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.
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THE MAOIST INTERNATIONALIST MOVEMENT
MIM Notes 176 December 15, 1998
MIM Notes speaks to and from the viewpoint of the
world's oppressed majority, and against the
imperialist-patriarchy. Pick it up and wield it in
the service of the people. support it, struggle
with it and write for it.
IN THIS ISSUE:
1. INDONESIAN PEOPLE FIGHT IMPERIALISTS' PUPPET REGIME
2. STUDY THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF MAOISM, PROMOTE
REVOLUTION!
3. LETTERS
4. BATTERING MYTHS BEING EXPOSED
5. GENDER BUREAUCRATS AND THEIR SUPPORTERS BATTLE
CONSERVATIVE STUDENTS
6. REVIEW: SOJOURNER: THE WOMEN'S FORUM
7. COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE PHILIPPINES, NEW PEOPLE'S
ARMY CELEBRATE 30TH ANNIVERSARY
8. AMERIKA'S "SCHOOL OF ASSASSINS" EXPOSED AND OPPOSED
9. KWAME TOURE, FORMERLY STOKELY CARMICHAEL, DIES
10. REVIEW: Z MAGAZINE
11. "LEFT" FACE COMES OUT IN JAPANESE IMPERIALISM
12. BASEBALL OINKS IT UP
13. NEW BILL ADDS HARD TIME FOR CRIMES WITH GUNS
14. RESERVE THE DEATH PENALTY FOR LYING COPS AND
PROSECUTORS!
15. SPORTS FANS SHOW THAT OPPRESSOR NATION MASSES AREN'T
STUPID, JUST CHAUVINIST
16. PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES SUFFER UNDER PRISON CRAZE
17. MAO ZEDONG ON LITERATURE AND ART
18. MIM SALUTES EARLY JEAN-LUC GODARD
19. UNDER LOCK & KEY: NEWS FROM PRISONS AND PRISONERS
* * *
WHAT IS MIM?
The Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM) is a
revolutionary communist party that upholds
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, comprising the collection
of existing or emerging Maoist internationalist
parties in the English-speaking imperialist
countries and their English-speaking internal
semi-colonies, as well as the existing or emerging
Spanish-speaking Maoist internationalist parties
of Aztlan, Puerto Rico and other territories of
the U.S. Empire. MIM Notes is the newspaper of
MIM. Notas Rojas is the newspaper of the Spanish-
speaking parties or emerging parties of MIM.
MIM is an internationalist organization that works
from the vantage point of the Third World
proletariat; thus, its members are not Amerikans,
but world citizens.
MIM struggles to end the oppression of all groups
over other groups: classes, genders, nations. MIM
knows this is only possible by building public
opinion to seize power through armed struggle.
Revolution is a reality for North America as the
military becomes over-extended in the government's
attempts to maintain world hegemony.
MIM differs from other communist parties on three
main questions: (1) MIM holds that after the
proletariat seizes power in socialist revolution,
the potential exists for capitalist restoration
under the leadership of a new bourgeoisie within
the communist party itself. In the case of the
USSR, the bourgeoisie seized power after the death
of Stalin in 1953; in China, it was after Mao's
death and the overthrow of the "Gang of Four" in
1976. (2) MIM upholds the Chinese Cultural
Revolution as the farthest advance of communism in
human history. (3) MIM believes the North American
white-working-class is primarily a non-
revolutionary worker-elite at this time; thus, it
is not the principal vehicle to advance Maoism in
this country.
MIM accepts people as members who agree on these
basic principles and accept democratic centralism,
the system of majority rule, on other questions of
party line.
"The theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin is
universally applicable. We should regard it not as
dogma, but as a guide to action. Studying it is
not merely a matter of learning terms and phrases,
but of learning Marxism-Leninism as the science of
revolution."
-- Mao Zedong, Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 208
* * *
MIM Notes 176
December 15, 1998
INDONESIAN PEOPLE FIGHT IMPERIALISTS' PUPPET REGIME
Throughout November students in Indonesia have led
growing anti-government demonstrations. The students
have the support of many others in the country
including many workers who take to the streets to
cheer on the demonstrations and who have joined in the
protests in increasing numbers.
On November 18 over 30 demonstrators were injured
after troops attacked a protest in the eastern
Indonesian city of Ambon. These protests have taken a
militant turn since dictator Suharto's resignation as
it has become increasingly clear that changing
figureheads does not mean changing the government in
any fundamental way that benefits the people.
In mid-November sixteen protesters, including eight
students, were killed when troops and police opened
fire on a march in Jakarta on the legislature. In
spite of claims by General Wiranto, the chief of the
armed forces, that the military was instructed to only
use plastic bullets, the demonstrators were killed
with live ammunition. In response, rioting broke out
in parts of Jakarta and others, including some police,
were killed.(1) Tens of thousands of people took to
the streets throughout Indonesia to protest these
killings. "None of us are afraid of the soldiers,"
said Arif Rachman, a protest organizer. "We are
getting stronger now because of the killing of our
colleagues."(2)
The violence in November is the worst seen in
Indonesia since over 1000 people were killed in May
during demonstrations which forced dictator President
Suharto our of power in an attempt to pacify the
people.
Throughout Indonesia, police and the military have
been attacking protesters. In Surabaya, Indonesia's
second largest city, police beat students who forced
their way into the governor's office. In Ambon more
people were injured after a protest which was attacked
by the military. Protesters set two military vehicles
on fire.(1)
Protesters are demanding changes in the government
including an end to the participation of the military
in Indonesian politics and that former president
Suharto be brought to trial. And they are calling on
General Wiranto to resign.
In response to the demonstrations, police arrested
many activists and charged at least ten with
orchestrating the protests in an attempt to overthrow
the government of President B.J. Habibie. If convicted
they could face life in prison.
Economic crisis worsens
The poverty that has become widespread in Indonesia
over the past year is fueling the protests in
Indonesia. According to the United Nations, children
in Indonesia are severely malnourished. Four million
children under the age of two are badly underfed.
Millions more are at risk. At Jakarta's municipal
rubbish dump an army of scavengers, many of them
children, scale the waste looking for plastic bags or
bottles, anything that can be recycled and sold. Since
Indonesia's economy collapsed, thousands have joined
this wretched goldrush, and not just the unemployed.
By the end of year, 100 million people, half the
population, are expected to sink below the poverty
line.(3)
Last week Indonesia's new president, B.J. Habibie,
awarded the nation's highest order of merit to his
brother, and to his wife. These actions added insult
to injury for many who had hoped Habibie would lead
reforms that would change the nepotism historically
rampant in Indonesian politics.(3)
The vast majority of the country's 240 banks are
insolvent -- relics waiting to be taken over by the
state or simply shut down. More than 60 percent of
loans made by Indonesia's banks are classified as
nonperforming -- meaning they will probably never be
repaid. Of the more than 200 banks, experts said that
perhaps 10 would emerge from the crisis intact.
The total cost of bailing
out the banks could reach $30 billion, an amount equal
to 15 percent of Indonesia's gross domestic
product.(4)
Some banks, attempting to survive this financial
crisis, are turning to foreign finance capital. Bank
Bali, one of the largest domestic banks in Indonesia
is looking at selling a controlling stake in the bank
to a foreign investor. They recently retained J.P.
Morgan to explore potential deals. Before the crisis,
Bali had sold minority stakes to Sanwa, Japan's
fourth-largest bank, and UOB, a Singaporean bank.(4)
U.$. financial and military support
The united snakes aided Suharto in his 1965 coup
against the Sukarno government. During the coup the
military killed hundreds of thousands of activists
including a large portion of the Indonesian communist
party which was decimated by the massacres after
gaining significant strength and numbers in the 1960s.
The Indonesian government's total foreign debt is
approximately $110 billion. It must pay huge amounts
of interest to the big US, European and Japanese banks
every year. These interest payments will leap again in
the next few years, ensuring greater dependency and
sucking up any funds that could otherwise be used to
provide for the needs of the people. This is a typical
international imperialist financing scheme which leads
to greater impoverishment for the people in the
imperialist colonies and neo-colonies and riches for
the imperialist and their lackeys.
On March 24, before the riots and overthrow of
Suharto, the United Snakes announced an offer of $56
million in food and medical supplies to Indonesia.
This was on top of $45 million in what the
imperialists like to call "developmental assistance":
money used to keep puppet governments stable and loyal
and their economies under firm imperialist control.
The u.s. has a number of economic programs in
Indonesia which total close to $490 million according
to the Under Secretary of State, Stuart Eizenstat.(5)
This does not count the extensive u.s. military aid
and training that helps the very same military which
is killing demonstrators on the streets of Indonesia
and freedom fighters in East Timor.
Proletarian leadership essential
As the economic conditions in the country continue
to deteriorate, unrest grows. The recent
demonstrations and the demonstrations that deposed
Suharto earlier this year show once again that the
oppressed and exploited people of the world will
always fight their oppressors. Alongside the open mass
movement, a proletarian revolutionary party must grow
in strength in the underground to serve as the core of
the revolutionary mass movement. Thanks to the
brutality, corruption, and puppetry of the Suharto
clique, conditions in Indonesia are ripe for the
development of protracted people's war. A
revolutionary proletarian party under the guidance of
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is best equipped to lead
protracted people's war and forge a united front among
anti-imperialist and anti-fascist forces. Under
proletarian leadership, the Indonesian people can
overthrow the pro-imperialist, militarist clique which
exploits and oppresses them, and establish a socialist
society which will be able to combat the re-imposition
of imperialist domination.
Notes:
1. Associated Press, November 18, 1998.
2. Associated Press, November 20, 1998.
3. BBC, August 20, 1998.
4. NYT, September 23, 1998
5. Indonesia Today:
http://www.indonesiatoday.com/a3/j6/y2mar98.html
6. AP, Nov 22, 1998.
* * *
STUDY THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF MAOISM, PROMOTE
REVOLUTION!
December 26th marks the 105th anniversary of the
birth of Mao Zedong, the principal influence in MIM's
own philosophy. We believe it is incorrect to worship
individuals in cults of persynality, but it is
superior to worship individuals instead of deities.
Individuals of the real world might actually
accomplish something to relieve oppression as Mao did
for more people than any other leader this century.
Jesus Christ solved no starvation problems this
century. Mao Zedong led the protracted People's War to
kick the Japanese invaders out of China, never once
capitulating or believing the many who said China was
too weak and hopeless. He saw to the feeding of his
people for the first time in modern history; doubled
the life expectancy of the people partly by
leapfrogging over crusty Western ideas of medicine
that would have required China to wait till it had
trained enough Western style-doctors and he led the
eradication of China's severe drug addiction and drug
trade problem--among many other things that Mao led
China into resolving.
When Stalin died and the Soviet Union turned to
capitalism it was only Mao amongst the leaders of the
international communist movement who correctly saw the
problem of the bourgeoisie in the party. Hoxha in
Albania, Kim in Korea, Brezhnev in the Soviet Union,
Castro in Cuba--all of these leaders attacked Mao for
what is obvious today--that it was the bourgeoisie in
the party and not the imperialists who restored
capitalism in the Soviet bloc. As a result of failing
to grasp or act on Mao's scientific analysis, the
bourgeoisie in the party came to power in the Soviet
bloc including Cuba and Korea.
The phony communists said Mao was "ultraleft" for
merely pointing out the unpleasant but scientific
truth of a bourgeoisie in the communist party itself.
Understanding the nature of the economic bases for
party leaders to use their access to the means of
production to form a bourgeoisie, Mao also created an
appropriate form of struggle--the Cultural Revolution.
