I have no authority to speak on behalf of the LLCO. But, I think it’s important to promote a correct line they have. Understanding the theory is important.

What is Global People’s War?

Global People’s war is an idea that was created by Commander Prairie Fire of the Leading Light Communist Organization. Essentially, it updates Mao’s theory of People’s War, expanded upon by Lin Biao,  and applies it to our new reality.  Lin Biao saw the great divide that was beginning to mark the world in the mid 1960s. During that time there were a great many wars of liberation being carried out across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. All of these countries had a common goal: defeat imperialism, national liberation. He saw the great divide that was taking place in the world. Lenin said that imperialism was the primary contradiction – this remains true today.

Today, we see that the contradiction of capitalist-imperialism has reached a new stage. The world has been fractured into three  groups.

The First World: The area that makes up the oppressor countries. The seats of power globally who wield finance capital and physical armies against the people of the global poor. These  power centers steal the value and wealth generated by Third World people and hoard it in their countries. Those societies have used that wealth to buy-off their populations so that they’ll refuse to carry out revolution. The citizens of those nations benefit greatly from global exploitation so much so, that they have an interest in maintaining it. As a result of this, they cannot be considered proletarian.

The Third World: The regions of the globe that are the victims of imperialist aggression. They are the factories of the world which produce the wealth and value that the First World steals. They are the global sweatshop that takes the brunt of global manufacturing, and lives the lives of immiseration that Marx had predicted. They are the oppressed, the super-exploited, those that do have an interest in rising up against the global economic order. They are the workers who have nothing to lose but their chains. They are the proletariat: “… that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour…”

The Second World: Countries which fall on a continuum between the First and Third World. Some are exploited, are exploiters, or a combination of both. Their position is complicated and requires much deeper investigation and  analysis.

The theory came about as Prairie Fire examined the changing face of the Third World. He examined the growth of the global slum. He looked at the philosophy and issues of meta-science. He advanced new understandings of the connection between fascism and contemporary First Worldism. There is no movement in the world that has pushed forward in such bold, scientific ways.

Just as the class structure of the Third World has changed, so has the class structure of the First World. In the First World, the revolutionary class has passed from the scene. In the 1960s, there was some basis for thinking that a revolutionary social base existed within the ghettos and captive nations of the First World. Such a base is nonexistent today. There is no significant First World revolutionary class, no significant First World proletariat. There is no significant stand-in First World revolutionary class. This means that we must look beyond the First World for a revolutionary social base. This means global people’s war is the primary means of bringing the New Power of the proletariat to the First World.[1]

Global Class

A document produced by the LLCO (Global Class) repeated here for sake of understanding. [2]

Marx predicted that the trends that he witnessed during the industrial revolution in Western Europe would occur globally. He thought that society would become polarized into two great classes, the industrial capitalists and their workers. Thus, as capitalism advanced, the paradigmatic producer and impoverished person would come to be represented by the industrial worker. He saw the industrial working class as the proletariat, the revolutionary agent. Marx thought competition and development would even out from country to country. Thus revolution was a matter of “workers of the world, unite!” However, things did not work out exactly the way Marx foresaw. Even Engels began writing of the bourgeoisification of large segments of the population of wage earners. Engels said that whole nations could be bourgeoisified. In Lenin’s time, the Bolsheviks began referring to a “labor aristocracy.” There is Lenin’s famous statement that the “seal of parasitism” affected whole nations. Lin Biao offered an alternative vision of polarization: the global city versus the global countryside. Lin Biao said that the proletarian struggle in the First World was “delayed” while it was vigorous elsewhere. This polarization of the global city of the rich countries and the global countryside of the poor countries, the First World and Third World, continues. The household per-capita income differential between a rich, First World city like Seattle and a poor, Third World city like Ibadan is as great as 739 to 1.[3] “In 46 countries people are poorer today than in 1990. In 25 countries more people are hungry today than a decade ago.”[4]

Lin Biao’s conception of the polarization is still essentially correct, although it is important to take note of the growing global slum within the global countryside. The growing urban population in the Third World has tremendous implications for the global class structure. Most city dwellers in the Third World are desperately poor. [5] Roughly a quarter of all urbanites in 1988 live in “absolute poverty,” surviving on one dollar or less a day.[6] According to one expert:

“Slums, however deadly and insecure, have a brilliant future. The countryside will for a short period still contain the majority of the world’s poor, but that dubious distinction will pass to urban slums no later than 2035. A least half of the coming Third World urban population explosion will be credited to the account of informal communities. Two billion slum-dwellers by 2030 or 2040 is a monstrous, almost incomprehensible prospect, but urban poverty overlaps and exceeds slum populations per se.”[7]

The true proletariat, the revolutionary agent, has nothing to lose but its chains. The proletariat has long since passed from the First World. The real proletariat lives almost exclusively in the Third World. Over the next century, more and more, the typical proletarian will come to be represented by the slum-dweller of the Third World. This isn’t to discount other segments of the revolutionary and exploited classes, such as the poor peasant and industrial worker in the Third World, this is only to point to the rising influence of the slum-dweller, a demographic group that is going to play more and more of a role on the world scene.

Encircle the First World

When the LLCO speaks of Global People’s War, they mean just that. A united front against the imperialist nations, a pan-Third Worldist movement which seeks to subvert the imperialist domination of the exploited countries. They advocate, “two, three, many Vietnams,” build a global structure against the imperialist nations. Third World people as a whole must unite to release the shackles which bind them. There must be mass cooperation among the Third World countries in order to carry out this plan.

Mao theorized that it is the countryside where the revolutionary potential lays. They must organize, fight, and encircle the city, the seats of power,  in order to destroy the capitalist despots. Today we see much of this remains true, but some of it must change. As global class has shifted in its manifestation, so must revolutionary tactics. The Third World should be seen as a global countryside, and the First World the global cities. The people of the First World are very much the city dwellers of globe. Those who live lives of luxury in comparison to those who die from hunger, preventable disease, and underdeveloped water use.

A common misconception is that the LLCO advocates the physical invasion of the First World by the Third. Such an idea is terribly naive, and is simply impossible to carry out. The technological military might of the world lies in the hands of the imperialists making this task impossible. No, they advocate something far different.  The enemy must be defeated at home. The imperialists must be kicked out of the oppressed nations. A great wave of revolutionary resistance must be carried out, booting the imperialists from the occupied lands. Revolutionaries in the Third World need not set a single combat boot in the First World.

The Third World must rise up and cut off the First World from its pools of Third World resources and labour. Capitalist-imperialism is built upon exploitation, and the promise of an infinitely expanding market. The need to exploit the Third World is an absolute, they must do this in order to keep capitalism alive. They must be forced to bleed away all of their ill gotten gains. Once they have been cut off from their super exploitation, the economies of the First World will collapse.

During times of such severe crisis, the antagonistic contradictions of capitalism become much more apparent. With the destruction of their empire, First World people will realize their common class interest – once their privilege has been taken away, once their global class position has been shattered. It is at this time that revolution in the now-no-longer-First-World countries will become possible. At that time, it will be up to those people to carry out revolution in their own lands.

In their Own Words

A document produced by the LLCO (Global People’s War) repeated here for sake of understanding. [8]

Anthropologist Michael Taussig writes of the outskirts of Cali:

“It dawns on me that just as the guerrilla have their most important base in the endless forests of the Caqueta, at the end of nowhere on the edge of the Amazon basin, so the gang world of youth gone wild has its sacred grove, too, right here on the urban edge, where slums hit the cane fields at Carlos Alfredo Diaz.”[9]

Mao famously compared the guerrilla among the peasants to a fish in the sea. If trends continue as they do, the slums will be a new sea in which people’s warriors swim. The rise of the global slum has implications for global people’s war, just as it has implications on our conceptions of what exploitation is and who constitutes the proletariat. Mao articulated a model of people’s war that was protracted, his model of people’s war began in the countryside then advanced to surround the city. People’s war of the past was mainly a rural affair. Red zones were areas that the revolutionary forces controlled in the countryside. Within red zones, the revolutionary forces created a new state and new economy in miniature. The red zone was the Maoist adaptation of Lenin’s conception of dual power to the Third World countryside. People’s wars, along with the red zone and dual power, will have to be adapted to the global slum. People’s wars of the future may not necessarily advance from the countryside to the city. Although the global people’s war will still move from the global countryside, which contains the global slum, to the global city. Global people’s war will advance from the Third World to the First World. While Lenin’s warnings about overestimating spontaneity and Maoist warnings about overestimating insurrectionary models still apply, protracted people’s war applied to the slum will be explored in the coming century by Leading Light Communists. RAND researchers commented on how slum-based resistance could have tipped the scales in El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s, “had the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front rebels effectively operated within the cities earlier in the insurgency, it is questionable how much the United States could have done to help maintain even the stalemate between the government and the insurgents.”[10] The lessons of the Iraqi resistance, both Sunni and Shia as urban-based resistance movements, should also be studied. Air power, the favorite weapon of the imperialists, the scourge of rural guerrilla movements, is also less effective in urban contexts.

