"In the various nations of the West there is a great obstacle to carrying through any revolution and construction movement; i.e., the poisons of the bourgeoisie are so powerful that they have penetrated each and every corner. While our bourgeoisie has had, after all, only three generations, those in England and France have had a 250-300 year history of development, and their ideology and modus operand have influenced all aspects and strata of their societies. Thus the English working class follows the Labour Party, not the Communist Party. Lenin says, 'The transition from capitalism to socialism will be more difficult for a country the more backward it is.' This would seem incorrect today.'"--Mao Zedong(309)

The correct scientific analysis of class structure and crisis in the imperialist countries is not only critical from the point of view of unleashing whatever movement is possible and appropriate right now. It is also important in terms of the future under the dictatorship of the proletariat. The COMINTERN of 1920 said, "Without exposing this evil, without fighting not only against the trade union bureaucracy but also against all petty-bourgeois manifestations of the craft and labour aristocracy, without the ruthless expulsion of the representatives of this attitude from the revolutionary party, without calling in the lower strata, the broad masses, the real majority of the exploited, there can be no talk of the dictatorship of the proletariat."(310)

The task of the Cultural Revolution after the initial socialist revolution is to consolidate the all-round dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie. That is how a country stays on the socialist road and advances toward communism if international conditions are ripe enough.

The masses are correct not to support any party that claims that the land of the Rodney King and Vincent Chin verdicts is ready for integration. The masses are correct to hate and distrust any party that puts forward such nonsense as how the white worker is going to suddenly wake up and become peaceful and full of brotherly internationalist love. When the white worker does wake up, s/he may fight for reaction first, but even in the best of circumstances, s/he will have to go through a long period of thought reform before peaceful internationalist integration is even thinkable, and not just a sham foisted on the masses by the imperialists interested in assimilation and stability. Even some of the oppressed nation workers infected with white nation chauvinism or parallel ideas will demonstrate great difficulties in waking up.

One cannot fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat, if one does not know what the proletariat is. For this reason alone, the many who suggest to MIM that its differences with others calling themselves Maoist in the imperialist countries are merely tactical are incorrect. Without MIM's cardinal principle on the oppressor nation working class, dictatorship of the proletariat is impossible.

Even when the Third World proletariat makes its weight felt and U.$. imperialism is overthrown, it is still possible for the proletariat to make disastrous errors without an understanding of the tasks and stages of revolution in the imperialist countries. Such errors surely have the potential of leading to a restoration not just of capitalism in the ex-imperialist countries but of imperialism. A restoration of imperialism threatens all the world's people, because for example, the United $tates is the principal enemy of the world's peoples. In many ways, the initial overthrow of U.$. imperialism will be an act of defense by the world's oppressed peoples, self-defense with regard to the right to live without imperialist militarism, starvation, inadequate health care and pollution. Yet, if the revolution starts and ends with defensive goals, there will be no transformation, and hence there will be an increased risk of imperialist restoration. For this reason, it is impermissible to speak of the class structure as a merely abstract issue that can be sidestepped with the tactics of flattery. Just as in every other country, the class structure of the United $tates will determine what the tasks of the revolution are. When imperialist country opportunists sidestep a concrete understanding of the class structure of parasitism, they are sidestepping the future tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Did not Mao say feudalism and colonialism were like mountains that had to be removed from the backs of the Chinese people? In order to remove the weight of imperialism from the backs of the world's peoples, the revolution must now go through its own special stage in the imperialist countries. We will refer to this stage as the re-civilization stage. It will complete some tasks parallel to the new democratic revolution but in the oppressor nations and with no capitalist ownership of the means of production. In particular the oppressor nations will have to come to grips with why it was that the oppressed nations needed a new democratic stage and what things like the civil rights movement were, including how they were twisted by the oppressor nations into assimilationist movements. During the re-civilization stage, the ex-oppressor nation will live without the power to oppress oppressed nations and come to understand why independent national courts and police among other things were necessary for the oppressed nations. In the re-civilization stage, the ex-oppressor nation will come to respect the military and political might of the world's majority. Instead of sending UN troops to Iraq, Somalia and Kampuchea, the proletarian dictatorship will send troops from Somalia, Iraq and Kampuchea to patrol the imperialist countries held in receivership during the re-civilization stage. As Mao said, these tasks alone would make the socialist transition more difficult in the advanced countries than in the backward countries. Yet even this does not describe in full all the difficulties of socialist transition in imperialist countries that are already apparent.

When Lenin originally wrote about the labor aristocracy's returning to the proletariat, he believed that world war would bring about European revolution in his lifetime. On the other hand, he was prepared to admit the possibility that it might not happen in his lifetime if militarism and super-exploitation managed to convert the workers of certain imperialist countries into a petty-bourgeoisie.

The consolidation of the labor aristocracy in the imperialist countries has several implications for the socialist stage of revolution in imperialist countries: 1) No where will racial integration be the direct goal, because the oppressor nation people will not be ready for integration until after some generations have passed. For a strategic length of time the oppressor nation people will undergo thought reform to prepare for re-entry into humyn relations with other peoples. 2) Oppressor nation people will generally not hold the predominant roles in the administration of oppressed nation affairs even in the event of transitional Soviet forms of government. 3) There is a high likelihood that the labor aristocracy will never be re-proletarianized before communism is achieved. 4) Reparations will be necessary to undercut Titoism in which people who happen to live on top of gold mines, oil wells or other sources of wealth do not have their wealth re-distributed in the name of "local control." 5) Reparations will be necessary not just as justice to the Third World but to undercut the material basis for oppressor nation chauvinism including the mythology of oppressor nation "productivity." Just as children raised only seeing Blacks as slaves can not be expected to have a well-rounded perspective of the Black people, a child raised in a society where ex-oppressor nation workers work with several times more capital at their disposal than oppressed nation workers cannot be expected to understand the real reason for a difference in "productivity" between nations. The question of reparations is one central item to the necessity of an historical stage in which the oppressor nation peoples are cleansed of parasitism. Thought reform by itself will be futile for the oppressor nation if the economic basis of parasitic thinking is not destroyed.

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