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

Rank ordering of enemies: the gender aristocracy

In order of importance, the imperialists and their labor bureaucrat allies articulating why workers and the petty-bourgeoisie should work within the capitalist system are the top enemies. Next on the list is the labor aristocracy--people who are not leaders but belong to the petty-bourgeoisie by virtue of imperialism's bribery of imperialist country populations with super-profits extracted from the Third World.

Gender bureaucrats play a sinister role comparable to that of labor bureaucrats by coming up with the psychological warfare wedding the people to patriarchy. Since MIM only sees three groups-- class, nation and gender--for purposes of discussing oppression, it is the gender aristocracy that seems in many ways the least important of the enemies. Nonetheless, the purpose of this Congress resolution is to put the placement of the gender aristocracy enemy in relative context.

Although the styles of the enemies of proletarian revolution differ, they all serve the status quo in different ways. An interesting comparison of styles would be the imperialist mouthpieces versus the gender aristocracy. The imperialist mouthpieces in the media such as the Fox News, CNN, Wall Street Journal and New York Times dedicate themselves to part-time employment detracting from scientific communism.

The style of the gender aristocracy normally focuses on apolitical leisure-time. Included here are the consumers of Cosmopolitan magazine, Playboy magazine, Playstation, etc. These consumers may not care much about who should be the political leaders of a country, but they enjoy socially oppressive entertainment such as a good tank battle on the video screen.

The point of this resolution is not to say that the people should be pure of video games and soft- core pornography. The point is to look at the people at the extremes: people who are imperialist mouthpieces in the media and people who could care less about government leaders but who have a passion for reality TV.

The argument breaks into two here. The fact that people find themselves pacified to the point of political oblivion also makes taking up a fascist activism less likely. Given that the economic basis for fascism may exist in the united $tates and imperialist countries generally, apolitical life is better than some other alternatives.

On the other hand, it's hard to deny that the most stupid and lying anti-communist in the media is at least concerned with politics and history. The real competitor of the New York Times is not MIM Notes. The real competitor for both MIM Notes and the New York Times would be something like the WWF (World Wrestling Federation) featuring staged athletics on television and the ever-increasing addiction to video games of the Nintendo and Xbox sort.

This question stands out in the rich countries in particular. They have money and education. So what do these people do with their time? This seems to be one of the depressing thoughts of comrades internationally when they think of places like the united $tates. When we think about it that way, it would seem that the gender aristocracy should rank higher on the list of enemies, higher than the imperialist lackeys at Fox News. The masses globally are ready to attack Hollywood for example.

It could even be true that the New York Times and MIM Notes increase each other's readership. Hooking people into some facet of politics may result in a spreading interest in politics in general.

When we think of Abu Ghraib and how the gender aristocracy brought its leisure-time preoccupations to so-called work, again the gender aristocracy looks poorly compared with the imperialist mouthpieces reporting on Abu Ghraib. Abu Ghraib is an example of what people bored out of their minds in the unproductive sector can do to add to imperialist torture.

The above are examples of what it would look like for MIM to make gender the principal contradiction. It would be much different than how other organizations make gender the principal contradiction, because MIM has already seen gender through the prism of class and national struggle. We would say we know what gender is and can separate it from nation unlike most calling themselves feminists in the majority-exploiter countries.

At this time, desite the above reasoning, MIM has decided that the principal contradiction revolves around class and nation. That means that the gender aristocracy is the lesser evil in the imperialist countries and most of what it does derives from the conflict between imperialist countries and oppressed nations. To put this in reverse, when we do raise the question of the gender aristocracy, most of the time we do so to rally the global forces dissatisfied with imperialist patriarchy. We're hoping to rally substantial sympathy for international forces among the internal semi-colonies of imperialism--a basis for which is still evident in polls on questions as diverse as the Iraq War and Proposition 187 in California.

Amendment: The patriarchy and gender aristocracy are actually lesser enemies, because even people going into the military for self-entertainment reasons are inept on that account. People entertaining themselves without militarism are even more lethal to imperialism. The demographic problem of the West is a big factor in our favor for resolving the principal contradiction between impeialism and oppressed nations.