NKP 100 YEARS – RECONSTITUTE THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF NORWAY
We publish an unofficial translation of an article found here.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
October 2023
NKP 100 YEARS – RECONSTITUTE THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF NORWAY
Introduction
The Communist Party of Norway was founded the 4th of November 1923, as the Norwegian section of the Communist International, after hard two-line struggle in The Norwegian Labor Party. As an integrated part of the International Communist Movement and under the leadership of the Great Lenin and comrade Stalin, the Party organized thousands of workers in Norway in hard struggles. The Communist Party of Norway is the organized vanguard of the working class in Norway and will lead the proletariat in struggle until Communism.
In the period 1970-1975 the revisionist degeneration of the Party culminated in some important events: First the vanguard of the left in the Party was expelled through criminal processes, then the Party was dissolved in favor of the new Socialist Left Party (SV), and the majority of the Party’s members joined this social-democratic project, and finally the Party was “reconstituted” in 1975 as a Brezhnevist Party, that followed the leadership of the social-fascist and social-imperialist “CPSU”.
Thus the “NKP” of today can not be called a real Communist Party, but the proletariat needs their Party. Only the Communist Party can lead the class struggle of the proletariat, unite the working people around the proletariat, and lead the socialist revolution to victory, establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and lead the development of the society onward through cultural revolutions until Communism. New Democratic and Socialist Revolutions are necessary to end the imperialist system that ravages in the world, with war, starvation, poverty and misery, to create the classless communist society. Thus it is today a historical and political necessity to reconstitute the Communist Party of Norway, based on and guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism, and to initiate the people’s war in Norway, as a part of and in service of the World Proletarian Revolution, as soon as possible.
1. The proud history of the Party
The modern proletariat arose and grew strong in Norway during the 1800-hundreds in line with industrialization, particularly in the second half, where the proletariat organized it self in unions and eventually established the first Labor Party in the country.
The left in The Norwegian Labor Party (DNA) took over the leadership in 1918, in an international and national context marked by the World War, the October Revolution, and a powerful workers’ council movement in our country. Under the leadership of the left, the Labor Party became a member of the Communist International in 1919. But the right in the Party worked systematically to undermine the membership. The right opportunists, under the leadership of Martin Tranmæl, sabotaged the resolutions of the Communist International. Tranmæl hid his arguments in “left”-radical phrases, but the content was right opportunism. His furthest most demand was “national independence” for the Party, which the right opportunists set in opposition to internationalism and democratic centralism in the International.
Several years with struggle between the left and right opportunism in the DNA lead in the end to a split on the extraordinary national conference on the 2nd to 4th of November, 1923. The right opportunists played on nationalism in the form of autonomism and a demand of “self determination” from the Comintern and was for a one sided focus on economic struggle, against proletarian discipline and democratic centralism and put the masses up against the leadership by slandering them. The left in the Party tried, together with the center, to reach a compromise, but the Tranmæl-wing sought splitting. This, despite the hard confrontation that found place that exactly in this time between the reaction and the revolution on international level. The armed proletariat was in direct struggle against the enemy in Germany, only four years after the social democrats murdered the great communist leaders Luxemburg and Liebknecht in 1919, and the conference took place only barely two weeks after the red uprising in Hamburg. Thousands of red workers, men, women and children, sat in the concentration camps of the enemy on Finland. The young Soviet State fought against terror and isolation campaigns by a united world reaction. In the middle of this situation, the right spoke up for DNA abandoning its post, its place in the ranks, and split the political unity of the working class.
The struggle in DNA did not take place separated from this broader context. The Communist Party of Norway was from the first moment a child of the international struggle against reaction, imperialism and revisionism. A large minority at the national conference of the DNA rejected right-opportunism and social-chauvinism. The left, who represented the proletariat, chose the Communist International and the International Proletariat, left the split conference, and constituted themselves on the 4th of November as the first conference of the Communist Party of Norway, Norwegian section of the Communist International.
