos?

Prachanda has the same pretension, when he states that "[he does] not think time has come to polemicize or debate the terminology 'Thought' or 'ism' right now."

With his relativist and ultra-democratic talk, Prachanda prevents any scientific analysis of revisionism by suggesting a "miracle drug", he stops any serious study of the existence of a black line in socialist countries, of its ability to conduct subversive activities and to fudge the communist positions(socialist realism transformed into formal propaganda in the USSR, people's democracy transformed into class alliance in Eastern Europe, analysis of the differences between imperialisms transformed into the "three worlds theory" in People's Republic of China, etc.).

He ideologically strengthens the hoxhaist current (which is, just like trotskyism, a much more present ideology than maoism in the imperialist countries) which has always pretended that the maoists were "leftist revisionists", that they conducted armed struggles with no vision, with no will to win, that they stood for the left-wing national bourgeoisie, etc.

He subjectively contributes to the pacification of armed struggles and people's wars in the oppressed countries, by giving value to talks with elements of the old State; he even openly advised the marxists-leninists-maoists to take advantage of the Nepalese example.

He objectively supports the "antiglobalization" and "popular democratic" plans of Chavez, Morales, Lula, of all those national and middle bourgeoisies which want to take the power and eventually quickly transform into compradore bourgeoisies serving the imperialist France-Germany-Russia bloc, the everyday competitor of the USA in the framework of the confrontation between imperialisms.

Prachanda's line serves modern revisionnism and imperialist pacification.

Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist Maoist) [France] August 2006