May 17, 2006

The April 30th 2006 demonstration of former Iranian Marxists outside the United Nations against Iran's uranium enrichment program has been a last straw of sorts in MIM's relationship to the international communist movement. We can no longer abide by the slow pace of developing class consciousness. Seeing former self- described Marxists reduced to such a pitiable state reinforces our determination to keep Marxism-Leninism-Maoism fresh instead of pretending that strategic evaluations never change or that an accumulation of strategic problems since the death of Mao in 1976 could not make a self-described "Marxist" organization become a stooge of imperialism.

It's been 30 years since Mao died, and plenty of big problems have arisen on the boundary between strategy and line. Most damaging are those problems concerning how local comrades implement opposition to u.$. imperialism.

When we at MIM ask ourselves about some chance that Bush will use nuclear warheads on Iran--including new tactical ones the imperialists are claiming--and picturing that and the aftermath, will MIM be able to say it did everything possible to prevent it? When even paleo-conservatives are saying now is the moment to act against this threat and they are giving us all the inside poop on their former conservative comrades to get this done, can it be said MIM does not have a glimmer of recognition? We also have our former comrades who are not up to the tasks at hand for various reasons. Some have poor leaders. Some may even have geopolitical interests that are somewhat congruent with u.$. imperialism at the moment. And if our reader can picture the use of nuclear weapons by the united $tates again, then our reader will also know why we have to break at this time with our former comrades-- including some parties conducting Peoples' Wars but without an immediate u.$. occupation to contend with.

In the ideal world, the masses doing the most to fight U.$. occupation would have the best Maoist parties leading them. Then there would be no conflict between our goal of opposing the number-one enemy of the world's people and supporting the Peoples' Wars. Alas, the people of Iraq are doing far more to shake the empire than any other armed struggle. Places two through five might very well go to Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Palestine.

Specific calculations causing the appearance of this new line

Overall, MIM finds the likelihood of anti-Islamic war higher than the likelihood of imperialist occupation of countries of our ex-comrades. The Islamic countries are at this moment tying down more imperialist troops than our ex-comrades are. Some of our ex-comrades have tolerated a party that formed on the basis of opposition to seeing the principal contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed nations. These ex-comrades stupidly tied themselves to a tool of anti- Islamic chauvinism.

Between 1917 and 1923 Lenin and Stalin worked with Sultan-Galiev. Later Sultan- Galiev is reported to have regretted the work and rumors say that Stalin had him shot in 1940. Nonetheless, the period of work with nationalities from 1917 to 1923 and Sultan-Galiev's role in founding the Communist University for the Toilers of the East were very productive. Without that work, we can say there would have been no Soviet Union. It was the fact that Lenin's party was far ahead of the Russian imperialists on the national question and far ahead of imperialism generally on colonialism that brought victory to Lenin, even just in the regions associated with Russian empire historically. Today, we are still talking about roughly the same peoples and their difficulties with imperialism.

We have our doubts that our ex-comrades would be saying and doing the same things if the united $tates were occupying them. Without breaking with these ex- comrades, we are not doing them any favors. They pig-headedly refuse to acknowledge Aztlán while recognizing Kanada and this confuses our young comrades, like many other wrong points in the international communist movement. MIM needs to stand up clearly for the Aztlán struggle, including by public criticism of our ex-comrades. This is "for their own good" in the case of the Third World peoples misled by ex-comrades with illusions about the nature of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. If the super-profit gorging parties win the day, it will only mean more Latino troops occupying countries with Peoples' Wars in the future. That will be much more painful than enduring harsh words from MIM right now.

Pragmatism, reciprocity & sectarianism

Over more than the last 15 years, MIM has delivered documents to the world on certain Peoples' Wars. Unknown to most of the world, MIM delivered millions of documents and terabytes of data in support of organizations that never even recognized MIM. We are often called "sectarian" through a misuse of the word. MIM practices "one divides into two," but the last organization in the world to be sectarian is MIM. The proof is that MIM supports organizations that show us no reciprocity.

One reason that MIM tolerated a lack of reciprocity is that we hate the politics of reciprocity that we have seen. There have been too many unprincipled documents signed by too many watery parties that should not claim to be scientific communist parties. Reciprocity takes on a life of its own and people sign things without knowing why. It's much better to have someone chew on the MIM line and not like it than to pretend to digest it and ask for more.

