On the relationship between opposing the Wang Ming line and supporting joint dictatorship of the proletariat of the oppressed nations
The first line of political defense of materialism in the communist movement is Mao's teachings on Wang Ming. The substance of the struggle against Wang Ming is knowing the concrete conditions in one's own society, no matter what educated or accomplished foreign authorities might say.
On the other hand, what makes a line materialist is not that it comes from natives of a society. If for example, a Filipino or Peruvian moves to an imperialist country and spends some time and effort doing concrete investigation of conditions, then s/he has as much to say as any native.
Book worship often attempts to solve a question by reference to an attractive chapter in Das Kapital, all of which Marx and Engels meant only to refer to particular concrete conditions, not something meant to be true in a timeless and ahistorical manner. So there is a tie between book-worship and the struggle for concrete understanding. The question of the labor theory of value is not just a diagram on surplus-value but actually being able to fill in the diagram with concrete values from the population at hand. The application part is actually more challenging and difficult than the drawing of a general diagram without concrete detail.
According to Stalin's detractors, he read 500 pages a day. Likewise, Mao also chided his colleagues in his last years for not studying enough as he prepared reading materials for party circles. Likewise, Stalin spent some of his last weeks of life preparing others to study political economy. So when we say we oppose book worship, it does not mean people can afford not to read books and be in the vanguard party! Opposing book worship means not replacing what we find from thorough investigation of conditions with something in a book. It also means that those with no books can still do systematic and painstaking investigations inspired by word-of-mouth discussion--perhaps with people who have read books.
Majority-exploiter country people who cannot read or read very little can be communists and the greatest of all heroes, but they cannot be scientific communists, leaders of the proletarian movement. We can say the same of math: it won't do to make excuses for not conquering math in the name of a Liberal attitude toward proletarians when it comes to the vanguard party. Here again, there is a crucial distinction between united front and public opinion on the one hand and party building on the other. We must have united front with illiterate people, and MIM is above all others in its work among illiterate prisoners, but we in the majority-exploiter countries cannot allow illiterate people to claim vanguard party membership and that goes for numerical literacy as well. We might even suspect that MIM has not gone far enough in separating public opinion building and party building, because Comrade Gonzalo in Peru emphasized spoken word work among the public as the key and that rings true for the whole world, but it's not in our primer.
It [emphasis on the spoken word] should be in the primer for all members to call themselves "MC."
The contributions of the illiterate to the struggle deserve extolling sky high, but it can be an error of over-romanticizing the image of the party to accept the illiterate. This problem comes from exaggerating the role of the party and turning it into a replacement for a movement and it also comes from underestimating the "real heroes" among the masses as Mao called them. The party is composed of intellectuals: whether of intellectual family background or not, the point is that once in the party, among many other things, a comrade is expected to be able to read about the international proletariat and conduct concrete calculations pertaining to its interests. In so doing, the party speeds up the progress of revolution: the vanguard party in no way can replace the role of the masses. Only in the rarest and luckiest of coincidental circumstances will a party that does not know the difference between itself and a revolutionary movement among the masses actually contribute to revolution.
Concretely-speaking, one reason for this in the majority-exploiter countries is that rational knowledge of the international proletariat has to come from books, because not everyone can travel like Ho Chi Minh did and even if we travel, it is impossible to learn all the languages and conduct concrete investigations by word-of-mouth with enough time for the 190 countries each. Hence, the phrase "international proletariat" would have no meaning at all if people did not read about other countries.
So if for example, one grew up where everyone lived on oil revenue or in the united $tates, the only way to have a point of comparison is by reading about other countries. So in this case, rational knowledge has the dominant role to play in countries where exploiters are the majority.
It's important to understand that the Wang Ming thesis by Mao is still correct overall; even though what MIM says about imperialist countries does not copy what Mao said about Wang Ming exactly. For example, by following Mao's teachings on Wang Ming, most of the world can learn about exploited people-- almost rather instantly. For 80% of the world, following Mao on Wang Ming leads directly into wading among the oppressed and exploited. Whenever something is 80% correct, that already is a good sign we better adopt it as truth.
