Regarding a new attack by a gentleman from Brazil against the Communist Workers’ Union (mlm)
Last May, a new attack against the Communist Workers’ Union (MLM) was published under the name “Editorial Team at the Service of the People – Brazil,” entitled “The UOC’s False Self-Criticism and Its Political Complicity with the Treachery of the Revisionist Clique of Sonu-Satish-Devji.” This attack once again deserves our rejection, as it reveals the same bad faith and intellectualist tricks traditionally employed by petty-bourgeois sects to attack the revolutionary proletariat and its organizations.
For any proletarian with even a modicum of class consciousness, internationalism is a class principle which, according to Lenin at the Second Congress of the Communist International, requires: “…first, that the interests of the proletarian struggle in any one country should be subordinated to the interests of that struggle on a worldwide scale and, second, that a nation which is achieving victory over the bourgeoisie must be able and willing to make the greatest national sacrifices for the overthrow of international capital.”
This formulation carries forward the banner raised by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party: Workers of all countries, unite! And the Inaugural manifesto of the International Workingmen’s Association, written by Marx: “The experience of the past has shown us how the disregard of the bonds of fraternity which ought to exist between the workmen of different countries, and which should incite them to support by each other in all their struggles for emancipation, is punished by the common defeat of their isolated efforts.”
Consequently, internationalist solidarity against imperialist aggression toward peoples, and solidarity with comrades fighting against every form of oppression and exploitation throughout the world, are not the private property of any small group, nor are they conditioned on blind adherence or upon remaining silent about their shortcomings, mistakes, or deviations. On the contrary, the entire experience of the workers’ movement demonstrates that genuine proletarian internationalism requires, in addition to unconditional support for those fighting against reaction, learning from both their positive and negative lessons, as well as offering fraternal criticism of their mistakes and limitations.
Marx did not disown the Parisian workers who dared to storm heaven in 1871, despite his warnings that the uprising was premature. On the contrary, once the proletarians took the initiative, he made the greatest possible efforts to ensure that the Commune advanced as far as possible along the revolutionary path, drawing general lessons from this experience for the international workers’ movement. Lenin did not dismiss with reactionary diatribes the European “Leftists,” who refused to analyze the concrete situation and attempted to turn the Bolsheviks’ experience into a universal recipe. Instead, he patiently exposed their limitations and provided guidance for their correct course of action, as set forth in “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile disorder. Mao did not attack the Communist International as an enemy despite its mistakes in its guidance concerning China; rather, he criticized those errors both theoretically and practically, providing the proletariat of the backward countries with a broader and more comprehensive perspective for revolutionary action.
For communists, there is a dividing line between the enemy and ourselves, and for this reason the entire history of the workers’ movement is the history of the struggle between what is correct and what is erroneous within its own ranks, as an expression of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in society. Mao repeatedly insisted on the need to distinguish between Yenan and Sian, between the enemy and ourselves. This corresponds to the orientation put forward in the Manifesto of the Communist Party: to support every revolutionary movement directed against the existing social order.
In this regard, solidarity with the Palestinian people against U.S.-Zionist-imperialist aggression, and support for the Palestinian resistance, are not conditional upon defending Hamas’s fundamentalist obscurantism, just as condemning the aggression against Ukraine, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba is not conditional upon supporting their regimes, which are also pro-imperialist.
Likewise, internationalist solidarity with the Communist Party of India (Maoist) [CPI (Maoist)] and with the People’s War it leads is not the property of any particular party, organization, or group. The revolutionary struggle of the Indian people, led by the CPI (Maoist), is part of the struggle of the world proletariat against imperialism and reaction, and forms part of the World Proletarian Revolution, regardless of whatever ideological and political differences may exist.
Furthermore, an inseparable part of proletarian internationalism is to take upon ourselves the problems faced by comrades around the world. Taking them as our own does not merely mean signing statements of support or carrying out some activity; it requires active participation and contributing to the clarification of problems, criticizing mistakes, and developing the struggle of lines. A timely criticism, a scientific argument, or a well-founded recommendation is worth more than a thousand speeches of empty praise and flattery.
