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January 2008
There is a spreading of web pages globally linking to and sometimes promoting MIM and the "Revolutionary Internationalist Movement" internationally. This article is only for those who have already studied such questions, and read various revisionist articles carefully.
The new web pages use the typical "mix and match" strategy where they want some ex-RIM parties and MIM, instead of all the RIM parties of old. We would warn readers about the advantages of spying for the CIA by using tactics of pretending to agree with MIM while dragging people back to CIA fronts. At the same time, because there are regional and language difficulties across the world, there is no doubt that some interest in the MIM line is genuine and we have seen increased attention to the question of parasitism in imperialist conditions globally. That is a good thing, that our comrades understand that it is possible to fight as a minority behind enemy lines. That way MIM sets a good example for the whole world's communist movement not to fear the truth. We do not need to tell lies about exploiter people just to boost our feelings. We can deal with reality as it is more effectively by training people what it really is.
The stilted language of the RCP=CIA is a give-away clue for those looking at this question of where there seems to be mushing going on. It's something that people with experience can detect.
We have some people who claim to be on the MIM side of the chasm separating exploiter and exploited and yet all they talk about is the RCP=CIA. Perhaps it is an intentional effort to have a sign of theoretical life in the RCP=CIA's circles. MIM finds it likely to reflect sectarian/state activity, as we will explain further.
It's a crying shame when we hear communists promoting stupid questions in the imperialist countries such as "who should we follow?" as if we were in Lenin's Russia about to overthrow the tsar in a country about to have a bourgeois democratic revolution. We are at a very low level where the vanguard defines itself by having the drive to answer questions and by insisting on judgment on the questions affecting billions.
The question of the individual to follow is a Liberal question, with no progressive content in an imperialist country like the united $tates. We are not overcoming peasant fatalism or bringing down a tsar with bourgeois Liberalism. It's not a concrete question who is going to be holding the reins in an imminent uprising and pretending so is monstrously detrimental to our movement.
If we had conditions as Rosa Luxemburg believed we have, where we struggle for liberty and a majority of an imperialist country has to make the revolution, then all organizing could be done in the open. So for example, in World War I, there would be ungovernable zones of the war front. If Russians and Germans are fraternizing somewhere, things may have broken down to allow open struggle, or its equivalent in parallel situations today. In that condition it actually becomes possible to concentrate on a leader and use the mass line in contrast with Luxemburg! If one were with a majority of exploited people who have forced open a liberal democracy into a libertarian attitude toward workers, then Luxemburg is correct that a majority can decide for socialism. The RCP=CIA line on organization would also be possible in that situation. Luxemburg is only wrong that those masses cannot decide that a particular leader would be best for them--in that situation. On the other hand, we do agree that to get to communism, the vanguard party as advanced detachment will have to wither away. That question cannot be on the front-burner right now though, as we have socialist tasks to complete.
Again, if millions are already at the barricades physically they may focus on a leader as the maestro, but that would be because the millions of exploited already opened up a space for struggle. Without that opening of space and ungovernability by the old regime, certain organizational strategies become meaningless and confused. It is the proletariat's opening of space that has to come first, and then open accountability of a public leader is possible. If we attempt to organize publicly for a leader before the proletariat has opened the space we vitiate Lenin's Jacobin-oriented teachings. Likewise today, just MIM's website is being used by people conducting thought crimes against imperialism around the world--without a persynality cult or even an Oprah Winfrey book club unfortunately.
We either understand the stage of history we are at, the extent of the bourgeoisie and its decadent character now and its characteristic ideology or we do not. We either understand that the imperialist countries are not opened spaces of ungovernability or we do not. (We agree with some Kanadians that the far North may be such a place, near the Arctic Circle, but there of course, the question is more how many masses there are, not to mention how bourgeoisified they might be.) Those who can see the difference between the MIM line, and see an unbridgeable chasm separating it from the pseudo-Marxist line on imperialist class structure have already undertaken two-line struggle, mostly as recapitulating history in miniature and partly by looking at the conditions creating the petty- bourgeoisie of today.