What happens in the imperialist countries starts the same way, but ends up somewhere different. When we wade into concrete conditions in the united $tates, we find for example that the u.$. government is correct that one in seven voting age people have served in the military. Then we can listen when they tell us what they have done in life and what they think politically. So far in this explanation of wading into u.$. conditions, we have copied what Mao said.
The twist comes when we have to sum up what we have learned. If we did not know from reading books and newspapers about the international proletariat or conditions for the military in oppressed and super-exploited countries, we might make an error when we summed up our concrete investigation of military veterans. We might try to copy Mao as if Amerikans were like Chinese, instead of Japanese, and unite 90% of the population. One reason people do this is that they do not understand concretely-speaking that Amerikans have more in common with the Japanese of Mao's day than with the Chinese.
It's very much a case where we go out hoping to find something of use to the international proletariat, but at the same time, we cannot lie if we did not find a revolutionary fighting force. Spreading lies about the imperialist country population has the effect of spreading false consciousness internationally and paralyzing the main force of revolution--the exploited and oppressed of the Third World. The inevitable effect of false consciousness will be an increased viability of cultural and identity movements as opposed to revolutionary proletarian movements--in the Third World. So it is the duty of people living among high proportions of exploiters to tell the truth about exploiters. Otherwise, the international proletariat will inevitably try to "learn lessons" from the "American proletariat" just as proletarians learn from each other in all countries. The most deadly and common effect will be to spread a cultural movement to learn from "advanced" workers using "high technology" and copy the West instead of making revolution. Thus, there is and always has been a connection among the labor aristocracy thesis, Marx's theory of the productive forces, economism and false consciousness. The key is to understand that the labor aristocracy contributes to the false consciousness abroad, in a way that a few rich people never can. Lying underneath this political problem is that the proletariat can come to various understandings of the gap between rich countries and poor ones and only the MIM explanations utilize the labor theory of value. Without the MIM line, the would-be Marxist- Leninist-Maoists spread bourgeois ideology when the realities of the gap between rich and poor countries appear and generate questions, questions we need to learn to recognize when they arise. Because of Mao's struggle against the Wang Ming line, the Third World comrades can afford to make revolution to a large extent without an accurate understanding of MIM science. It is only when it comes to understanding people globally that we see the MIM line is universal truth and absolutely essential. The closer the day of the fall of imperialism, the more essential the MIM line will become. In the meantime there is the question of how best to fight false consciousness.
In contrast are the opportunists and Bernstein revisionists saying we should lie to the Third World so that the people became jazzed or psyched for revolution, since the American proletariat is allegedly going to overthrow the government any day. Quite the contrary, some in the Third World may conclude their own efforts can wait while the u.$. lackeys fall of their own accord once the revolution comes to power in the united $tates. Likewise, the old Menshevik line of waiting for the productive forces will come into play reinforced by the image of the labor aristocracy of the West, which propagandists say made it with "hard work," not class struggle to appropriate Third World labor.
This was the question that prompted MIM's founding. When founded, MIM did not have all the answers to form a MIM Thought. It only knew that there was no Maoist party applying Mao's teachings on Wang Ming, because it's not good enough to say, "well there is a proletariat and there is a labor aristocracy." We did not need any vanguard party to know that, so in effect, the Wang Ming line in a petty-bourgeois population has a liquidationist effect: taking the Wang Ming line in the imperialist countries results in raising incorrect questions on the need for a vanguard party at all. What we need is a vanguard party to apply Marxism- Leninism-Maoism in each concrete circumstance in detail.
By coincidence that Mao was aware of, most of the world can examine conditions within a society and draw relative conclusions that stand up accurately as approximations of the global picture in broad outlines--at least the line between progressive forces and enemy forces. Thus China or southern Africa can be microcosms of the world. Whatever errors there are from not studying rational knowledge of the international proletariat in China, the Philippines etc., those errors will result in only a minor degree of error. So in those societies, verbal investigation of one's own conditions can create a picture that is more or less true for the world as a whole: two-line struggles are appropriate for that context to fine tune how to move forward in the camp of the 90% being united.