Consequently, attempting to use a disagreement over the development of capitalism in oppressed countries as grounds for labeling a proletarian organization revisionist and counterrevolutionary is not only a vile and despicable act, but also a service to reaction and imperialism.
By attempting to turn support for the People’s War in India and for the CPI (Maoist) into private property, the author of the libel against the UOC (MLM) ends up adopting, in this case, a sectarian and essentially counterrevolutionary position, as demonstrated by his underhanded attack on the International Committee in Support of the People’s War in India (ICSPWI), which for more than a decade has been the principal promoter of international support for this revolutionary struggle. Regarding the worldwide campaign of solidarity with the People’s War in India and against Operation Kagaar, a global campaign endorsed by the CPI (Maoist), the aforementioned gentleman states:
“This time, usurping the leadership of the International Committee in Support of the People’s War in India (ICSPWI), reducing it to a small group that restricted its expansion to democratic, progressive, and anti-imperialist forces, as well as to worldwide mass support for this advanced line of combat of the World Revolution.”
Who usurped the leadership of the ICSPWI? It was the comrades from France (Pierre), Italy, and Galicia who organized and developed this initiative, around which comrades from other countries joined, including the UOC (MLM) in Colombia. It was an initiative supported by the CPI (Maoist), and it seems that what bothers the gentleman in question, due to his petty egotism, is that others, rather than himself, took the initiative and led the efforts in support of the People’s War in India.
Anyone who has closely followed the solidarity actions in support of the People’s War in India and against Operation Kagaar, particularly those carried out during the week of March 23–29 of this year, will realize that numerous revolutionary and progressive forces participated in this campaign so that no one can claim it as though it were his own “fiefdom,” as the gentleman in question attempts to do.
On the other hand, the gentleman once again resorts to slander, maliciously accusing the UOC (MLM) of calling for the abandonment of the People’s War. On the contrary, anyone even remotely familiar with the history of this position knows that, since the days of the magazine Contradiction, the UOC has consistently denounced the so-called “peace agreements” (such as the Peace Letters in Peru following the arrest of Comrade Gonzalo, and even the false peace agreement signed by the guerrillas in Colombia); it has condemned betrayals of the revolution, as it did in the case of Prachanda’s clique in Nepal; it has harshly criticized liquidators such as K. Venu in India when he called for the dissolution of the Party; and it has even thoroughly criticized comrades who have adopted a centrist attitude toward these decisive problems of the revolution.
The gentleman believes he has found a fact and an argument with which to condemn the UOC (MLM) as revisionist and counterrevolutionary in the mistake of plagiarizing Mr. Abhinav Sinha, committed by a comrade of the organization’s Commission for Theoretical Struggle. This error was recognized by our Directing Committee as a failure of revolutionary vigilance, since plagiarism is unacceptable in the workers’ movement. He further argued, however, that our organization did not need to borrow Mr. Abhinav Sinha’s arguments, since the discussion over whether imperialist capitalism destroys feudal relations in oppressed countries has a long history in Colombia and in the International Communist Movement dating back to the 1960s, a debate in which we have taken a position of our own.
As for Mr. Abhinav Sinha, we do not know if he is an “important counterrevolutionary,” as the gentleman from Brazil pontificates. What can be known from his writings is that he is an intellectual who also identifies himself as a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist and who polemicizes against advocates of the thesis of semi-feudalism in India, including comrades of the Communist Party of India (Maoist).
As to whether the uneven development of capitalism implicitly entails the destruction of precapitalist relations, and how this process has unfolded in oppressed countries, this is a legitimate discussion among Marxist-Leninist-Maoists concerning the Marxist analysis of the socioeconomic relations of concrete reality, and not a matter of reciting phrases, as is customary among dogmatists.
