 |
MAO
IS BACK |
SAMIR
AMIN - PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION OF “THE FUTURE OF
MAOISM” |
|
Daanish
Books, C-502, Taj Apartments, Gazipur, Delhi-110096 |
Understanding the polarization inherent in capitalist globalization is essential for formulating any view about transcending capitalism. This polarization lies behind the possible rallying of large fractions of the popular classes and above all the middle classes (whose development is itself favoured by the position of the centre in the world system) of the dominant countries to social-colonialism. At the same time, it transforms the peripheries into a zone des tempêtes, in a continual natural rebellion against the capitalist world order. Certainly rebellion is not synonymous with revolution, but only with the possibility of revolution. On the other hand, grounds for rejecting the capitalist model are not lacking in the centre of the system, as 1968, among other things, illustrated. Undoubtedly, the formulation of the challenge by the Communist Party of China (CPC), at a given moment, in terms of the country-side encircling the cities, is too extreme to be useful. A global strategy of transition beyond capitalism in the direction of world socialism must articulate the struggles in both the centres and peripheries of the system.
Initially, Lenin kept some distance from the dominant theory of the Second International and successfully led a revolution in the “weak link” (Russia), though always with the conviction that this would be followed by a wave of socialist revolutions in Europe. This was a disappointed hope. Lenin then formulated a view that stressed transforming rebellions in the East into revolutions. The CPC and Mao would systematize this new perspective.
The Russian Revolution had been led by a party firmly entrenched in the working class and radical intelligentsia. Its alliance with the peasantry (represented by the Socialist Revolutionary Party) was naturally vital. The radical agrarian reform that resulted finally satisfied an old dream of the Russian peasantry: to become property owners. But this historical compromise carried the seeds of its own demise: the market produced on its own, as always, growing differentiation within the peasantry (the well-known phenomenon of “kulakization”).
The Chinese Revolution set out from the beginning (or at least from the 1930s) on bases that guaranteed a solid alliance with the poor and middle peasantry. Moreover, the national dimension, the war of resistance against Japanese aggression, also made it possible for the communists to recruit widely from the bourgeois classes that were disappointed by the weaknesses and betrayals of the Kuomintang. The Chinese Revolution consequently produced a new situation, different from that of post-revolutionary Russia. The radical peasant revolution did away with the idea of private property in agrarian land and substituted a guarantee for all peasants of equal access to the land. Up till now this decisive advantage, which is common to no other country except Vietnam, is the major obstacle to a devastating expansion of agrarian capitalism. The debates underway in China revolve, in great part, around this question. But the rallying of numerous bourgeois nationalists to the Communist Party should have an ideological influence that is favourable to supporting the deviations of those whom Mao called “capitalist roaders”.
The post-revolutionary regime in China has to its credit a good many political, cultural, material and economic achievements (industrialization of the country, radicalization of its modern political culture etc.). Maoist China also resolved the “peasant problem” that lay at the centre of the decline of the Empire during two decisive centuries, 1750–1950, as described in my work “The Future of Maoism”. Moreover, Maoist China succeeded in achieving these results by avoiding the most tragic excesses of the Soviet Union: collectivization was not imposed by murderous violence, as was the case with Stalinism; opposition within the Party did not give rise to the institution of terror (Deng Xiaoping was removed, he returned). The objective of relative equality involving not only the distribution of income among peasants and workers but also between them and the ruling strata was pursued tenaciously, with ups and downs. It was formalized in development strategies that clearly contrast with those of the USSR (these choices were formulated in “ten great balances” at the beginning of the 1960s). It was these successes that account for post-Maoist China’s extraordinary growth, beginning in the 1980s. The contrast with India, which has not had a revolution, assumes its full significance here, not only in accounting for the different paths followed during the decades 1950 to 1980 but also for probable future prospects. It is these successes that explain why post-Maoist China, henceforth incorporating its development into the new capitalist globalization has not suffered from destructive shocks similar to those that followed the collapse of the USSR.
The successes of Maoism have not, for all that, definitively settled the question of the long term prospects for socialism. The development strategy of 1950–1980 had exhausted its potential and, among other things, an opening (albeit controlled) was imperative. As the result demonstrated, this involved the risk of reinforcing the tendencies of an evolution in a capitalist direction. Simultaneously, the system of Maoist China combined contradictory tendencies that both strengthened and weakened socialist options.