In contrast, if we draw only relative conclusions within majority-exploiter countries, we can surely say who has more assets and who has less within those societies, but our conclusion will be far, far off the international truth. Our degree of error will be much greater than if we did the same thing in a Third World country.
The fact that the imperialist country petty- bourgeoisie has far fewer assets than the imperialists does not mean the petty-bourgeoisie is not exploiters. Since Marx and Lenin had already told us it was important to draw the line between the proletariat and the middle-classes, we in the imperialist countries have no choice but to study some books to derive our principal knowledge of the international proletariat first and then do some comparisons in our own conditions. Without concretely knowing how much surplus-value is coming in from the Third World, analysis of concrete relative conditions in the imperialist countries is book-worship less useful than cow dung. Thus the meaning of "concrete investigation" in the imperialist countries has to receive a different emphasis, including one with a decisive component involving rational knowledge of the international proletariat. We can only do without that book knowledge of the international proletariat to the extent that doing the concrete investigation of u.$. imperialism is doing concrete investigation of u.$. super-exploitation of the whole world. That again is why it is important to note that Ho Chi Minh is the best we could hope to do in investigating conditions so widely as to do a complete investigation of u.$. imperialism. It's also a reason why JDPON is the correct strategy: real knowledge of imperialism has to come from outside it with a contribution from each oppressed nation in interaction with imperialist country comrades in the best-case scenario.
In the majority-exploiter countries, the problem with book-worship also comes in when it comes to opportunist lies to boost the psyches of insignificant sects. Many have conducted enough investigation to know what MIM speaks of, but some believe politics is a matter of bubbling optimism in its own right. The only problem is that this optimism converts exploiters into exploited and thus night into day. When that happens the goal of Marxist revolution is gone.
MIM has conducted the concrete investigation. Now we invite the outside world in to the majority- exploiter countries. In fact, socialist revolution is not coming from the lower 90% of Amerikan society, but increasing global exploitation is coming from the lower 90% of Amerikan society, so we call for a joint dictatorship of the proletariat of the oppressed nations of the world over u.$., English etc. imperialism.
Following the teachings of Mao on Wang Ming, it is understandable that the comrades of each country have not had time to investigate conditions in the majority-exploiter countries. Likewise, MIM does not comment on all the conditions in the Third World and eastern Europe: it's simply beyond us.
At a political and military level, it is readily apparent why MIM's thesis for the JDPON might be true. Regarding Mao's teachings on Wang Ming though, a Third World comrade may conduct all the concrete and relative economic investigations inside his/her country correctly or 90% accurately and still miss something crucial in relationship to the national question--the question of reparations. Moreover, one may detail the class structure of a Third World country and still someone may conclude that the answer is to copy the Western labor aristocracy even more than before as the solution to Third World poverty. We must not think that bourgeois propaganda works only by painting a picture of the lives of the ultra-rich and famous. It is also effective to paint the life of the average Joe.
In an odd way, pro-Western Third World people have a point in not finding all the answers to questions from within a relative examination of one country's class structure. So they look to the West for the answer. It's just that when they looked to the West, they drew the wrong conclusion. The answer is in the West, but it is from appropriation of labor, not advanced culture. Therefore, in the Third World, the first line of defense is Mao's line on Wang Ming and nationalism. The second line of defense against Third World false consciousness is the MIM line on the West. When it comes time for putting imperialism into receivership, the MIM line will be principal and the past victorious struggles against Wang Ming line secondary.
The standard of living of the West is a key question--maybe the top question--in the minds of the international proletariat, even when that question is unconscious. The MIM line is based on concrete investigation and it is a ready tool for refuting Third World false consciousness on the sources of economic development and well-being.
Amendment 1.e. We should avoid any comparison with Mao's party that involves any knowledge of proportions of the party to the population.
