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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.
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I think it's clear that the RCP, by officially dismissing MIM's line as unimportant (in effect) and being oblivious to the proverbial elephant in the room, has repudiated line struggle and also the mass line. Whereas MIM has openly criticized the RCP's line, the RCP has confused its own supporters on MIM's line by denying MIM's existence. Some RCP supporters are saying that's just because MIM is just closet Republicans and isn't worth talking about. Yet, they insist on talking about MIM themselves. But should MIM and its supporters start doing the same? I mean, should MIM give up proactively struggling with the u.$. petty bourgeoisie over line -- give up line struggle in this sense? In the context of MIM's recent announcement on not engaging RCP supporters in debate, I am confused as to why MIM became involved with WITBD/AWIP in the first place if they knew their opponents were going to be so unprincipled. I accept your point about the qualitative difference between two-line struggle and what's going on between MIM supporters and RCP supporters, which is more like an endless debate between Marxists and non-Marxists, with all their shamelessly subjectivist reasons for why u.$. Euro-Amerikan workers, who are non-exploited in LTV terms and better-off in material terms than Lenin's "parasites" in 1915, are still fundamentally interested in the revolution. However, not all needed line struggle is two-line struggle. Opportunists are putting out the line that the typical u.$. white worker is exploited and has a fundamental interest in overthrowing capitalism. This petty-bourgeois propaganda has to be actively combatted in order to serve the interests of actually exploited workers (in terms of reparations and wage adjustments after the seizure of power). I really don't think putting out a paper and saying "take it or leave it" is enough if that's what you were getting at about the debate being over. It's possible that such an attitude will end up leaving sections of the working class outside oppressor nations in their exploited and oppressed conditions. While I think struggling with individuals over opportunist line is needed, I am inclined to agree with you when you suggest MIM supporters should not bother debating people so close to the RCP's particular line. Instead, it might be more productive to engage in line struggle with the larger petty-bourgeoisie who are not addicted to the subjectivism of the RCP. About my small criticism of MIM's Internet activity, it's not pointed at any particular persyn claiming to be a MIM supporter, anywhere. My criticism of MIM is that MIM has sometimes called out RCP supporters as representatives of the RCP's line in ways that are sloppy, and prone to mistakes and pissing off people needlessly. I just think MIM needs to more clearly distinguish between people who are naive RCP supporters and people who are actually qualified to represent the RCP's line (as people who are actually affiliated with the RCP). Some RCP supporters on the Internet seem to be angry that MIM is calling them "the RCP" when it isn't really clear they're affiliated with the RCP. I'm just speaking from my own persynal experience, and this does not justify RCP supporters' unprincipled methods of attacking MIM. For one, this is something RCP circles have really brought on themselves by associating with a party that goes out of its way to ignore MIM officially. ************************************************* Web Minister replies: First a note on definitions. "Error"-makers and even "deviationists" should be allowed to stay in a party. "Opportunism" could be a shade of opinion within a vanguard party or maybe even another party in a general revolutionary trend. One of the confusions in the RCP=U$A is that they call the MIM line "counterrevolutionary," but they allow it in their party! If they want to allow our third cardinal in their party, they should call it a shade of opportunism or a deviation that should be cracked down on and repented from--not counterrevolutionary or they are admitting they have counterrevolutionaries in their party. It's just an example of how words have totally lost their meaning over there. In Lenin's day he was careful to say during World War I that things he used to regard as mere opportunism he no longer did. Some of the same lines and people he used to regard as opportunist he started considering enemy. We are going through a similar splitting process today. RCP=U$A line is outright counterrevolution, as Lenin said in so many quotes applicable for their approach justifying higher wages for Western workers. You rightly point out that things are more