by PIRAO chief
MIM and its affiliated organizations employ no professional staff. Quite the contrary, MIM members pay for their political activity. For this reason, outsiders who donate money to MIM can rest assured that their money goes straight into building public opinion: there is no overhead for salaries.
In another resolution I submitted to the Congress titled "On Socialist Synthesis," I talk about some of the virtues of not putting money into salaries. Labor bureaucracies have a long history of killing communist movements. That's not to say if someone wants us to hire staff and donates the money that we would not. Rapidly speeding up MIM's activity would require the hiring of staff. However, right now there is no staff or overhead to speak of and we will inform donors when and if that situation changes.
In the past year, PIRAO continued its general retreat from previous campaigns that reached too high but with some success. Instead, especially in the past four months, PIRAO has launched a number of smaller offensives that are more easily completed in a short period of time. As an example, operational expenses for our flagship public opinion devices have decreased over 22% in 2002 so far with an increase in speed and the same circulation level.
In our continued search for ways to build public opinion we also tried out the suggestions of a new PIRAO comrade. While measuring the response of the public, in 2002 so far PIRAO and the Boston branch and affiliated comrades carried out distribution offensives in 19 cities and towns in 14 states where we usually do zero or insufficient distribution. We also did our first distribution work in the Russian language.
In coordination with the distribution work we also tied ourselves to the work of the MIM web page. It appears that when we do MIM distribution work correctly the most obvious result is an increase in web page readership. We have yet to find an effective way to advertise MIM Theory; although we tried various approaches to find one. Increasing MIM Notes distribution does not result in increases in MIM Theory sales worth mentioning. Nor does circulation in new areas necessarily result in quickly finding new supporters.
Instead, it appears that properly done MIM Notes distribution results in growth of web page readership beyond the normal for the Internet as a whole. When web page readership increases more than 50% annually, as it has in recent months, the credit should go to translators and MIM Notes circulation workers.
Both the web page and circulation work saw degenerations of comrades--quitting. On the one hand, the quitting of comrades means fewer trained comrades for the future. On the other hand, dispensing with participation of some comrades has made it easier for me to get a closer grip on the nature of work being done right now in infrastructure building The silver lining in that cloud of degenerations has been that "better fewer but better" has proved true again. Since MIM as of yet does not hire any professional companies to evaluate MIM Notes circulation, the web page statistics serve as a central indicator not just for the web page but for MIM Notes distribution. When we do a good job in distribution, web page statistics increase. When we slack off, web page statistics do not increase as much.
MIM Notes enjoys five-digit circulation and five-digit figures of people go to the website each month. I do not have an exact way to measure MIM Notes circulation, but I believe that the best overall statistics gauging MIM's performance of "building public opinion" are the three figures from the Web Minister's monthly report that exclude most graphics--1) number of pages pulled per day 2) number of distinct users in a month and 3) average megabytes of material served per day. These are crucial in understanding MIM's success with its principal task of "build public opinion and the independent institutions of the oppressed." Since I do not have better ways of measuring our work, I use these figures as the best overall assessment of the MIM infrastructure's strength.
PIRAO has pledged to double circulation of MIM Notes by September 11th, 2002. Yet nothing stops MIM Notes circulation from increasing even more except money. MIM Notes operates right inside u.$. imperialism's belly. Right now despite its strategic location, MIM Notes does not exert much power in the balance of forces overall; however, a circulation of 500,000 while still not amounting to a Red Army would create a headache for imperialism and make imperialist propaganda work much more difficult.
Contact MIM by writing mim@mim.org