Georg Lukacs once wrote that even if all of Marx’s individual predictions proved false, one could still be an “orthodox Marxist” because real Marxism, at its core, is simply revolutionary science. Marx was the beginning. Lenin was the first one to make the ideological breakthrough that led to the first sustained proletarian revolution. Mao was the one who made the next breakthrough. They were real revolutionary scientists despite their errors and limitations. They did not just inherit the mainstream so-called revolutionary theories of their day. They adapted and expanded revolutionary science. They understood that Marxism is not a set of dogmatic formulas, it is a science — the science of human liberation. Today, leftovers from the last revolutionary breakthroughs remain: “Marxist-Leninists” and “Maoists.” The forces that fly these banners today were not the ones who made the breakthroughs themselves. What is called “Marxism-Leninism” and “Maoism” today are merely an echo of the past breakthroughs. “Marxist-Leninist” and “Maoist” forces today grab the pre-scientific and popular form of these breakthroughs and run with them. These forces never grasped the scientific core, even if they applied the popularized, dogmatized form of the ideology. In some cases, the dogma works well enough so that these forces have been able to create sizable armed organizations and seize large swaths of territory in the Third World. However, the dogma is not good enough to conquer state power, let alone to reach communism. Times have changed. Old dogma won’t cut it. It is over 60 years since Mao declared the People’s Republic of China. It is almost a half century since the initiation of the Cultural Revolution. Science learns. Material reality, including the global class structure, is much different. The composition of the global countryside, with the growth of the global slum, is very different. Our conceptions of people’s war and global people’s war must evolve. Imperialists have been perfecting and advancing their science of oppression. We must advance the science of liberation to beat them. Marxism must adapt or die. Leading Light Communism is the revolutionary science of today. It is the new breakthrough.

What Must Third World People Do?

As a whole, they must rise up against the exploitation of the First World. They must unite across national boundaries, ethnic lines, all manner of divisions if they are liberate themselves. There is no time for establishing a nation for every single group. Yes, their rights should be respected. Their uniqueness defended.  But, we cannot divide the people of the Third World along those lines at this time. They must remain with a united front against the imperialist forces. Creating more divisions among the global proletariat will solve nothing. It will only make it easier for the First World to retain its empire. All attempts to create mini-states among Third World people at this time should be seen as nothing less than an attempt to maintain oppression.

What Can First World People Do?

First World people must recognise that we have a duty to aid the Third World in their struggle for liberation. We live in the belly of the beast, we are fed the same value as the imperialists. The First World “masses” cannot be seen as allies to the global oppressed. We, as Marxists, must aid the anti-imperialist struggle in anyway way we can.

We must not see ourselves as the victims in this global order. Black, Brown, White, Homosexual, Transgender; we are all beneficiaries of the global order. We live off the value sucked away by the imperialist economic order and war machine. It is that stolen wealth that keeps First World people pacified and unwilling to strike out into revolution. First World people as a whole have a collective interest in maintaining the empire. There are no First World victims in imperialism. No minority group, based on race, gender, or otherwise can consider themselves the victims of imperialist empire. All First World people who refuse to acknowledge their advantageous global position, who instead see themselves as victims, must be seen as enemies of revolution.

Among the First World population there will be anomalies who will rise up in the service of the oppressed masses of the Third.  We have a duty to help them with our privileged in the world. Our home is the center of wealth. It is all around us. We must transfer as much wealth, money, resources, to Third World liberation struggles. We must aid the oppressed, not imagine ways to see ourselves as the oppressed. Being a revolutionary means acknowledging the science, recognising our position within the world, and helping abolish it.

Global Slum – Global Countryside – Global People’s War!

Notes:

[1] Monkey Smashes Heaven 2, New World, New Challenges, New Science

[2] Monkey Smashes Heaven 2, Global Class

[3] Davis, Mike. Planet of the Slums. pg 25-26

[4] Davis, Mike. Pg 163

[5] Davis, Mike. Pg 49

[6] Davis, Mike. Pg 25

[7] Davis, Mike. Pg 151

[8] Monkey Smashes Heaven 2, Global People’s War

[9] Davis, Mike. Pg 49

[10] Davis, Mike. Pg 102