parasitic than in 1915, so much so that we are again in a process of splitting from something that cannot be called opportunism even if maybe it would have been in 1913 or even 1915. Moving on from definitions, let me answer about WITBD in the first place. WITBD involved a shock to MIM in that apparently sensible people went so far into strange sectarian/cop territory as to make excuses for fascists and open cops. This was simply an error of estimation by MIM, the kind that we have no choice but to make if we are going to start struggles. We abandoned WITBD as soon as apparently sensible people proved otherwise. For MIM, WITBD was way over the line and it involved MIM's misleading a number of people into thinking there was going to be political struggle and not these kooky goings-on that ended up happening in WITBD. In contrast with the WITBD discussion board, AWIP is not something MIM initiated at all. It was clearly intended as an attack on the MIM line with heavy featuring of articles from philistine RosaRL and liar-extraordinaire Kasama attacking MIM. In reviewing the website I noted that some people were offended early on in AWIP about being labelled RCPers or supporters or whatever. It was brought to our attention that there was a paper of the RCP circles going around about profits and investment. That drew our attention as part of a standing challenge MIM has out there to the RCP=U$A to calculate the super-exploitation. Now, let me skip to the last part of what you said and why it's complicated for us at MIM. When you take into account that RCP=U$A assigns people for secret tasks including impersonations of other lines including Reagan's and carries out recruiting in secret guises, you can see why there's going to be a problem in sorting out RCP supporters & fans from RCP=U$A itself. As you point out, those who want to criticize the MIM line and be separated from the RCP=U$A should start by attacking RCP=U$A practice, because MIM does not allow the secret RCP=U$A and PLP recruiting tactics or public opinion staging. If pro-RCP=U$A liners want to say they are not RCPers, fine, and they can do so by sending letters here, but also do not expect us to take them 100% seriously given RCP=U$A tactics. As you point out, it's a bad combination, not taking responsibility for public polemics but also recruiting with off-beat tactics. It's not that the RCP=U$A is not attacking the MIM line. It is, just as unaccountably as it can. Our web page on the crypto-Trotskyist phenomenon clearly sorts all this out and documents printed there say at the top: "Although some views spoken there are official 'RCP-USA' views, there are also numerous statements on that website that support the 'RCP- USA' and which the 'RCP-USA' does not rebut. Both official and unrebutted pro-'RCP' comments are quoted and dealt with below." The whole section is titled, "MIM replies to www.2changetheworld.info and other pro-'RCP-USA' critics." Our AWIP materials are going there in that section where they belong. I'm not sure what more they all would expect. To my knowledge, there are very few instances on AWIP where lines backing the RCP=U$A were not RCP=U$A lines, lines unleashed in their own support and fully consistent with their line. I can note that there was one struggle there with repeater who came off as if the "international center" polemics of RIM were more important than RCP=U$A's central task. So yeah, in that case, I can see repeater is not RCP=U$A or an accurate representation of RCP=U$A line. Even so, repeater's "international center" and RIM press-release line is rehashed Trotskyism/Wang Ming that Avakian does promote, just not with as much priority as repeater. If there are other cases where I or somebody has inaccurately dubbed something as reflecting RCP=U$A line, then people can write mim3@mim.org and we'll straighten it out on the crypto-Trotskyist page. Currently, the RCP=U$A handles this by the Trotskyist "people-centered approach" of pointing to which people are supposedly not RCP=U$A members or spokespeople instead of pointing to which LINES are not theirs. That raises an interesting sideline question. If the RCP=U$A thinks it should be holding its party congress in the open with everyone debating it and that there is no point in thinking the RCP=U$A would be rebutting its utopian party congress members in the open, then it should have said so, and we could have taken that into account. As we understand it, their line in the 1980s program still stands and they should be rebutting backward lines in public--if they deem them backward. If they have now named the whole public part of its party congress and seek to "respect" all the congress participants--then I could see that they've made a crazy anarcho-Menshevik error on behalf of a counterrevolutionary