The class struggle as it exists now in imperialist countries does not require biographical narrative, contrary to what the post-modernists are telling us that in breaking with the past that each must tell his or her story for equality. Telling our stories as individual narratives does not help us break out of Liberalism today. Apart from the fact that it is bad security practice setting a bad example for the exploited class, it is simply not how science advances in the imperialist countries. Knowledge of the individual does not bring knowledge of the class in the imperialist context we are in.
If the masses ask a revolutionary leader for an autobiography or a resume in a monarchy situation, by all means, the revolutionary should tell the story. It's a good thing when formerly monarchist peasants are asking for the bio, instead of taking religious authority at face- value. That does not make asking for the bio the correct thing to do in the imperialist countries today. This reflects a total confusion about what can be known to the masses and what cannot in our non- Luxemburgist conditions. Luxemburg's conditions included a weak state falling apart in World War.
Our enemies on one security question
For decades now MIM has put forward anonymous work and forced a break from ad hominem reasoning in the united $tates. At this time, in 2008, despite the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan etc., a majority of Republican Party voters actually say that "likability" of their candidate is more important than the stance on issues. That's how Republicans picked Bush in 2000 as the "guy to have a beer with" and it's how McCain is favored over Romney right now; even though Romney leads on the issues in the polls. So to overcome this sort of lazy persynality focus it proves necessary even in the midst of hot wars to disseminate information in an anonymous way. Amerikans are too lazy otherwise and if one appears in a persynal way, Amerikans will likely focus on one's hair, hat or other clothing before the substance of issues. So when we ask the masses about an individual leader we are playing into that.
MIM's enemies realized after 9/11 that our strategy of anonymous anti- Amerikkkanism was working and they countered with a strategy attempting to drive us above-ground--using all tactics ranging from death threats to bribery. Our most deceitful enemies went to the imperialist state and took information about us to spread around to our local and international political enemies in violation of privacy laws. MIM can state categorically that people do not see MIM doing that. We can also state categorically that if one has heard biographical information about MIM, to be spun in an incorrect way, then one knows one is talking to a pig or pig-assisted moron. When it comes to gossip, we have to get clear on what information can and cannot flow. It's not that MIM cannot also distribute gossip, but we understand the organizational needs of our time much more clearly than other organizations do.
This is a tactical point that we have not addressed sufficiently in connection to our cells strategy. One thing that the enemy cannot stop is a strategy of breaking into anonymous cells.
This question is also important well beyond MIM itself, and in fact the example set for youth in the imperialist countries is more important than the actual tactical struggles MIM is engaged in right now. If biographical information about one or rumors about one start to spread, one should know that the state has many dishonest operators and billions to spend. On the one hand, the attack is an honor of the class struggle. On the other hand, one must prepare for further struggle, especially by taking care to pitch aside any Liberals of whatever guise who try to soothe one by saying that the MIM strategy is unnecessary.
The generational difference on security
One of the things we have to do for security is turn the page on the 1960s generation's habits of thinking. We have already pointed to the sell-outs and the fact that the anti-war movement connected to Vietnam was not the victory made out by anti-war activists. Here were are again in Iraq, not to mention Afghanistan.
The 1960s generation does not so much as have a coherent line on security anymore, because it has fallen off to such a degree and splintered into various directions. The default is biographical pragmatism mandated by post-modernism--a killer for security. Nonetheless, there is a big difference between living among youth who are broadly revolutionary and the situation today. The situation in Paris, May, 1968 is no more. It is not throngs of people in the streets at our elbow. There is nothing even close to a generation rising up and seizing its bourgeois libertarian possibilities. Unfortunately even followers of Lenin except for MIM seem to show no awareness of that and Luxemburgism rules de facto on security questions.