All those claiming to be for socialism have the
obligation to address the experience of the Chinese
Revolution led by Mao. It is not that Maoism is
another religion. Rather its success can be measured
not just by what Mao accomplished in his lifetime, but
also by the capitalism that has arrived in China now
that Mao's scientific conclusions have been discarded
by the so-called Communist Party of China.
* * *
LETTERS
Dear MIM:
How goes it?
I was at Keene State College today, and as I was
putting some MIM notes in the campus center, I got
quite the hysterical lashing from the lowly drone in
charge of the place. He was foaming at the mouth,
saying that such subversive material does not belong
on a respectable college campus.
I asked according to which criteria. He said that
it was obvious. I said it was not.
To make a long story short, I left a small pile of
papers (which he'll probably throw in the trash
tommorrow) but I did get him to shut up.
MIM responds: We call on all of our readers to help
us with the campaign to expand MIM Notes distribution.
As can be seen from this letter, it's not always easy
to get the paper into the hands of the people.
* * *
BATTERING MYTHS BEING EXPOSED
A small study published this year admits that it is
not just fear or economic dependency that keeps wives
in battering relationships. On the other hand, the
authors put forward that wimmin stay in relationships
longer the more violent the relationship is based on a
study of 140 couples that included a "cobra" group
that choked wimmin.(1)
In a separate media story, Patricia Pearson brought
to light the fact that the female actor in "The
Burning Bed" testified in court in August that she
destroyed some items in a domestic dispute with
someone who by her story had just proposed marriage.
Farrah Fawcett's boyfriend has been convicted for
attacking Farrah Fawcett after her violent threats
with a fireplace poker and smashing a lead-plated
window.(2)
It would be tempting to laugh if the scene were not
so typical and filled with pointless violence. This
scene along with the fact that wimmin stay with more
violent men longer is more proof that this Hollywood
culture cannot tell apart movie theatrics from their
own relationships. Movies with more sex and violence
sell better and somehow relationships with more of
both closely intertwined are more convincing as well
in this culture with nothing better to do.
Patricia Pearson uses the Farrah Fawcett case to
present the fact that adult biological females are as
likely to slap, hit, kick, punch, throw objects as men
(in fact slightly more likely than men). She talks
about how only 25 percent of battering cases involve
violence only by the male and how 25 percent involve
violence only by the female.
"It's noteworthy that men are far less likely to
report crimes than women."(2) MIM would say that if
ever there was a gender role, men are not supposed to
complain about female violence for fear of appearing
"unmanly" or "wimpish." However, we do not condone men
going to police about wimmin either, because the
overall prison-state situation is already far out of
control, with the United $tates as the world's leading
prison state per capita.
Pearson adds that the culture only knows the
"Burning Bed" story and does not even prepare its
usual psychological hocus-pocus remedies for violent
wimmin: "Denying the existence of mutual combat is a
popular feminist activity, and an utterly unproductive
one. As one Austin, Texas, woman whose husband
received treatment for wife assault told psychologists
William Stacey and Anson Shupte: 'He talks to me now
rather than hits me. I still hit him, however. I would
like to enroll in a class in anger management, but the
shelter for battered women does not help women with
this problem.' Needless to say."(2) "Anger control"
therapy --like psychiatric therapy in general-- has no
proof of working and in fact as MIM reported in MT2/3,
in some studies such therapy showed a
counterproductive effect. Hence, we do not agree with
promoting "therapy for wimmin too," but we take the
above is proof of the ubiquitous gender roles.
MIM agrees with the view that sexually-related
violence is gender oppression. For this and other
reasons, MIM counts most adult females in the
imperialist countries as gender oppressors, the gender
aristocracy. We agree with Patricia Pearson for making
the sick Amerikan romance culture face itself. "Girls
are the fastest growing group of violent offenders. I
expect it's time we stopped gasping in surprise and
began thinking of aggression as human, with victims
and villains on each side of the gender divide."(2)
MIM agrees it's time to stop with the gender
stereotyping that always makes females out to be
victims. Pseudo-feminists exalt stereotypical feminine
social roles whatever the truth may be.
On the other hand, MIM believes it is inevitable
some honest intellectuals are going to confront facts
while coming up with the wrong conclusions. There is
nothing "human" about violence. Some pre-industrial
communist tribes observed in Africa show no signs of
internal violence -- no record of murder, rape or war.
Some systems are much more violent than others.
That is why MIM says that we aim our fight against
patriarchy including the gender aristocracy. Females
in the U$A are sick with the imperialist patriarchy.
Their level of patriarchal privilege is so high MIM
only distinguishes imperialist country adult females
from adult males in matters of degree.
Notes:
1. USA Today 3 March 1998, p. d1.
2. USA Today 7 October 1998, p. 21a.
* * *
GENDER BUREAUCRATS AND THEIR SUPPORTERS BATTLE
CONSERVATIVE STUDENTS
Ann Arbor, MI--The University of Michigan
conservative student organization is having a spat
with supporters of the University of Michigan's sexual
assault bureau supported with taxpayer money called
"SAPAC." In a dispute going on across the country, the
conservative students call the SAPAC supporters
"extreme feminists" who portray men as "Neanderthal
beasts."
SAPAC is a university organization far from
advocating revolution. In fact, it does not openly
advocate "feminism." It does raise awareness by
distributing flyers and holding skits and discussions,
but it also recommends individual lifestyle changes to
prevent sexual assault. It addresses the symptoms
instead of the underlying institutions.
The Michigan Review and SAPAC therefore share the
underlying belief in the individual as the focus. In
contrast, we communists have an open program for
changing the overall underlying conditions of the
interactions of males and females.
One criticism of the Michigan Review by the SAPAC
or SAPAC-supporters is that "10-14% of all married
womnen in the U.S. have been raped by their husbands."
It is an example of the kind of statistics that SAPAC
supporters do tend to use. The Michigan Review
counters by pointing out that SAPAC figures contradict
each other. However, from MIM's point of view, we hope
all the readers stay with the issue of rape, but it
can never be scientifically resolved from an
individualist viewpoint. What is "extreme" is the gap
between the theory and facts on the one hand and what
the conservatives and state-backed pseudo-feminists
want to do about them.
MIM says all sex is rape, because we are dealing
with the conditions underlying oppression in this
country at a group level and we know full well how the
oppressor is going to use statistics. Yet, even
reflection by anyone on the "10-14%" figure used by
SAPAC should result in far more radical conclusions
than SAPAC ever reaches. Possibly marriage should be
abolished, which by the way is MIM's long-run
position.
SAPAC and others have never succeeded in showing
any plan that can eradicate such a large problem. Rape
and domestic violence figures like the ones pointed to
by SAPAC remain at fairly regular numbers over long
periods of time.
When we translate this sort of figure into persynal
life honestly, something like the following would have
to result: females receiving their marriage licenses
would be told that 10 to 14 percent will be raped by
their husbands. Males would be told that 10 to 14
percent of them will be viewed as rapists by a certain
brand of pseudo-feminist. If such were really to
happen before marriage, we doubt many marriages would
still happen. Who would take that chance?
By throwing about these figures without drawing the
institutional conclusions anywhere, the SAPAC and
others trivialize the rape of wives by their husbands.
It's as if to say marriage should go on in the midst
of such crime, because the sick happiness of the 86
percent outweighs the crime of the 14 percent.
There are many other figures used by the state-
backed pseudo-feminists that should be put to the same
test of matching the facts and theory to the action.
Before a date even happens, "I just want you to know
that I believe 10 to 14 percent of men rape their
wives; one third beat their wives and most men would
rape if given the chance." Then at the persynal level
if all were being honest, we doubt there would be many
males or females willing to date. It never happens
that way though and those who do give up dating are
living a consistent lifestyle that does not depend on
criticizing heterosexual lifestyles. The need for a
whole bureaucracy on the subject disappears if the
individualist is only concerned about individual
behaviors including his/her own. Only we anti-
individualists can legitimately claim to want
transformation beyond having some people give up their
dating lives. Consistent individualists would stop at
the point of ending their own dating practices.
Since a large portion of the figures used by SAPAC
also come from the police, SAPAC ends up framing much
of the issue in terms of typical arguments about
crime. The real conclusions drawn by those who hear
such figures without the overall context and
institutional discussion will be to support fascism.
Lock up the 14 percent then lock up the one-third
connected with beatings as well is the potential
backdrop.
In reality what happens is that the pseudo-feminist
of Amerika uses these figures as a bargaining chip.
They know that locking up one third of men would be a
real civil war and they have no intention of real
radical change, especially since a civil war would
quickly sharpen the political acuity of all concerned.
So they argue that the cases that do go to court are
legitimate as a form of negotiation that people like
Catharine MacKinnon are so good at.
One figure MIM has never seen from a SAPAC or any
other pseudo-feminist organization is this: 63.3
percent of the time a Black man accused of rape is
accused by a white female.(2)
That is where pseudo-feminism leads, not to a
serious civil war locking up 14 percent, one third or
44 percent of men depending on which statistic one
reads for what oppression. Pseudo-feminism leads to a
reinforcement of national oppression and patriarchy.
MIM itself does not support going to civil war over
the romance culture either. We believe the romance
culture should be abolished long before this sort of
war is attempted, because lives are more important
than what people want to do in their leisure time.
Being unwilling to state this, SAPAC and others come
across as the ultimate in romance culture: love is so
important that we should endure widespread crime or
violence and repression to stop that crime according
to the pseudo-feminists. It's a theme doing "General
Hospital" one better.
Pseudo-feminism does not name the institutions and
does not come out saying: yes, romance culture and
dating are less important than the violence we see, so
toss the romance culture, marriage and dating. This
is the way that heterosexual pseudo-feminism
ultimately trivializes the intertwining of sex and
violence--by not clearly advocating what it is willing
to give up in return for an end to "sexualized
violence." In contrast, we rooted in the proletariat--
the social group with the most to gain from radical
social change--we have clearcut priorities.
Instead of civil war what happens is a minority of
men get locked up, and their sexuality is appropriated
by the pseudo-feminists so that they may keep their
romance culture. MIM in contrast is able to say: no,
no, we will try a lot of things before we lock up
large percentages of men in a country where the
imprisonment rate is already the highest in the world.
We will try the sacrifice of the romance culture
itself before we go to the patriarchal imperialist
state to solve this problem. When we seize state
power, we will use the state to change things short of
locking up and executing people as much as possible.
We will ban production for profit which will remove
99 percent of the wind from the sales of
pornographers. We will raise children in cooperative
child-rearing practices in which masculinity
definitions will not be imposed by one or two people
but by a people led by a feminist party and state. We
will exercise proletarian feminist dictatorship in the
arts so that not even the dimmest bulb in our society
can "copy-cat" an oppressive gender practice. MIM
takes the figures and gender oppression seriously. We
do not see the individualists of SAPAC or the Michigan
Review willing to fully digest what the figures they
throw around really imply. -- MC5
Note:
1. The Michigan Review 18Nov1998, p. 3.
www.umich.edu/~mrev/
2. National Crime Survey, 1983. ASI 6066-3, Table
45.
* * *
REVIEW: SOJOURNER: THE WOMEN'S FORUM
November, 1998 Vol. 24, No. 3
42 Seaverns Ave. Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
info@sojourner.org
reviewed by MC5
MIM is somewhat impressed with this issue of
Sojourner. It is lengthy, covers a wide variety of
issues and sustains a certain level of political
insight.
Matthew Shepard
We were happy that a self-styled lesbian writer
wrote the style of article that she did about the hate
crime murder against gay student Matthew Shepard in
Laramie, Wyoming. Taking the perspective of one of the
murderers, she writes: "I owe you so much, Dad. You
taught me not to be afraid of anything. But the fag
couldn't take it, Daddy. He died like a girl. Hey,
Dad? I did this for you. Isn't this what you wanted?"