line, but we could adjust to that and explain it, if that's what was the RCP=U$A's utopian intention. Probably what you are referring to with people upset is something that the petty-bourgeoisie everywhere does not like-- "pigeon-holing." They call it pigeon-holing to be lined up with anybody. That's the nature of the petty-bourgeoisie, which is the class with the illusion of independence that must be pierced. They jump in in the midst of a struggle between Sakai and RCP=U$A supporters and then act surprised when they get attacked for supporting the RCP=U$A line. Now if we are talking about whether there is a white oppressor nation or exploited white working class, then we at MIM are happy to be "pigeon-holed" with Sakai. That is the only way scientific discussion can proceed. People who oppose pigeon-holing are usually hell-bent on holding inconsistent political lines and not being accountable for their political lines, and we do not respect that. The petty-bourgeoisie may believe in each persyn's unique individualism, but we believe there are classes and lines that go together. One last point--again, if I were confronted with as much ideological junk in the name of my party as there is in support of the RCP=U$A in AWIP, I would take swift action to disassociate the MIM from it. I would rebut it. This gets to what kind of "dictatorship of the proletariat" the RCP=U$A envisions. Clearly, what it entails is unleashing philistines to run society while RCP=U$A turns a blind eye to gay-bashing, racism and chauvinism. That's why we CAN sum up something about RCP=U$A from what happens at AWIP and www.2changetheworld.info. ***************************************************** Observor continues: To clarify, by "value of labor power," I mean the hourly wage that would allow a persyn to reproduce their labor power on a daily basis. It would be more precise to talk about a daily wage here since people don't go to work for one hour just to reproduce their labor power for another hour. Third World workers effectively work one hour to reproduce their labor power for 2 1/3 hours, given a 72-hour work week. Okay, so schematically, this is how I see it. *In general*, there is 1) an interval between zero and the local, prevailing value of labor power, 2) an interval between the value of labor power and the critical non-exploitation (or barely exploited) income level, where the rate of exploitation is zero, and 3) an interval between the non-exploitation income level and infinity. I want to make it clear that I am not saying that income by itself determines whether a persyn is exploited or an exploiter. For example, if an individual productive worker regularly gets slightly more than average non-exploitation income for productive workers, it is possible that they are still exploited if they labor at an above-average intensity. This is why I hold out the possibility that some oppressed nationalities who receive the legal minimum wage are still exploited if they are doing extremely intense work that represents a greater amount of toil under capitalism, which means the production of more social, exchange value. Permanent unproductive workers are non-exploited by definition (I don't consider paper boys to be exploited in the LTV sense although they may face capitalist exploitation growing up and be in working-class households in an exploited region), so they don't enter into the picture. Like I said, even some capitalists starve, so MIM's opponents should stop inventing subjectivist and relativistic reasons for why imperialist-country unproductive workers are still exploited simply because other people get more money than them. That is not the way Marxists do economics. Starving or having to pay late fees for bills does not equal exploited. Back to my diagram, productive workers within interval/range #1 are superexploited. Productive workers within interval #2 are exploited in the LTV sense, but they receive more than the value of labor power, and this could be a material basis for them to be opposed to the revolution. Productive workers in interval #3 are non-exploited and at least petty-bourgeois. The vast majority of people who get above the legal minimum wages in imperialist countries are in group #3. From Lenin's viewpoint, much of the Russian labor aristocracy at the time of the First World War and the revolution were not only in #3 but also in #2, which means that Lenin could have been calling some highly paid but still-exploited productive workers parasites. I think this characterization is accurate for several qualitative reasons, but it is difficult to calculate (prior to people's political behavior) what the labor-aristocracy income level is, or the consumption level that is the material basis of the objectively existing labor aristocracy.