Conscious of this contradiction, Mao attempted to bend the stick in favour of socialism through the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1974). An appeal went out to “bombard the headquarters” (the Party’s Central Committee), seat of the bourgeois aspirations of the political class. Mao believed that, to undertake this course of correction, he could rely on the youth (who, among other things, greatly inspired the 1968 events in Europe; see jean Luc Godard’s film “La Chinoise”). The result of these events demonstrated the error of this judgment. The Cultural Revolution came to a close; the partisans of the capitalist path were encouraged to go on the offensive.
The struggle between the long and difficult socialist path and the capitalist option is certainly not over for good. The conflict between capitalism and socialism is the “clash of civilizations” of our time. In this struggle, the Chinese people have some significant assets, which are the heritage of the revolution and of Maoism. These assets exist in various spheres of social life. They are forcefully apparent in the peasantry’s defence of state ownership of agricultural land and guaranteed access to it for all.
Maoism contributed decisively to making an accurate assessment of the issues and the challenges represented by global capitalist expansion. It allowed us to bring into focus the challenge of the contrast between the centre and the periphery immanent to the expansion of capitalism, and then to draw all the lessons that’s this implies for the socialist struggle, in the dominant centres as well as the dominated peripheries. These conclusions have been summarized in a wonderful Chinese-style phrase: “Countries want independence, nations want liberation and the people want revolution”. Countries, that is, the ruling classes of countries, when they are something other than lackeys, intermediaries for outside forces, devote themselves to enlarging their space for movement. This enables them to manoeuvre in the world system and raise themselves to the position of active participants in the shaping of the world order. Nations, that is, historical blocs of potentially progressive classes want liberation, development and modernization. People, that is, the dominated and exploited classes, aspire to socialism. The phrase allows us to understand the real world in all its complexity and therefore formulate effective strategies for action. It is part of the viewpoint that it is a long – very long – transition from capitalism to world socialism, which breaks with the short transition concept of the Third International.
The Maoist Solution for the Agrarian Question
The agrarian question lies in the heart of decisive choices in Third
World countries. An inclusive pattern of development needs an agrarian
radical reform, that is a political strategy based on the access to
the soil for all peasants (half of humankind). On the opposite, the
solutions proposed by the dominant powers –to accelerate the privatization
of arable soil, and its transformation into merchandise – lead
to massive rural disintegration. The industrial development of the concerned
countries being not able to absorb this overabundant manpower, this
one crowds together in shantytowns or risks its life trying to escape
in dugouts via the Atlantic Ocean.
Access to land is a question of survival for the three billion peasants
of Asia, Africa and Latin America, i.e. nearly half of humanity. No
form of development is acceptable if it sacrifices the lot of those
human beings. Yet, the capitalist path of development, based on private
appropriation of land, which is treated as a commodity similar to others,
sacrifices precisely the rural population “surplus”
on the altar of increase of the “profitability”
of the capital invested in agricultural production (modern equipment
and “value” of land). The obvious result of this
option is the transformation of the planet into one of slums, from Sao
Paulo to Mumbai, from Mexico to Bangkok, from Cairo to Casablanca and
Johannesburg.
The people’s alternative – that of socialist oriented development
– rests on the judicious principle that land is a basic natural
resource, and the property of the peoples, particularly the peasantries
living off it. The two great Asian revolutions (China and Vietnam) have
confirmed the performance of that principle and thereby avoided the
uncontrolled rural exodus which has struck at the rest of the three
continents. The pursuit of this alternative implies total respect for
that principle at all the stages of the long socialist transition. Certainly,
the urbanization accompanying a necessary industrialization (even in
specific modalities not confined to the unlimited technological imitation
of capitalist models, would require a transfer of rural inhabitants
to urban centres. But this should be regulated in accordance with the
pace of the absorption capacities of productive urban activities; and
the formulas of agricultural management should take this into consideration.
There is no question of keeping the “overpopulated”
rural areas in immobilism. There could have been mistakes by thinking
that an accelerated collectivization, ahead of technological possibilities
and requirements, could overcome the related contradiction. Experience
has shown that an access to land, guaranteed to the peasantry as a whole
in formulas linking small-scale family production with the market, is
conducive to a rapid and big increase of agricultural production, in
terms of peasant self-consumption rations and commercialized surpluses
alike. Continuation of this progress would certainly require the invention
of new forms adapted to every stage of the path of socialist oriented
development. But, such forms should never be based on any abandonment
of the principle of access to land for all to the benefit of eventual
illusions about private appropriation of land.