There have been no masses conscripted to serve in a war since Vietnam. If the 1960s generation wants to claim a victory, that is the only one it can claim. The victory has a dialectical turn to it, because it means that one cannot rely on one's youth peers regarding any assumptions. There is thus what we call a "demographic effect." Things that the movement can get away with in a time of upsurge within youth it cannot get away with today, because the critical mass of the 1990s or 2000s generation is not there. On the simple question of dealing with spies, today one is more likely to find spies even in one's persynal life, than at Woodstock or the barricades of Paris. That's a generational difference-- even on the question of how to socialize.
So in the 1960s, going public to defend one's leaders was one thing. There were millions of revolutionary college youth and Blacks at that time. There was also a generational radicalism in France.
Defending one's leaders in public is appropriate in the same way that pushing a trade union struggle up from a factory to fighting for a whole law or change of political leaders is also a good thing-- but only where the conditions for that are appropriate. MIM is concerned that to this day, the 1960s generation and apolitical follow-on generations have not adjusted their outlook, for the fact that there is no majority reference point, not even within a generation or single city.
It's not a surprise to us that the 1960s generation ended up producing the mass manufactured political correctness stifling us today and shoe-horning more cannon-fodder into the empire's military. There was too little time and intensity to go from zero in the 1950s to 60 in a revolutionary movement of scientific depth that we need. What is surprising is the extent which people are not able to place the correct value or emphasis on what we as proletarian revolutionaries should want now, with an eye on reality.
Mass line and security
It goes without saying that if one takes the blindly patriotic view that we should have faith in Amerikans as 90% "masses," then security errors will be systematic and rise to a strategic deviation. Applying mass line, means unleashing the oppressed nations, not the enemy. The enemy has co-responsibility for its oppressiveness and exploitation. The other organizations out there are using the word "masses" to cover up global exploiters in the top 10%.
One thing we have to understand is that when we have the dishonesty level of the RCP=CIA or rather when having one persyn as leader is so cardinal, there is potential for dishonesty on so many questions. Anyone with half a wit should know that because people do not know the internal workings of the RCP=CIA, they cannot judge whether Avakian's leadership is cardinal or not, not in practice. The RCP=CIA has never pretended that its internal struggles and accomplishments are open even to close supporters such as "LeftyHenry" used to be. Right there, the RCP=CIA is confusing two things--the need for a Jacobin approach in a sea of enemies and how to unite a class in public. What the RCP=CIA has raised to a science is how to disrupt the mass line, which can only be practiced the way MIM has explained it. The Luxemburgist approach is more appropriate for those who believe there is an exploited majority and a real possibility for faith in libertarian possibilities, the desire for marijuana etc. that we see at revleft.com for example.
The Avakianists simultaneously tell us that their internal workings and great accomplishments are secret while they also say that Bob Avakian's leadership is cardinal. Now if internal workings are not open, how would the public know if Bob Avakian's leadership is cardinal? How would the public know if it was Ely or Avakian or Z responsible for what? It's absolutely crazy, which is why MIM always focuses the masses on the things they can see themselves--movies, videogames, even each other in the open. That way the masses can check on their judgment abilities and ours. We do not want to encourage slapdash investigation which is what making Avakian a cardinal question would be for the masses. They cannot know the inner workings of the RCP=CIA and so the masses' attention should be brought to bear on things they CAN know, for example, exchange rates, wage rates, incarceration rates etc. It is only by drawing people's attention to things they can know about that a mass line is possible. Without that rationalist emphasis, the mass line breaks down and we have unaccountable biographical pragmatism to fill the gaps, the informal white nationalist network.
RCP=CIA proceeds from the position that communism hangs by a thread in the imperialist countries, but Avakian goes from there to the role of his leadership. When one persyn's leadership is so key, there is an organizational incentive for dishonest front activities.
People with any judgment should know that with the CIA outnumbering us by itself these days unlike the 1960s, there is no realm for leaving substance questions to individuals. The odds are stacked against us, even before we analyze how weak bourgeois intellectuals are in being able to launch independent struggle for proletarian political interests. The masses cannot know who exactly is CIA at any given moment, but they can see the CIA when it is in the open and they can also figure out what the CIA's interests are, at which point it becomes irrelevant whether CIA behavior was a subjective error or paid professional behavior. We need to take a behaviorist approach to attack CIA behavior and train people how to recognize it.
