|
|
|
|
|
|
|
by Web Minister
October 27 2006
We just received a report of another classic provocateur/slander situation. Someone asked someone else to undertake armed activities--all within close range of MIM circles--or so we heard. This is typical for a cop trying to entrap our young comrades. Though we cannot verify the details in this case, provocation has definitely happened many times in MIM history. The government has a lot of money to waste and endless agents who think they are original. This problem could also arise on our side from overconfidence in party-building strategy.
MIM has said repeatedly that we are against having comrades meet people unless they have already known them for years and observed their political activism. Instead of saying "I don't know what to do then," as people are apt when speaking with MIM, people need to think for themselves and come up with ways to work appropriate for our conditions.
We do not need to go into a gossip situation. What is meeting with someone going to accomplish? And now afterwards, we have one accusing another of something. This is not something that millions of people can know about. The enemy is always trying to embroil us in situations like, "did Gonzalo really capitulate in prison?" It's inherently divisive, and we lack the power to answer the question properly, especially at the early stages. Now after so many years in prison, people need to come to conclusions about Gonzalo, partly because there is no vanguard party anymore. If there were a vanguard party not worth splitting over a speculation about a man in prison, the situation would be different. This is something we have to learn: what can the millions know? The millions can know that the united $tates has sent warships to Iran and has a history of imperialist attacks. Such a question has a potential for our proletarian class. Getting involved in situations where individual comrades are fighting is not good for the proletariat, if it can be avoided.
The 50-40-10
Provocateurs are just one more vindication of MIM's strategy. 50% of the people we deal with directly are spies. 40% are petty-bourgeoisie of one sort or another trying to weigh what MIM is saying. 10% of the people we are in touch with are for real. This is not true in most countries in the world. It just happens to be true in countries like the United $tates and Germany.
Instead of saying "huh?" or "what?" comrades should look into this. What is the history of infiltration of organizations? How much does the state spend on this sort of thing? How could they have money for some of the things they have done? Nothing MIM does strategy-wise is going to make sense until we understand the nature of the parasite state. "Do not pass go; do not collect $200" until comrades understand the overall situation.
MIM's original document on the cell strategy is in accordance with this reality. The "authoritarian leadership principle" enters in this way. We would rather be in a situation where 90% of the population counts by Lenin's definition of "masses." Instead, we are in a situation even more needing of authoritarian strategy and tactics than Lenin's. It is not possible to apply the "mass line" to non-masses.
Our critics might say that Lenin was in a monarchy when he came up with "What Is To Be Done?" Lately it's not so clear that is not true in the united $tates too. Even more importantly, Lenin's raw material was better, though superstructurally subservient to strong leaders. We need an underground-like approach partly because of the material we are working with.
When people fail to account for the 50-40-10 in the imperialist countries, they may sometimes make ultra-democratic errors. Combined with the party-building fallacy we could be headed for major security problems.
Party building fallacy
We are not in a party-building strategic period where millions of revolutionaries exist in parasite countries and are asking the deep questions that necessitate party- building. Building parties before there is material results in the situation of watering down Maoism. This is what we see again and again with the RIM, either taking parties that degenerate or never agreed with Maoism. It stems from pressuring people who are not ready or deserving of a vote on Maoism.
So making the mistake of meeting someone who one has not known for years already just opens the way to cops taking your picture, recording your voice and trying to trick you with this or that stupid idea. Even just meeting you is a victory for the bourgeoisie, because the bourgeoisie can afford to meet with you, sort of, at least as far as government salaries permit. Meanwhile, the proletariat cannot afford your meeting. The proletariat needs you to do the work you can do that will reach large numbers.
Spies will be 50% of the time. Another four out of five of the remainder of times that you meet someone interested, you will be talking to some petty-bourgeois who wants to spend time with you. Nine out of the 10 people you meet with will be bogus one way or another, so why not just do direct public opinion work? The stupid will say you do not give people a chance. It's just that you should give more people a chance to interact with the revolutionary line--broadness as the preferred tactic for right now.
