Toward Guerrilla Warfare!
#PUBLICATION NOTE
This edition of Toward Guerrilla Warfare has been prepared and revised for digital publication by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland on the basis of the edition published by the Maoist Documentation Project on maoism.org.
#INTRODUCTION NOTE
This is a speech delivered by Comrade Gonzalo at the Enlarged Third Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Peru in Lima, Peru on the 24th of August, 1980. It was first published in the pamphlet We Are the Initiators, Red Flag Publishing House, Lima, 1980.
#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!
#TOWARD GUERRILLA WARFARE!
#SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE ENLARGED THIRD PLENARY SESSION OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF PERU
#Gonzalo
#24th of August, 1980
#★
We can draw the following essential conclusions from the first part of this meeting:
- The Plan for the Initiation, its application, and the conclusion of the first actions, are brilliant and all-round successes of transcendental importance, with great repercussions that have kindled the immortal flames of the People's War in our country.
- Summing up the experiences of the general evaluation of the first actions has led us to further develop the Party's Military Line and advance in its consolidation by crushing the Right-wing trend, which proposed militarist standpoints that tended toward a bourgeois military line.
- The Party, having been consolidated through the tempering of its first actions, has become militarized and ready to march toward the development of guerrilla warfare.
The first conclusion stands out as a brilliant and clear success obtained by the Party, which will have great historical repercussions.
The second conclusion indicates that, in the evaluation of the first actions, the Party's Military Line has developed further and advanced. It has been consolidated by combating militarist standpoints that tend toward a bourgeois military line. In this way, we have obtained a major development and consolidation. The Military Line, like all lines, can only develop and consolidate itself in the course of struggle.
The third conclusion establishes and emphasizes that the Party is prepared to march toward the development of guerrilla warfare.
We have finished the first phase, which is essential and serves as the basis for this Enlarged Plenary Session of the Central Committee. On this solid basis, we can outline the domestic and international context and establish the Plan to Develop Guerrilla Warfare. We should be very conscious of the brilliant and great success of the application of the Plan for the Initiation of the Armed Struggle. This plan is of historic transcendence and has shaken the country, placing the Party at the centre of the class struggle and the political struggle.
The constant struggle of Communist militants as the expression of the class struggle of the proletariat and the masses of our country has been historically moulded and defined in the countryside. We have embarked upon a higher form of struggle, armed struggle, to destroy the old order and build a new society.
From now on, the People's War shall dwell in us and inhabit the nation. Its immortal flames kindle and inflame our people. Its flames will be invincible, shaking and demolishing the rotten prevailing social order, and from the heart of these flames will be born the most potent bonfire of the future.
It has become our historical mission to launch the armed struggle in our country and to develop and sustain it as part of the struggles of Latin America, the international proletariat, the peoples of the world, and the world revolution, which we serve by adhering faithfully to the principle of proletarian internationalism.
The struggle will be long, but fruitful, bloody, but brilliant, and difficult, but vigorous and omnipotent. It has been said that the world will be transformed with arms, and that is what we are doing now. Everything will grow out of the barrels of our guns. We are already living through it and will see it more as the People's War develops.
To the members of the Communist Party, in this country, who have broken the stonewall of more than 50 years, their spirits must be no less than vibrant today with the realization of this great evaluation, which proves and tests the achievements, counting, measuring, and weighing the future. We are very conscious of and responsible for our actions. We have nothing to be vain about; we are only fulfilling our duty. We have nothing to brag about, because the glory belongs to the working class, the people, and the Party. Nevertheless, we need to be optimists, assured that the pebbles of the new order are beginning to fall into place. The future is beginning to be written. We will write our new history, so that flowers of bronze may blossom forevermore. We will tame the mountains, we will write a new history with the tips of swords, the light of fire, tearing down inequality and giving birth to the future.
For every Communist Party that assumes its role as the armed vanguard of the proletariat, there comes a time to tear away the centuries of oppression. It lets out its war cries and storms Heaven, the shadows, and the night. It begins to demolish the old and rotten reactionary walls, it begins to rattle and crackle like dry leaves before new and tender flames, before young but crackling bonfires. The People's War begins to sweep away the old order in order to inevitably destroy it. From the old, the new shall be born. And, finally, like the pure and glorious Phoenix, communism will emerge forever.
We should unfurl our optimism and overflow with enthusiasm, furthermore thinking that we serve to carry out a task whose results will last forever. We humans are mere fragments of time and heartbeats, but our deeds will remain for centuries, marking generation after generation. People march inevitably toward their ends, but humanity, the working class, and their creations will never end. We will populate the Earth with light and happiness.
With us, with our armed struggle, the authentic and only true realm of freedom begins to be born. We are the trumpets of the future, the inextinguishable fire that crackles in the stormy present.