We are not in exile in Siberia where we can be pretty sure that there are cops but also a larger mass of other people not totally controlled by the state. More likely, we are surrounded by CIA people with PhDs and also others with long experience in counter- terrorism and counter-intelligence. Our ability to vett others once and on a continuous basis is limited and the proletariat needs to know that about itself. In practice, the RCP=CIA pretends to know that by making its inner workings secret. This is a difference between MIM's approach and that of the bourgeois management school of thought regarding leadership. It's the difference between recognizing when one is outnumbered and what vetting individuals would really entail on the one hand, and past revolutionary movements where the revolutionary masses could be a majority in some context or another.
MIM is all in favor of the RCP=CIA persynality cult--in the right place, not a scientific communist party. Like it or not, there are millions of people emotionally moved by videos of Giuliani's walking about New York City on 9/11. So we cannot begrudge anyone who attempts to do the same for the anti-war movement, if there is a way. We should not be patriotic, as in loving our country, but we should love our anti-war movement. And if that means loving an individual, then so be it. We are all for it. If an anti-war organization wants to publish Ray McGovern naively or get mixed up with Phyllis Chesler, still we love our anti-war movement. It's only in the party that we demand judgment, not love.
MIM has already argued that there is no progressive role for the persynality cult in imperialist countries, which are tasked toward advancing science with the use of all the extra surplus-value floating around. There is no feudalism or monarchy to overthrow, even within the last generation's thought or if there is monarchism, it is a movement arising out of apathy, which we cannot combat by using echoes of electoral strategy.
In addition, we have to call the line of RCP=CIA circles Luxemburgist, even if taken up by honest people, not CIA fronts. In ideological principle having the majority is not the worst; although even that MIM would not totally agree with--for the world scale. Yet, when we go from saying "we need a majority" to "we need a majority within U.$. borders as they are right now," that's where we have metaphysical dogmatism leading to social-patriotism, sometimes via Luxemburg's attacks on Lenin.
Luxemburgism is fine for an inter-imperialist war where troops occupy each other's territory. In that context a vague line about being for everyone and opposing all nationalism can work out, and so Luxemburg died a martyr's death for the revolution. Today Luxemburgism is drastically passe, because there is no inter-imperialist war proletarianizing masses of imperialist country people, and the rest of the Luxemburg line is white nationalist. The Luxemburgists never address it, because they mostly like it as Trotskyism without Trotsky. Without the context of inter-imperialist war, the progressive content of Luxemburgism is zero. Even taken at the level of theories, and not methods, Lenin's theories to this day are more relevant, because Lenin and his colleague Sultan-Galiev placed a much greater emphasis on the colonies than Luxemburg did.
It is correct to say that the workers themselves have to make the communist society, and hence it cannot be done by a vanguard party: that's what Luxemburg said. We can agree on a global scale, but not in conditions as they are now in imperialist countries. It's incorrect to say that imperialist countries have workers being proletarianized by a massive world war anymore. Luxemburg's premises are out-of-date and her call for a libertarian majority if mistakenly elevated to method leads nowhere but social-democracy and social-patriotism today. It is no mistake that RCP=CIA ended up with the Democrats and could not even mobilize them as Democrats. It is a misplaced faith in the volk that Marxists should be the last to take up, as our goals are not faith in imperialist country populations and love of country but transformation of the class structure.
Judgment and the difference between our concrete situation and Lenin's
In Lenin's day, the existence of richer imperialist countries without monarchies and the build-up of the productive forces in Russia gave rise to a whole crop of intellectuals far ahead of their time. There was a huge gap between what the revolutionary intellectuals were capable of and where the state was. The exploited gave rise to a reflection in the superstructure among intellectuals.