The existence of capitalist relations, particularly in the countryside, in the majority of oppressed countries is a concrete reality, an objective truth. Even in India, where the majority of the population still lives in rural areas, wage-labor relations have become established in many regions where semi-feudal relations once predominated. This is a law of the uneven development of capitalism and shouldn´t surprise to any Marxist, but which dogmatists refuse recognize.
Now, the fact that some intellectual—even if he were a reactionary bourgeois—acknowledged this objective truth should not be a reason for the uproar raised by the gentleman from Brazil. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao did not hesitate to recognize the discoveries made by bourgeois authors and even welcomed their correct conclusions, incorporating and developing them further. Marxist economic theory, the recognition of class struggle as the driving force of history, the evolution of the family, the theory of imperialism, among many other truths, have their antecedents in bourgeois intellectuals. Even the Three Principles of the People, which the Communist Party of China adopted as the programmatic basis of the Revolutionary United Front, were formulated by Sun Yat-sen.
The gentleman from Brazil believes that insults can invalidate or discredit the findings of science, and for this reason he attempts to intimidate less-informed comrades, once again pontificating and demonstrating, for the umpteenth time, not only his bad faith but also his profound ignorance:
“This is the legacy of which they are so proud; they claim that capitalist relations had already become established in the Colombian countryside by the mid-1960s. But it is completely false to associate this legacy with the founding of the Communist Party of Colombia (PCC). The PCC-ML was headed by Pedro Vásquez Rendón, an advocate of Mao Zedong Thought, as Maoism was referred to at the time. Rendón participated in and led the guerrilla struggle in southern Tolima, a peasant region with a strong revolutionary tradition in Colombia.”
But let us allow the comrades themselves—especially Pedro Vásquez Rendón—to refute the claims of the gentleman in question. In their preparatory documents for the 1965 Party Congress, when addressing Colombian society and the program of the revolution, they stated:
“Colombia is a capitalist country, fundamentally intertwined with remnants of feudalism, dependent on U.S. imperialism, which distorts and obstructs its development.
It is a capitalist country because its predominant relations of production are capitalist and show a clear tendency toward expansion, while feudal forms of production are receding. As for its evident dependence on U.S. imperialism, this is the fundamental cause of its insufficient and distorted development. This dependence is not open and straightforward, as occurs in colonies in the strict sense, but rather concealed, since it operates through economic exchange ultimately imposed by the circumstances of the world history of capitalism in which Colombia has been situated since the beginning of its history as a nation, particularly when the incipient bourgeoisie achieved a certain accumulation of capital derived primarily from mercantile activities.
… In Colombia there are typical representatives of the remnants of feudalism, but they do not constitute a class in development; rather, they are a class in decline, closely intertwined with the pro-imperialist bourgeoisie and, like imperialism, hostile to Colombia’s development.”
(See Documents 1, Communist Party of Colombia M.L., Editorial 8 de Junio, pp. 107–108 and 116.)
Referring to the landowners and “large landowners” whom the dogmatists of the time described as feudal lords, the comrades stated that this was a particular phenomenon in which reactionary military and paramilitary violence had been the instrument through which the large landowners and capitalists had seized the best lands, displacing the peasants; a phenomenon that has marked the history of the country and still persists:
To speak of “large landowners” in the abstract and to see them as mere feudal lords from the European past, while forgetting that, to a great extent, they are genuine modern capitalists, is evidence of diverting the revolutionary edge away from the pro-imperialist bourgeoisie that has developed anti-popular violence for nefarious purposes.
… The convergence of the interests of large landownership and the big bourgeoisie constitutes a fundamental aspect of the assessment of the national reality, since it explains the reactionary and aggressive character of the ruling classes, demonstrated throughout the process of violence of recent decades, and determines—and must determine—basic changes in revolutionary strategy.
We are dealing with remnants of feudalism, but above all with a feudalized bourgeoisie that has become the worst internal enemy of our people.
