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

May, 2004 Central Task Report

by PIRAO Chief, June 1, 2004

  • See also previous Web Minister reports
  • See also overall situation of prison censorship and prison struggle

    MIM's central task: "to create public opinion and the independent institutions of the oppressed to seize power."

    Summary statistics comparing May 2003 and May 2004

    Statistic May, 2003 May, 2004 % change
    Number of different computers MIM served 42949 52352 +21.9%
    Avg. MIM pages served per day 3180 3763 +18.3%
    MIM data transferred 120.46 megabytes/day 124.98 megabytes/day +3.8%
    MIM Notes printed copies compared with pre-911=100 167 222
    All language newspapers printed copies compared with pre-911=100 167 222
    MIM prison circulation averaged over two months Jan 2002=100 0 240
    Number of top 53 cites of U.$/Kanada receiving at least 1000 MIM Notes** Unknown 8
    Average days after print date by which 80% of papers have been distributed Unknown +10
    Number of Art page users 4699 8716 +85.5%
    Number of different MIM web page files actively chosen from 4100 4181 +2%
    Amazon visitors sent from web page 801 844 +5.4%

    The above continues the bad news of the previous two months. It now seems certain that on our current trajectory we will not be meeting our Five Year Plan to grow this website to half a million users a month.

    It's going to take fresh blood to get us back on track for our Five Year Plan. In our current setup, we have our hands full just having our web page grow. Doubling the website traffic in five years looks to be in reach, but we are not going to settle for that.

    What it all means is that people who have not contributed to the web page or MIM's press before are going to have to figure out how to do so. The people we have now are insufficient. We can probably double it in five years, but improving by a factor of 8 to 10 is going to require new help.

    Obviously a lot of you are reading this. It's still the case that we put up new articles garnering thousands of hits each month. We don't intend to slack off on doing that. However, the problem is that that has been the case for a year or two now and we are not able to "beat ourselves." It's to the point where if we forget something or get tired in a certain month, the webpage may show no growth. The only way to beat what we did before is by bringing in new blood. For those of you who have already started working with us, I do not mean to address you.

    Inevitably, people looking at this are making two kinds of errors. Some are "left" opportunist and do not think it's important, because they imagine they have something better to do. If you are in a People's War, you do. The rest of us in imperialist countries should not be pissing on this idea.

    Others are more common with their "right opportunist" ideas. They see this all happening, but treat it like a gigantic tanker going by while they are swimming with a rubber flotation device.

    After the last report, a number of you have written in in one way or another expressing determination that the MIM web page growth pattern continue. In this report, I would like to stress what it is like to oppose "right opportunism." I'm not asking anyone to do more than "their best." It's important not to get frustrated and think that comrades ever ask for more than "your best." We all have varying skills, experience and resources. Every comrade should just keep steadily improving relative to his/herself, because revolutionary efficiency probably doubles every four or five years.

    There are always comrades who compare themselves with more experienced comrades or comrades working in different native languages or other unparallel situations. All such comparisons are wrong when they lead to frustration. What is important is the comparison of oneself with oneself. It's not right to compare someone who just started with reading Mao to someone who started half a lifetime ago. That may cause a feeling of worthlessness "that what I do doesn't make difference" that is wrong. Such is the common substance of "right opportunism," which sells the possible short. "To be good at learning" and to keep at it is important.

    What Maoists and their allies of all levels of skills, experience and resources do does make a difference. If this were not true, we would have achieved the proletariat's goal already when in fact we are not even meeting our Five Year Plan goals.