From the first moment the Party participated in great struggles and organized a large part of the deepest and broadest masses in Norway. The communists took a leading role in the iron strike in 1923. In the Menstad battle in Skien in June 1931, the communist led a militant demonstration of 2000 workers that attacked strikebreakers and police. When the red workers won this battle, the bourgeois State put in military departments to crush the struggle. Leading members of the Party had to serve time in prison.
NKP organized thousands of working class women in the housewife associations. Many of these women went on to become Party members. The Party united its self with the working class women as a champion of women’s rights, particularly economical and social rights, that have been very important for the masses of working class women. The Party also played a large role in organizing the struggle of the forest workers in the poorest parts of the country, particularly Hedmark. The Communist Party of Norway was certainly not just a name of any group, organization or Party, as it is used today for the revisionist Party. The Communist Party of Norway is forever the name of the sole real vanguard of the international proletariat and the working people in Norway.
During the Second World War and the fascist occupation, our Party got more than 200 martyrs that fell in honorable struggle against fascist occupation. Thousands of communists and revolutionaries were persecuted, incarcerated, tortured, or sent to the concentration camps of the Nazis. Nothing can erase this sacrifice! The culprits and the accomplices are criminals of the worst type, that has a bloody bill to pay back to our Class and our Party. Among the accomplices of Hitler-fascism in this injustice, as well as the genocide against Norwegian Jews and the oppression and persecution of countless other anti-fascists, is the Norwegian bourgeois police, the Norwegian bourgeois State, Norwegian capitalists that acted as collaborators during the war, and the social democratic governments before, during, and after the war. The social-democratic governments, in collaboration with Yankee Imperialism and British Imperialism, persecuted communists, sabotaged the resistance, organized snitching in large scale, and initiated the suppression of revolutionaries and communists after the war. The social-democratic leaders did this as a part of the international crusade against the Soviet Union.
2. Revisionism liquidates the Party
During the second world war the revisionist Peder Furubotn usurped the central apparatus of the Party. From the position of non-elected “chairman” of the Party, he liquidated the army of the Party, the National Guard, and sabotaged the active resistance led by Asbjørn Sunde (comrade Osvald). Furubotn liquidated the independence of the Party by submitting under the bourgeois resistance front and the Labor Party government in London. His line was nationalist, and after the war he represented a line for peace with the class enemy, “reconstruction”, and increased “productivity”. His revisionism and opportunism was revealed by comrade Stalin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the NKP initiated a reckoning with the Furubotn-clique. This clique operated as a faction in the Party, and consistently violated the democratic centralism. Their line was revealed as bourgeois-nationalist and Titoist, and in 1949 Furubotn and his cronies were driven out of the Party in hard two-line struggle.
The reckoning with Furubotn did not go deep enough, and when the traitor Khrushchev took over the power in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union with the death of Stalin in 1953, and consolidated revisionism in power of the Party with the Party Congress in 1956, the leadership of the Communist Party of Norway was not able to reveal the modern revisionism. Instead the Party leadership became a revisionist center in the Norwegian Party. Despite hard resistance from the left, lead by genuine communists like Kjell Hovden, Esther Bergerud, and comrade Osvald, revisionism and opportunism fastened its grip on the Party leadership. The left won a temporary victory in 1967, in the struggle against the Vogt-wing in the Party leadership, that wanted a more clear revisionist line, but in 1970 the leaders of the left inside the Party was excluded. These had already reorganized under the name Marxist-Leninist Front (MLF), and raised the struggle to create a real Communist Party. MLF became a part of the new «Marxist-Leninist Movement» that also MLG and SUF (m-l) were a part of. There was hard two-line struggle within this movement from the start. A petty-bourgeois clique springing out from SUF (m-l) won the hegemony in the movement, and lead the founding of the AKP (m-l) [Workers Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)] in 1973. During few years these revealed themselves as revisionists, and the revisionist development of AKP (m-l) culminated in the period from 1977 to 1984, where the Party entered a deep crisis. The Party leadership supported the revisionist Hua-Deng-gang when they usurped the power in the Communist Party of China in 1976. The national conference of the AKP(m-l) adopted a throughout revisionist Party program in 1984.
