Of Internationalism and Communists

Harsh Thakor

Morally there is no international communist movement of any substance today. There are lots of organisations around the world describing them as communist, or Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, etc., but most of them use the terminology and aesthetics of the communist tradition in order to promote dogmatism, reformism, capitulation, and are incoherent. Some belong to the long tradition of revisionism and can trace their origin back to one or another historical betrayal of communist principles and the masses, be it Trotsky’s attempts to sabotage the socialist transition to communism in the Soviet Union or those who embraced the 1976 counterrevolutionary coup in China that overthrew socialism and restored a new bourgeoisie to power led by Deng Xiaoping. Others are those who have opened a new shop, usually people who spend a lot of time posturing on the internet but no time among the masses.

There still are genuine communists dedicated to making revolution, scattered in some parts of the world, but mostly in relatively small organisations that are not united into an international communist movement. There are a few places where Maoism has a strong legacy and where revolutionary struggle continues to be waged under communist leadership today, in particular Turkey, South Asia, and the Philippines. However, there is no internationally organised forum for binding the world’s genuine communists together, nor is there any force currently able to stem the development of such a forum.

From 1984 up until the mid-2000s, there was an organised international communist movement in the form of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM). Considering the scenario of the widespread demoralisation and disorientation among revolutionaries, as well as revisionist drift, of the 1980s, the founding of the RIM on firm communist principles was a landmark step.

Regrouping genuine communists around the world, with participant parties and organisations in both the oppressed and imperialist countries, after the revolutionary storms of the 1960s had receded and socialism had been lost in China with the 1976 counterrevolutionary coup.

Unfortunately, RIM’s approach has not undergone constructive self-criticism by many others in the world since RIM’s collapse as an ideological and political centre in the mid-2000s. Some RIM participants, such as K Venu’s Central Reorganisation Committee, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), outright capitulated in the face of the international anti-communist onslaught of the 1980s and ‘90s.

A notable feature was a gradual decline, growing disagreements, and organisational disintegration. In the RIM’s first decade of existence, several of its participant organisations faded into oblivion and too often without any public summation. Strong differences with RIM’s principles sprang within some RIM participants soon after the 1984 Declaration was published.

A most rampant problem or vitiating trend within the RIM, however, was not the wrong direction pursued by some of its participants, but an escalating dogmatism with its roots in the intellectual and analytical weaknesses of the Maoist movement of the 1960s and ‘70s and the failure to inculcate intellectual methods and intellectual work that could rectify those weaknesses. The RIM was plagued by them. Within the RIM, the dogmatic streak intensified in the wake of the capture of Chairman Gonzalo and the setback in the revolution in Peru. It fermented religiosity, eulogising Gonzalo and the people’s war in Peru as the Second Coming that promised the Rapture—a “century of people’s wars” that would lead directly towards the Heavenly Kingdom of communism. This defined an absolutely dogmatic interpretation of Maoism.

The RIM disintegrated in the mid-2000s as a consequence of growing disunity among its participants and the growing dogmatism within it. The final nail in the RIM’s coffin was the capitulation of Prachanda and other leaders of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), precisely when the revolutionary people’s war in Nepal had scaled its peak and the challenge of seizing state power was most directly and immediately on the agenda. The end of the people’s war in Nepal and the public renunciation of communist principles and objectives by some of its leaders was a blow that the RIM could not recover from.

After the RIM collapsed, those of its participants who did not outright and openly capitulate moved in different directions, characterised as Avakianism. The Avakianists answered the dogmatic streak in the RIM by insisting that the “new synthesis” developed by Bob Avakian was a dividing line that the whole international communist movement must embrace. That insistence has only accentuated dogmatism, with the Avakianists unable to answer the strategic challenges of advancing the revolutionary movement in their own countries and becoming increasingly politically irrelevant.

The good old Maoists might be genuine in their desire for revolution and still uphold revolutionary principles. However, their Maoism has become increasingly ossified, and their statements increasingly dogmatic, as exemplified by the Maoist Road blog and the journal Two Line Struggle. The latter has spent years polemicising against the second church of PPW universalism that is largely irrelevant to the advanced masses, without producing any positive contributions to revolutionary theory or summation of revolutionary practice.

During the RIM’s existence, there were some genuine revolutionary parties and organisations adhering to Maoism who remained outside of the RIM. The two most significant ones in the former category are the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the Communist Party of India (ML-PW). The latter merged with other Maoist organisations, with the assistance of the RIM, to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI(Maoist)) in 2004, but chose not to join the RIM. Both the CPP and the CPI(Maoist) have been leading revolutionary people’s wars for decades, but neither currently has the capacity, ideologically, politically, and organisationally, to steer the process of rebuilding the international communist movement (ICM).

The revolutionary struggle led by the CPI(Maoist) reached impressive heights in the mid-2010s in the Dandakaranya forest region, with the Adivasi populations as its principal mass base. The Indian bourgeois state responded with merciless repression in an encirclement and suppression campaign. The CPI(Maoist) has stood heroically in the face of this repression, rejecting the Prachanda path of capitulation. Besides repression by a powerful repressive state apparatus, the CPI(Maoist) also faces the challenge of how to develop revolutionary strategic doctrine in an India very different from China in the 1930s and 1940s, with a growing urban population and a large informal proletariat that lives, for the most part, in massive slums, as well as changing conditions of feudal and capitalist exploitation in the countryside, not to mention the recent rise of Hindu fascism to political power.

Having variance in political lines within the parameters of firm revolutionary principles is fine and can be productive in a concrete debate. But it is only through clarity on line questions, including what differences exist, that debate can be productive. A constructive self-criticism must be undertaken to revive the spirit of the communist international.

[Harsh Thakor is a freelance journalist. Thanks ‘Going against the Tide’ blog for information on the Organisation of Communist Revolutionaries.]

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Vol 58, No. 1, June 29 - Jul 5, 2025