The following is an excerpted version of a
private letter that the Central Committee of Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist)
wrote to the Central Committee of Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) in November
2006. This letter was written at the time when CPNM entered into a Comprehensive
Peace Agreement with the ruling parties in
This letter has been edited
for public release.
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To the CC of CPNM—from CC of CPIMLM
Nov 2006
Dear comrades -- red salutes.
…
We think it is very important to make an
assessment of the class interests embodied in the
recently signed Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA)…. You can imagine our
extreme dislike of this Agreement. The reason is not our dislike of your
“flexible tactics”. The reason is that this plan objectively (regardless of
your intentions and tactical aims) is a strategic plan to restructure
the Nepali state as a comprador – feudal Republic. Why you have signed
it, is a different matter that we do not want to discuss here. Because we are
familiar with your arguments, saying: “the process of revolution needs to take
retrogressive as well as progressive measures”. OK! you have taken this
retrogressive measure as a “tactic” but let us define its class character
clearly and emphasize that if this is in your “tactical” interests, it is in
“strategic” interest of the OTHER side—ie, the enemy.
The OTHER side looks at this as a “strategy”. The OTHER side is a class--a
class alliance consisting of a section of the comprador- feudals of
The effect of your present tactic is that it is giving a new vigor to
the comprador-feudal ruling classes of
We think, whatever
your aim is, this CPA plan (and ensuing interim government) has an objective
class character that must be analyzed and its nature not hidden from the eyes
of the masses and the international proletariat.
What is a tactic for you is a strategic plan
for the enemy. CPA is a plan to oust the King and to destroy the
revolutionary people’s government which was formed during 10 years of People’s
War and restructure the old state as a comprador-feudal Republic around
the axis of the Congress party and the Maoists who --as they think-- would have
been transformed from a revolutionary war party to a political party of the
status quo. Is it impossible for them to get rid of Monarchy and forge a
Using this kind of strategy by the reactionary
ruling classes is not new. Lenin called it a Constitutional way of solving the legitimacy
crisis of the old state. In
Never forget the fact that in Nepali
revolution, your most important and most successful and most inspiring tactic
has been to masterfully turn your strategic strength (being a revolutionary
party representing the deep and long-term interests of the oppressed masses in
Nepal and India and the world) into a tactical advantage for yourself; and to
turn the strategic weakness of the old
state (being the state of the reactionary
classes who are a minority united with India and imperialists) into a tactical
disadvantage for it. Now the enemy wants to deal with this problem. They
want to de-link you from the revolutionary social upheaval and organized
revolutionary masses and use your partnership to disunite the organized
revolutionary masses and paint the refurbished state structure as progressive.
This is their strategy. Using this strategy
does not exclude bloody conspiracies from their agenda. But if it works, it is
more effective than bloody suppressions. When the enemies see that they can not
tame a rebellion or defeat a revolution, they think about the option of
incorporating a layer of revolutionaries. Even in old times, the feudal classes
occasionally utilized this strategy. That is why, for example, when Mao wanted
to warn some of the leaders of Communist Party of China that they should not
stop revolution halfway, he reminded them of the fatal deviation of “Sun Chiangism”. (Sun Chiang led a heroic peasant war in
The reactionary classes have used this policy in
the era of imperialism as well. One of the most dramatic examples is the Weimar
Republic in Germany after the First World War, when the bourgeoisie
incorporated the Social Democrats (leaders of the Second Communist International)
into the Capitalist imperialist system. The Social Democrats in
Or look at Irish history, how the
British imperialists split the Irish movement by incorporating revolutionaries
into the restructured old state and caused splits in the Irish movement and sad
episodes in which new Irish functionaries arrested and executed their
ex-comrades, revolutionaries who did not want to surrender to the old state.
By citing these examples, we are not intending
to say that this is what you want to become or that this is your
strategy. No, you do not want this. But this is the logical outcome of this
interim government. Lenin said: even the road to hell is paved with good
intentions and emphasized that political line has its own logic despite
one’s intentions. …
The whole greatness of Lenin was that he did
not allow the old Russian state to revitalize itself
through the interim bourgeois government. Instead, he led proletarians to
replace the old rotten state at one stroke with a revolutionary dictatorship of
the proletariat. That made Lenin a hero for the proletariat and peoples of the
world and sent Marxism to the remotest corners of the world. After that,
millions of masses around the world turned to Marxism-Leninism, because he had
opened a fresh new chapter in the history of humanity. The freshness of the new
state was awaking peoples of the world even in the most backward corners, in a
magical way. When Mao said the canons of October brought Marxism to
Please pay attention: Our main point is not
that the ruling classes try to corrupt the revolutionaries. They always try to
do that! Our main point is that a
section of the ruling classes and the big powers (imperialists and regional
powers) also feel the need to revitalize their system and some times they even
resort to utilizing the revolutionaries to revitalize and restructure their state.