All societies before modern (capitalist) time were peasant societies.
Their production was ruled by various specific systems and logics —
but not those which rule capitalism in a market society such as the
maximization of the return on capital. Modern capitalist agriculture
— encompassing both rich, large-scale family farming and agribusiness
corporations — is now engaged in a massive attack on Third World
peasant production. The green light for this was given at the November
2001 session of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Doha, Qatar.
Capitalist agriculture governed by the principle of return on capital,
which is localized almost exclusively in North America, Europe, Australia,
and in the Southern Cone of Latin America employs only a few tens of
millions of farmers who are no longer peasants. Because of the degree
of mechanization and the extensive size of the farms managed by one
farmer, their productivity generally ranges between 2 and 4.5 million
pounds (1 to 2 million kilograms) of cereals per farmer. In sharp contrast,
three billion farmers are engaged in peasant farming. Their farms can
be grouped into two distinct sectors, with greatly different scales
of production, economic and social characteristics, and levels of efficiency.
One sector, able to benefit from the Green Revolution, obtained fertilizers,
pesticides, and improved seeds and has some degree of mechanization.
The productivity of these peasants ranges between 20,000 and 110,000
pounds (10,000 and 50,000 kilograms) of cereals per year. However, the
annual productivity of peasants excluded from new technologies is estimated
to be around 2,000 pounds (1,000 kilograms) of cereals per farmer.
Indeed, what would happen if agriculture and food production were treated
as any other form of production submitted to the rules of competition?
One can imagine that the food brought to market by today’s three
billion peasants, after they ensure their own subsistences, would instead
be produced by twenty million new modern farmers. The conditions for
the success of such an alternative would include the transfer of important
pieces of good land to the new agriculturalists (and these lands would
have to be taken out of the hands of present peasant societies), capital
(to buy supplies and equipment), and access to the consumer markets.
Such agriculturalists would indeed compete successfully with the billions
of present peasants. But what would happen to those billions of people?
Under the circumstances, agreeing to the general principle of competition
for agricultural products and foodstuffs, means accepting the elimination
of billions of non-competitive producers within the short historic time
of a few decades. What will become of these billions of humans beings,
the majority of whom are already poorest among the poor, who feed themselves
with great difficulty. In fifty years time, industrial development,
even in the fanciful hypothesis of a continued growth rate of 7 percent
annually, could not absorb even one-third of this reserve.
The major argument presented to legitimate the competition doctrine
is that such development did happen in 19th and 20th century Europe
and the United States where it produced a modern, wealthy, urban-industrial
and post-industrial society with modern agriculture able to feed the
nation and even export food. Why should not this pattern be repeated
in the contemporary Third World countries? The argument fails to consider
two major factors that make the reproduction of the pattern in Third
World countries almost impossible. The first is that the European model
developed throughout a century and a half along with labour-intensive
industrial technologies. Modern technologies use far less labour and
the newcomers of the Third World have to adopt them if their industrial
exports are to be competitive in global markets. The second is that,
during that long transition, Europe benefited from the massive migration
of its surplus population to the Americas.
The contention that capitalism has indeed solved the agrarian question
in its developed centres has always been accepted by large sections
of the Left, an example being Karl Kautsky’s famous book, The
Agrarian Question, written before the First World War. Soviet ideology
inherited that view and on its basis undertook modernization through
the Stalinist collectivization, with poor results. What was always overlooked
was that capitalism, while it solved the question in its centres, did
it through generating a gigantic agrarian question in the peripheries,
which it can only solve through the genocide of half of humankind. Within
the Marxist tradition only Maoism understood the magnitude of the challenge.
Therefore, those who accused Maoism of a “peasant deviation”
show by this very criticism that they lack the analytical capacity to
understand imperialist capitalism, which they reduce to an abstract
discourse on capitalism in general.