MIM believes in selective and organized violence,
not pacifism, but Susie Day hit it on the head with
"The Bottomline 'Scarecrow.'" There is definitely
something wrong with Amerikan masculinity to be
threatened by gay men to this degree that it has to
kill them for nothing. As Susie Day says, "dad" failed
somewhere. She also pointed to the car-dragging
lynching of a Black man in Texas recently as the same
phenomenon, backed by Reverends and Senators.(p. 5)
On the whole, Amerikans belong to oppressor groups,
not oppressed groups. However, oppression that results
in death as in the case of Matthew Shepard -- such
oppression is every bit as severe as that happening in
the Third World for the individuals concerned. If it
happened as often as starvation and imperialist war
does in the Third World, Amerikans as a group would be
revolutionary too.
The system of patriarchy that resulted in the death
of Shepard cannot be combated in a one-on-one way,
just by changing attitudes. Those who speak against
what is considered masculine are simply deemed
unmasculine. Hence, some people may change their minds
while others will be reinforced or returned to
reactionary thinking.
To change the masses requires power. Under the
feminist dictatorship of the proletariat, children
will grow up in collective child-rearing practices. No
single bigot will be able to decide how children grow
up and the state will ensure that there is equality
between boys and girls and no gay-bashing.
The dictatorship will extend into the arts until
that time when the people no longer have violent
aggressions amongst themselves. That won't happen
until some stage of communism. In this way -- by
reorganizing child-care and culture without the motive
of profit, domination of reproductive access or
leisure for its own sake ñ the dictatorship of the
proletariat will destroy the destructive gender roles
that have resulted in deaths like those of Matthew
Shepard.
Independent abortion providers
A review of a book titled "Abortion Wars" by Rickie
Solinger points out that many in the movement
exaggerated the threat of "back-alley butchers." (p.
14) MIM itself ran a graphic photo of the death of a
womyn in a black market abortion in MIM Notes.
In actuality, such deaths were rare prior to the
Supreme Court ruling of Roe vs. Wade that legalized
abortion. By asking the state to legalize abortion
because of the black market practices of abortion
professionals, activists undercut the independent
institutions of the oppressed and flatter the
oppressor that his institutions are superior.
If the reactionaries do manage for a time to outlaw
abortion or otherwise make it unavailable as they have
already in many counties in the United $tates, then
the masses will have no choice but their own
independent efforts. Revolutionary power always stems
from such independent organization.
Television
Adriene Sere attempts to put readers in touch with
the problems of the soap opera "General Hospital." The
problem is a famous scene in which a rape led to real
romance.
"As for romance, all of
society promised that it would transport us to heaven.
. . Romance was the solution that would finally bring
us soothing safety, make us visible to someone, to
someone who counted in the world, and surround us with
much needed love. All this paradise would then
culminate in magical and mysterious sex. The soaps
promised this to us. . .
"As for those individuals with who girls were
supposed to enter this paradisial state -- boys --
well, they mostly weren't watching the soaps. A lot
of them were primarily learning about girls and sex
through pornography of various kinds, and through each
other's mean-spirited stories about 'scoring' with
girls. What a set up."(p. 17)
Sere admits that she does not watch the soaps
anymore and thinks they are dangerous. We agree.
More questionable is the defense of "Buffy the
Vampire Slayer" on account of the main character's
being a fearless female martial artist. The best we
can say of this show, other shows like "Xena," and
movies like "Barbarian Queen" is that even in the
worst situation there is a dialectical silver lining:
They show wimmin who excel in combat and take a
certain kind of leadership, which is not the usual
image of wimmin in mainstream culture. The down side
to "Buffy" and "Xena" is that both intertwine sex and
violence too closely. All the evidence already
indicates that society is too confused on why it
enjoys sex. Many seem to think that violent passion
proves something or fulfills something in this boring
capitalist world where workers are not in control of
the work process and get no intrinsic pleasure from
their work.
Victimology
Like the pseudo-feminist movement it is based in,
Sojourner ranges into victimology. Just as post-
modernists believe there is no truth now, just because
they and their peers in academia used to believe all
truth resided with white male culture, there are those
who overuse the concept of violence and water it down
so that everything is violence and therefore nothing
is.
The leading arts review is an example of
victimology, because it is about a film on cat-calls.
When a womyn walks by on the city street and some men
stare, howl, cat-call or whistle, Silja J.A. Talvi
says the problem is "it's a threat. I am not safe."
(p. 29)
It is this sort of victimology that has derailed
feminism and also contributed to a highly irrational
movement for state repression in the name of opposing
"crime."
Conclusion
Sojourner is rounded out by plenty of plain old
welfare state liberalism articles. The polls these day
that the bourgeoisie talks about with regard to
Amerikan wimmin are true. They are more liberal than
men with regard to support for the welfare-state.
Publications like Sojourner are further proof. It's
not the place to find revolutionary politics. On the
other hand, not all articles are mainstream pseudo-
feminism.
* * *
COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE PHILIPPINES, NEW PEOPLE'S ARMY
CELEBRATE 30TH ANNIVERSARY
MIM sent the following solidarity mesage to the
Communist Party of the Philippines for its anniversary
on 26 December, 1998.
Dear Comrades,
The Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM) sends
warm and enthusiastic greetings to the Communist Party
of the Philippines (CPP) on the 30th anniversary of
its re-establishment on the theoretical basis of
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. We also greet the red
fighters of the New People's Army (NPA) on the 30th
anniversary of the NPA's founding under the absolute
leadership of the CPP on 29 March 1998.
MIM is especially happy to congratulate the CPP on
the continued successes of the Second Great
Rectification Movement it launched in 1992. The Second
Great Rectification Movement is one of the two most
important developments in the International Communist
Movement since the counter-revolution in China in
1976. The other is the success of the armed struggle
led by the Communist Party of Peru.
The rectification movement - which emphasizes the
study of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and especially
Mao - was able to defeat the modern revisionists,
petty-bourgeois adventurists, hidden Trotskyists, and
other charlatans who sought to subvert the CPP's work
from within. The rectification movement helped the
revolutionary movement regain ground lost under the
influence of incorrect ideas and thus demonstrates the
continued relevance of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as a
tool for liberating the oppressed.
The rectification movement reaffirmed the CPP's
general political line of new-democratic revolution
under the leadership of the proletariat, through a
protracted people's war and with a socialist
perspective. This political line allows the CPP to
lead both legal and underground forms of struggle,
while recognizing the primacy of the armed struggle.
On the international plane, the CPP has once again
been an ally in the ideological struggle against
modern revisionism since the rectification movement.
At the same time, the persistence of the NPA in waging
the armed struggle while implementing genuine land
reform and undertaking thorough mass work has been an
important example to anti-imperialists and Communists
around the world. For comrades in semi-feudal and
semi-colonial countries, the NPA is an example that
the conditions are ripe there for the development of
armed struggle under the leadership of a Marxist-
Leninist-Maoist party. For comrades in imperialist
countries, where armed struggle is not feasible at the
moment and will not be until the imperialists are
truly helpless, the armed struggle led by the CPP is a
reminder that the seizure of power by armed force is
the highest form of revolution - a reminder which
keeps us from straying into the swamp of opportunism.
The victories won by the revolutionary movement led
by the CPP aid the struggles of the oppressed within
u.$. borders and around the world, because these
victories are a blow against our common enemy:
Amerikan imperialism. MIM takes this occasion to
reiterate its commitment to helping the revolutionary
movement in the Philippines the best way it can: By
hastening the day when the oppressed masses in North
America overthrow Amerikan imperialism and enter into
a dictatorship of the international proletariat which
will ensure that imperialism does not rise again.
Long live the New People's Army!
Long live the Communist Party of the Philippines!
Long live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!
* * *
AMERIKA'S "SCHOOL OF ASSASSINS" EXPOSED AND OPPOSED
On November 22, 2,000 people were taken into police
custody at a demonstration outside of the School of
the Americas (SOA) at Ft. Benning Georgia. The SOA is
a training ground for the military leaders of puppet
regimes backed by the United Snakes. The school's
students have been linked to some of the worst
military atrocities in Latin America.
Protesters at the Fort Benning demonstration,
organized by School of Americas Watch, were not
charged and were released about a mile away. Last year
the protesters were charged with "criminal trespass",
a charge that more accurately applies to the U.$.
economic, military and political presence on every
corner of this planet.
At a college in the Northeast, the Revolutionary
Anti-Imperialist League (RAIL) held a video showing of
"The School of Assassins" and a discussion on the
topic of Amerika's death squad training school. The
video was made by School of Americas Watch. The RAIL
event was one of the largest in recent memory and had
a high quality discussion about the nature of U.$.
imperialism.
School of Americas
The School of the Americas -- more accurately
called the School of the Assassins -- is one of the
tools that has enabled Amerikan imperialism to repress
and exploit the masses of many Latin American
countries for the last 50 years. This training ground
equips the leaders and the soldiers of military
dictatorships with the military strategies needed to
oppose popular rebellions and revolutions, and teaches
tactics of torture, both physical and psychological.
The School of the Assassins allows the Amerikan
imperialists to protect their interests without
sending numerous Amerikan troops to fight a direct war
in the countryside of Latin America. Instead, they
train local thugs to fight their battles by proxy.
The Latin American Training Center-Ground Division
was started in 1946 in the Panama Canal Zone. This
became the School of the Americas in 1963. In 1984,
the school suspended its operations in compliance with
the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty. Three months later it
reopened in Ft. Benning. Since then, the trail of
massacres, murders and torture of rebels continues to
trace back to the School of Assassins. The
assassination of Bishop Romero and over two-thirds of
the soldiers responsible for the worst atrocities in
El Salvador have been linked to this school.
School of Assassins video
On November 18, RAIL showed the School of Assassins
video on a college campus in the Northeast. RAIL
introduced the film by linking the injustice of
perpetuated by the School of the Americas with the
injustice of other parts of U.$. imperialism. The
intention of this introduction was to counter the
reformist shortcomings of this otherwise excellent
video.
The video "attacks" the SOA by asking "What purpose
can the SOA serve, now that the communist threat is
over?" Aside from perpetuating humdrum anti-communism,
this approach downplays the decades-long U.$. war
against the people of the Third World.
A number of people present came with no pre-formed
opinion about the School of Assassins, and all but one
opposed the SOA by the end of the evening. This one
person found the video unpersuasive because he found
it to be "one-sided." This then provoked an
interesting discussion about how the U.$. government
would defend the School of Assassins if interviewed.
One argument which the u.$. does make consistently
and openly is that the SOA and programs like it help
expand U.$. influence in Third World countries. At the
video screening RAIL argued that expanding the
interests of the United Snakes comes at the expense of
Third World peoples. Amerika's Third World client
regimes often massacre their own people because that
is the only way they retain control.
Amerika isn't forced to
use such methods often within its own illegitimate
borders because it has bribed the white majority into
complacency. Repressive measures like prison and
selective assassination are reserved for internal
oppressed nations and their revolutionary leaders. In
the Third World, the immediate revolutionary potential
of the people is much higher than in the First World,
and the response of their governments is likewise at a
much higher level.
The video traces the efforts of Representative
Kennedy to pass a bill in Congress shutting down the
School of the Americas. The video ends in a plea to
lobby your CongressPig to support Kennedy's bill. As
the truth about the School of Assassins becomes public
knowledge, it is certainly possible that the school,
as just one part of the U.$. imperialist war machine,
could be shut down. This would be a victory, and MIM
challenges liberals - including liberal CongressPigs -
who wring their hands about "human rights abuses"
abroad to put their money where their mouth is and
shut down the SOA.
