He upholds Gonzalo because he’s an MLM. The ideology itself was developed by Gonzalo, so an MLM who doesn’t uphold Gonzalo makes as much sense as an ML who doesn’t uphold Lenin.

Maybe I confused him with someone else? I thought I read a piece from him where he defended Gonzalo.

but Gonzalo himself was based in his time and you should read him. The movements in South America inspired by the PCP are good to study as well.

Yeah, see, this is where I have to part from him. There’s nothing to gain from studying Gonzalo except to study failure and monstrosity. He created a death cult and ordered massacres of the peasants he and his group were supposed to be organizing.

He absolutely does uphold Gonzalo. All MLMs uphold Gonzalo. You don’t have to be an MLMpM to uphold him. The main difference is the same way both the Communist Party of Cuba and the Worker’s Party of Korea uphold Kim Il Sung, but only the Worker’s Party of Korea actually build their party line and ideology based on Kim Il Sung’s writings. His particular pre-party formation using writings by Joma instead of Gonzalo is like how the Communist Party of Vietnam uses writings by Ho instead of Mao.

It is good that the PCP existed, it is good that Chairman Gonzalo looked around at the state of his country and, out of love of his country and people, risked his life and sacrificed his freedom to organize his students and other masses to transform it through force of arms. Excesses and errors aside, his struggle and the struggle of his comrades in arms who sacrificed their lives breathed life into the Communist project at what was termed by many “the end of history” and “the end of Communism”.

Yeah, some petty bourgeois settler professor and his gang of settler college students enacting a reign of terror on the Indigenous peasantry is hardly something worth emulating. Compare them with the MRTA, which at least tried to incorporate Indigenous people into their struggle and centered the texts of a Peruvian Marxist as their guiding ideology. I don’t know enough about MRTA to say whether they were genuinely good or had other major flaws, but as far as not enacting a reign of settler terror and reproducing settler colonialism, they had the Gonzaloites beat. Or consider the EZLN, where the majority of its members are Indigenous even with settler members like Marcos. They have successfully decolonized parts of Chiapas from the settler colony of Mexico. There’s a reason why the EZLN is still around and the PCP is not.

Peru is a settler colony like the US and Mexico. Just because it doesn’t look like a typical Anglo settler colony like the US or Australia doesn’t mean it isn’t one as well. Being a settler colony means the primary contradiction of settler colonialism has to be dealt with first. The contradiction of settler colonialism is only resolved with either the complete extermination of the Indigenous population ie genocide or the overthrow of the settler regime and land stewardship returned to the Indigenous population ie land back. The Gonzaloites absolutely did nothing on the front of returning land to the Indigenous population. If anything, they arguably did their own ultra-leftist brand of cultural genocide by banning Indigenous ceremonies in the areas they controlled. It’s just more settler colonial bullshit.

Gonzalo himself was based in his time and you should read him

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