… The struggle against the pro-imperialist big bourgeoisie is therefore the same struggle against large landownership, since in Colombia large landownership and big capital, when they do not coincide, mutually reinforce one another… (Ibid., pp. 117, 118, and 119).
Referring to the Colombian bourgeoisie, the comrades stated the following regarding its pro-imperialist character:
The bourgeoisie, for its part, must continue clamoring for the incorporation of foreign capital into the country, and by doing so it accentuates its truly anti-national character. It mortgages the sovereignty of its state, since, lacking possibilities for development in the productive sense, it can only sustain itself by surrendering more and more into the arms of imperialism.
It increasingly depends on international exploiters, although it retains the reins of domestical power, with a well-organized state to squeeze from the people the profits that enrich it and the tribute it pays to its masters.
Confronted with our people as an exploiting class, the Colombian big bourgeoisie becomes a junior partner of U.S. imperialism in this common enterprise of profit-making.
It loses out to imperialism only relatively, since it is only with the latter’s help that it can profit at the expense of our people.
Thus, the patriotic, popular, anti-imperialist revolution will also be a revolution against the pro-imperialist bourgeoisie, its agents, and its allies. In the face of this revolution, the fate of the denationalize and anti-national bourgeoisie will be the same as that of imperialism. (Ibid., p. 121).
As can be seen, the comrades of that period did not devote themselves to reciting empty phrases; rather, they used Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to knit one’s brow when examining reality and, from that examination, to elucidate programmatic, strategic, and tactical formulations.
In response to that reality, the Communist Party of Colombia (Marxist-Leninist) set out to develop the strategy of Protracted People’s War, but in accordance with the characteristics of Colombian society. The Second Plenum of the Central Committee, held in October 1966, devoted an important part of its efforts to clarifying the question of people’s war in Colombia, considering the various revolutionary armed detachments of the period, it stated:
Of course, both the ELN and the guerrillas of Marquetalia, Riochiquito, Pato, and Guayabero are objectively revolutionary, and on the subjective level they fight with weapons in hand against reaction and imperialism. Both have enormous possibilities for development if they correct their most pronounced defects. For the ELN, magnificent prospects will open up if it overcomes its contempt for theory and for the vanguard party, consciously participating in the Patriotic Liberation Front. As for the other guerrilla detachments, the only possibility for progress lies in repudiating the treacherous leadership of the Vierist clique and participating in the great revolutionary current leading to the formation of the National Patriotic Liberation Front, as indicated by our Tenth Congress.
… Our Party, and a large part of the people as well, knows and has found the flaw about the experience of attempting to lead war from one or more armed fronts (“foco”), placed more or less behind the backs of the masses. For us, the issue is to extend the people’s war, starting from several guerrilla zones deeply rooted in the masses of each region. Furthermore, we know that the concentration of revolutionary forces in a single location provokes, in response, the accumulation of enemy forces in that same sector, depriving us of the tactical superiority initially acquired. It is therefore necessary to develop the struggle, more or less simultaneously, in various zones, dispersing the enemy’s forces. No one can fail to see that this is happening in the country today and that it constitutes a guarantee for the progressive expansion of the people’s war. (Ibid., pp. 285 and 296, emphasis in the original).
In March 1968, Pedro Vásquez Rendón, during the controversy with the advocates of semi-feudalism and the “national bourgeoisie” at the Third Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party, stated:
Our Party has vividly assimilated… [the] extraordinary and rich experience of the struggle of the popular masses; it has united with them and, interpreting their interests, formulated at the Tenth Congress its characterization of Colombian society, based on the historical stage of its current economic, political, social, and cultural development; it identified the social classes that participate in national life, establishing the role each of them has played up to the present and the role they will have to play in the historical destiny of the nation; it identified armed struggle as the principal means of resolving all the problems of the nation and the Colombian people; it concluded that “Colombia is a country with predominantly capitalist relations of production, fundamentally intertwined with feudal remnants, dependent on U.S. imperialism, which distorts and obstructs its development,” and that, consequently, only through the Patriotic, Popular, and Anti-Imperialist Revolution on the Road to Socialism is it possible to liberate the nation and the people from oppression and exploitation.