In this way they achieve two aims: one is that they stop the revolution halfway
and “democratically” persuade revolutionaries to eat their own children, step
by step. (We ironically call this a “democratic” and bloodless
counter-revolutionary coup). And two, overall they make their system and
old state more viable by removing some non-functional parts of it (such as the
Monarchy) that have become an obstacle to the needs of the development of the
comprador-feudal state in the country and region. By doing this they make the
old state more efficient and at the same time they tell the masses: “Look, we
changed things! This is the change you wanted.” And they do this with the help
of ex-revolutionary leaders. Every time they have been able to victoriously
carry out this strategy they have been able to hinder revolutions for decades.
This Comprehensive Peace Agreement is an
“Indian” style attempt to carry out the above said strategy. But the
… With this plan the enemy is coming at you in
order to take away big chunks of you. You should not think that these kinds of
tactics can only be used by you. There are certain tactics that are pragmatic
and do not have a proletarian class character. So the bourgeoisie can use them
very well. But there are certain tactics that they can never use. They can
never use the tactic of granting democracy (that is, the power to overthrow
the old state) to the masses. That is why in the Comprehensive Peace
Agreement they want to make you dismantle the People's Power: the revolutionary
army and the revolutionary state.
The CPA is the road to restructuring the
state along comprador-feudal Republican lines. There are lots of conspiracies
going on against revolution -- of the sort that you are aware of. But this
is the biggest conspiracy against revolution in
Anti-democratic
This CPA is very anti-democratic in nature. Its
anti-democratic aspects should be brought to light and the masses made
conscious of them so that they can understand their rights more deeply.
The oppressed masses have the right to rebel
against their conditions of oppression. This CPA makes this right unlawful. Not
recognizing this right is not even a bourgeois-democratic line, let alone a
proletarian democratic line.
The Agreement is anti-democratic because it is
calling for dismantling of the Peoples state, courts and autonomous governments
and gives power to the political functionaries at the centre. It calls for the
dismantling of the direct democratic rule of the masses and the establishment
of dealings among state bureaucrats. Is this 21st
century democracy?
CPA is anti-democratic because it calls for the
abolition of the rights of the people to land and recognizes the right of
dismantled feudal land owners to their land ownership.
CPA calls for the humiliating confinement of
the PLA but gives all sorts of responsibilities to the Nepali Army: it gives the authority to the Nepal Army to
guard the borders, the banks, the ministries, etc., while these should be
targets of insurrectionary takeover.
CPA recognizes the dictatorship of the Nepali
Army. Dictatorship is always the extra power (military and economic and
political) that one class exercises over another class. In this case, the
dictatorship of the Nepali Army is recognized because it gives the right to
this army to hold more arms (it will lock up as many arms as PLA and keep the rest.) It will be deployed to carry out many tasks
such as guarding the border and banks and the PLA will be confined to camps.
Who is the victim of a coup here?
CPA is anti-democratic because it says that any
violation of this agreement is punishable by law: which law? Whose law? How can
one speak of suppression even before the election of the CA? Is this 21st-century democracy?
All of these counter-revolutionary measures of
the Comprehensive Peace Agreement are justified by vague promises for
“scientific land reform”, which is just a high sounding but empty phrase. The
rights of the people (class, gender, nationality, caste…) in this Agreement are
so vague that any comprador state can agree to them…..What kind of negotiation
is this that the wining side should dissolve itself into the structure of the
other side? …The interim government will prepare the conditions the old
Concrete analysis of concrete
situations
We agree with your emphasis on the importance
of making concrete analysis of concrete conditions in order to be able to
advance our strategic aims. We know (theoretically and practically) that
without having tactics, one can not make the strategy fly. …
The point we want to get at here is this:
beware of making wrong concrete analyses and beware of following wrong tactics.
As Mao said, some words can bring progress and other words can bring
disaster.
Here we
want to familiarize you with our own historical experience. Our original organization--the
then Union of Communists of
It is well known that in the Iranian revolution
of 1979, the Monarchy was overthrown. But the most noteworthy aspect of that revolution
is that, it did not go far enough in order to destroy the old state and give
birth to a new state. So the counter-revolution succeeded and gave birth to a restructured
comprador-feudal theocratic state under the name of the Islamic Republic of
Iran.