When you have an army, you have a justification for having more party members. Ditto when you are running the economy. Still, even then, as we said in our resolution on altruism, we want to do it with as few as possible or as few as we can find with some minimum level of altruism. By setting up the party to receive lower pay we accomplish that.
In the imperialist countries and their internal semi-colonies, we are not running armies or economies and we are not living in caves, which Mao literally did for a long time with the rest of the leadership. Getting a radio was a big deal: there was no amazon.com, other Internet or even TV. So the excuses people give have to be relative to their circumstances. What we are seeing today is people comparing themselves with Mao's comrades in China and thinking it's OK not to be literate. I'm going to take one of the most cutting documents of Mao's on the subject and break it down.
"Throughout history, very few of those who came first in the imperial examination have achieved great fame. The celebrated T'ang dynasty poets Li Po and Tu Fu were neither chin-shih nor han- lin.[21] Han Y and Liu Tsungyilan [22] were only chin-shih of the second rank. Wang Shih-fu, Kuan Han-ch'ing, [23] Lo Kuan-chung, [24] P'u Sung- ling, Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in were none of them chin- shih or han-lin. P'u Sung-ling was a hsiu-ts'ai who had received promotion, he wanted to rise to the next higher rank, but he was not a ch-jen. [25]None of those who became chin-shih or han-lin wore successful. Only two of the emperors of the Ming dynasty did well, T'ai-tsu and Ch'eng-tsu. One was illiterate, and the other only knew a few characters. Afterwards, in contrast, in the Chia- ch'ing reign, when the intellectuals had power, things were in a bad state, the country was in disorder.[26] Han Wu Ti and Li Hou-chu [27] were highly cultivated, and ruined the country. It is evident that to read too many books is harmful. Liu Hsui was an academician, whereas Liu Pang was a country bumpkin. . . .
"We shouldn't read too many books. We should read Marxist books, but not too many of them either. It will be enough to read a dozen or so. If we read too many, we can move towards our opposites, become bookworms, dogmatists, revisionists. In the writings of Confucius, there is nothing about agriculture. Because of this, the limbs of his students were not accustomed to toil, and they could not distinguish between the five grains. We must do something about this. " http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/classics/mao/sw9/mswv9_14.html
In the above, he's talking about the Confucian examination system, and it's just not relevant to our context. The emphasis on rankings in a one- shot national exam and cramming for that is an East Asian thing: "At present, there is too much studying going on, and this is exceedingly harmful. There are too many subjects at present, and the burden is too heavy, it puts middleschool and university students in a constant state of tension. Cases of short sight are constantly multiplying among primacy and middle-school students. This can't be allowed to go on unchanged." He's talking about epidemics of very young students needing glasses because they strain their eyes too much. That's not happening here.
It's also not the same thing as reading books to know the international proletariat. The Confucian system had no such goal.
Backing Mao up, someone said: "At present, middle- school students take continuing their studies as their sole aim. After graduating, they are not willing to engage in labour; this is a very big question, and we must solve it. We must put into practice the union of education and productive labour; in addition, we must also walk on two legs." Also, again, the emphasis ends up being on production, which if we look at closely, we see has little productive character in our society anymore so what Mao is saying about a few people in his day applies to the majority now in our conditions. Opposing book reading for reasons of production is not exactly the same thing as saying it's undesirable generally.
Another context is for younger students in the same above document dissing books, because, "The syllabus should be chopped in half. The students should have time for recreation, swimming, playing ball, and reading freely outside their course work. Confucius only professed the six arts -- rites, music, archery, chariot- driving, poetry and history -- but he produced four sages: Yen Hui, Tseng-tzu, Tzu Lu and Mencins. It won't do for students just to read books all day, and not to go in for cultural pursuits, physical education, and swimming, not to be able to run around, or to read things outside their courses, etc."
