Overall

This is the best report we've had in a few months in terms of our primary goal of readership. It's still not within range of our Five Year Plan goals though.

From this month's statistics it's evident that some people stepped up their work with MIM. Red salutes go out to the ALKQN (Latin Kings/Queens), comrades in the Philippines and Iran and readers who are just studying Mao now more than in the past. We have many of the relatively new pages of Mao getting almost 100 readings a month.

January was a planned setback month, because of budget cuts for MIM Notes. Nonetheless, in January we started to get back on track with prison mailings. We have high hopes for February as MIM resumes its normal public opinion offensives in the street.

This month I'm going to explain something that MIM is reluctant to discuss, because it's a subject always liable to misinterpretation. For several years, the MIM has had more readers than other organizations in the united $tates including the "Communist Party" and "Workers World." More than one organization of the marketing bourgeoisie has done various third party reports on this and confirmed it, not because they want to market to communists, but because they are interested in web traffic in general.

The only organization to surpass MIM in web traffic for any appreciable number of days and who upholds Stalin is the Progressive Labor Party. In general, though the pro-Stalin parties lag far behind MIM in web traffic and total readership. Our closest competitors are Workers World and "CP USA."

Averages over years of time will show MIM far ahead, and in fact, for many stretches of time, MIM has had more traffic than the English edition of the People's Daily of China and the Cuban Granma. That is less true now as those papers have greatly increased popularity relative to MIM. Another competitor of a sort that has surpassed MIM in web traffic is the Trotskyist reference source, www.marxists.org. So though MIM is the path-breaker on this subject followed by many imitators, it's not true that all news is good news on this front. Lately there is even a Trotskyist party (not mainly u.$.) that seems to get more traffic than MIM on a consistent basis, another reason I find it necessary to explain this in some detail.

Today if one goes to www.alexa.com, the marketing bourgeoisie will explain that among u.$. parties calling themselves socialist or communist, MIM has the most traffic. Some days that will not be true, but most days the past several years it has been true. Alexa shows the rankings to be as follows today:
1. MIM
2. Workers World online
3. CPUSA
4. Progressive Labor Party
5. Socialist Party

For the report, click here.

We've known for several years that MIM is the most read party of the "communist" or "socialist" variety. The reason we generally have not discussed how we know we are influencing people, is that very few people understand such questions in correct Marxist-Leninist-Maoist scientific light. The goal is not to attract numbers in their own right and that is one of the main reasons that MIM never discusses this.

On the other hand, there are four benefits from describing what we know about this a little bit.

First is to look at this historically and to know that when it started MIM had fewer members and less money than all of its nearest competitors for readership. Instead of drawing the conclusion that it is necessary to water down line and be popular that way, we hope readers will realize that especially compared with "Socialist Party," "Communist Party" and "Workers World," MIM actually strives to take more unpopular positions. If MIM were smashed completely tomorrow, it would still be true that between 1983 and 2005 MIM proved Mao right for imperialist country conditions when Mao said of conditions in oppressed countries: "The correctness or otherwise of the ideological and political line decides everything. When the Party's line is correct, then everything will come its way. If it has no followers, then it can have followers; if it has no guns, then it can have guns; if it has no political power, then it can have political power. If its line is not correct, even what it has it may lose. The line is a net rope. When it is pulled, the whole net opens out." Since Mao believed that we in imperialist countries should be engaged in "long legal struggles," we can say that when the line is correct in the majority-exploiter countries it will be possible to create public opinion (instead of having so many guns under its command).

Secondly, a little history and statistical reporting gives the party a way to check on its own work and even a gauge by which to evaluate work individually. We can evaluate whether we are going to settle for falling behind Trotskyist parties in public opinion building or whether we are going to keep innovating and moving forward. The proletariat is going to have to decide if it's going to let MIM squander its historic lead to Trotskyists. Gross pragmatists (people leery of clear and momentarily unpopular goals like MIM has) should note that MIM has surpassed the CP-U$A, despite long-time jibes that pragmatists have levelled at us in the anti-revisionist movement, and despite the obvious numeric success of the Black Panthers.

Thirdly, this little reporting is useful because it introduces some reality and gives the public a gauge as well. What are we to make of all the nay-sayers to MIM? How much reality did they have a grip on? What about the quitters and degenerates? How many of MIM's critics ever knew what's what? No, it is obviously wrong that taking hold of the line on the labor aristocracy and gender aristocracy means we cannot create public opinion, "never get anywhere." Countless people who slander MIM in various ways also prove not to have done any factual investigation on our influence. So it's not MIM's ranking or number of readings that is important here, but the proof that our critics just do not investigate what they are talking about.

Fourthly, MIM needs to beware of what happens to organizations at this stage of development. When we had much less influence, a Japanese party told us that it has a policy of making a point of writing individually to smaller parties like us for polemics. We need to keep with that spirit, because we can never stress enough that no numbers will ever make up for a fundamental scientific error.

One of the reasons we do not discuss things like newspaper and website readership is that most of our critics tend to latch on to something random, narrow and concrete for a reason why they reject MIM. By spelling this whole web traffic thing out in detail, we risk descending down to the level of people who fascinate themselves with concrete details and not goals--people who are usually consciously or unconsciously looking for an excuse to swallow some sugar-coated bullets whole instead of taking up the MIM line.

Yet, we hope people take away the message that it is not necessary to compromise ourselves like reformists of the SP-USA, WWP and CP=U$A. Our detractors refer again and again to a dogma about numbers that just is not true and has never been relevant to the history of social change. It's a dogma implanted in us because of the electoral system and its direct and indirect impact on the thinking of communists.

What Mao was saying about line being decisive is just another way of saying that science makes a big difference. Large numbers of people using no science are never any match for smaller numbers of people who organize with science. Right into 1917, Lenin was taking very unpopular positions, because science was more important than the fact that large numbers of people were supporting other parties, parties that just happened to be wrong.