Nepal 2008, the Maoist are back
1.An Authentic Revolutionary Advance
A liberation army that supports a generalized revolt of the peasantry
reaches the gates of the capital, where the people, in their turn, rise
up, drive the royal government from power and welcome as their liberator
the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M), whose effective revolutionary
strategy needs no further demonstration. What is involved here is the
most radical victorious revolutionary advance of our epoch, and, for
this reason, the most promising. One could imagine — to make a
comparison — the FARC of Colombia managing to mobilize the whole
of the country’s peasantry (impossible to imagine), and coordinating
this victory with an urban popular rising that drives out [President
Alvaro] Uribe from Bogota (all also impossible to imagine), thus allowing
the FARC to head the new revolutionary government!
This victory in Nepal has created the conditions of an initial success,
that of a national and democratic people’s revolution and characterized
as an anti-feudal/ anti-imperialist revolution by the CPN-M itself.
Indeed, the generalized urban revolt, uniting the poorer classes with
the middle class, has compelled all of Nepal’s political parties
to proclaim themselves, in their turn, “republican revolutionaries.”
It is a position they never would have thought of taking a few weeks
before the victory of the Maoists, having taken the road of “peaceful
combat” on the path to reformism and having invested their
hopes in “elections.” The other Communist party
– the Union of Communists, Marxist-Leninist (UCML), had themselves
joined the reformist camp and denounced “the adventurism”
of the Maoists.
The CPN-M deliberately chose to make a compromise agreement with the
parties in question (the Congress of Nepal, the UCML and others), estimating
that by rallying to the revolution these parties had regained a minimum
of legitimacy that could not be disputed among the masses.
A compromise – characterized as a “peace agreement”
by the United Nations authorities that recommended it — transferred
to a Constituent Assembly the responsibility for writing the new democratic
and popular republican constitution. These multi-party elections gave
the CPN-M first place among those parties making up the victorious coalition
(thus entrusting the responsibility of prime minister to their leader,
“Prachanda”). At the Parliament for the first time
in the history of the country and of the entire Indian sub-continent
an authentic representation from the people has been seated, including
poor peasants, informal urban workers and women from the popular classes.
2. Five Major Challenges for the Future
The compromise agreement does not resolve all the future problems; on
the contrary it reveals their entire breadth. The challenges confronting
the revolutionary popular forces from this point on are gigantic. We
will examine them in the five sections that follow.
(i) Land reform
The peasant uprising was the product of the CPN-M’s correct analysis
of the land question and of the strategic conclusions, also correct,
that they drew from it: the great majority of the peasantry, consisting
of super-exploited landless peasants/sharecropp ers (often Dalits—“untouchables”
— in certain areas of the country), could be organized in an united
front and go over to the armed struggle, to the occupation of lands
(which included giving Dalits access to land, which is forbidden by
the caste system), to the reduction of the ground rents paid to owners,
etc. The rising, for these reasons, gradually spread through the country,
and its army, organized by the CPN-M, inflicted defeats on the state
army. But it is true that at the moment when the revolt in the capital
opened its doors to the Communist Party (Maoist), the popular army had
not yet managed to destroy the State army, which was strongly supported
and equipped by the government in Delhi and the imperialist powers.
In the current moment of “compromise” two lines
have been put forward by political forces associated with and represented
in the Parliament:
The line defended by the CPN-M, that of a radical revolutionary land
reform, guaranteeing the access to the land (and the means necessary
to live from it) to all the poor peasantry (the great majority), nevertheless,
without touching with the property of the rich peasants.
The vague line defended by other parties (in particular the Congress
Party), regarding a more “moderate” land reform,
which requires in addition, before the law sets up the new rules, a
return of the old order in the areas that had already been liberated
by the peasant revolt.
(ii) Future of the armed forces
The two armed forces coexist at the current time. This coexistence obviously
cannot last indefinitely. The CPN-M suggests their fusion. The Maoists’
adversaries fear (and admit this publicly) that such a fusion could
lead to the rank-and-file soldiers of the State Army being “infected”
by Maoist ideology! But they propose nothing as an alternative, and
do not dare demand the dissolution of the People’s Army.
(iii) Bourgeois democracy or people's democracy
This major question animates all the debates within the Constituent
Assembly, in the political parties, in the popular organizations of
peasants, women and students, in the trade unions and in various associations
in which mainly the politicized layers of the middle-classes can be
found.