These formulations are the product of a concrete analysis of the concrete reality of the country and the Colombian people, and in arriving at them, the viewpoints and universal truths of Marxism-Leninism have been employed. They constitute the backbone of the political-theoretical body that our Party has submitted to the judgment of the broad popular masses for subsequent verification and rectification. (Documents 2, Communist Party of Colombia M.L., Editorial 8 de Junio, pp. 279–280).
Refuting the advocates of a supposed national bourgeoisie, he said:
Our Party has pointed out since the Tenth Congress, and this has been confirmed in practice, that the bourgeoisie is an enemy class of the revolution, given its characteristics as an obligatory and unconditional partner of U.S. imperialism. In Colombia, this class exercises political power in alliance with the landlord sectors and serves anti-national interests, since it serves U.S. imperialism. (Ibid., p. 283).
“… It must be very clear that in Colombia, within the class referred to by our Party as the bourgeoisie, just as among the landlords, there is currently no progressive sector, much less a nationalist one. This is what our Party has determined as a result of many years of study, investigation, and analysis. This formulation of the Tenth Congress has been and continues to be subjected to a severe test in daily practice
If a progressive bourgeois sector emerges within the process we are experiencing in the future, only practice will be able to determine this, and when that opportunity arises, our Party will not disregard it, because we are a Marxist organization whose greatest concern is that its theoretical formulations correspond exactly to concrete reality. (Ibid., pp. 285–286).
Likewise, he argued that in Colombia there existed an internal market and that its economy was immersed in the world market; furthermore, that wage labor, the «typical form of capitalist relations of production» had become established in the countryside, even though it is precisely there those «feudal relations exist with the greatest aggressiveness»:
In the countryside, where the backwardness of capitalist development is most evident, machinery and certain modern techniques of animal breeding and cultivation are already present, as are developed financial systems. This is demonstrated by coffee-growing operations, the sugar and panela industries, cotton, banana, rice, cereal, and oilseed plantations, vegetable oil industries, etc. Moreover, small-scale peasant production contains certain germs of capitalism, manifested in the high degree of commodification of small farms across vast regions; we have observed that the production of middle peasants and above is carried out to a large extent through wage labor and, to a considerable degree for the market.
… Yes, comrades, Colombia is a country with predominantly capitalist relations in its economy. This is strictly true. Those who fail to recognize this reality are completely mistaken, as are those who advocate a classical bourgeois revolution while attempting to disguise their aims under the pretext of a progressive bourgeoisie.
But our Party not only asserts the predominantly capitalist character of the relations of production; it also maintains that our economy is “dependent on U.S. imperialism, which distorts and hinders its development.” The advocates of the old-type bourgeois revolution forget this part of our formulations; they forget that this situation determines our condition as a semicolonial country; they forget the historical fact of the October Proletarian Revolution; they forget the existence of the socialist camp. They neither see nor wish to see the anti-imperialist and national-liberation character of our revolution, which prevents the ruling bourgeoisie, allied with and subordinate to imperialism and associated with the landed estates, from participating in the process alongside the people or from leading it, and which at the same time determines the fact that our revolution is part of the world proletarian revolution. (Ibid., pp. 291–292).
And in the same way that he polemicized against the right-wing position that was expelled from the Party in 1968, Pedro Vázquez Rendon also fought against the “leftist” ideas of those who upheld the thesis of an immediate socialist revolution:
- The system of land ownership, which identifies approximately 8,000 landowners (large landowners and bourgeois) as the owners of 50 percent of the country’s arable land…
- The existence of nearly a quarter of a million peasant families who still live under conditions very close to serfdom and cultivate land belonging to landowners, having to pay rent for the land in money, in products, and even through personal service.
- The widespread presence of rudimentary means of production.
- The persistence of numerous artisans still bound to the feudal mode of production.