The minute we give up the party-building context, we are still in a situation of 80% of oppressor against 20% oppressed in the parasite countries. However, we are reaching larger numbers at one time than if we concentrate on party-building. Also, we waste less time with outright spies by getting out of a party-building context. That is the major plus of adopting more authoritarian methods.
Socializing
We cannot obtain our fun or social life from our comrades--that could be the real situation. We should not meet with people with the expectation that that is fun. It's not good for security.
Those of us who are inherently gregarious need to get over it and separate that from politics. Or if they want to be gregarious, they should take up tasks suitable for that purpose. We used to say we should have cultural and sports troupes, but even that is looking pretty shaky at the moment.
Authoritarian drive and the vanguard party
Being authoritarian in one's work does not mean we have to be stupid. We should study history avidly and be more scientific than anyone.
Studying history is not the same thing as trying to recreate all history in the party. We do not want to have a "two-line struggle" with people that have lines already addressed previously by history. Instead we want purges so people do not waste time on questions already decisively answered and without new and original analysis appearing.
It's not "two-line struggle" to struggle with people who are obviously saying something Trotsky or some other historical figure already said. It's just "not doing our homework." We want to save "two-line struggle" for the truly original and path-breaking things that have to be done. We can't afford the clutter if we do not purge the party and international communist movement.
The people raising this "two line struggle" thing against MIM do not carry out their own ideas. They are not explaining MIM to themselves. They are not making the demand "where is the other side?" Rather what they are doing is taking sectors of the petty-bourgeoisie already confused and confusing them more and then calling that two-line struggle. Anyone who looks at the number of polemics MIM has done to clear up crypto-Trotskyist confusion can see who is doing more polemic. It's not MIM in Hoxhaite denial of the existence of the enemy.
Vanguard parties are not supposed to be like pulling teeth. There should be arduous struggles once people are in vanguard parties, but choosing the vanguard party and the life of revolutionary should not be something that leaders hand- hold people through, not in the parasite countries. Just upholding this particular principle will cut back on our membership 90 or 95%. Not having resources going to building labor bureaucracies is another principle that will cut us way back, but with positive political benefits. Without cutting ourselves back, we waste time struggling with people as if party-building were pulling teeth. Such an approach stems from an ultra-democratic politics corresponding to an exploiter political economy. When we have a proper sense of the preponderance of the enemy economically, we will also give the enemy's politics its proper sense of preponderance.
In the exploited-majority countries time spent on democratic persuasion has a much higher chance of bearing results. A more friendly approach is warranted. Third World countries should not copy what MIM says in this article.
In the parasite countries, the people are well off enough that if they want to, they can sit down and read through Kautsky, Trotsky, Bukharin, Wang Ming, Deng Xiaoping etc. before they even choose a party. And that is the point: the true vanguard does sit down and straighten this all out. The vanguard scientists already know the difference among the parties and historical figures up to this point before getting involved in current vanguard struggles and claiming "two-line struggle." Instead of trying to relive all the gigabytes of material on the MIM website, the vanguard studies it. We are starting to meet people who have done that too, just an elite minority compared with the millions who have been in contact with MIM.
When we go from fourth grade in school to fifth grade, supposedly we have accomplished something so that we do not have to repeat fourth grade. Likewise in politics, the vanguard party is composed of the leaders, the people who are already seeking out answers to revolutionary questions on their own. We do not have to meet with the vanguard if the vanguard has the material that it needs to become revolutionized. Seeing our hair length, what color clothes we like etc. is not helpful to the real vanguard. It is just a morbid curiousity of the decadent and bourgeois idealists in our parasite countries.