Today, we can say that our comrades in the Peoples' Wars and elsewhere have had adequate exposure to true Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. We know because we have measured the terabytes distributed. We've done too much work in this area to tolerate our ex-comrades' apathetic approach to international class analysis.

Increasingly we believe that with one particular party conducting People's War, pragmatist cynicism by some of its key leaders is standing in the way.

The political line problems rehashed

Regarding the universals of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Lenin and Stalin said Blacks were a nation. Trotsky said they were a race. We've told our comrades this many times. They have not heeded the obvious. Quite the contrary, many still heed the Trotskyist view of Cominterns and uphold parties that are not in step with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and never have been.

Khruschev came to power and Gus Hall dropped the Black nation thesis. Right-hand of Stalin Harry Haywood and others left the party. Not one bit of that is a secret that MIM dug up.

Since then the "Communist Party of the USA" has supported the civil rights movement and the multiracial view of one country flying the stars and stripes. One would have thought that within the universals of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, nothing could be more obvious. Trotsky and Khruschev are on one side and Lenin, Stalin and MIM on the other side. The sad truth is, no it was not obvious to even our comrades in the Peoples' Wars.

At this time, when the ability to link the Latino struggle to the anti- militarist struggle could be crucial for the whole world, MIM has to ask itself another question: if a Maoist Internationalist Party-Aztlán formed from our young Aztlán comrades, would the Peoples' Wars not facing an immediate u.$. occupation recognize it? The answer again, sadly, is no. Here again the political link is clear. Weakness in the fight regarding Islamic countries fighting U.$. occupation is also weakness in the fight for Aztlán to remove repressive occupation.

Some of our former comrades are in the Third World and have to emphasize that Third World and Fourth World nations have no reason to be in conflict. Conflict among them aids u.$. imperialism. This is no excuse where Kanada and Aztlán are concerned. Nor is there any "third force" politics where we can stand above both u.$. imperialism and oppressed nations whether they are Islamic-dominated politically or not. The proof again is that Iraq is damaging the imperialist military more than any other country. This all has to do with sharply bringing out the difference between imperialism and oppressed nations.

Some of our former comrades try to tell MIM that Aztlán is only in Marxism- Leninism- Maoism-MIM Thought, not Maoism universally, so we will have to wait till u.$. imperialism falls to recognize Aztlán. In other words, when MIM brings down u.$. imperialism, they will be happy to elevate MIM Thought to a universal aspect of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and then we can recognize Aztlán on par with Kanada according to these people. Our former comrades want the Martin Luther King line for a multiracial so-called working class within u.$. borders, not national liberation. It's the same old Trotskyist story to wait for the white workers, because revolution is supposedly impossible without them.

Some people will blame me, the International Minister for ever putting up with the backward line from our ex-comrades on how Aztlán supposedly does not exist as a nation deserving its own vanguard party like Kanada. I will try to spin this as best I can: there is some benefit to seeing these questions as specific to MIM Thought, because we are having so many problems with the Wang Ming line internationally. For us to treat questions as more than 50% application is also healthy generally.

The only problem is--the cynical comments about Kanada and Aztlán are not in line with the universal aspects of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. If Blacks are a nation according to Marxism- Leninism-Maoism and if Aztlán has a distinct language and a territory derived from Occupied Mexico, then how can we say that Aztlán is not a nation too? MIM has a dilemma here. Throughout the world, the majority of Maoist parties are led by people in their teens and twenties. So we are often at the stage of struggle dealing with the Wang Ming problem. This leads us to emphasize what is MIM Thought, the application of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism for specific conditions. On the other hand, we already have the Black reference point from Marxism-Leninism- Maoism, so it is outrage number one to have anyone say Aztlán is a MIM Thought question alone.

Decisive outrage number two is that these comrades have all recognized a Kanadian nation and they have entered into relations with Kanadian organizations. Supposedly that is not part of MIM Thought, but Aztlán is.

We just cannot tolerate this. It's chauvinism and neo-colonialism beyond comparison. These other parties and ex-comrades also give ambiguous responses about First Nations of North America, and absolutely none of them give Huey Newton his due, though at least with Huey Newton, MIM has to acknowledge that intercommunalism is a new development not within prior Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. In a word, much of the opposition to MIM looks like bourgeois nationalism, a failure to divide one into two in the name of appeasing white so-called workers. MIM is just not going to stand for First Nations' and Aztlán's not getting their due as outright nations in the classic Stalin sense.