> I guess in theory you are saying there is a space One of my lowest estimates of the non-exploitation earnings level (the monetary equivalent of the full value of one average labor-hour) is $2.00. I got this by increasing my estimate of the number of Third World workers who contribute to Third World exports to imperialist countries. So, in fact, even people who get $2.50/hr are non-exploited in the LTV sense. This is not surprising to me because there are millions of Third World workers who get only a couple quarters an hour. What you said there highlights one of the problems with thinking of parasitism definitions in terms of the value of labor power. In Capital, Marx places the value of labor power between zero and the non-exploitation wage, corresponding to a rate of exploitation of zero. Realistically, however, the value of labor power could exceed the non-exploitation wage. Some critics of MIM would say that can't happen in the long run because workers would be dead in a week with some of their product even going to exploiters, but in reality, there is a significant variation in lifespans, and MIM must hold out the possibility that *even if* the value of labor power turned out to be greater than the non-exploitation wage (meaning that a productive worker could receive back the full value of their product and still die sooner than the average lifespan), people getting more than the non-exploitation wage could still be exploiters. One of the goals of the dictatorship of the proletariat should be to reorganize production so that everyone can have a consumption level equivalent to the value of labor power. However, that does not mean that people who get less than the value of labor power right now are not parasites. Some capitalists starve, but they are still parasites. Parasites can include people who get less than the value of labor power as their regular income. Ultimately, the Marxist rate of exploitation does not depend on the prevailing value of labor power. The rate of exploitation is just the ratio of paid labor to unpaid labor--the value of labor power could be anything. A persyn could be paid back the full value of their product and still starve. To address what you were getting at about falling into the crack before petty-bourgeois status at 2.50/hour, I think it's possible that productive workers who make more than the value of labor power are not petty-bourgeois. If they make less than the non-exploitation wage (and labor at the average or above-average intensity), they are still exploited, so it is difficult to call them outright petty-bourgeois. However, I must admit that getting more than the value of labor power would mean having access to investable money, and this could be basis for even some exploited workers in group #2 (exploited but not superexploited) to be petty-bourgeois and receive capitalist income. I would say that getting an income starting at around the middle of my interval #2, or substantially above #1, represents a bourgeoisification. And certainly, getting an income within #3 means being bourgeois almost as matter of fact because then you are a net exploiter.
> What you are really saying is that there is some point of I think I understand what you are saying here: people in the world are principally either superexploited or non-exploited, with relatively few people between the superexploited and non-exploited (net-exploiter) statuses. There is no law that would force superexploitive employers to pay employees wages that are above the value of labor power (hourly wage needed to reproduce labor power on a daily basis) but below imperialist-country legal minimum wages, which are above the value of labor (full value of the product of an hour of productive work). I agree with you that the above is true at the world scale. But I can come up with real examples of people being paid between $2/hr and $3/hr who could still be exploited in the LTV sense even if $2/hr represents the subsistence wage (talking about the value of labor power here, not the value of fully paid labor). Average wage in the Mariana Islands colony of the u.$. is a little bit more than $3/hr, and some of these people are doing productive agricultural work. I admit this situation is not common (and I can't think of any examples of the u.$. off the top of my head), but in principle, it is possible for exploited productive-worker wages to persistently exceed the value of labor power. Whether they are petty-bourgeois is another issue. If the subsistence wage is $2/hr, there are Malaysian productive workers who get a little bit more than $2/hr (to do the exact same *skilled* work Euro-Amerikans do). In fact, it is very possible that there are still-exploited productive workers who get more than the value of labor power. Marx defined the value of labor power in a way that could mean that it is very low right now. The value of labor power is the consumption level needed to reproduce labor power for the time that it operates in the production process, as well as an amount needed to biologically reproduce the total amount of labor power demanded by the bourgeoisie. If the bourgeoisie needs only 1 million workers, it could paid these workers at wage such that some of their children will die, leaving no net change in the size of the labor force. Or lifespans could be less. It doesn't matter--as long as the exploiters get their 1 million workers somehow. To be starving is obviously something of a material basis to be interested in the revolution, even if a persyn is an unproductive worker. However, MIM must hold out the possibility that the value of labor power is extremely low, meaning that there are more workers "in between" in wages. On the other hand, like I said in my last e-mail, I think MIM should also hold out the possibility that the value of labor power is not a factor whatsoever in determining whether a group is parasitic. So, even if the value of labor power is *higher* (so, not extremely low) than the zero-exploitation wage, people who get more than the zero-exploitation wage are still net parasites. Being a net parasite depends only on whether a persyn receives capitalist income that would be taken away under socialism. To clarify my diagram more, each "productive worker" is laboring at the average intensity. Under that circumstance, the diagram is completely accurate. A worker who does one hour of useful labor to produce a commodity, but receives an income corresponding to less than the full value of the hour of labor, is exploited. A worker who does the same hour but receives more than 1 labor-hour of value (in the monetary equivalent) is non-exploited. They are net parasites, and net exploiters, which is to say they are not exploited at all because their individual rate of exploitation is negative according to the formula: (rate of exploitation) = [(unpaid labor that the persyn does) - (payment beyond the value of any productive work that the persyn does)] / (paid labor that the persyn does). A worker who does an hour of productive work but receives less than the corresponding value as a wage, AND the wage is less than the value of labor power, is superexploited. In theory, it [is] possible that a persyn who receives slightly more than the non- or zero-exploitation wage (not the value of labor power!) is still exploited if they labor at, say, twice the average intensity of labor. Effectively, they're doing twice as many labor-hours. This is probably true for a few oppressed nationalities who receive the legal minimum wage in the u.$. I'm not talking about skilled work being more "valuable" on the market, but things like Third World workers being forced to labor at high intensities with sub-optimal production techniques that are nonetheless socially necessary. They actually produce more value per hour than productive workers of oppressor nations. This is important in calculating a more precise estimate of the zero-exploitation wage, but it could be dropped, and MIM's conclusion about u.$. white worker parasitism would still be correct.