In the long run, no amount of lobbying CongressPigs
can stop U.$. imperialism or the oppression of the
people of Latin America in particular. To keep
revolutionary movements in check, the U.$.-backed
regimes would be forced to return to the same death
squad tactics, and the u.$. may just take up more
covert forms of funding and training them.
To end imperialist-sponsored genocide of the
people, a revolution to overturn the existing
imperialist dictatorship and replace it with a
dictatorship of the international proletariat is a
necessity.
Close the School of the Assassins! Down with u.$.
imperialism!
Note:
Boston Globe November 23, 1998, p. A8. School of
the Americas Watch is an organization exposing the
SOA. For more information on SOA, on their annual
protest at Ft. Benning in November, or to obtain one
of their two informational videos on the subject
write: P.O. Box 3330, Columbus, GA 31903.
* * *
KWAME TOURE, FORMERLY STOKELY CARMICHAEL, DIES
MIM mourns the death of Stokely Carmichael, later
Kwame Ture, an important early figure in articulating
the politics of Black nationalism within u.$. borders.
Stokely popularized and explained the slogan "Black
Power" as the need for Blacks to have independent
institutions - the first step in the struggle for
national liberation. This was an important step in
defining terms of Black nationalism in the 1960s. MIM
also has some serious disagreements with Ture's later
political turn toward Pan-Africanism, narrow
nationalism, and pseudo-socialism.
Born in Trinidad in 1941, Carmichael moved to the
u.$. as a teenager. He became political after entering
Howard University in 1960. In 1961, he participated in
Freedom Rides, non-violent protests against
segregation that included integrating public busses,
sitting in at lunch counters and trying to use whites-
only restrooms and waiting rooms at bus stations
throughout the south.
By 1964, Carmichael was an activist with the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, or
"Snick"). He spent the summer of 1964 in Mississippi
as a leader of the Freedom Summer. Freedom Summer was
a directed campaign to bring youth - particularly
college students from the north - to Mississippi to
advance voter registration and anti-segregation work.
Carmichael served as a SNCC's district director of the
Second Congressional District in Greenwood that
summer.(1)
When Stokely joined SNCC, much of the
organization's work was electorally focused.
Segregation had barred Blacks from voting since
slavery, and SNCC's voter registration drives educated
Blacks about the intricacies of the system that
colonized them, and brought many people into political
activism through this educational work. Also in 1964,
SNCC launched the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
(MFDP).
The MFDP was in some ways a failure in SNCC's eyes
at the time. It was a campaign to send representatives
elected by Blacks in Mississippi to unseat the
unconstitutionally elected white Mississippi
delegation to the Democratic National Convention in
1964. The MFDP "failed" because it failed to get its
representatives seated at the convention, or even to
get Amerika to recognize that the Mississippi
delegation had been unfairly elected in a process that
was closed to Blacks. But the MFDP educated the SNCC
organizers about the level and recalcitrance of
segregation in the u.$. government as a whole. The
MFDP experience gave them new proof that eventually
the battle for Black political power would be fought
against all of Amerikan imperialism, not just the
Southern segregationists.(2)
The failure of the MFDP prodded Carmichael and
other activists to look more deeply at defining and
building independent Black institutions - structures
that could build from the community level upward
rather than trying to be an independent segment of the
broader white-dominated government. By the time
Carmichael became the Chairperson of SNCC, he was
arguing for staunch anti-integrationist, anti-
tokenist, anti-imperialist Black nationalism. Arguing
from a basic understanding that "this country is not
now nor has it ever been run on morality, it runs on
power, " Carmichael set out to describe the next steps
for self-determination. He argued that integrationism
was something Black college students could see for
themselves, but that it was irrelevant to the majority
of Blacks who did not have access to institutions that
would teach them how to operate in the white power
structure.(3)
Developing this anti-integrationist stance further,
Carmichael co-authored the book Black Power: The
Politics of Liberation in America with Charles
Hamilton. Carmichael and Hamilton wrote: "we blacks
must respond [to our oppression] in our own way, on
our own terms, in a manner which fits our
temperaments. The definitions of ourselves, the roles
we pursue, the goals we seek are our
responsibility."(4) MIM agrees, and the Black Panther
Party agreed. It is not for any nation to decide how
another nation should live. Every nation by its
existence has the right to self-determination and
liberation. Of the white nation, Stokely said: "they
ought not to try to define Black Power, they ought to
listen and see what it is."(3) From this position,
Carmichael joined and worked as a leader of the Black
Panther Party from 1967 until 1969.
Stokely broke with the Panthers in 1969, because he
disagreed with the Panthers' policy of forming
alliances with white groups like the Peace and Freedom
Party. After this split, the Panthers criticized
Stokely for narrow nationalism and subjectivism, the
latter because he extrapolated his inability to form a
revolutionary alliance with whites at SNCC to the
level of universal principle. The Panthers also
criticized Stokely for his shallow accusation that the
Panthers were "dogmatic," which came about the same
time the Amerikan psychological warfare operations
accused the Panthers of the same thing.(5)
In the same year Stokely moved to Guinea, where he
changed his name to Kwame Ture, after African
revolutionaries Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure.(6) In
an interview he proclaimed: "The black man should no
longer be thinking of transforming American society.
We should be concerned with Mother Africa. America is
an octopus with tentacles all over the world. If the
tentacles that grip Vietnam, South America and Africa
are cut, it will be so much easier to rise up and cut
off the head."(7) It is true that the main blows
against u.$. imperialism will be struck in the
colonies and neo-colonies, but First World
revolutionaries should not bag the struggle here and
move to the Third World.
To many revolutionaries in the First World, the
struggle in the Third World carries obvious appeal:
The battle lines are clearer, the majority of people
have an interest in overthrowing imperialism and the
anti-imperialist struggle there is far more advanced
than it is within imperialist borders. But because the
struggle in the First World is so undeveloped our
Third World comrades need us to stay here and develop
it. We are the ones with organizing expertise in this
decadent society, our lives here in the belly of the
beast make it easier for us to study and understand
how to advance here. There is no guarantee that if we
joined a revolutionary movement in the Third World we
would ever be anything but a burden on our comrades
there. As the Panthers wrote of Stokely: "You have cut
yourself off form the struggle in Babylon, [but] you
are not about to become the Redeemer of Mother
Africa."(5)
Kwame Ture helped found the All-African People's
Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) in 1969. MIM's biggest
difference with the AAPRP is its ideological
eclecticism. Kwame Toure supported and the AAPRP
supports the "PLO, the Irish Republican movement, ...,
Cuba, Libya, [and] revolutionary Korea..."(8) MIM
supports movements for national liberation -
proletarian or not - because even independent
capitalism is progress over living under imperialism.
But we do not lump all nationalist movements together.
Non-proletarian led anti-imperialist movements lead to
neo-colonialism, as the recent examples of the PLO,
Sinn Fein, and the ANC demonstrate. Even worse, Cuba
and north Korea claim to be examples of Marxist
socialism while in reality they represent state-
capitalism, which confuses the masses about what is
and is not socialism.
MIM takes this opportunity to encourage comrades in
the AAPRP to deeply study the history of the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China and the great
debate between the Chinese communists and the Soviet
social-imperialists, in order to make the hard
ideological and political choices necessary to ensure
that the anti-imperialist movement succeeds and does
not founder on the rocks of neo-colonialism.
Again, in the words of the Panthers' criticism of
Stokely: "[I]f you look around the world you will see
that the only countries which have liberated
themselves and managed to withstand the tide of
counterrevolution are precisely those countries that
have strong Marxist-Leninist parties. All those
countries that have fought for their liberation solely
on the basis of nationalism have fallen victim to
capitalism and neo-colonialism, and in many cases now
find themselves under tyrannies equally as oppressive
as the former colonial regimes."(5)
Notes:
1. James Forman, The Making of Black
Revolutionaries. (Washington, D.C.: Open Hand,
1985), p. 519.
2. Forman, p. 386-96.
3. Speech at Hill Auditorium, University of Michigan,
1966.
4. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black
Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. (New
York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. ix.
5. Philip Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak, pp.
104-106.
6. Los Angeles Times 17 Nov., 1998.
7. See MIM's review of Kwame Nkrumah: The Conkary
Years His Life And Letters for more information
about Kwame Nkrumah.
8. "Kwame Ture our Revolutionary Young Ancestor,"
http://members.aol.com/aaprp/index2.html.
* * *
REVIEW: Z MAGAZINE
October 1998
Sysop@zmag.org
508-548-9064
Z Magazine is far to MIM's right or we would review
it more often. Z Magazine fortunately does not claim
to be Marxist. The sad part is that some good anti-
imperialists like Edward S. Herman and James Petras
write for it.
In this issue, there is a humorous look at an
evolutionary view of war as the product of too many
young males available. We would like to accept
humorous writers like Lydia Sargent into our own
ranks. The "theorists" writing about too many young
men around did not seem to notice that the United
States Government is the number one war-maker and it
does not have the highest proportion of young males
available.
A more typical Z Magazine article is about
organizing adjunct professors for higher pay.(p. 18)
As usual there is much hand-wringing over middle-class
people by social-democracy. It is much easier to
organize and address middle-class people than to
organize oppressed people. That is why radical and
"critical" magazines like Z Magazine swamp the efforts
of proletarian organization in the United $tates.
We would add that having professors poor is a good
thing. This ensures that only the most dedicated to
teaching and truth remain in the profession. In a
country like the United $tates the truth produced and
taught by poor adjunct professors is guaranteed to be
flawed by its circumstances of production in higher
proportions than in other more proletarian countries,
but college professors are a source of information and
authority differing from that of Wall Street. If the
pay were similar to that found in other professions,
college teaching would become indistinguishable from
stockbroking in its outlook.
Conservatives such as William Buckley and now the
Republican youth movement always ask why there are not
more conservative professors, to the point where now
they ask for affirmative action for Republicans. It's
very simple: "successful" people motivated by greed do
not stay in academia. The conservative ideology is the
most individualistically greedy one there is.
Conservatives go into law, banking and
stockbroking. That is not to mention the question
raised by Buckley himself as to whether conservatives
are on average simply less intelligent than the rest
of the world, something proved by some surveys, but
also self-evident in that it requires little thought
to be comfortable with the status quo.
The feature article of this issue of Z is a
strategy guide for the labor aristocracy, "The
Economy: Neoliberalism Comes Unglued." It unveils the
ancient social-democratic strategy of political
mobilization: hire more government bureaucrats whose
jobs depend on the welfare state.
Mark Weisbrot complains about those seeking to
privatize social security in the United $tates: "They
want people to identify with corporate profits, and to
have policy makers increasingly constrained from doing
anything that might upset the stock market."(p. 10) In
contrast, Weisbrot would like to see a social-
democratic growth of imperialist state power. Like all
social-democrats, Weisbrot sees the state as an
innocent place where the "radical" or "critical"
thinkers can make their mark--unlike the stock market.
The Weisbrot argument against the likes of
Washington Post columnist James Glassman is an intra-
labor aristocracy debate. There is no question that
the labor aristocracy should be tied to imperialism in
their minds. The only question is how, via the
imperialist state bureaucracy or the Wall Street
traders.
In contrast, MIM sees no difference in the
parasitism of the two options. Either way it is a
discussion of how to re-divide the superprofits
extracted from the Third World. Dividend hand-outs
from Wall Street or government hand-outs: either way
it is parasitism and a negative influence on any class
of people.
As a classic social-democrat, Weisbrot puts forward
the basis for an exclusively monogamous relationship
between the imperialist country labor aristocracy and
its imperialists: "The United States still consumes 88
percent of what it produces, and could, with the right
policies, protect its population from adverse economic
events in the rest of the world."(p. 9)
Weisbrot is one of those petty-bourgeois social-
democrats who believes the U.S. economy as is would do
fine without superexploiting the Third World. It would
be impossible to find any corporate executives in the
Fortune 50 who agree with him, because they know their
profit margins depend on the superexploitation of the
Third World, but somehow Weisbrot believes it is
possible, much like Patrick Buchanan claims to
believe.
