Without the strategic confidence described by Mao, compromise with the house-slaves of U.$. imperialism is one result. Here we cannot fail to mention RCP-USA leader Bob Avakian as the contemporary Kautsky. Like Kautsky, Avakian touts some important credentials, most significantly, the approval of his work by the Peruvian comrades including the truly great revolutionary Gonzalo.

Like Kautsky, a casual reading of Avakian would find Avakian using certain Marxist rhetoric. When it comes to parasitism and the labor aristocracy, Avakian is willing to make some noise. Yet, it is the fact that Avakian does talk about the labor aristocracy without going all the way into the issue and correctly resolving it that makes Avakian the contemporary Kautsky for our conditions.

To be sure, from his economist chauvinist right, there are those like the Mensheviks that urged the COMINTERN to drop the labor aristocracy idea entirely who see Avakian's ideas as too dangerous. These imperialist-economists go so far as to tell MIM that Avakian actually agrees with MIM, but he is either constrained by the rank-and-file or just unable to spit it out as clearly as what MIM is saying. In essence, these social-democrats criticizing Avakian never accepted "What Is To Be Done?" and Avakian needs these Second International retreads to make him look good.

Just in case the imperialist-economists know something about the Co-RIM and RCP-USA that we do not, we urge Avakian to dump all the editors supposedly watering down his work into imperialist chauvinism and bring his true followers to MIM. Despite these speculations about Avakian by people close to or in the CoRIM, MIM can only go by his published writings on the assumption they are not altered and that Avakian is a Kautskyite on the question of the labor aristocracy.

Yet, as we have shown before, the Revolutionary Worker has condemned the MIM line on the white working class. Moreover, the RCP program holds that a majority of the oppressor nation is exploited.

Recently, the January 19, 1997 issue of the Revolutionary Worker put forward the same opportunism from Avakian as all the other Mensheviks when it comes to parasitism. Avakian's is the simply the clearest version of Kautskyism because of its explicitness, unless we count the Kautskyite interventions of Adolfo Olaechea with regard to party formation in the imperialist countries. For his part, on an INTERNET "Lenin List," Adolfo Olaechea found it fit to admit Khruschevites and anarchists while purging MIM and echoing Kautsky's attacks on Lenin's supposed "sectarianism" during World War I.

The bottom line is that Avakian does not have strategic confidence in the oppressed nations. In this he shares with Kautsky a will to botch this issue at the last possible instance while sounding like Lenin as much as possible in order to smuggle labor aristocracy politics into the proletarian movement.

Avakian maintains that if we do not act like we are going to win the 90 percent within U.S. borders we are going to lose. We heard the same argument when we were arguing with now defunct RCP clones in England. In the end, the line is just opportunism no different than social-democracy on why we need a majority, even if it means putting forward parasitic demands. It flows from chauvinist use of dialectics that is really eclecticism. On the one hand, Avakian quotes Lenin on how a whole country can be a parasite, but on the other hand, he says the Euro-Amerikan workers are proletarian. While it is possible for re-proletarianization to occur through crisis, at this time we do not believe that it is appropriate to call the workers here both proletarians and parasites at the same time. This is simply Avakian using smoke and mirrors. It would be different if the scale of parasitism were only small, such that superprofits distributed to the workers did not exceed the surplus-value they generate, but that is simply not the case.

While many in Europe criticize MIM and the RCP interchangeably, in actuality, the RCP shares the bottom-line position of more numerically popular revisionism and social-democracy in Europe. We urge these revisionist and social-democratic parties to recognize the RCP-USA as their brothers and sisters. Bought-off extensively by the European welfare state, the European claimants of "Marxism-Leninism" are mostly in denial with regard to parasitism, and they should join up with the RCP-USA in its plans for a COMINTERN or with Adolfo Olaechea in his plans. If we understand what is wrong with the RCP-USA line, it will be relatively easy to deal with the many more blatant versions of revisionism in the imperialist countries.

Instead of putting forward the warmed over social-democratic demands that have a shot at appealing to the 90 percent in the parasite countries--bomb Libya, support the Gulf War, create jobs by building weapons etc.-- MIM only puts forward those demands in line with the international proletariat. We don't care what share we get in the oppressor nations, if it's 5 percent or 50 percent, but we will not take up chauvinism and militarism, both because the world's majority and the independence of the small nations will conquer anyway and because we don't want to get in their way like Avakian does by unleashing parasitic movements in the imperialist countries.

At the same time, the truly oppressed will not trust the Avakian line and to the extent that Maoism is associated with Avakian, the revolution will be set back. MIM spells it out into the concrete details of the class structure and national oppression. Avakian is trying to hide something--namely that he is thinking of parasites as the revolutionary vehicle and he wants to sneak his labor aristocracy line into the proletarian movement to use it for another round of imperialist assimilationism.

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