MIM has no problem saying physical education should be the main thing for youth, not even just half. Physical growth is still more important than detailed study right up into high school. As we get toward high school, maybe half of one's energy should go to study. With our current state of knowledge, once a child has growth stunted because buses went to school too early to read too many books, there is nothing that can be done. Book-learning by contrast is something like a light that can be switched on at any time.
Another context for an anti-books comment was attacking the division of labor in production: "We must drive actors, poets, dramatists and writers out of the cities, and pack them all off to the countryside. They should all periodically go down in batches to the villages and to the factories. We must not let writers stay in the government offices; they will never get anything written if they do not go down. Whoever does not go down will get no dinner; only when they go down will they be fed."
With this amendment, we are making it officially ultra-left Liberalism to believe that the party eradicates classes through an attack on the division of labor before the seizure of power to run production. Especially in a voluntary and altruist party, resentments about tasks are based on intra-middle-class Liberal distinctions. If people don't want to do a certain task, then they can always come up with other activities to do or even affiliate with MIM without taking up total centralism like our HCs do. People who raise division of labor questions in a volunteer party out-of-state-power are looking for excuses for degeneration. From time to time, we hear about the likes of Committees of Correspondence tell what we suspect are tall tales about other parties where activists were prevented from doing theoretical work by party leaders. This is a twisted attitude toward organization in the majority-exploiter countries. No one can really stop anyone else from writing theory except in prison--and the people in such conditions are still the minority.
From MIM's experience, getting anyone of any sort of volunteer of any class background to write scientific communist theory articles is very difficult in the united $tates. Coming up with excuses is common and the main suspect in countries where there is a large middle class of people with the resources if they wanted to--to write theory.
The party out of power is different than the party in power. The study regimen connected to public opinion and theory work have to be relatively higher, when we are not in charge of physical education, the economy or an army. In other words, part of our concrete responsibilities at this stage of public opinion or even party-building is tied up with study. Armies have to know how to do things and we who do public opinion work have to know both substance and form. Concrete investigation plays a role in financial, medical and other independent infrastructural work, but ultimately, even those tie in to public opinion, because what ties them into the party instead of making them something with no Maoist character is going to be our ability to generate persuasive MN and MT. MN and MT are about our large-scale investigations where possible, but they always have to be half tied into what other people are saying and have investigated--books.
Mao said, "But we should not look down on the under educated? During the National People's Congress, X X X, a comrade of mine who is now a lieutenant governor of Hupeh Province, asked to speak with me. He said that he has now come to understand that intellectuals have the least knowledge. Throughout history, many emperors were intellectuals but were unsuccessful: Sui Yang-ti could write essays and poetry; Ch'en Hou-chu and Li Hou-chu could write poetry and were good at narrative verse; Sung Hat Tsung could write poetry and paint. Some of the under educated can do great things: Genghis Khan was an illiterate. Liu Pang too could not read a dozen characters, and was under educated. Chu Yuan-chang was also illiterate, a cattle herder. In our military ranks there are many under educated, but only a few intellectuals. Hsu Shih- yu[9] studied for a few days! X X X has never had any formal education, nor have Han Hsien-chu or Ch'en Hsi-lien. X X went to senior primary school, as did Liu Ya-lou[10]. Of course, we cannot do without several intellectuals. We consider Lin Piao, Hsu Hsiang- ch'ien, X X X, X X X, . . . to be middle grade intellectuals. My conclusion is that the under educated can defeat the students of Whampoa. . . .
"We also do not want to read too many books. Reading several dozens will do. The more you read, the more unclear things become."
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/classics/mao/sw9/mswv9_16.html
There are two parts to this. We should not look down on the undereducated no matter what. Nor should we make ad hominem/attribution error mistakes and assume that an intellectual is opposing exploitation better than someone from another background. We can make generalizations like that at the group level, but it never validates any one persyn anymore than Margaret Thatcher or Colin Powell are a step forward as individuals.