Echoing the World Bank, Weisbrot focuses his fire
on the IMF, which he correctly identifies as not
consistent with his social-democratic goals. He seems
not to have noticed that his "neo-liberal" enemies
have been in the main defeated already, as much as
they can be within imperialism. He trails after the
leading lights of imperialism who long ago reached his
conclusions for the simple reason that the IMF has
been an obstacle to the export of capital and its
accumulation.
The left-face of imperialism surfaced long before
Weisbrot and other spokespeople for the labor
aristocracy clamored. The proletariat does not care
for either face of imperialism the social-democratic
or the neoliberal. We oppose capitalism, not
"neoliberalism."
MIM has addressed the numerous fallacies in this
article in "Imperialism and Its Class Structure in
1997," currently available only to readers outside the
United $tates. The fact that the Third World is
crucial to the imperialist economy and the true nature
of inter-imperialist contention driving profits rates
and hence the stock market are among the points
addressed.
* * *
"LEFT" FACE COMES OUT IN JAPANESE IMPERIALISM
The economic collapse in Russia and the near-
collapse in Japan has the U.$. imperialists allowing
that Franklin D. Roosevelt style reform of capitalism
might be necessary. There is much pressure, not just
from the labor aristocracy of bought off workers, but
also from other imperialists for Japan and the United
$tates to stimulate their economies. Thanks to
Clinton's plans to visit with the Japanese in mid-
November, the Japanese government laid its cards on
the table.
In mid-November, the U.$. central bank cut it's
interest rate a third time for a total of three-
quarters of one percentage point since Russia
defaulted on its international loans. Meanwhile, the
Japanese government sought to prove to President
Clinton that it is not slacking off in trying to end
the Japanese recession dragging down all of East Asia
except for China.
At this time, there is a left-of-center concurrence
of imperialism. The newly elected French and German
governments are the greatest proof, but the Japanese
government formed from pragmatists is also proof,
especially at this time when all imperialist
governments are seeking to avoid another 1929.
When the right face of imperialism is in place,
belt-tightening is the rage even in the imperialist
countries. Right now the left face of imperialism is
showing and so according to the imperialists it is
time to show solicitous concern for the consumption
needs of the oppressor nation peoples.
For this reason, the Japanese government literally
just started handing out shopping coupons to Japanese
citizens as part of a $196 billion economic stimulus
package labelled in such a way as to make Clinton and
the West think Japan is doing something Western-style
to get out of the recession.
Many liberals believe it is their steadfast
grovelling that "persuades" the imperialists to change
toward reform. The current conjuncture should make it
clear that the imperialists put on their "left" face
for reasons completely unconnected to the snivellings
of the liberals. The real reason for the "left" face
is to get out of certain kinds of economic crises and
to prevent revolution arising from those crises.
According to Hilary Hinds Kitasei writing for USA
Today, the interest rate on savings accounts in Japan
is currently negative. People who buy a bond now in
Japan get back less money six months from now. As MIM
pointed out in "Imperialism and Its Class Structure in
1997" this feature of Japanese imperialism is
characteristic of Japanese imperialism.
Overall, Japanese imperialism's posture toward the
rest of the world is still the most competitive as
gauged by profit rates and interest rates, which are
really just the profit rate on finance capital. The
miracle of Japan is that it does not fold when
executive compensation and profits plummet. For us
communists, Japan proves that a zero profit rate may
not be enough reason for the imperialists to give up.
On the other hand, we suspect that U.$. imperialism
would rather die than go through a long period of zero
or slightly negative profits.
Capitalist overproduction is inherent to the
capitalist system. By this we mean in the current
context that the capitalists must invest or loan their
capital somewhere. They may panic and stop investing
in Russia or they may dry up on junk bonds or any
number of places to plunk their cash, but the pickier
they get, the more the crisis intensifies for finance
capitalists. "Expand or die" is the motto of all
capitalist business, so holding their nose up toward
many borrowers does not work for the finance
capitalists.
Finance capitalists would like to lend their money
only to ideal borrowers, but they do not have that
choice. Facing such a situation, even finance capital
believes that it is good for the masses to have
aspirations for their own material well-being. The
Amerikans in particular seem to be saying the Japanese
middle-classes need to consume more. If no one
consumes and if everyone stays home economically
apathetic, then there is no profit to be made and it
becomes impossible to loan money out for profit. That
is one of the main reasons for the left face of
imperialism apart from a desire to avert revolution.
Note: USA Today 18Nov1998, p. 27a.
* * *
BASEBALL OINKS IT UP
During the 1994 baseball strike, MIM was the only
u.$. organization to attack the phony Marxists who
sided with the players as if they were exploited
workers and not bourgeois.
Figures just released in USA Today show that the
minimum wage for baseball players was $170,000 in
1998. The median was $428,500 and the average was
$1.38 million per year.
$170,000 a year gives a player enough to live on
and a portion of the means of production. Last we
checked, "owning means of production" was the
definition of bourgeois.
Note: USA Today 20Nov1998, p. 13c.
* * *
NEW BILL ADDS HARD TIME FOR CRIMES WITH GUNS
In November, Clinton made headlines by signing a
new bill to "strengthen penalties for violent
criminals and drug traffickers who possess, brandish,
or discharge a gun when committing a crime."(1) He
presented the bill, S. 191, at the same time as
another one which provides college scholarships for
the families of cops killed on the job. The
combination serves only to underscore the ideological
motive behind the new legislation -- to equate the
problem of crime with guns, and to equate guns with
the killing of police officers.
At the signing, Clinton made the equation outright:
"We know from painful experience that the most serious
threat to the safety of police officers is a criminal
armed with a weapon. Most police officers who lose
their lives die from gunshot wounds ... To protect our
families and police officers the bill I sign today
will add five years of hard time to sentences of
criminals who even possess firearms when they commit
drug-related or violent crimes. Brandishing the
firearm will draw an extra seven years; firing it,
another 10. A second conviction means a quarter
century in jail."
According to the Associated Press, the legislation
resolves a key point which has been argued in the
courts, namely, that "the additional and mandatory
federal five-year penalty for criminals who 'use or
carry' firearms applies even if the criminal simply
was in possession of a gun -- locked in a car trunk or
glove compartment, for example -- during the
commission of a violent crime or drug felony." (2)
But according to "Justice" Department statistics,
drawing both from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR)
and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS),
most crime does not involve guns.(3) The touting of
sentence-enhancing legislation for crimes involving
guns as a way to reduce the crime rate is worse than
hypocritical -- it is a way to fan the public flames
of reaction against the majority of non-violent, non-
gun-carrying persons accused of committing crimes.
MIM and RAIL have long worked to expose the
national oppression in all stages of the criminal
injustice system -- from the police to courts to
conditions in prisons and jails. We know that under
imperialism, strengthening any aspect of that system,
as this new bill does, serves only to enhance that
oppression.
Notes:
1. Remarks By The President At Crime Bill Signings
Event 12:17 P.M. EST - Old Executive Office Building
2. The Associated Press, Nov. 13, 1998.
3. "Guns Used in Crime: Firearms, Crime, and Criminal
Justice" Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1995.
* * *
RESERVE THE DEATH PENALTY FOR LYING COPS AND
PROSECUTORS!
The USA Today ran an excellent article on the death
penalty November 13 about 30 wrongfully convicted
people from death row now going to attend an academic
conference on the subject. " Since the Supreme Court
reinstated the death penalty 22 years ago, 486 people
have been executed. Williams is one of 75 men in 19
states who have been spared execution and freed from
death row after evidence emerged showing that they had
been wrongfully convicted."(1)
Flawed implementation
The U.$. Supreme Court has already admitted that
the death penalty is applied in a racially
discriminatory way. It decided that the good still
outweighed the bad in having a death penalty, thereby
not prioritizing the fight against national oppression
or racism.(2)
Now there is a campaign afoot to focus on the
innocent. The average length of time that the innocent
sat in prison was seven years before s/he cleared his
name,(1) but the fascists in this country want to
speed up a process known by statisticians to be
racially flawed and therefore likely flawed in other
ways as well.
Motivations
Although most Amerikans are conscious of their own
viciousness and support police and prosecutors in a
knee-jerk way, a minority has naive views about
police, prosecutors and judges. When MIM says that the
government is set up to protect property and that
conscious and unconscious mechanisms ensure that the
judicial system is used to oppress, the naive minority
does not understand. However, an increasing portion of
the public will understand that prosecutors and
elected judges seek public office based on their
success in locking people up. As long as the headlines
show a prosecutor to be successful, it does not matter
to the prosecutor if s/he locked up the wrong persyn.
In the United $tates, there are 50 states each with
two U.S. Senators and one governor. That is 150
people. MIM conducted its own investigation to tally
up how many of these 150 are former prosecutors. It
turns out 30 were as of 1997.(3) There was also one
former head of the Department of Corrections, Governor
Miller in Georgia.
Bill Clinton is a former prosecutor. Furthermore,
the mayor of the largest city -- R. Giuliani was a
prosectuor just before being elected in New York City.
Giuliani in particular had to bump aside his police
chief when the police chief tried to take credit for
reducing crime. Hence, cops too are trying to use
crime to get elected. It is typical to use the
prosecutor job as a stepping stone to being mayor or
governor. Bill Clinton then went from governor to
White House.
In very recent years, another motivation has
appeared for cops to lie about crime -- to get on
television and make a good impression or be famous.
Legal barriers preventing television from live
broadcasts of police and suspects have fallen. Now
cops have the incentive of fame to stir something up,
conspire a bit and get on television, just as the many
sick people who conspire to get on the Jerry Springer
show and other talk shows. While not all cops will
have such motivations just as not all people will do
something nuts to get on television, there is a
minority that can cause plenty of trouble. We
recommend the movie "Running Man" to open the eyes of
the naive.
Unconscious fascism
Almost no scholars find any point to having a death
penalty in the U$A. In fact, there have been numerous
studies of the flaws of the system, studies which
never seem to be digested by the public or politicians
of the oppressor nation.
About 7 in 10 Amerikans do not believe in "innocent
till proven guilty" and instead majorities believe
someone is guilty if cops seek charges. As a result of
concerns about juries, a number of studies have been
done.
One study of 1000 wrongful convictions of all types
shows that about half are attributable to eyewitness
error. Different studies based on mock crime scenes
have shown that from 21 to 33 percent of all people
will point to someone in a police lineup as the
culprit when the culprit was not present.(4)
This would be a case of unconscious fascism. In
academic experiments there is no persynal reason these
eyewitnesses could have for lying, but they are just
inaccurate in about a third of cases. The willingness
to finger someone is just a case of unconscious
fascism, the fact that injustice is so routine in U.$.
society that people carry out injustice as a matter of
course.
Reform of the death penalty
The meeting of 30 freed death row inmates at
Northwestern University focussed on reforming or
abolishing the death penalty. Illinois has had 9 freed
already since 1994 and it is considering formation of
a panel to review all death row cases given its poor
record. That's one kind of reform.
MIM believes there should be another reform -- a
death penalty for attempted judicial murder. 10 people
have been freed with the result of DNA evidence. Most
of the time, nothing happens to the cops, prosecutors
and judges who lied. In one case, three assistant
prosecutors in Illinois's DuPage county were charged
with perjury, obstruction of justice and
conspiracy.(1) In MIM's opinion, that is not enough.