There is in Nepalese society defenders of the conventional formula of
democracy, reduced to the multi-party system, elections, the formal
separation of powers (among other things an independent judiciary),
to the proclamation of human rights and fundamental policies. This is
the general form in which the dominant ideology, spread on a world-wide
scale by the major media (among others, those of the Western countries)
tries to channel the debate.
The Maoists point out that the basic rights on which proposed “democracy”
rests place the respect of private property at the top of the hierarchy
of so-called human rights. As a counterpoint, the CPN-M defends the
priority of social rights without whose implementation no social progress
is possible: the rights to life, food, housing, work, education and
health. Private property is not considered “sacred”;
its respect is limited by the need for implementing social rights.
In other words one group defends the concept of democracy dissociated
from the questions related to social progress (the bourgeois and dominant
concept of “democracy”), while the other defends
that of the democracy associated with social progress.
The debate — in Nepal — is not confused, but it is often
polemical. The defenders of “Western democracy”
count in their ranks authentic reactionaries, who, as recently as yesterday,
hardly protested against the royal autocracy, or were satisfied with
minor protests, as they wished to be more associated with it. But they
also count in their ranks undoubtedly sincere democrats who are not
very sensitive to the real miseries from which the popular classes suffer.
The NGOs of the “defence of the democratic rights,”
mobilized in mass within this framework and largely supported from abroad,
plead the “moderate” cause as well as they can.
Some are satisfied with saying that conventional and limited democracy
is better than nothing, as if more were impossible. Others draw up a
list of charges against the CPN-M, calling them “inveterate
Communists,” “Stalinists,” “totalitarian,”
imitators of the Chinese autocratic model, etc.
The Maoists don’t do a bad job of defending themselves regarding
these vicious attacks. They remind everyone that they do not challenge
private peasant property nor even capitalist property, national or foreign.
Without of course ruling out the nationalization of property if the
national interest requires it (prohibiting the foreign banks from imposing
the integration of the country into the globalized financial market,
for example). They call in question only “feudal”
land and buildings, whose recipients had been the clients of the successive
kings, authorized by them to dispossess the peasant communities. They
do not challenge personal rights and the independent judiciary responsible
for guaranteeing respect for those rights. They add to this programme,
without reducing it, by inviting the Constituent Assembly to formulate
not only the great principles of the social rights, but also the institutional
forms necessary to implement them. The people's democracy that they
define in this manner remains, of course, to be employed gradually,
by the means of the intervention at the same time of the self-organization
of the popular classes as well as by the state.
Obviously there exists no “guarantee” for the future,
protecting Nepal from backsliding. It could be the direction of an autocracy
of the state power. Or in a not less likely opportunist alignment on
what appears to be “possible” for the immediate
future, consequently accepting the rallying of the CPN-M to the “moderate”
line their rivals. But what right does anyone have to condemn in advance
the experiment, when one knows that the questions raised here are the
object of serious debates within the party? And that a plurality of
opinions exists there.
These analyses and the strategies of pursuing the struggles go beyond
those formulated at the time of the Bandung [Conference in Indonesia]
starting in 1955. At the time the regimes that arose from the national
liberation struggles of Asia and Africa, which were legitimate and popular
struggles, were generally of a “populist” nature,
which was recognized in the practices of the state (often confused with
its charismatic hero) and of the party (made from above in certain cases,
and not always very democratic in its practice even when it was based
on the popular mobilizations associated with the liberation struggles)
in their relations with the “people” (a word which
was a vague substitute for an alliance of identified popular classes).
The ideology on which the legitimacy of power rested did not use Marxism
as a reference; it was manufactured of a little of this and a little
of that, associating a reading of the past broadly reinvented and presented
as essentially “progressive” (through allegedly
democratic forms of the exercise of power in ancient societies, through
religious interpretations of a comparable nature) and nationalist myths,
with a pragmatism hardly critical with regard to the requirements of
technological and administrative modernization. The “socialism”
that characterized the Bandung regimes remained extremely vague, difficult
to distinguish from populist state control that redistributed and guaranteed
“social justice.” Should one call attention to
the persistence of many of these characteristics in the recent advances
in Latin America, where people were unlikely to be acquainted with the
Bandung experience, and because of this risk reproducing the limits
of Bandung?