The second part to this is that the intellectuals in old China were simultaneously government officials and land-holders. The ordinary peasant with no education was super-exploited by the imperialists. So what Mao says applies in China and would apply here too if college graduates were only 1% and held all the government jobs. We need to understand that well after Mao died the percentage who went to college was around 1% in China. So it was always a very elite thing with heavy class overtones. Respect for the class structure and intellectuals was one and the same thing.
In the West, the intellectual is a middle-class persyn, maybe slightly better off on average, (though graduate student unions run by the Wobblies point out that they are on the bottom of society income-wise), but we cannot contrast an uneducated petty-bourgeois with an educated one and say that there is some widsom of the uneducated petty-bourgeois in building socialism in the West. That would be moronic copying. Teachers receive the highest respect under Confucianism. Here there are referenda to allow lawsuits against teachers.
A more balanced Mao quote about the party running the state is here: "It will not do to not read books, nor will it do to read too many books. Ability does not depend on books alone; it must depend on practice. Our state will chiefly rely on those cadres who have read books through practice to take hold of its future."
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/classics/mao/sw9/mswv9_20.html
Again, that is not our problem here. Reagan and Bush came to power with a dubious reading background. Whether the bourgeoisie is educated or uneducated hardly matters here. If anything Clinton is more dangerous for his competence, but it's not a stark contrast of the sort we see in China where public officials had to be the most highly educated.
The above quote is more like what MIM is saying about the party: that we need practical knowledge, experience in struggle and running states. At the same time, we don't have many Amerikans who sit around like Confucians studying for an imperial exam. What Mao is talking about does not happen in Amerika. At most we might have some very rare shy people, who read Marxist books but don't go out, but we don't have the kind of people who sit around reading books as the elite culture's stated goal. So actually it is important not to use Mao as an excuse for not studying in the Anglo-Saxon countries in particular where everything is geared to the next buck and the next one-night stand. We have the far opposite problem.
In the majority-exploiter countries, anti-intellectualism stems from a completely different class place. (( Surveys show that anti-intellectualism was bound up with McCarthyism in the u$a. ( For example, http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2004/04so/04sobr.htm )) A lot is just petty friction and resentments typical of Liberalism and class society generally. A gas station owner easily makes more money than a professor and so there is not the kind of reverence of professors that there is in East Asia under Confucianism's influence. The friction that occurs is about what MIM has called "invidious distinctions" for 20 years, distinctions among individuals so important to Liberals.
Amendment (passed unanimously)
Understanding Mao's priorities in 1964 when he made his most famous statements on "too many books" is different than understanding MIM's. MIM has no army, no economy to run and no resources for running scientific experiments. Part of recognizing the resources we have at our disposal is the fact that book reviews receive heavy web traffic at the MIM website, and in a sense, all MIM's written material does. Part of the reason for that is the research that goes into it.
At this stage, even our PIRAO work spins off into apolitical careerism if public opinion and theory work are not the key link. So when we say "independent" institutions of the oppressed, we are not saying we can set them up in a liberated zone defended by irregular or positional warfare. Mao had that once the Japanese landed: we don't.
Nor are we in some remote region where the issue of warfare will not come up. We are talking instead about people getting their lives together to be able to contribute further to public opinion and theory work, or alternatively, if not to work on MIM's central task then to help some other Maoist party's central task.
The one sense in which we completely agree with Mao is that it is better to write a book than to read them if one is doing a good job like Mao did! Mao did a statistical examination of a village in which he catalogued every umbrella, bit of salt and various other consumer goods in the household to know the conditions of his people. Part of that was to know what economic connections Mao needed to make in potential base areas--what cities to trade with, what merchants to find, who to tax how much. People may be surprised that even reported on his local-level comrades rather objectively to see if he could understand the factors underlying diversity in political views. We can read Roger R. Thompson's translation of "Report from Xunwu" as an example.
So Mao did his own concrete investigation and did not rely on non-existent books on the subject. This is the sense of opposing book-worship most useful to MIM: going out into the public and examining conditions systematically to write detailed and thorough reports. This is something we can never do enough of. Part of what we need to understand is that opposing book-worship means writing one's own books based on investigations. Especially in connection to the Cultural Revolution, the enemy stresses how Red Guards burned books. This is a simplistic and wrong image. Mao wrote books and found it necessary to "solve problems" for the party.