We must still highlight the left in the “ML-Movement”, that struggled the whole time against the worst manifestations of revisionism and right opportunism. MLF struggled against the nationalism in the AKP (m-l), and for a Party based on the proletariat. The left of the AKP (m-l) struggled against orienting towards elections, dissolution of democratic centralism, reformism, bureaucratism and other manifestations of the revisionist line in the leadership. The final degeneration of the AKP (m-l) was first fulfilled in 2007, when the Party was liquidated in favor of the social democratic Party “Red”. In 2008 multiple communists were excluded from Red Youth and Red, because they rose the banner for communist organization.
3. The Party must be reconstituted
History teaches us with all possible clarity that revisionism is the mortal enemy of the Party. Furthermore, we have to highlight that the left was always there, and struggled the whole time. Two significant shortcomings of the left of the NKP and of the AKP(m-l) was the understanding of the ideology and the Party. Without correct understanding of the ideology, today Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, one can neither understand nor defeat revisionism. Without a correct understanding of the Party, one does not understand that the Communist Party of Norway, founded on the 4th of November, 1923, as a Marxist-Leninist Party and Norwegian section of the Communist International, is the sole Party of the proletariat. The Party is already founded, and thus can not be founded again. The historical and political task for the communists it therefor not to found a “Communist Party”, but to reconstitute the Communist Party of Norway.
Revisionism is a form of bourgeois ideology. It is clearly defined and proven by Lenin. Revisionism is the bourgeois socialism that finds its way into the labor movement in a red disguise. After Marxism had won the hegemony in the worker’s movement, bourgeois socialism was smuggled into the movement as revised “Marxism”. With Khrushchev and Brezhnev this repeated itself in the CPSU and the International Communist Movement. Modern revisionism was disguised as “Marxism-Leninism”. After the coup in China in 1976 by the Hua-Deng-clique, a coup that was conducted with the army and an own department of the intelligence service, that cost the life of thousands of revolutionaries and communists, modern revisionism in China took “Mao Tse-Tung Thought” as disguise.
New forms of revisionism disguises themselves today as “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism”. The most felonious and criminal of these have raised the black banner in Peru, under the cover of “Gonzalo thought”. These criminals thus dirty the name of Chairman Gonzalo. Gonzalo Thought is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism applied to the concrete conditions of Peru, and it has given universally valid contributions to the ideology of the proletariat. Just as the proletariat only has one Party, the Communist Party, we also only have one ideology: Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism, with the universally valid contributions of Chairman Gonzalo.
The most important contribution of Chairman Gonzalo, is his correct definition of Maoism, as the new, third and higher stage of the ideology of the proletariat. Maoism is universally applicable in all countries, it is the worldview of the proletariat. With Maoism the proletariat gets its military theory: the people’s war. Chairman Gonzalo uncovered that to lead peoples was the Communist Parties must be militarized. The Party has to lead its own construction and the construction of the People’s Army and the Revolutionary United Front. Chairman Gonzalo shows us that this construction has to be concentric, with the Party as the core, and as the leadership of everything, as absolute leadership of the People’s Army, and that uses the People’s Army to construct the Revolutionary United Front that the Party also leads. With the People’s Army and the United Front, the proletariat can wage people’s war, and build new power, which is the core of the people’s war.
The Communist Party of Norway has to be reconstituted as a Maoist and militarized Party. The militarization is expressed organizationally in the concentric construction of the Party, the Army and the Front. The purpose of the Party is to wage people’s war, to conquer and defend the power for the proletariat. This is the only way to Socialism and Communism, the only way to liberation.