- The persistence of numerous legal, ideological, cultural, and religious institutions that are survivals of a feudal superstructure.
Those who put forward the thesis of the socialist revolution have not wanted to take the trouble to investigate our national reality. (Ibid., pp. 293–294).
This is how the great Pedro Vásquez Rendón spoke, and in this way, he reaffirmed the line approved at the Congress, according to which the character of the revolution in Colombia was Patriotic, Popular, Anti-Imperialist, on the Road to Socialism; a form of the New Democratic Revolution as proposed by Mao Tse-tung, but not identical to the revolution in China. Such was the outlook of the Marxists of that period, mortal enemies of religious formulations.
In this historic document, Pedro Vásquez said regarding investigation:
With sufficient reason, Comrade Mao states: “He who does not study and investigate has no right to speak.” That is to say, whoever does not study and investigate the concrete conditions of concrete reality does not possess the elements that scientific rigor requires for serious analysis and, consequently, cannot issue a serious judgment. Everything else is the charlatanism of fools or dishonest people who have nothing to do with Marxism-Leninism or with the sacred interests of the proletariat and the people in general. (Ibid., p. 278).
These are words that the know-it-all from Brazil should remember, since he arrogantly ignores this history of the programmatic struggle in Colombia and yet dares to pontificate about it. In Colombia, since the mid-1960s, when the Communist Party of Colombia (Marxist-Leninist) was restructured, it was already clear to the communists that capitalist relations predominated, and the comrades of that period found a particular formulation to point out that this was not a revolution like the one that had taken place in China, although it was still necessary to sweep away the existing feudal remnants.
Consequently, the Strategy of Protracted People’s War also had certain particular and specific formulations, as cited above in reference to the ELN and the FARC. To this was added the plan to establish five operational zones, based on the same idea of dispersing the enemy’s forces and not losing the tactical advantage, while establishing support bases or liberated zones. Given the enemy’s initial superiority, this compelled the adoption of guerrilla warfare as the form of struggle, which could not be separated from the revolutionary struggle of the masses: “The mobilized masses are the main point of support, the fundamental force, the superior weapon.”
When examining the characteristics of the Colombian population and its majority concentration in the cities, the Second Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party made it clear that:
“More than half of the population, 53%, lives in concentrations of more than 1,500 inhabitants.
… Statistics from recent decades show a rapid exodus from the countryside to the city, and at present it continues irresistibly—and with nothing indicating that it will diminish—the tendency toward urban growth at the expense of the rural population.
… Nevertheless, the Plenum considered that this does not invalidate the concept that the struggle will fundamentally take place in the countryside during its first two phases, but rather obliges us to think about how to link broad sectors of the urban population to the people’s war from the beginning. It obliges us to anticipate that, under conditions such as ours, the people’s war will shift its principal center to the cities in a shorter period than would be required in a country with a majority peasant population. (Documents 1, Communist Party of Colombia M.L., Editorial 8 de Junio, pp. 259–260).
With this orientation, efforts were made to form detachments in several regions, and the peasant uprising was organized in the northwestern region of the Upper Sinú and San Jorge River, where the first Patriotic Junta was established, an experiment in building the new power, which relied on the strength of the masses organized in the Junta, with its own democratic government backed by the People’s Liberation Army and the militias. This epic struggle withstood two campaigns of encirclement and annihilation, but was ultimately defeated by the forces of reaction supported by the Yankee imperialists.
The failed efforts to launch a genuine people’s war and build support bases led to the death of the majority of the Central Committee, the isolation of the Party from the working class, and a crisis from which it never recovered, culminating in its fragmentation and its degeneration as the proletariat’s vanguard detachment.
Where, then, is the malicious rubbish spewed by the pontiff from Brazil, according to whom: “it is completely false that this legacy [that of the UOC (mlm)] is related to the founding of the Communist Party of Colombia (PCC)”?
