This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Maoist Internationalist Movement

Learning our lessons:

Shoe shopping as Liberal propaganda

reviewed by mim3@mim.org, holiday season 2005

A birthday card for "dreams come true" selling now features an ad for "buy one pair of shoes, get eight free." A TV commercial playing in November for Payless Shoes features a womyn and a truck. The womyn is fully clothed. The truck is nothing special. There is no sex, violence or chase scene in this advertisement; yet we suspect it still works or it would not be running.

This commercial is an example of very soft selling. The truck has an everso slight accident and out of the back spills out several meticulously placed pairs of shoes, right at the feet of our passing womyn, who is not barefoot and impoverished. It's all so soft and fuzzy the commercial could be a dream about shoes.

In contrast, our socialist realist propaganda about wimmin in Soviet and Chinese history seems harsher, because the propaganda we hear about is the harshest. Yet we should not mistake soft sell propaganda as restricted to capitalism or as not propaganda at all.

The truck could just as easily spill out letters from children with no shoes asking for shoes. That could be socialist propaganda.

Deposed wife of a dictator Imelda Marcos earned disgrace globally partly for her collection of thousands of shoes kept in a closet the size of many people's houses. Yet in truth wimmin in the rich countries often have scores or hundreds of shoes also. Within the united $tates such shoe ownership would not distinguish such wimmin from the vast majority of wimmin. It is only on a global scale that we can see that there is a class issue, one of waste and war.

The rich womyn's dream is for a truck full of shoes to spill out in front of her to pick from. We call it shopping Liberalism, an ideology of happiness through "choice." The rich womyn's "choice" comes off the backs of the working poor globally. For Payless shoes to arrive, U.$. military aid has gone to China and other regimes to repress the workers into wages less than a dollar an hour.

So that Amerikans can have the "choice" to drive SUVs, we also fight wars for oil. In real life, shoe manufacturing and oil extraction are not as simple as having a truck stop and open the door.