The Maoists of Nepal developed a much different vision of the question
of socialism. They refrain from reducing the “construction
of socialism” to the realization even of the whole of their
current maximum programme (radical land reform, People’s Army,
people's democracy). They characterize this programme as “national
democratic popular,” opening the way (but not more than that)
to the long transition (secular) to socialism. They do not use the expression,
“socialism in the 21st century.”
(iv) The question of federalism
The physical and human geography of the Himalayan valleys is expressed
by the extreme diversity of the peasant communities of Nepal. It is
not a question of two, three or four “ethnic groups,”
but of 100 so-called communities, related certainly by language (Nepali
or Tibetan) and religion (Hindu or Buddhist), but nevertheless proud
of their individual characteristics. The people of these communities
aspire to recover the use of their land, expropriated by the clients
of the conquering generals in the service of the kings. They also want
recognition of their dignity and equal treatment. But they do not aspire
to secede.
The formula of the federal republic, promoted by the Maoists, can certainly
satisfy the demands of the Nepalese people. This does not exclude the
danger that adversaries of centralized state power, if necessary will
manipulate this formula.
(v) The question of the country’s economic independence
Nepal is classified by the United Nations in the category of “less
developed countries.” The “modern” administration
of the state and the social services, and the work on its infrastructure
depend on outside assistance. The government in place appears to be
conscious of the need for freeing itself from this extreme dependence.
But it knows that this release can be only gradual. Food sovereignty
is not Nepal’s main issue, although self-sufficiency in this area
is associated with often deplorably low food intakes. The organization
of more effective and less expensive networks of marketing for the country
producers and the urban consumers is a major problem on the other hand,
because it brings into play the interests of intermediaries. That of
small-scale production, half-craft, half-industrial and able to reduce
dependence on imports will require difficult efforts and time to produce
adequate results.
The Maoist speech raising an “inclusive” development
model, that is, one profiting directly and at each stage of its deployment
the popular classes, in opposition to the “Indian”
model of growth associated with an “exclusive”
social model, that is, profiting only 20 percent of the population,
and condemning the other 80 percent to stagnation if not impoverishment,
testifies to a principled choice which one can only support. Its translation
in programmes of implementation remains to be formulated.
3.Who will carry it out?
Revolutionary Nepal clashes with the extreme hostility of its major
neighbour, India, whose ruling class fears contagion. The endemic revolt
of India’s Naxalites could, while taking as a starting point the
lessons of the victories gained in Nepal, seriously call into question
the stability of the modes of exploitation and oppression in force in
the Indian subcontinent.
This hostility should not be underestimated. It constitutes one of the
reasons of the military rapprochement between India and the United States.
It mobilizes considerable political material resources. Among other
things, India finances the constitution of an “alternative”
Hindu political party, on the model of the Indian BJP [right-wing Hindu
chauvinist], the analogue of the political Islam of Pakistan and elsewhere
or the political Buddhism of the Dalai Lama [Tibet] and others. The
support of the United States and other western powers – Britain
in particular – is coordinated through these reactionary projects.
The crystallization of a powerful Nepalese Hindu political force would
have a chance for success if the achievements – even modest –
of the new Nepal were delayed for too long a time. Those intervening
from outside could then also mobilize the Nepalese reactionaries and
may even provoke “secessionist” movements. The
use of outside assistance, always with strings attached even if this
is not acknowledged, and demagogic speeches concerning "human
rights” and democracy, that the NGO networks feed, finds
its place in this strategy of the enemy.
The compromise now in force delays the implementation of the radical
reform programme that is at the source of the popularity of the CPN-M.
It encourages certain tendencies – in the ranks of the political
leadership itself – to want to hang on to what this compromise
allows, thus preparing the ground for the counter-offensive of the reaction.
But there is no need to despair. The Maoists publicly repeat that the
popular classes have the right to remain mobilized and to continue their
combat to carry out their programme, whatever the results of the deliberations
of the Constituent Assembly. The CPN-M did not fall into the electoral
trap of seeking votes above all else. They carefully distinguish what
they call their social base (“social constituency”),
made up of the majority (poor peasants, urban workers of the popular
classes, students and the young people, women, and patriotic and democratic
sectors of the middle-classes) from their electoral base (“electoral
constituency”), which, as with all electoral bases, remains
volatile. To build this popular social base into a ruling organized
social block, an alternative to the feudal-comprador block thrown out
of power, constitutes the objective of the long-term combat of the CPN-M.