So forget all that; prepare materials for distribution to public opinion. Do not water down what you think. Do do your homework in advance and then spread the proletarian hard line. If our materials show signs of no work, no knowledge of various political lines and history, then they will not be taken seriously by the potential revolutionary forces. So being ultra-authoritarian again does not mean stupid. It does not mean "here is how a decent girl lives today," period. No, we have our reasons for thinking about the trend of history in connection to gender questions. We look at other points of view and discuss them, which does not mean we treat them equally to our own or allow them in our organizations. We would never just provide some sterilized model to live by in the hopes of gaining popularity among those too lazy to do anything but latch onto this or that lifestyle fetish. The politically lazy should be in anti-war and environmentalist organizations. The vanguard is for the people who already do this sort of scientific research themselves.
It is the exploiter who can afford to treat all opinions equally in the parasite countries. It is a means of building exploiter unity. Post-modernism is the obvious latest retooling of Liberalism, one that covers up the crimes of imperialism with equality of all petty-bourgeois tokens of all cultures.
Anti-war or Third World solidarity work
If we go join a Quaker organization to do peace work or if we sit in a Black church or if we go hang out with the environmentalists, we can listen to others' opinions. If we go do their work with them, we can also gain experience with what kind of things people out there are saying. It's also a good thing to go knock on some suburban doors for just about any campaign issue or cause and see what happens, especially if we go into Red state rural territory. If people go knocking on doors in counties that voted for Bush, they will learn something. We can open an Almanac to find what counties voted for Bush. We can do all that without talking about the difference between dialectical materialism and contemplative materialism with anyone. No one has to know we are revolutionaries.
So when MIM says use ultra-authoritarian methods, we do not mean study no history, study no current writings and listen to no opinions. That can all be done without putting a kick-me sign on our backs.
When it comes time for your revolutionary intervention, do not waste it on the 50-40-10 situation like banging your head on the wall. One can gather countless opinions and study opinions seen in history and spend much time on that. Where we should not spend time is in "struggle" with spies willing to invent anything to waste time. Just because we do not listen to the 90% in a party-building situation does not mean we do not listen to the imperialists, petty-bourgeoisie and proletariat in other situations. We listen more than anyone and read more than anyone, but to do that we cannot waste our time on situations designed by the enemy. "Work hard; play hard," the bourgeoisie says. We say, "listen more, study more and then push the proletarian hard line more."
Party-building deviation
People DO chew on what MIM says. If you expect more than that, you are going to make a tactical error over and over again. When those tactical errors add up, we say you made a "party-building deviation."
I want to give credit to IRTR for building the party organization, and of course, also building the infiltration of that organization. That's the meaning of 50-40-10. No one has done more to build party organization lately than IRTR. Dialectically also, no one has done more to destroy it.
There are going to be some people who see a sharp struggle and MIM raising the red flag. For some people it will clarify the situation. At the same time, there will be others trained by the whole operation that we did not want to train.
As I said a few months back, MIM and IRTR have been paid a profound compliment, one I'm not sure we deserved and one that more people can see now. The enemy decided to fly the red flag against the red flag in what we are doing. By now we've seen this quite a few times.
The clearest example of flying the red flag against us is the people who support the Iranians organizing defeat of Iran by u.$. imperialism. It turns out that some among us were actually in centralism with those Iranians! This was not revealed until we pushed people for a stand.
Then there was the India situation. It appeared that a cell had arisen in support of MIM work. Yet again, this turned out to be false. Despite appearing after the May 2006 Central Committee statement, the alleged India cell was in centralism with Sabedaran, not MIM.
It's most baffling, because on the surface one might wonder if there are two organizations more alike in the world, the MIM and the Communist Party of India(Maoist). Then too, one might think that Indian comrades should be good material. So why not conduct an IRTR as if there is party-building work to do once we consider the Indians.
And all this reasoning is true as it goes, "reasonable" on the surface. That is why in class struggle we must learn to see beneath the surface. We must understand the inherent logic of struggle in each historical context and moment. The trouble with the oppressed is that the reason they are oppressed is that they are not good at power struggle. They fail to see the enemy's objectives and tactics.