They should have been charged for attempted murder
since they knew their accusations could lead to the
death penalty. In other words, as some of the former
death row innocents have said, in many cases the
prosecutors know they are prosecuting someone
innocent. Attempted murder and murder by prosecutors,
cops and judges who condemn innocent men -- such
should receive the strictest penalties of all, the
death penalty.
So if someone wants to become governor by falsely
winning cases as a prosecutor, he or she should also
weigh the possibility he or she will face the death
penalty if caught. The existing law should be
interpreting these cases as murder and attempted
murder and the penalty for attempted murder in such
cases should be death.
Alternatively, should some liberals feel bad for
fascist cops, prosecutors and judges being executed
for their unjust treatment of the innocent, they can
support a different reform. They could make it
impossible for prosecutors or judges to ever run for
public office.
Even then, there will still be a death penalty
applied in a discriminatory way against oppressed
nationalities. Only anti-imperialist revolution can
resolve that injustice.
Notes:
1. USA Today 13Nov1998, p. 14a.
2. "In the 1987 case of McClesky v. Kemp, the U.S.
Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the
death penalty despite evidence that killers of whites
are given the death penalty more often than killers of
blacks."John E. Conklin, Criminology, 3rd ed., (NY:
MacMillan, 1989), p. 406. MIM would add that the court
admitted that the anti-death penalty lawyers proved
their point.
3. Almanac of American Politics (Washington, DC:
National Journal, 1998). 4. New York Times 17Jan1995,
c1, c6.
* * *
SAMMY SOSA WINS MVP - SPORTS FANS SHOW THAT OPPRESSOR
NATION MASSES AREN'T STUPID, JUST CHAUVINIST
Sammy Sosa won the MVP for the National League of
Major League Baseball. He beat out Mark McGwire who
hit 70 home runs. Both MVPs this year are from Latin
America.
This is important because imperialist baseball is
increasing its international audience by taking in
famous stars from Latin America including Cuba and
also from Japan. Hence, poor boys everywhere can have
that feeling that there is a lottery chance for them
too. This is an important illusion typical of the
capitalist system in which many are poor and few are
rich. We must combat it. There has been a higher
percentage of revolutions happening in countries this
century than there has been of poor boys becoming
millionaires. The question for imperialist country
masses is different though.
Sosa deserved to win by the tradition of the MVP
award which goes to the player who typically helps his
team win most. Sosa had more RBIs than McGwire and
Sosa's team made the playoffs.
McGwire fanatics said (contrary to the history of
the award) that McGwire can't help it if his team
stinks. We were quite impressed with the dialectical
argument explaining why McGwire hit more home runs per
at-bat than either Babe Ruth or Sosa. Sosa had 134
more at-bats than McGwire simply because opposing
pitchers were so afraid of McGwire that they walked
him that much more.
MIM points this out to defeat masses-are-asses
reasoning. When the Amerikan masses want to get
analytical about something they can do it. If not, the
bourgeois newspapers would never be able to sell so
many sports pages with so many statistics about
batting averages, batting when runners are on base,
RBIs, total bases etc. They pick it apart in every way
and thus we know for example that if Shaq shot free
throws as well as Michael Jordan, Shaq would have the
higher scoring average. Thus the sports fanatics hone
in on one aspect of one player's game with amazing
statistical detail.
MIM prints many statistics too--on crime, national
oppression and the labor theory of value in
particular. We do not print the kind of statistics
that require a college education to understand. We
print mostly percentages which are usually easier to
understand than figures commonly used in the NBA or
MLB, for instance. The reason MIM's arguments do not
sink in is the conscious national chauvinism of the
oppressor nation masses, not "false consciousness." -
MC5
Note: USA Today 19Nov1998, pp. 1-2.
* * *
PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES SUFFER UNDER PRISON CRAZE
The current University of Michigan president has
attempted to follow in the footsteps of his
predecessor in talking about the trade-off between
building prisons and supporting public universities.
President Lee C. Bollinger has called the prison
policy of Michigan "a very unfortunate set of laws and
public policy."(1) We call on all public university
presidents, students, faculty and researchers to turn
up the heat against the prison craze.
Michigan expects to imprison 70,000 in 2005, up
almost 75 percent from already fascist levels.(1)
The facts about imprisonment in the United $tates
are that the United $tates has been the world's
leading prison-state per capita for the last
generation, with a brief exception during Boris
Yeltsin's declaration of a state of emergency.(2)
That means that while Reagan was talking about a
Soviet "evil empire" he was the head of a state that
imprisoned more people per capita. In supposedly
"hard-line" Bulgaria of the Soviet bloc of the 1980s,
the imprisonment rate was less than half that of the
United $tates.(3,4) Since that time, the United $tates
has only increased its rate of imprisonment.
To find a comparison with U.$. imprisonment of
Black people, there is no statistic in any country
that compares including apartheid South Africa of the
era before Mandela was president. The last situation
remotely comparable to the situation today was under
Stalin during war time. Stalin was fighting Nazis, but
the U.$. fascist movement is simply repressing
oppressed nationalities.
The rednecks tell MIM that we live in a "free
country." They live in an Orwellian 1984 situation
where freedom is imprisonment. Apparently they won't
notice until the very last persyn criticizing the
government is in prison.
The media and politicians, including the
prosecutors and cops running for mayor, governor and
president talk about crime as if we became the world's
prison-state leader for imprisoning murderers.
However, the majority of prisoners in the United
$tates are there for non-violent offenses.(5)
Public university students and even moreso public
university researchers who receive the bulk of
government funds are the ones to pay the price for the
prison-state buildup. They should be allies of the
proletarian movement. -- MC5
Notes:
1. Michigan Today Fall, 1998, p. 6. Michigan Today
is an official publication of the University of
Michigan.
2. Marc Mauer, "Americans Behind Bars: The
International Use of Incarceration 1993," The
Prison Sentencing Project, 918 F. St. NW, Suite
501, Washington, DC 20004 (202) 628-0871 Reference:
SRI: R8965-2, 1994
3. Ibid., 1992 report.
4. United Nations Development Programme, "Human
Development Report 1994,:" Oxford University Press,
p. 186.
5. Figure of 51.2 percent for state prisoners there
for non-violent offenses. Abstract of the United
States 1993, p. 211.
* * *
MAO ZEDONG ON LITERATURE AND ART
Budding proletarian artists inside Amerika have a
lot to learn and study. On the one hand there is a
rich history of proletarian art, from Soviet cinema
and music, to Brecht's theater, to Comrade Chiang
Ching's operas and ballets. On the other hand, there
is much to be learned about making proletarian art
here and now in the belly of the beast, from technique
to finance and distribution (see review of Jean-Luc
Godard on page 9). But we do not suggest that budding
proletarian artists bury their heads in books for a
decade before starting to practice. We must move ahead
now as best we can, while recognizing that the
experience of past proletarian artists can solve our
problems as they arise.
Perhaps the best primer on the problems of
proletarian art is Mao Zedong's "Talks at the Yenan
Forum on Literature and Art." We print a selection
form that short essay here, in order to encourage
budding proletarian artists to read it and then rush
out an apply it. - MC206
In all the world today all culture, all literature
and art belong to definite classes and are geared to
definite political lines. There is in fact no such
thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above
classes, art that is detached from or independent of
politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of
the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are,
as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole
revolutionary machine.
Our literary and art workers must... shift their
stand; they must gradually move their feet over to the
side of the workers, peasants, and soldiers, to the
side of the proletariat, through the process of going
into their very midst and into the thick of the
practical struggles and through the process of
studying Marxism and society. Only in this way can we
have a literature and art that are truly for workers,
peasants and soldiers, a truly proletarian art...
In literary and art criticism there are two
criteria, the political and the artistic... There is
the political criterion and there is the artistic
criterion; what is the relationship between the two?
Politics cannot be equated with art, nor can a general
world outlook be equated with a method of artistic
creation and criticism. We deny not only that there is
an abstract and absolutely unchangeable political
criterion, but also that there is an abstract and
absolutely unchangeable artistic criterion; each class
in every class society has its own artistic and
political criteria. But all classes in all societies
invariably put the political criterion first and the
artistic criterion second... What we demand is the
unity of politics and art, the unity of content and
form, the unity of revolutionary political content and
the highest possible perfection of artistic form.
Works of art which lack artistic quality have no
force, however progressive they are politically.
Therefore, we oppose both works of art with a wrong
political viewpoint and the tendency towards the
"poster and slogan style" which is correct in
political viewpoint but lacking in artistic power. On
questions of literature and art we must carry on a
struggle on two fronts. - Mao Zedong, "Talks at the
Yenan Forum on Literature and Art," Selected Works,
vol. III.
* * *
MIM SALUTES EARLY JEAN-LUC GODARD
Jean-Luc Godard Interviews
David Sterritt, ed.
(Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi
Press, 1998) 203 pp. pb
MIM begins this review by making self-criticism for
passivity with regard to work in film. While MIM has
known of Godard's work since before MIM's existence,
it never got around to engaging Godard even on a
theoretical or public opinion plane. This has set back
the proletarian art movement even more than necessary.
Jean-Luc Godard was a French Maoist in the 1960s
and 1970s and he was also the most influential
imperialist country director-producer outside of
Hollywood.
Godard's political line
Middle-aged Godard did much for the Maoist
movement. Reading these interviews is like reading the
autobiography of David Hilliard, because the
trajectory is the same. Godard was wildly successful
as a Maoist and then later in life could not quite
hang on to his Maoism, much the way the Black Panthers
did not. While Godard made his greatest contributions
in his thirties and not his twenties, the old adage
about selling out with older age seems to ring true
and by the 1990s, reviewers were calling his work
post-modern.
Godard as a persyn in the 1960s and 1970s backed
Mao while criticizing Stalin, including "Stalinist"
art, which we gather Godard believed was just state-
sponsored art and hence evil. This caused Godard to
say good things about Yugoslavia where there were some
independent film producers. Obviously in China's
Cultural Revolution, there was also an emphasis on
amateur art, of the workers and peasants producing
their own art. Nonetheless, while we note the
distinctions Godard makes we continue to defend
professional state-sponsored art under the
dictatorship of the proletariat and we anticipate its
necessity until at least the lower stages of
communism.
Our only other possible complaint about Godard
would be his gender line. Since sex is so important in
the imperialist country movies, Godard did develop a
razor-sharp gender line. Some of it is feminist and
some of it evokes the split between Marxist males and
apolitical or reactionary females that Clare Duchen
talks about in her book about why French pseudo-
feminism arose in reaction to Maoism. On the other
hand, parts of Godard's gender line may be considered
to be walking that fine line between revolution and
macho misogyny. We must point out though that MIM has
no right to criticize Godard, because we have not led
any filmmaking efforts, so we haven't proved that we
would have handled the gender question any better. We
salute his efforts to make movies that do not rely on
romance to sell.
In truth, it would be a disservice to review all
Godard's films here, so we will not even try. Perhaps
other reviewers could step forward after seeing all
his films made between 1962 and 1976.
As a persyn, Godard punched his producer at a film
showing once and called on the audience to pay to see
his version of the film with the money to go to a fund
for Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.(p. 52) Moreover,
Godard spoke for "Third World cinema" as the correct
phrase for what he was doing instead of "underground."
(p. 11)
Godard also hooked up the Rolling Stones to his
Maoist film. The active support by the Rolling Stones
of Maoism in France is an example of the kind of times
the late 1960s and early 1970s were.
Although Godard championed industrial workers in
France on occasion, as far as his art went, he had the
correct line on the labor aristocracy. In the first
place, he criticized the labor bureaucrats for
interfering with his low-budget work, requiring him to
use four people instead of three behind the camera as
an example.(p. 18) He said the unions were more
reactionary than other people and were economically
strangling his independent filmmaking.