And regarding the detachments linked to drug trafficking, which the gentleman claims are still an expression of the peasant struggle for land, the cruel facts of the war against the people speak for themselves. As early as 1973, the Fifth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Colombia (Marxist-Leninist) was compelled to identify the FARC as counterrevolutionary in a historic Resolution, which we reproduce in full so that the reader may judge for themselves:
CONCLUSION OF THE FIFTH PLENUM OF THE CC THAT MUST BE MADE KNOWN TO THE MASSES REGARDING THE FARC
The Fifth Plenum of the CC of the Communist Party of Colombia (M-L), once again establishing the true reactionary class nature of the native revisionists, their sinister role in the struggles of the people and, in particular, in the Colombian armed movement, which they have sought to infiltrate and manipulate for the purpose of betraying the revolution, considers it necessary to denounce:
- That the FARC are a counterrevolutionary organization directly serving the revisionists and the oligarchy of Colombia; they are completely controlled by revisionism from the lower ranks upward and governed by statutes that oblige the rank and file not to dissent from the revisionists’ treacherous policies. According to these Statutes, all “commanders are distinguished militants” of revisionism.
- That the FARC are an armed instrument for carrying out a plan of native revisionism in complete agreement with the political and military plans of the oligarchy and Yankee imperialism against the revolutionary movement in northwestern Colombia. For both the oligarchy and North American imperialism, as well as native revisionism, this movement constitutes a major obstacle to their efforts to prevent the revolution.
For these clear reasons, the Fifth Plenum considered that organizational-level relations with the FARC cannot be established or maintained, and resolves:
– To publicly denounce the FARC and their activities as counterrevolutionary, and to draw attention to the difference between their revisionist leadership and the honest but misled elements at the base of the organization.
– To strengthen the Party, the EPL, and the masses from an ideological and political standpoint in order to confront revisionism and, in particular, the activities it carries out through the FARC.
– To issue special instructions to the regional organizations to confront this situation.
– To deploy an intensive propaganda plan throughout the Party.
– To entrust the EPL newspaper with developing an active campaign to clarify and denounce the activities of the FARC, both within and on the periphery of this region and throughout the rest of the country.
– To prevent the infiltration of the region by the FARC and entrust the EPL with carrying out this provision.
– To identify and denounce the counterrevolutionary maneuvers that the FARC have carried out or are carrying out against other revolutionary movements.
Communist Party of Colombia (Marxist-Leninist)
V Plenum of the Central Committee
July 11 – August 4, 1973 – From the Mountains (Documents 3, Communist Party of Colombia M.L., Editorial 8 de Junio, pp. 310–311).
This was already that clear to the communists in Colombia as early as 1973, but the crimes of the FARC leaders did not stop there: there is also a history of their ties to the ruling classes, and particularly to drug trafficking, which only the naive refuse to accept. In the case of the gentleman in question, this reaches the extreme of labeling communists counterrevolutionaries and mouthpieces for the imperialists simply for telling the truth, as it is their duty to do.
It is an irrefutable historical fact that, in the early 1970s, the FARC persecuted and treated as criminals the peasants who cultivated marijuana, considering it a counterrevolutionary practice, while charging “taxes” to large producers, just as they did with cattle ranchers and other capitalists; on numerous occasions, they opposed the struggle of the peasant masses for land, even going so far as to assassinate their leaders. This tendency toward an alliance with the enemies intensified in the late 1970s, turning the FARC into protectors and intermediaries between the peasants and buyers of coca leaf and coca base paste.
It is also an irrefutable historical fact that, at the proposal of Rodrigo Londoño, alias “Timochenco,” the Seventh FARC Conference, held in May 1982, approved the collection of “taxes” from all actors in the drug-trafficking chain, from cultivation and processing laboratories to the use of airstrips and other means of transportation for bringing in supplies and taking out the final product, etc. The excuse was that, from that moment onward, this guerrilla organization would become a true regular army—for which reason it added Ejército del Pueblo (People’s Army), or EP, to its acronym—and that it intended to “expand the war toward the seizure of power.”