In the recent struggles, the enemy has attempted all of the following: dividing MIM by geography, dividing MIM by gender, dividing MIM by questions of individual judgment and dividing MIM by appeal to identity politics. Some of the enemy's pettiness is so small as to be not worth mentioning. To our enemy's surprise, we said, "go ahead!" Thus far, the enemy's schemes have failed to net the enemy his goals. On the other hand, there are as yet, still many fakes among us, nestled beside us--not out in the open yet.
We had a nice clean separation with those supporting defeat of Iran by u.$. imperialism and backing Bush's crusade against "Islamo-fascism." This helped us a lot with our fakery problem, as the peace accords struggle clarified many things in Peru.
What we need now is to go back to the kind of work that contributes to finding new revolutionaries. If instead of public opinion work, people would like to write party-building historical articles, to draw on the past to serve the present as Mao said, that would be a good use of time. Someone should volunteer to write about the question of how long it took for Mao to send troops against the Japanese imperialists and draw the comparisons with Afghanistan today. Others may want to compare Turkey in Lenin's day with the situation in Iran and other countries today. Whoever reads through Trotskyism thoroughly will see that all the subjects of today have come up before in connection to Islam, gender and revolution. Another promising area would be articles about the differences among Ludo Martens and the historical record, especially on the history of the struggles involving Stalin, Hoxha and Mao. Another question would be if Mao acknowledged any Third World parties as vanguard parties if they were not conducting People's War or how did Mao's praise for Third World parties generally go? In what contexts if any did we hear about Third World parties not conducting armed struggle? What is it called in Marxist-Leninist-Maoist terminology when we hear so much about parties that are not attacking imperialism and simultaneously when we hear so much against forces actually fighting imperialism?
If people want to do party-building work, MIM regards that in a friendly way, but where we start to have problems is where the 50-40-10 is not accounted for in party-building work. In-depth party-building and intensely ideological articles can be written for MIM as opposed to the kind of other cultural and news reviews we do. MIM is not opposed. The question is how to do it with ultra- authoritarian methods. Instead of polling one's comrades, one should do one's homework, write the party-building article and then distribute it. Hey the good thing is: the enemy cannot copy that tactic in democratic fashion! 90% of the Amerikkkans could do no such thing, sheerly from lack of motivation, so here is a tactic that the enemy will have a hard time copying to twist.
Instead of hoping for party material that is not there, I'd advise comrades who are interested in ideology to go do some history and ideology work and then distribute the articles. That is an authoritarian approach. If we get our hopes up too much about people we meet on the Internet or on the street in the parasite countries, we are going to make ultra-democratic and party-building errors. When we combine ultra-democratic and party-building errors we are going to head to security problems.
Those of us who are good authoritarians can communicate with many people at a time by doing our homework, writing the articles and then putting them up on Internet. The same goes for art production I'm sure.
To do this means having confidence in one's own ideas. It boils down to thinking one has something worthwhile to tell others, the millions.
2006 is an exception for MIM. We prefer not to write ideology and strategy articles like this one. When things are going well, other parties write the ideological articles and we work on popularizing knowledge of our own conditions. That was not the situation this year, because we had a huge accumulation of problems. Struggle revealed people quoting articles from 1998 on the Taliban and falling for light rhetoric instead of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. It were as if Bush were never president and the "war on terror" never started. So all this detritus leftover from the 1990s was clogging up our political veins, just as the Central Committee told us in May, 2006. New lackeys have arisen who are still getting credit as progressive people and old thinking about former lackeys of imperialism has not changed. At fault is that the vanguard parties including MIM did not steer adroitly enough in the aftermath of 9/11. We should have known that Bush's blitz would catch some of us napping historically. Our communist movement has a history of getting stuck in the mud.