See our general page on security
In his day Engels organized huge political parties and even sports leagues. Today many organizations that MIM disagrees with still essentially base themselves in friendship organizations despite the growth of the labor aristocracy since the day of Engels. Most do not apply Mao's teachings from "Combat Liberalism." At MIM, we believe that comrades in the majority-exploiter countries should work independently and if they cannot do so, then they need to study and acquire the skills to be able to do so. Comrades should remember that their revolutionary skills will double in less than every five years of steady practice.
A number of comrades find in the MIM web page something that is equally distributed or more equally distributed across the imperialist countries than political consciousness. The feeling that an individual is the only communist in a backward or remote area has brought many to our web page. This means that many of our most active comrades find themselves "isolated."
It's of course an excellent thing that the web page reaches into the far corners of the imperialist countries, but we do not recommend thinking of MIM as a cure for "isolation." We have generally advised comrades to live in places where access to lots of people is easy. Breaking isolation is not a matter of the party but going out among the population--tabling in the streets, organizing public events, writing letters to prisoners or getting involved in Internet discussions.
In all of this an iron determination not to let others' bourgeoisified opinions slow you down is key to ending isolation. Many of our comrades show too much respect to enemy opinions and let them "get to you." That's part of why it is necessary to train comrades in contempt for labor aristocracy opinions.
In point of fact, MIM seeks to reduce contacts among its own branches and affiliated groups for reasons of security. As we have described before, it's all about learning how to work together at arms-length and discouraging police activity. Police ask who, what and where questions and infiltrators seek such information. They win a certain percentage of the time in such pursuits. These same agents can stare at MIM line 24 hours a day, and it will not help them except to use as a cover among those weak comrades among us with a liberal attitude toward security. However, the enemy is powerless to stop the development and promulgation of MIM line. The smarter we get at working together at-arms-length, the sooner imperialism is going to fall. As our line spreads to sufficient numbers of people, the cops' "who, what, where and when" games become pointless.
The website has proved to you --and with numbers that the party has decided to allow publishing in central task reports -- that MIM related work is not "ineffective." The more information like that that we publish, the more we endanger our own security, but we have paid that price to some extent to give people a summation of what is going on and the impact of our combined efforts that is visible to anyone. Something we are training everyone to do is not to bait each other for information. That's what cops do. We are not even completely comfortable telling you how much public opinion success MIM has already had, but there is the problem that comrades do not develop a quantitative sense of their own work. If 90 out of 100 people scorn the revolution, we just scorn them back as our duty to the international proletariat and then there are 10 people still to talk with. That would be 29 million in the united $tates, so we do not accept excuses from people.
Many people who could not recognize MIM's impact have already left its circles. We can say they do not recognize what is going on right under their noses, and there is no cure for that. The same "can't do it" attitude is underneath the complaints of many experiencing isolation. The root error is "can't do it." In fact it is possible to set up a Maoist practice with whatever comrades have at hand. Waiting for some miracle from the party Center is a form of idealism. We even have some people who seem to think their job is coming up with more things for fewer comrades at the party Center to do. All these wrong attitudes contribute to comrades' own feeling of isolation.
In actual fact, the ideal comrade should be willing to wait on Mars to launch a particular armed attack on the imperialists, alone if need be. We feel revolutionary contempt for those whose ignorant, imperialist-militarist and chauvinist opinions oppose the exploited and oppressed. If we need a social life, we can adopt bourgeois leisure-time practices or we can organize politically.