Much more importantly, Godard had the intuitively
correct line on the approach of artists to the labor
aristocracy, one that is even more correct for our
times than for the 1960s. His advice to the
revolutionary artist in the imperialist countries was
to hold the line: "'Worrying about distribution
patterns affects the kind of pictures people make.
Only by concentrating on production without any
thought of distribution can we create the kind of film
that will change distribution.'"(p. 57)
Godard on art: lessons for PIRAO
Perhaps what Godard is known best for is being a
"high-brow" "artsy" film director. He did not like the
"art" label as a contrast with other films, but he
also spoke of the idea as a reference point to make
himself understood on the relationship of artists to
finance capital.
Godard's most enduring insight is to defeat the
"masses-are-asses" line in art while combining that
view with a strong orientation toward building
independent institutions of the oppressed. In 1962 he
hadn't made any Maoist films yet, but he was already a
Brechtian. That means he sought to change the world by
engaging the audience in his art. In fact, in 1968, he
correctly said "we have to fight the audience." (p.
vii, 15) That to MIM is an accurate statement about
the imperialist country audiences, which are bound to
be a majority petty-bourgeoisie and encrusted with
reactionary ideas.
We believe Godard is correct that there is no
essential difference between film and theater, so
Bertolt Brecht's theories of engaging audience
participation and not encouraging passivity are
correct for film as well as the theater Brecht worked
in. In 1962, Godard said of making films, "One must be
sincere, believe that one is working for the public,
and aim at them. In my early days I never asked myself
whether the audience would understand what I was
doing, but now I do. If Hitchcock, for example, thinks
that people will not understand something, he will not
do it. At the same time I feel that one must sometimes
just go ahead-light may always dawn in a few years
time. But of course one must be sure of what one is
about, because if one just goes ahead and does
something, saying 'They won't understand but it won't
matter,' one may be disastrously wrong and that it
does matter."(p. 5) To MIM's knowledge, while he gave
up Maoism, Godard continues to hold this view. In
fact, he argued that filmmaking should be film
criticism at the same time, so there continues to be a
self-critical view in Godard's work and he continued
to believe such criticism is a matter of science, at
least as late as 1981.(p. 120)
Because Godard was willing to put together art that
the masses would not always understand, he received
the label "abstract," but he also opposed that label.
He considered himself explicitly Marxist-Leninist.
Much of the masses' rejection of Godard stems from his
unwillingness to utilize sex and violence the way
mainstream imperialist producers do. MIM believes it
is unreasonable in an ultraleft or right opportunist
way to expect proletarian filmmakers to have success
any greater than that of proletarian newspaper
distributors relatively speaking.
Godard had a firm grip on the influence of finance
capital on filmmaking. For this reason, he likened
himself to a whore. It was not the whore he opposed
but the pimp--the finance capitalist in the guise of
the producer as usually distinguished from the artist
who is the director.
Unwilling to work for Hollywood no matter how much
they offered him, (p. 21) Godard correctly avoided
pie-in-the-sky idealism. He realized he would be
making "low-budget" films. On a related note,
filmmaking was also brief with only short periods of
time requiring professional actors.
For the MIM-led army called PIRAO that has
responsibility for financial and infrastructure work
this all makes sense on how to build an infrastructure
for independent filmmaking. Right opportunists in film
art capitulate to the demands of Hollywood finance
capitalists and sell out. Ultraleft opportunists
cling to a non-existent independence of art as if
talking about it and waiting for manna from heaven
were as good as making art and distributing it. Even
in 1980 and 1996 Godard correctly warned artists that
"Art and economy are always related."(p. 101) Along
these lines, Godard warned that television is
absolutely the worst medium, because it is state and
monopoly controlled, whereas filmmaking even in
Hollywood had slightly more autonomy. We believe this
insight continues to this day, where the main
television channels in the imperialist countries are
the worst purveyors of reactionary drivel. Even
attempting to work from within television backfires
miserably as the example of the Archie Bunker
character in "All in the Family" proves so well. Since
television offers no audience interaction with the
directors, there is the definite risk that the
audience will identify with and glorify the
reactionary characters of television scripts, no
matter how bluntly depicted. There is no quick and
dirty way to subversion of our video culture, so we
must not expect or attempt overnight success.
In conclusion, Godard has a very realistic notion
of what is possible with imperialist country art. We
must steer between capitulating to Hollywood (which is
pervasive to Godard the way pornography is to
Catharine MacKinnon) on the one hand and blaming all
evil on Hollywood on the other hand in order to
justify our own economic and artistic passivity.
Leadership at this time means challenging thoughts and
not gaining popularity.
A call to action
A minority of Hollywood films and independent
documentaries is progressive. To reach the next level
of building public opinion and independent
institutions of the oppressed, we need more than to
cull the best of Hollywood. We need our own
proletarian filmmakers, theaters, bands and other
artists.
"And so for a young movie maker, if he really wants
to make a film, it is very easy to do. The problem is
getting it shown after you've made it."(p. 19)
MIM calls on all young, old, aspiring and existing
film artists to be the early Jean-Luc Godard and work
with us. Already we have the independent party press.
We can assist in publicizing the works of Godards, so
all you Godards out there, please step forward!
We recommend the following: 1. Keep the day-time
job. 2. Do not wait for manna from heaven-i.e.
Hollywood or state grants; defeat parasite-think and
build economic and political independence. 3. Do not
expect colossal success in the imperialist countries
at this time or you will water down your work and
become useless to the revolution.
Since MIM has not worked closely with filmmakers,
our first efforts will likely be severely flawed. As
materialists we believe any effort is better than
nothing and after some years we may hope to surpass
Godard. At this time, we believe we must recognize
that we would do very well right now just to copy what
Godard said in the first 84 pages of this book.
* * *
UNDER LOCK AND KEY: NEWS FROM PRISONS AND PRISONERS
Brutal Assault
Revolutionary Greetings to one and all. My Brothers
in the struggle, I was attacked, assaulted, kicked,
and stomped. My head was rammed into the chain link
fence and the concrete building. I was put in four
different head locks, grabbed around the throat and
choked until my eyes rolled back into my head; until
spit gushed out my mouth and my nose starting
bleeding. All of this was done to me while both of my
hands were handcuffed behind my back.
This was done at 3:25 in the morning in the dark
hallways. I was being escorted to Pre-Hearing
Detention by Lt. Boyle a racist, Aryan, white
official who works here. They pull a race hate crime
on me behind their prison walls. As you all know,
hate crimes against Black males in prison are going
on all over the U. Snakes.
This racist Lt. Boyle is the same Lt. who was run
out of Ad Seg [Administrative Segregation] for
excessive use of force, abuse of authority and abuse
of power. Just like this Lt. Boyle, the whole Allred
Unit located in Iowa Park, TX, 89% of the unit is run
and operated by white Aryan Brotherhood employees.
This race hat crime against me was done in July 1998.
At this time Lt. Boyle has charged me with assault on
an officer. He wrote a ticket saying that I rammed my
head into him.
They have now placed me in Ad Seg. I'm protesting
the treatment I'm receiving. I'm an innocent man. I'm
on a hunger strike. I have been on this hunger strike
since July 4, 1998. Racist guards here have attacked
four other Black males. Each prisoner has been put in
Ad Seg. The same racist guards deliberately go around
provoking Black males daily. All the paperwork we
file on these white officers has no effect whatsoever
on this unit. Here is a list of the racist guards on
Allred Unit: Lieutenant Boyles, Lieutenant Gentry,
Lieutenant Sperry, Captain Patty, Captain Cooks,
Captain Wilkenson and his wife, Sargent Skelton,
Sargent Freeman, Sargent Bull, Officer Tolber,
Officer Saunders, and Officer Bria.
I am unable to physically fight back but I'm never
giving up the struggle!!...
-- A Texas Prisoner, 10 July 1998
Pigs Kill Four Prisoners
...Comrade, we are going through continuous trials
with these pigs or human devils you know. These human
devils have killed four inmates deliberately. They
were audacious in admitting it verbally, when it was
asked how many people were killed.
These human devils have brutally beaten down Blacks
and Hispanics. After they have beaten them down, they
deliberately deny them medical treatment. I have also
witnessed these human devils serving another brother
in here, with a tray with a racial mark, Nazi sign on
it. Then they had one of these Uncle Tom, house
negro, captains try to cover it up.
These human devils are poisoning the food with some
kind of drugs that enslaves the inmates' mind, where
they always feel tired mentally, where they are too
weak to workout. This drug that these human devils are
putting into our food has robbed us of our physical
physique and mentally too.
One of the reasons I feel that they think they are
getting away with it is because they are at
psychological war, playing off people's reasoning.
They have the people believing that Blacks and
Hispanics are ignorant. [The officers claim
prisoners] can't read or write, so they don't know
what they're talking about --so people won't believe
that they are poisoning the food, which is robbing us
mentally and physically.
The human devils don't even provide education,
especially [absent is any information] dealing with
the law. There's a lot more, I'm just briefly filling
you in with the pragmatics. We need your help and I'm
hoping you can aid us. One more reason why the pigs
are doing what they doing is because they realize we
don't have any outside help. The majority of us are
indigent, so it's going to be kind of hard paying for
the books from you....
-- A Connecticut Prisoner, 26 August 1998
MIM responds: This letter illustrates why we run a
political Books for Prisoners program and why it is
important that everyone outside the prisons supports
this program with donations of money and books. We
also hope people who read this letter and want to help
out will get involved with the Prisoner's Legal Clinic
that MIM runs to help prisoners with these legal
fights by providing briefs on relevant legal issues.
On the outside we need help with legal research as
well as typing in and proofreading the information
sent to us by prisoners. And on the inside we need
jailhouse lawyers to send us briefs on issues of
importance to the hundreds of thousands of people
under lock and key.
Exposing Abuses in Lockup
...This around, I've been called Spic, half-breed,
nigger, etc. Well I got tired of it all and cussed
them pigs every which way. Then they jumped on me
roughed me up. Well I had them under investigation.
They put me on lock-dawn for 45 days in the swine
cells. I dropped the investigation 'cause the pigs
said they would let me off lockdown and all these
little promises, so I did! Two days later they
transferred me to another prison on C/M (Close
Management). There I was locked down for 13 months.
Because I had this bullshit DR [Disciplinary
Report] that said I assaulted one of the pigs at the
last camp -- the pigs at the new camp started in on
me. This time I ended up with an outside charge. The
pigs set me up once again!
Since I've been at this camp I have been written
several DR's and set up on a third outside charge --
but I beat that case cause the Pig was lying. But
they are stilling screwing with me here and little
nit-picky stuff.
...Medical co-payment went up from $3.00 to $4.00.
On the close management unit the nurse walks by our
door. We don't holler sick call because if they don't
like you they'll go ahead and charge you $4.00 and
write down that you were seen for whatever reason,
without sending you to medical.
Just January 1997, a convict who was having pretty
bad seizures was placed on C/M for thirty-seven
months. He had to wear a football helmet all day and
night long. He should never been here in the first
place! He was complaining for days straight all day.
Well one night he had a bad seizure and died back
here. When the guard made their rounds they found him
lying on the floor dead. If he had been at a prison
that deals with medical problems I believe he would
be alive today....
-- A Florida Prisoner, 26 July 1998
Racial Bias against Black Prisoners
...In 1995 I wrote letter to the Regional Director.
I asked that a thorough investigation be done of the
conduct of the Evans Correctional Institution's staff
regarding the blatant acts of racism that are being
perpetrated against the African-American inmates.
Here at ECI, when white inmates desire to be
transferred to another institution they are claiming
that they had been sexually assaulted, extorted,
and/or raped. As a result of their statements,
regardless of the improbability of their assertions,
we the Black inmates are being accused of these
assaults and repeatedly assigned to the administration
segregation unit.