The perspective for the struggle of the proletariat – a powerful class struggle that has been ongoing since the class took its first steps, and where we can point out milestones as the Paris Commune in 1871, the 1905-Revolution in Russia, the Russian Revolution in 1917, the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution initiated in 1966 and the initiation of the People’s War in Peru in 1980 – is that our class is the only class that will dissolve all classes, and itself, by leading its struggle to victory. Conquering the power is only the first step. After conquering the power the proletariat will continue the struggle to expand their power to all areas of society. It will use the power to dissolve exploitation, dissolve all capitalist relations, and lastly to dissolve classes and the state itself as a machine for class-oppression. As such exploitation and class oppression is swept away from the surface of the earth.
Chairman Mao has taught us that the proletarian power has to defend itself and expand itself in socialism through cultural revolutions, until the classless Communism. Chairman Gonzalo reveals that the revisionists in China could suppress and stop the cultural revolution and seize the power, because they took over the People’s Army from within and from the top. Thus, Chairman Gonzalo raises the necessity of the armed sea of masses, and of the People’s Army incorporating the People’s Militias, and arming the whole people, to defend the power of the proletariat and wage cultural revolutions, without giving the bourgeois and the revisionists any chance to re-organize and make a “come-back”. We know, and the Soviet Union and China have shown it in practice, that revisionism in power is the bourgeois in power, that the bourgeois will restore the capitalist exploitation and oppression, and that they, in order to crush the dictatorship of the proletariat, have to do it with fascist methods. Revisionism therefore imposes fascism, and what we see today in China is a social-fascist government, with ambitions of making China a social-imperialist superpower that stretches its tentacles all over the world. Thus a new Socialist Revolution is on the agenda in China, and only a reconstituted Communist Party of China, armed with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, can shoulder this task.
The most important task for the communists in Norway is to reconstitute the Communist Party of Norway, as a Party of a new type, a militarized Party, based on and guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism, with the universally valid contributions of Chairman Gonzalo.
The Communist Party of Peru writes: “The proletariat generates a political apparatus: the Communist Party, totally opposed and different from the other Parties with the aim of taking the political power, as Marx defined it. Lenin established the characters of the Party of the new type fighting the undermining influence of the old revisionism that generated bourgeois workers’ Parties based on the labor aristocracy, trade union bureaucracy, parliamentary cretinism and molded to the order. Chairman Mao Tse-Tung developed the construction of the Party around the rifle and proposed the construction of the three instruments. Chairman Gonzalo establishes the thesis of the militarization of the Communist Parties and the concentric construction of the three instruments.”
The Communist Party is the Party of the Proletariat. The task of the Party is to lead the proletariat through revolutionary war, to conquering the political power. The Party can only only function as leadership as long as it organizes those of the class who are most active and most willing to sacrifice, those who voluntarily and of own conviction comes together in the Party, and as long as the Party organizes these with the strictest discipline based on democratic centralism, mainly centralism.
Conclusion
We assert that the «NKP» of today is not the Communist Party of Norway, it is a revisionist Party. We assert that there is no qualitative difference between the revisionist Party and “Red”, the differences are only the form and the quantitative size. The essence – the ideology and politics – is common among the two Parties: revisionism and opportunism. The program of the revisionist Party is not a program for revolutionary war, it is a program for “peaceful transition”. Moreover the revisionist Party is a part of a revisionist international movement, where several Parties with blood on their hands participates, like the Russian revisionist Party, the revisionist Party on Cuba, the revisionist Party in Korea, and the revisionists in India – and that also maintains close contact with the social-fascists in China.
Thus, it is the duty of the communists to dedicate themselves fully to reconstitute the Communist Party of Norway and to initiate the People’s War – the only path to the liberation of the proletariat and the oppressed peoples of the world.
Down with revisionism! Long live Maoism!
NKP 100 years – reconstitute the Communist Party of Norway!
Editorial board of the journal Red Banner
October 2023