Subsequently, during the 1990s and 2000s, following the Eighth Conference, the FARC assumed direct territorial control over cultivation areas, moving from the collection of “taxes” to directly administering the cultivation, processing of coca leaf, and transportation of cocaine hydrochloride toward the borders and coastal areas.
They participated directly in cultivation, processing, and export in the Eastern Plains, where they controlled the entire process, from production to direct delivery to foreign drug traffickers at their own airstrips and camps. They continued charging a “tax” for every gram of coca base paste marketed in the areas where they had a presence, providing armed protection for crops, laboratories, and drug escape and transit routes. They also established alliances with international drug cartels, particularly Mexican ones.
This is a historical truth, so much so that even during the false peace negotiations in Havana, the FARC leaders acknowledged it. The pontiff from Brazil conceals these facts, including the notorious case in which Tomás Medina Caracas, alias “Negro Acacio,” one of the members of the FARC leadership, escaped a bombing of his camp where Brazilian drug trafficker Luiz Fernando da Costa, alias “Fernandinho Beira-Mar,” was arrested in the midst of an exchange of a cocaine shipment for weapons in 2001.
The groups now referred to as FARC dissidents have changed absolutely nothing, except that they do not even fight the military forces anymore. They are devoted to the struggle for control of the territories where coca leaf is cultivated and the routes used to export cocaine in the country. Added to this is their involvement in mining, principally gold mining.
As for the ELN, although it preserves some of the revolutionary aspects of its founders and generally maintains work among the masses, both rural and urban, it is not exempt from charging “taxes” to imperialist companies and large capitalists in exchange for “peace” in the territories where it has a presence. At the same time, some of its fronts have also become involved in drug trafficking and mining, as well as in armed struggle over the revenues generated by these activities.
All of these are confirmed facts; denying them, as the gentleman from Brazil does, is simply indefensible. Where is the peasant struggle for land? In the mind of someone who pretends to know everything and dares to pontificate about problems that he either ignores or deliberately conceals.
If this gentleman truly cared about the peasants, he should pay attention to the frequent denunciations made by indigenous and peasant comrades from the territories, some of which have been published on the Revolución Obrera portal[1], where they expose the reactionary practices of those whom he defends. These are facts that anyone with a modicum of common sense and even a little social consciousness should repudiate, not because the imperialists and reactionary classes say so.
What has been said is sufficient to refute the “brilliance” of the gentleman from Brazil and to reaffirm the correctness of the position of the Communist Workers’ Union (mlm), which, following the revolutionary Marxist tradition of which it is an heir, has fought to defend the science of proletarian revolution, despite and against those who seek to turn it into a catechism of articles of faith.
Thus, with such “arguments” and slanders, a character who poses as an all-knowing internationalist reveals his miserable subjective idealist conception of the world, his metaphysical method of thinking, and his petty-bourgeois, sectarian point of view. The efforts of this pontiff from Brazil, in his attempt to smear those who unreservedly support the revolution in India by labeling them counterrevolutionaries, merely expose the false internationalism of the petty bourgeoisie which, in its sectarian eagerness to divide the revolutionary camp, does indeed render a great service to imperialism and world reaction. This occurs at a time when the Communist Party of India (Maoist), the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army, the People’s War, and the people of India are demanding from the proletariat and the peoples of the world the broadest unity and the firmest internationalist solidarity in order to isolate their imperialist, bourgeois, and landlord enemies.
Finally, we hope in the coming weeks to respond to the diatribe that the same gentleman entitled: The New Democratic Revolution Is the Main Force of the World Proletarian Revolution.
Commission for Investigation and Theoretical Struggle
Communist Workers’ Union (mlm)
August 2026
[1] See:
Once Again, the Terror of Drug Trafficking in Southwestern Colombia
The Dissident Groups Seek to Control the Social and Political Movement Through Force
The Truth About the War for Territory in Cauca
No More Terrorism Against the People
The National Army Attacks Peasants and Indigenous People to Defend Smurfit Kappa