Btw, I feel a lot of what I am saying is preaching to the choir since MIM already knows what I'm talking about. I'm just concerned with MIM's recent emphasis of high # of unproductive workers and labor-power issues as if MIM's line on imperialist-country worker parasitism depended on them. In fact, the truth of MIM's line does not depend on these things, and this is important to know. Looking back at the formula for the rate of exploitation of a persyn (the parameters are obtained by averaging over a period of time during which the individual is actually employed): (individual exploitation rate) = [(unpaid productive work that the persyn does) - (payment beyond the value of any productive work that the persyn does -- capitalist income)] / (paid productive work that the persyn does) or E = (UL - CI) / PL In Capital, Marx assumes that PL is equal to the value of labor power, but this assumption can be dropped and we could still have this comparable formula for the rate of exploitation. It is clear that even productive workers, like those putting the finishing touches on products made in the Third World, can be non-exploited. Not only are they net exploiters, they are exploiters, plain and simple, because they are experiencing a negative rate of exploitation. Notice that if CI is positive, UL is obviously 0, so the numerator is negative regardless of the size of PL, which is payment for productive work that the individual actually does. For pure unproductive workers, UL = 0, PL = 0, and CI is a positive number, so E is a negative number divided zero. The same formula can be applied to outright capitalist owners, for whom UL = 0, PL = 0, and CI is positive, too. The world unproductive sector has a negative exploitation rate. The world productive sector has a positive exploitation rate. But the imperialist-country productive sector has a negative exploitation rate (non-exploited), while the Third World productive sector has a positive exploitation rate. Again, value of labor power doesn't enter into the picture here. The prevailing value of labor power has nothing to do with parasitism, and there is no need to treat superexploitation as if it were a precondition of imperialist-country worker net parasitism. MIM would be limiting itself by doing this. In response to MC5's comment at , MC5 notes that Avakian thinks that a worker can be both parasitic and proletarian. I agree with MC5 that net parasites are not proletarian. However, some exploited workers are parasites in the sense that they have relative privileges from living in imperialist countries, and these income levels would be taken away under socialism as more of the social surplus value is dedicated to the revolution. So, I would say that not only are net parasites not proletarian, even some highly privileged exploited workers are parasites in some sense, and their status as proletarians is questionable. A worker who is exploited at a positive but several-times lower rate than another worker is not what Marx had in mind when he talked about the industrial proletariat as the revolutionary class. *************************************
mim3@mim.org replies: You raise a good point about wage rates. Mao was concerned about them in China and he said the 8 grade wage system was in fact a basis for the restoration of capitalism even in China which was not sucking the world dry. So how dare these imperialist country pseudo-communists invoke Mao's name to say we don't have to calculate whether workers are exploited or not? If wage rates can be a problem in China, they are going to be an even bigger problem to solve in the u$A--and the line of MIM & its allies points in that direction. With regard to the various attacks on the exploited-imperialist-country-worker-theses, MIM does have a number of angles, because Marx gave us a number of things to check on. The question of unproductive labor is also a question of the future like the abolition of money. Both the abolition of money and unproductive labor will be difficult and not occur overnight. Nonetheless, these are goals that Marx laid out. If someone wants to say Marx is dated or wrong for other reasons on these points, we'd like to see the reasons. We do not believe the revisionists ever accounted for their departures from Marx. They more or less said that Marxism was "too difficult" and tossed it without saying so.
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