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A year ago, the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (PRT) initiated a Political Line Clarification Campaign. The objective of this campaign is to deepen our understanding of fundamental aspects of the proletariat ideology, revising our published political line under the light of this deeper understanding, reissuing the fundamental documents correcting any errors we may have made, and synthesizing the General Political Line for the socialist revolution in our country.
The Clarification Campaign, initially planned for the second half of the year 2024, has turned out to have a much larger scope than initially planned. In this article, we will share the reasons why we give it a great relevance, to the point that the Clarification Campaign has become the main thrust of our general tactic, ratified at our Central Committee Plenum on March of this year.
The aim of this communiqué is to share with our comrades in struggle, whether they are sympathisers of our party, militants of other detachments, or activists with whom we share a trench, the focus of our current general tactics, which serves as a compass to guide our work in the different spheres and levels, inside and outside the party.
Unity-Struggle-Unity
At the II Congress of the Communist Organization Revolution (2018), the organization that preceded us, the ideological line around anti-revisionist Marxism-Leninism was consolidated. The consistent application of that line ended up triggering a division within the Party: an economist deviation began to develop which was opposed by a sector of the organization. This is how the struggle became primary and unity secondary, and this process gave rise to the two-line struggle around Maoism, of which we spoke in a previous communiqué.1
The contradiction between the left line and the economist line sharpened during the spring and summer of 2022, and the end of the two-line struggle process was the III Congress of the Communist Organization Revolution – I Congress of the PRT, held at the end of 2022. This meant a qualitative change to a stage where, again, the main thing is unity. Thus, in recent years we have gone through three stages: unity around the ML, struggle around the need to adopt Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and new unity around the MLM.
However, MLM was adopted without a sufficient understanding of the different ideological lines in contention in the international debate; there were no leaders up to the task of developing certain political areas and the political cohesion among them was insufficient. In addition, the documents of the 1st PRT Congress incorporated some ultra-leftist deviations and left some issues open.
This needed one more year of study and practical experimentation leading to a Conference during the fall of 2023. There, Unity was strengthened through the concretization of some aspects of our line: mainly in the documents of the Workers’ Movement, Urban grassroots movements and organizations, and, secondarily, during the debates around Youth.
Clarification campaign aim
The 2023 Conference left out an important task: our Party’s political line is scattered in dozens of documents and fills almost half a thousand pages among documents of different kinds (congressional documents, conference documents, internal and formative materials and some transcendental articles2). Moreover, these documents have some contradictions among them and do not clearly distinguish between the fundamental and the secondary aspects.
In this context, on April 2024 we decided to undertake a Clarification Campaign to bring the Party together. The main tasks of this campaign are:
1. Synthesizing the Party’s line in a General Political Line document:
- So it serves as a presentation of our analysis and wager for the revolution in Spain.
- So it clearly expresses those fundamental and secondary aspects relevant to our line.
- So it serves as a guideline for the interpretation of specific documents, bringing together the political line different areas , clearly expressing the main and secondary aspects relevant to our line.
2. Developing relevant questions that are still unanswered, especially those that are the most debated among MLM communists today.
3. Correcting the ultra-left and right-wing mistakes in some parts of the First Congress of the PRT and the Conference of 2023 documents, as well as other relevant documents.
Clarification campaign political line development
The main aspects on which we are developing the political line, based on exhaustive research, as well as our practical experience in the class struggle, are:
- The revolution in Spain, in particular starting from deepening our understanding of the Protracted People’s War and its universal elements, its application in imperialist countries, and its application according to the actual conditions in Spain.
- The role of the United Front in the revolutionary historical experiences, its nature and shape as an indispensable tool of the revolution, and its role in building and defending socialism.
- The analysis of the consequences of the “universal contributions of Gonzalo Thought” application , taking into account the experience of contemporary detachments that defend “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism with the universal contributions of Gonzalo Thought”.
The tasks related to the deepening of these three aspects were underestimated both in relevance and scope: encompassing this study and analysis with the required level is assuming a work of several months that we aspire to complete during the next year.
Agitprop and cadre’s promotion
The Political Line Clarification Campaign has highlighted the need to improve our leadership methods and cadre policy.
