For this November 12th of 1998, we remember your party and especially the blood sacrifices of your founding leadership twelve years ago.

In twelve years it has already become apparent that the struggle against Soviet revisionism will emerge victorious and relatively soon. Comrade Dr Faiz Ahmad did not live to see the collapse of Soviet social-imperialism, but we followers of Lenin, Stalin and Mao all rest confidently that imperialism and social-imperialism will die one way or another. All of us communists die knowing that this is so and that the work will be carried on by the next generation.

Even in the reactionary center of US imperialism, this is true. The invasion of Afghanistan by the social-imperialists in 1979 created a pretext for President Jimmy Carter to re-institute the draft registration as a step toward conscription. Yet, such action had the dialectical consequence of politicizing the youth of the USA. Thus the formation of our own organization and its predecessors owes very much to the invasion of Afghanistan. Not only did resistance arise in Afghanistan. The reverberations were global.

At the time when the Islamic Party killed your founding leadership, the chokehold of revisionism was very much in force in the USA. When we criticized the militarist actions of Soviet social-imperialism in Afghanistan and Eritrea, we were told that these cases were exceptions or we met with stonewalling and ignorance.

The Trotskyists who never had anything good to say about the Soviet Union when it was socialist even said, "Hail the Red Army in Afghanistan!" We told them no Red Army invades another country, rapes its women and imposes military-feudalism.

Since that time, some have admitted at least being partly wrong about Soviet social-imperialism. However, what is more important is that we can be sure that the judgement of the next generation of communists will be harsh. While the older people still under partial sway of revisionism may not break completely from the past, especially in the imperialist countries where the majority of people is labor aristocracy, the newer comrades will see clearly the nature of the bourgeoisie in the party --the Khruschevs, Brezhnevs, Gorbachevs and Yeltsins, along with Alia in Albania, Castro in Cuba and Kim in Korea-- none of which provided the necessary ideological and scientific aid to unmask revisionism when it needed unmasking.

Equally certain is the destiny of Chinese revisionism. After the death of Mao in 1976, Hua Guofeng betrayed the international proletariat, ceased the campaign against Deng Xiaoping and eventually handed power over to Deng Xiaoping without a fight. Veteran Chinese comrades said they would like to ask Deng Xiaoping what he did that Chiang Kai-shek wouldn't have done. The blood of Chinese martyrs was not spilled to make China another capitalist country.

In the huge vacuum left by Mao Zedong's death, the torch passed to the so-called Gang of Four, who were four leaders of the Cultural Revolution. Before we communists call for armed struggle, the proletarian leaders worldwide must sum this up as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union. Only in this way can we prevent mistakes and successful infiltration of the party by the new bourgeoisie, in the likes of Hua, Gorbachev or Yeltsin.

Here in the USA, the pro-Deng Xiaoping revisionists did raise their voices against the invasion of Afghanistan. However, by the late 1980s they were dovetailing with Soviet revisionism and the main pro-Deng organization dissolved in 1990. Thus, while there is a mountain of propaganda that communism is dead, there has never been a better chance to defeat revisionism since MIM formed.

Always our revisionist critics told us the choice in Afghanistan was between Islamic reaction and social-imperialist reaction and always we told our critics that there were Maoists in Afghanistan and surely there is a proletariat which can provide the basis for emerging from all kinds of reaction.

Today some of those who criticized us in the past on this question work with us. As Mao Zedong taught us, if the ideological line is correct, then success will eventually be ours.

The blood sacrifices of the leaders and the people demand that we communists constantly renew our determination to hone the science of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. It is by utilizing the science of revolution that the day of communism is brought nearer and the bloody sacrifice of the proletariat and oppressed people is reduced.

Were the process of reaching communism a peaceful road, we could afford to be indifferent to the experiences of the international communist movement. However, reality in these years of the death throes of imperialism is violent. Martyr's Day, November 12, 1998 beckons us to hasten the end of imperialism and reaction.