Since these other parties will not recognize Aztlán, then the super-exploited and exploited of Aztlán deserve to know that the first party in the world to call itself "Maoist" does recognize Aztlán and will not put up with these chauvinists and wannabe compradors passing themselves off as Marxist-Leninist- Maoists anymore. Most of them are just as happy calling themselves "Marxist- Leninist" still in 2006 anyway. We said it in 1983 and we'll say it again now: whatever eclectic mish-mash it is they put together, we are the Maoists.

Application, recalibration & re-summation

By now, MIM is also impatient with some of our Third World comrades, because we know that in their own countries, they describe as urban petty-bourgeoisie a class with a fraction of the living standard of what they are calling "workers" in the imperialist countries. Even in Russia, we know that the civil servant of the petty-bourgeoisie makes less than the garbage collector of Los Angeles. That is even more true in most countries. Because things are incorrectly calibrated by imperialist-country revisionism, most of the world communist movement hews to the mythology of an imperialist-country "working class" that is somehow better paid and owns more assets than the Third World petty-bourgeoisie. We are long past due for a re-calibration on an internationalist basis. The parties we have broken with had their chance to sign our W.E.B. Du Bois declaration and they never did. They have never summed up the international class structure to the level of rational knowledge. Whether the former comrades are incompetent for decades at a time or bought-off hardly matters.

Because from no fault of MIM's some previous revisionist parties told the Third World comrades that imperialist country workers deserve a living standard several times higher than the urban petty-bourgeoisie of the Third World, our Third World comrades continue along the same mistaken lines. It's a problem of internalized chauvinism--an opening to comprador politics. We are not doing the international proletariat any favors by overlooking the problem of wannabe compradors.

The special problem of Peru

MIM was the first organization in the world to call itself "Maoist." At first the Communist Party of Peru (PCP) defined Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in a document where it knew the initiating signatory considered itself "Marxist-Leninist" in then recently signed documents in Latin America. As it turns out, some other signatories never considered themselves Maoist at all. The PCP eventually raised the question of "Marxism- Leninism-Maoism" and "principally Maoism." However, these comrades suffered CIA infiltration. The Yankee imperialists and Peruvian reaction smashed the PCP with the active aid of a party still tolerated by our former comrades.

For this reason, MIM is going to continue offering PCP documents to the world. When the state smashed the original leadership of the PCP, MIM was already engaged in a serious line struggle with it--all the details of which are still not public. We shall count our struggle with the PCP as prematurely terminated. On the other hand, MIM will no longer recognize any current Peruvians as having continuity with the PCP. It may not be aiding the struggle too much given the Peruvians' struggle's stage of development.

Policy

Henceforth, MIM is going through a re-registration process with all international comrades. We cannot abide by the combination of circumstances we are in. From now on, it's not just a question of what Yankees are doing for the Peoples' Wars. It's also a question of how the Peoples' Wars are supporting Marxism- Leninism-Maoism in the imperialist countries. If they cannot separate from Trotskyism and labor aristocracy politics, they're not going to do anything to help our handfuls of comrades in the imperialist countries stay on the correct road. Tolerating the chauvinism of the First World Trotskyists only increases the opportunities for imperialist aggression.

1. Parties that wish to be regarded as fraternal by MIM are welcome to contact us. Perhaps MIM made a mistake in interpreting other parties' lines. The International Minister does not claim to have made no mistakes and the MIM does not claim to have given the International Ministry enough comrade-time to do a good job.

We will demand reciprocity. Comrades unprepared to recognize Aztlán need not call themselves comrades of ours. Likewise, anyone going to tolerate the Iranian Mujahedin or the RCP=U$A need not bother calling themselves comrades of ours. If that is not public, they can forget thinking they are making a contribution to the imperialist country struggle. We can rejoin forces at a later date in history.

2. All organizations that MIM deems not to have met the challenges of this period now find web pages related to their struggle removed from our website.

3. It's not that MIM is going to put up web pages attacking the parties not facing immediate U.$. occupation. If our former comrades would like to criticize us, they may do so. We would rather drop the subject until a more propitious historical moment.