In this sense, we have decided to upgrade the role of our newspaper (our website and social media), making it our main method of directing both our militancy and mass base. Through communiqués, articles and documents, we can provide political guidance to our base and supporters before the different class struggle happenings, both in the fields of direct economic and political struggle, as well as in the field of ideological struggle.
This allows us to give directions based on ideological and political orientations for creative application by the militancy and mass base. This method of leadership brings to the fore our priorities, agenda and objectives, and replaces the tendency to lead our militancy by solving each individual problem, which drags the party’s resources into routine management. Replacing “case by case” management with political leadership, the explanation of the situation to point the struggle to transform it, is a qualitative leap that favors discarding bureaucratic methods of leadership, and gives our base the indispensable role of reporting and sharing their experiences through public chronicles and internal reports, in order to confirm or rectify the orientations given.
This new approach has meant completely banishing the conception of our newspaper as a portal for articles based on the subjectivity of a few party members, or that is limited to following the political news. On the contrary, it allows us to make our newspaper a tool for ideological and political guidance, which through appeals and analysis guides the discourse, actions and measures to be taken and reinforced. We understand our newspaper as an organ at the service of the class struggle and the reconstituting of the party.
In turn, we have strengthened democratic centralism, with agile permanent leadership bodies at all levels, which complement the plenary meetings at each level, and with clear political principles of organizational operation, allowing us to have an unified leadership, with a general vision and initiative to guide the party’s activity in the face of the various changes and obstacles of the class struggle, and with the ability to apply the general line according to the particularities of its concrete reality.
These changes have allowed us to overcome the spirit of a “small circle of militants” that we had carried over from previous stages, and have allowed us to take better advantage of the efforts of each militant, correct our management methods (which, as we said, tended to micro-manage case by case) and lay the foundations for a new system of promotion of cadres.
On May 2024 we held our I Cadres’ Central School, which was the first step to resume the standardized training. Recently we have approved the new Militant Training Plan, structured around the three integral parts of the ideology (scientific socialism, political economy, and philosophy), in three levels (introductory, intermediate, and advanced) for each one of them, surpassing our previous training plan that hardly included, or did not systematically include, the contributions of MLM.
General Political Line
All this effort will be completed with the publication of our General Political Line, whose objective is to be the basic document of our Party, which will allow our existence, our ideology, our political line and basic positions to be understood in a synthetic way by our base, our sympathizers and the International Communist Movement. In addition, this document will serve in the future as the basis for our revolutionary program.
At the present time, we outline that the General Political Line will cover: the essentials of our ideology; a balance of the International Communist Movement and Spain with its main milestones; the reality of imperialism globally and in Spain in particular; the revolution and the Protracted People’s War in general and the character of the revolution in Spain; the nature of the Communist Party and the struggle for the reconstituting of that Party in Spain; the necessary building of the United Front and the Red Army, and its foundations in a country like Spain; and finally the mass line and our general method of application of all this.
It is not only an outline or a repository of previous positions because, although it draws directly from them, it elevates them to a new level by expressing them in a unified and cohesive way, without contradictions and dealing exclusively with the main points, omitting secondary details that will be dealt with in other documents.
In order to draft the General Political Line, first, it is necessary to complete the Clarification Campaign: study and correct erroneous secondary aspects of our documents, identify the need to draft some shorter partial documents and, in general, identify the main and secondary aspects of each aspect of our line in order to express them as clearly as possible.
Beyond that, the General Political Line entails a qualitative leap, discreet but relevant, for the International Communist Movement. It will be the first Marxist-Leninist-Maoist General Political Line applied to the Spanish reality. The more needed by the more the contradictions of imperialism intensify, war is unleashed in more points of the globe, the peoples of the third world are crushed with more vehemence, and reaction within imperialist powers rises.
Conclusions
We are aware that the road ahead of us is still long and hard. We are also aware that, although we are still learning to walk, our influence in the communist movement and the popular movements of this country is ever greater; and consequently, the responsibility that weighs on our shoulders is bigger. But we have confidence in living up to this purpose to which we have given ourselves: that of reconstituting the Communist Party and leading the people towards revolution. Let us not lose our enthusiasm, let us not lose our discipline and let us not lose our wrath.
Let’s march towards the clarification of the political line!
Let’s fight for the reconstituting of the Communist Party!
Worker’s Revolutionary Party