In MIM experience, we have advantages and disadvantages relative to Mao. Mao operated where the central government was weak and the economy relatively underdeveloped. It was either he write the investigation or there was not going to be anything for him to use.
In the united $tates, we have advantages and disadvantages. The main disadvantage is that as in Mao's day, the reactionary government does not run any institutes to calculate exploitation. What is worse, this is obviously much more important in the united $tates than in China, because the u.$. economy is much more tied into the global economy than Xunwu was. Whether it's the food on the table produced by migrant workers from Mexico or the shirts on our backs from China, the disadvantage we have is painting a unified picture based on investigation of the exploitation that happened in China or other countries.
The advantage we have relative to Mao is that our government is so large and the economy so developed that we do have much by the way of systematic data available that Mao did not have in his conditions. Marx used relatively backward data from manufacturers by comparison. Lenin warned us against not using government collected data. From time to time, MIM has to correct something, but that would be the same of our own work as well: what data there is on economic conditions does check out in the field. The bourgeoisie is not going to say how much surplus-value came in from Hong Kong, but counting TV sets in welfare-recipient households is something the government does do and Mao would have wanted to do as well if we read his own investigations of conditions. In a mere five typed pages, Mao reported on jewelry, tin, watches, clocks, rice, pork, firewood, bamboo, vegetables, fish, fruit and candy. We can find similar information from bourgeois sources today in the united $tates.
Two of the most critical places to investigate in Mao fashion are the welfare projects and the Appalachians. MIM has done this. We've distributed many thousand papers in projects and we have talked with people in the projects while examining conditions inside thousands of apartments. MIM is perhaps better known for shredding anti-communist propaganda off by a factor of ten or totally invented and it's natural that controversy attracts more attention than statistical tables: however, what is less well known but equally important are those times when we can confirm something that the bourgeoisie has reported. As with many other questions, the bourgeois data published on welfare recipients is not wrong. Our investigations can confirm that. Likewise in the Appalachians. It's easy to come up with a fantasy, but if we actually visit, we may come to understand why there is such a resistance to communist activity there despite all the focus. So opposing book worship also means not reading somewhere that all bourgeois economic reporting is propaganda and then throwing out all concrete factual information. Investigation sometimes means checking on something where you were not the first in the field to examine the conditions.
Amendment (passed unanimously) The specific MIM challenge
It's important to understand that MIM does not talk about the international proletariat just to "psyche you up" for some political goal. There is no spin like that in what MIM does.
So if one has not read many books about the international proletariat, then one may disagree with MIM from a lack of reading. One needs to read enough to know how MIM knows that Amerikans are exploiters in the majority. Alternatively, if one reads and does not see, another possibility is that MIM is wrong, and the average wage is not a fraction of the U.$. wage and wealth is not accumulating to the united $tates from that to the extent MIM says and it is not covered up somewhat by the imperialist financial institutions and propaganda about "hard work" and white-collar "productivity."
If one has read enough about the international proletariat, one should be able to challenge MIM with concrete details then. If one cannot, then that is probably a good sign that one has not connected to the international proletariat enough-- and we do not mean emotionally but in terms of its actual existence and conditions.
Another possibility we have seen in Black Book of Communism editors and other anti-communists is that many people simply cannot handle numbers in the millions and more. If this is your weakness, again you need to work on this before what MIM is saying is going to make sense. The united $tates has over 290 million people. If we cannot handle that and we think Amerikans are most of the world's workers and we deny the possibility of surplus-value coming from an even larger number people internationally, it's going to be hard to understand MIM line.
The challenge is that either one has not read enough of the international proletariat to connect Amerikan conditions to that and support the MIM line or one has not the quantitative literacy to understand it. The only other alternative for the proletarian-minded is that one has done the necessary study but has yet to lay out a rebuttal in concrete detail.