White inmates are using this technique with an
overwhelming degree of regularity and are
experiencing amazing amounts of success, whenever
they choose to use it. The white inmates are more
often than not transferred, usually, to the
institution of their desire.
I have personally been a victim of this type of
racial manipulation three times since being
incarcerated at SCDC [South Carolina Department of
Corrections]. ...Black Prisoners are not given the
opportunity to make a statement prior to being
assigned to segregation. This results in an intensely
negative feeling toward the white inmates and a deep
sense of disrespect for staff. When the white inmates
do not bring disciplinary charges against the Black
inmates -- the Black inmates will, as a matter of
practice, be reassigned from investigation to
administrative hold (ML5). This is an unjustifiable
punishment of innocent individuals. These prisoners
are still placed on ML5 even after going in front of
the adjustment committee and the charge has been
dismissed.
These are very serious matters, resulting in a
report that is unilateral in scope and racist in its
application. In the three times that I have been
victim of this type of racism, not once have I been
found guilty! I am requesting your assistance in my
endeavor to be transferred away from here before
something evil happens to me as a result of some sick-
minded individual's racist concept of nationalism.
Last year the nurse and a pig woke me up. They were
trying to force me into taking some liquid
medication. After I refused it, I filed a grievance.
Then they made it look like it was only a mistake. I'm
now being denied medical care....
Power to the strong spirits, -- A South Carolina
Prisoner, 31 July 1998
Physical Effects of Lock-Up
Nationwide inmates must fight the atrocities that
are inflicted upon us by our oppressors. Especially
in segregation management units [SMU's] and
isolation. Long-term lock up causes psychological
stress, which is a plausible etiology for sleep
disturbances, depression, and cognitive difficulties.
The goal of SMU's is clearly to disable prisoners
through spiritual, psychological and physical
breakdown.
Physically we are faced with sick-building syndrome
(SBS). It is caused by being in an enclosed area with
shut windows, and lack of fresh air circulation,
which entraps chemical fumes, molds, mildews, and
airborne pollutants in the building. The effects are,
but not limited to, headaches, itchy or burning eyes,
hoarseness, dry mouth and breathing difficulties.
The laws of our oppressors that inmates will not be
subjected to physical or psychological harm. What do
they think lock up is! Short term for a disciplinary
measure is one thing, but anything over 6 months
isn't discipline, it's cruel and unusual punishment,
which violates their laws and correctional policies.
I urge all inmates, especially jailhouse lawyers,
to work on this problem, so some type of maximum term
can be established. They take our privileges, our
good time etc, isn't that enough when inmates get a
charge? Sooner or later, chances are, most inmates
will find themselves in lockup for something. So
fight before it's too late. Far too many inmates let
the injustice system get over on them. By doing
nothing, things will only get worse. Instead of
fighting amongst ourselves, fight the oppressors
legally!
-- A South Carolina Prisoner, 23 September 1998
Forced Labor in Florida
...We are assigned jobs. If we refuse to work it
carries 60 days confinement, 180 days loss of gain
time, restriction from the weight room and 120 days
after we get a Disciplinary Report (DR)! We are NOT
paid any money. The state of Florida gives gain time
instead. No restitution monetarily, just time, which
they take back by writing a C.C. [Corrections
Citation] for anything from not having our shirts
tucked in, or not having our ID cards in an exact
spot, to cussing or yelling. I am "receiving" 20 day
per month [as payment for my labor.] A C.C. takes
away up to 10 days.
Yes, we suffer drastically from censorship. They
authorize magazines and subscriptions and then deny
each issue.
...As to lockdown, I have been there recently. It's
95 degrees back there. The lights are very warm but
we receive a DR if we turn them out during the day.
The walls are concrete and there is a "window" that
allows light in and small quantities of air. The doors
are solid, no bars. As if it wasn't hot enough, the
pigs must have thought we were a little chilly -- so
they turned the heater on for two hours every
morning. I personally lost 16 pounds in 12 days back
in lockdown. The weight was written down three times
a week when we took a shower. We have to be in
lockdown for 30 days before we are allowed to go
outside three times a week, 1 hour per day. Before 30
days, we are not allowed to go outside.
Medical staff? It's a joke! ...I had two ingrown
toenails that were hideously infected. It took seven
months for full treatment. They pulled both nails
completely off of both big toes. They are growing
right back in because they don't have any brogans to
fit me. ...We do have a Pride boot factory on the
compound but they do not have the ability to make my
size shoe. The [commissary] prices are equivalent to
7/11 in a large city. ...We are taxed for everything
including food items....
-- A Florida Prisoner, 30 July 1998
Pigs Target Oppressed Nationals
Dear MIM,
On March 4, 1998, the Assistant Commissioner put
out a memo to all New Jersey State Prisons, informing
inmates of the STGMU (Security Threat Group
Management Unit). Those groups considered a threat are
the ALKQN (Almighty Latin King Queen Nation),
Association Neta, Five Percent Nation, and the East
Coast Aryan Brotherhood.
What they failed to say was that a first shipment
of inmates was already made, a list was made for a
second shipment and that so-called Gang unit was
completely illegal! The proposal for this unit wasn't
presented by the commissioner until June 15, 1998.
Yet before this, two shipments were already made and
the system itself contradicted the Commissioners
notice. Members of these families were already
targeted and absolutely none of them were given the
chance to comply with the notice.
To show the inmate population that the Department
of Corrections wouldn't stop bringing forth
oppressive forces even less to inmates in
Segregation, they opened up a separate gang unit for
those serving lock up time, which was the only unit
which rebelled. It was the very first time that all
families united and protested against the pigs.
When the Segregation Unit shipment came in, the
cells had no mats, no cell numbers, no personal
hygiene supplies and no officers, staff or
administrators wanted to answer questions. The inmates
were told that they would soon find out what was
going on. After two weeks of no showers, no telephone
calls, or explanations, everyone was told that they
were part of the STGMU program and when they are done
serving Seg. Time, they would be taken to the regular
Gang Unit. What they didn't say was that we were
supposed to be given a Hearing and only be classified
STGMU if found guilty.
We were denied access to the law library and given
one phone for three tiers to use. They couldn't
identify individual family members, so at times,
enemies would share a rec. yard. The medical attention
was so hard to get, that a month later, a Neta died
of lack of medical attention (RIP). The Latin Kings
urged rebellion and the Aryan Brotherhood wanted all
out war, yet things remained calm. The administrators
tried to help get things in order, so we thought and
everything started running like a regular segregation.
Verbal confrontation started and worsened with each
day against the pigs.
On May 15, 1998, a Neta was being removed from his
cell to be placed in detention. Once outside the
cell, two officers smashed his face against a
security fence and he was beaten while being escorted.
Two Kings saw him being beaten, so they decided to
make an example for all inmates to see that
oppression has no distinct color, race, religion, or
nation, it only has victims!
The two Latin Kings lit fires in their second floor
cells and started a chain reaction on every floor.
The pigs maced both Kings and opened on cell at a
time. Each King fought against 6 pigs. I say an even
fight, because it takes about six pigs to bring
ruckus to any true Latin King Warrior. After a
struggle, the Kings were finally shackled and beaten
down the steps and met by a gauntlet of over 60
officers who repeatedly stomped and punched them.
They were hospitalized and released the next day.
Back on the unit, everyone was confused, not
understanding why two Latin Kings took a beating for
a Neta. The rest of the families continued to rebel,
yet no one else was beaten because the other pigs
called internal affairs, brought in cameras and the
administration got shocked to learn that two inmates
were beaten. Over fifty inmates were given more than
five hundred days segregation time and the two Kings
over fifteen hundred days in false charges.
Once everyone completed their detention time,
everyone involved was placed back in the Segregation
Gang Unit and given late hearings, finding them all
guilty and classifying them as part of STGMU. All
family members decided to fight the system legally,
before any other steps were taken. At this present
time, many are studying prison litigation and a few
have beaten their Gang Unit Hearing decisions.
To all families, I want to say that not only are we
familiar in the way we stand for each other, we must
also know we share one struggle. Put your differences
aside and be true to not only your family, but also
the cause of our shared union. Help educate each
other and stop the contradiction. Don't preach to
show otherwise, instead organize and help abolish
these cages modern day slavery and capitalist society
we live in. My King Love to the ALKQN.
Forever in the struggle, -- A New Jersey Prisoner,
31 July 1998
Revolutionary Greeting Comrades,
I am a Latin prisoner being held hostage in New
Jersey in one of their new Security Threat Group
Management Units (STGMU). I have been placed here
because of my affiliation with the Latin Kings. Since
I came to this state in 1996 I have been kept locked
down in Ad Seg on charges that these Pigs have
formulated against me. I have never been in the
inmate population, therefore I can't understand how
these Pigs can claim I pose a threat to the safety of
these Pigs or other prisoners.
Now I have been placed in STGMU. In this unit you
can only find three members of the racist groups
known as the East Coast Aryan Nation and the rest are
Latin and Black prisoners. This out of a unit made up
of 78 cages, plus 78 more prisoners being that they
are double locking us, so there can be up to 156
prisoners on one unit at a time.
It is a fact that these Pigs are only targeting
prisoners of color, Almighty Latin King Queen Nation,
Neta and the Gods 5%er Nation. The white boys are not
being bothered, but there are many Aryan's in the
population in this state. So it's clear that the Beast
is looking after their own and trying to cage up all
that pose a threat to their plans, which is to
eliminate all races of color, or to have them submit
to their will.
Since this unit has been opened on March 4, 1998,
there has been one death of a Latin comrade. This
needless death was due to the neglect of the medical
staff who did nothing when this comrade was
complaining about urinating blood. They killed him by
denying him medical assistance. He passed away April
14, 1998, found dead in his sleep. This comrade was a
Neta and his own brothers did nothing in retaliation
to his death, which makes me wonder just how true is
their cause.
On May 15, 1998, we, the Kings, had a riot in which
many brothers were sacrificed. Some Neta's did get
involved as well as some 5%ers, The abuse is
something that can't be tolerated on any level and
will not be, at least not by the Latin Kings. We will
keep sacrificing ourselves if need be before
submitting to the evil forces. Since this riot, the
following has been taken from us: all typewriters, all
our personal clothes, which have been replaced by
gray jumpsuits. No personal sneakers are allowed.
We can't receive any more food packages from home,
but the limit of our canteen purchases has been
increased to $110.00. So it's clear that they want
our loved ones money being that they are the only
financial supporters. We can no longer have pens,
pencils, markers, etc. They have replaced ours with
some short flexible pens, which after writing a
letter are no longer any good. Our toothbrushes have
been taken from us, and replaced with some 3-inch
toothbrushes. This is just some of the things that
the Beast is doing in order to break those who stand
for what they believe in.
Comrades, it's time to stand and fight by doing
whatever it takes, so that the lives of those who
came before us will not have been lost in vain. Wake
up and understand that we are as one. Just because one
is darker than another, or is not a part of your
Nation does not mean he is not your brother, for we
of color are brothers. Know who your true enemy is.
I'll keep live in the struggle.
Our Struggle Continues, -- A New Jersey Prisoner,
29 July 1998
MIM responds: We join in these two prisoner's call
for unity in the struggles of the oppressed nations
against the pig imperialists. It is time to stand and
fight. But we must wage this battle by building up our
forces so that we can over throw the system. This
means taking on winnable battles, a very difficult
task behind the bars where the pigs have all the power
and the choices are often between a defeat or a bigger
defeat. We urge all our comrades behind bars to
carefully weigh the outcomes of your decisions. We
must always fight back, but the way we fight back
should be the way that will gain the most for our
struggle.
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