From the CoRIM

May 1, 2005: Communism in the 21st Century

Revolution #1, May 1, 2005, posted at revcom.us

April 18, 2005. A World to Win News Service. Following is a statement by the Committee of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (CoRIM) on the occasion of May Day 2005.

The world seethes and moans with discontent and resistance on the part of the people. Through war in Iraq and the threat of wars in the Middle East and elsewhere, the imperialist powers, in particular the U.S., are desperately trying to hammer into place a new world order with itself as king of the heap. Their hands drip with blood.

Many people are in a reflective mood, angered that their struggles in the millions to stop the war failed. Valiant resistance is taking place on the ground in Iraq. Regrettably, painfully, the target is not always the imperialist forces of occupation and oppression and the reactionary regime.

May Day is a time to take stock of where we stand in our struggle to overthrow the ruling exploiting classes. What we need is a world where the interests of humanity and not the endless search for profit is at the center of society, where the masses are no longer faceless, regarded as beasts of burden, locked out of any possibility of utilizing their creative energy to consciously transform the world and themselves.

The global plan of U.S. imperialism is sinister—one world, one empire. They are unleashing naked military intervention on a scale that no other power can rival to enforce and organize globalized exploitation. A range of possibilities exists for the world’s people, from devastating defeats to great advances, including revolutions in a number of countries. The outcome is up to us all.

Propelled into resistance, new generations have stepped onto the stage. They lack knowledge of our past achievements. Or they only hear the ruling class propaganda machine spewing out that Communism has failed.

The masses need the clear vision of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to guide them in their struggles. They need a vanguard leadership wielding this ideology in each country and a new communist international to help different streams of revolution form a worldwide torrent against the capitalist system.

As with all science, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism cannot stand still. It must be a living, developing tool that can analyze new conditions and questions. Communist ideology advances amidst a turbulent process. New understandings must overcome the inertia of past ways of looking at things, and correct and incorrect viewpoints must be sorted out. The ideas that derive from different realms of humanity’s experience will be further tested and developed in the course of changing the world. This whole process is marked by what communists refer to as the two-line struggle.

Rebels and visionaries of the past have sacrificed greatly to try to transform society. Marx and Engels developed a scientific understanding of the nature of the capitalist system. In the Communist Manifesto Marx called for rupturing with traditional property relations, the social relations based on those property relations and the traditional ideas and institutions that reinforce those social relations in the whole world. That is what communism is about. Lenin and Mao Tsetung further developed and applied this science.

Great victories were achieved during the Paris Commune, the October Revolution in Russia and Mao’s socialist China with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution at its pinnacle in the 1960s and `70s. These were crushed by the reactionary forces in general and the weight of thousands of years of class exploitation and the traditional ideas and institutions that serve and reinforce it. The Maoist forces around the world analyzed the 1976 coup in China and went forward to unite and form the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), the embryonic center of the world’s Maoist forces.

RIM has called for a wide discussion and debate inside and outside its ranks over the most vital issues facing the communist revolutionaries today, such as summing up the experience of exercising proletarian dictatorship (USSR and China), understanding the dynamics of how the imperialist system works, analyzing the socio-economic developments that are taking place in different countries and understanding their implication for revolutionary strategy, as well as other important questions. Through this process RIM itself has and will continue to be tempered and strengthened. Today our comrades in Nepal have made great strides in their struggle. The poor and downtrodden of Nepal have established their own revolutionary political power in 80 percent of the country and are now using those red base areas to attack the fortresses of the enemy in order to seize political power countrywide.

Communism remains the only hope for humanity. But this lofty hope can only be realized through struggle, hard struggle, in every sphere. The international communist movement has brought forth legions of heroes who have braved imprisonment, torture and death in the face of the enemy. It must show the same courage in its merciless self- examination and its determination that its ideology remain vibrant, capable of comprehending ever more fully the rich complexity of human society and class struggle, and able to reach out, learn from and unite with millions of others while fighting tenaciously to uphold, apply and win others to the ideology of liberation.

We need to advance further in our goal of building a communist international of a new type, and unite with all of the genuine Maoist forces the world over in this process, as well as reaching out to revolutionary activists who are yet to be won to the liberating truth of communist ideology.

Today the RIM is determined to fuse our scientific tools of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism with the new rising tide of revolution.