UCI and
other communist forces had deviation in terms of the Central Task (Mao said the
central task is to settle the question of power through violent seizure of
power). This deviation helped bring about the defeat of revolution and rise to
power of the Islamic forces. To make a long story short, UCI rationalized its
deviation under the signboard of “concrete analysis”. Indeed, concrete analysis
was necessary. But because we had given up the general theories of MLM (we had
become centrist on the universal theories of Maoism), our concrete analysis did
not have an underlying MLM foundations. As Marxists we know that concrete
and universal is unity of opposites. Our “concrete” had the “opposition”
but not “unity” with the universals of MLM.
Our deviation came in the form of “tactics” but was related to being centrist
and eclectic on the strategy of revolutionary seizure of political power.
UCI’s “concrete analysis” was that the new
Islamic regime had a dual character: on the one hand it was reactionary
because the old army still had not been dissolved and democratic
transformations (especially uprooting feudalism through land revolution) were
not happening; on the other hand it had a “progressive” aspect (which
did not!) because it was “anti imperialist” (which was not!) and consisted of
petit bourgeois and national bourgeois parties. On the basis of this eclectic
and wrong “concrete analysis” we concluded, the task of revolution was to make
the “progressive aspects” to grow and push out the reactionary aspects; the
task was to pressure the regime “from below” (by mass movements and
revolutionary armed struggle in Kurdistan) to radicalize and make it “shed” its
skin (like a snake which drops off its old skin and renews itself). This was a classic
form of non revolutionary, eclectic right deviationist line. Shortly after
formation of Islamic Republic of Iran, pro-Khomeini students seized the
UCI’s second disastrous “concrete analysis” and
corresponding tactics was when the Iran-Iraq war broke out. It made the “concrete analysis” that this was
a patriotic war and if the communists took part in it, this would strengthen
the communist movement. UCI falsely compared this policy to Mao's war against
UCI’s centrist line on the question of seizure
of power was accompanied by many other wrong theories. For example, UCI had
formulated a “third road” theory for accomplishing the Democratic Revolution.
This was formulated by a section of our leadership in a book called On
the Socio- Economic Character of Iran. The book said: democratic
transformations can be achieved through three roads: one, from the
top (what Lenin called the Prussian road). Two, by revolutionary violence
under the leadership of the proletariat from below, which we called a
People's Democratic Republic. Three, by national bourgeois road-- which would
be a national bourgeois state but under constant pressure from below (the
revolutionary masses)
UCI also believed that the road to revolution
in
The reason we are recounting this history is
not to say that your party is just like ours at the time of 1979 revolution.
But to say that we made serious errors, and point out what seem like similar
errors in your present line in a number of aspects. Some trends of thinking we
see in your party seem similar to how we thought in some periods. It is true
that our party was not firm on Maoism. But being firm on our universal
understanding is not something that is guaranteed once and for all. At
different times a communist party can lose its grip on fundamentals. One of
those times is when that party is quickly passing from one stage to a new
stage. These are the times when our universal line and outlook cry out
to be re-affirmed and developed. One great opportunity that you have is that RIM
exists, with a clear-cut universal line and developing scientific knowledge. …We
want to speak FRANKLY: We in our history
used the same Maoist and Leninist concepts such as Mass Line and Concrete
Analysis and United Front to justify incorrect lines. …
Take a hard look at whether or not the
underlying basis of your particular line corresponds with universal line of
MLM. Universal and particular are unity of opposites. The universal must be the
guiding compass for the particular; strategy must be the guiding compass for
tactics. If you drop this compass it would be like losing your way on the
dangerous peaks of the
Comrades: we have tried to make clear the
nature of this “transitional regime”, and we think you should also be clear
about its nature: it is anti-revolution;
it is anti-masses and anti-national independence.
We are certain that for revolution to advance,
this agreement should be broken. We are
sure the OTHER side will violate it and will provide ample reasons to that
effect. But what are your preparations for that?
Once again we urge you to safeguard the
revolution in
Our hearts are pounding in anxiety for
revolution in
the CC of the CPI (MLM)
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Footnote:
1-What replaced the Panchyat
system was a fractured and crisis-ridden state structure which was not able to
dissolve feudalism even a little bit so as to alleviate the class
contradictions. The People’s War did dissolve feudalism to great extent.
Dissolving certain aspects of feudalism was a kind of necessary reform
(necessary for preventing New Democratic Revolution and necessary for
penetration of imperialist capital) that the seven-party alliance and the King
were completely incapable of carrying out, even with the aid coming from
outside. So now they can benefit from some aspects of the dissolution of
feudalism achieved by the CPN(M). Imperialist
-sponsored systems always can arrange to benefit from lukewarm anti-feudal
transformations. In