Such a reflection in the superstructure is missing in the united $tates because the exploited are a tiny minority. The intellectuals are not far ahead of the state. Quite the contrary, the state buys them in the united $tates on a massive scale, and the rest with good intentions are disempowered.
What we have in the superstructure is those intellectuals who reflect the exploited globally. Russia had those as well but it also had those driven by Russia's conditions. We in the united $tates have only the thin reed of global exploitation to interest Euro-Amerikan intellectuals; whereas Russia had that and also its own conditions for the vast majority.
So to talk about how social-patriotism manifests itself today, even just going by intellectuals alone, this reviewer would be a millionaire if she had a nickel from every intellectual who pointed out the share of assets owned by the bottom 85% but only WITHIN the united $tates-- that as some sort of criticism of MIM by the patriots. Yes, well MIM is unpatriotic and we tell people that Amerikans in the bottom 85% are still in the top 10 or 15% of the world by assets. We let that cat out of the bag for the whole world to see and attack, how unpatriotic of us. That is the internationalist question of interest, but few intellectuals will touch it. That percentage of intellectuals who touch the question MIM would estimate at 2% of intellectuals, while a much broader portion is aware of inequality within the united $tates, again because of the dominance of social-patriotism among capitalism's alleged critics.
Among intellectuals interested in international questions, the CIA dominates outright. Other parties are unwilling to admit and confront the full gravity of their own actual situation within U.$. borders. Some are ignorant, the rest too gutless to tell others to start thinking harder about fighting as a minority.
So the one thing Mike Ely and his former head honcho are correct about is that there is something wrong about intellectuals and communism in the united $tates. We are doing better there than among other social groups except for lumpen, but we lack a critical mass of intellectuals that was so apparent for other revolutions or even revolutionary movements starting out.
In passing, as youth we need to study Marx on the labor theory of value, realistically at a university. We will need to cover the same ground under different instructors, and MIM would insist on Das Kapital, not just historical story-telling with a Marxist flavor allowed by post-modernism. It is something that takes months of time to be followed again with months of study of the same subject with other instructors. Students themselves have to demand this to understand fully the questions MIM is raising.
We also agree with Ely's observation that his former leader's writings are too textual and not based enough on research of underlying social and economic realities. His ex-leader's works are always re- explanations of concepts from other people, assertions at a conceptual level.
The trouble is--there is not a communist consumer who knows enough to feel taken. The only "new" part of Avakianism is petty-bourgeois philosophical methodology to rise above the proletariat and imperialists in "elasticity." It justifies criticizing Stalin and Mao from a petty-bourgeois angle, and yet Ely is saying that RCP=CIA is not petty-bourgeois enough lately. There is a lack of judgment within the communist movement, because it has been overrun by the pre-scientific types, even at this desperately reduced level.
Another thing that Ely and his ex-leader are correct about is finally in recent years trying to get into how to escape a utopian appearance. Along these lines, Ely and his ex-leader both have been more candid about the weakness of imperialist country organizations calling themselves communist. This is helpful in giving RCP=CIA circles a more realistic glimpse into the communist movement's problems.
Rumsfeld said the insurgents in Iraq were "dead-enders" and he turned out wrong. However, it is much more correct to say that our self- labeled communists in the imperialist countries are "dead-enders." Most of the people who would object to mopping up the supposed communists would be quirky libertarians. Also important is that imperialist country phony communists are dead-enders on the wrong side of history.
When we call for a contest for leadership--now between the old honcho and Ely, and there is another guy out there contending for Avakian's job, we are calling for a public understanding of individuals. That requires the ability to judge confidential information, merits and demerits to put it in the old language. Yet as soon as we realize this, we realize that the two-line struggle as perpetrated by individuals for leadership has a Luxemburgist assumption behind it, which is simply invalid. People calling for a contest for leadership are in essence calling for libertarianism and its outlook on the world. Even if such a contest were done well, the example would be bad and Liberal for youth.
Along these lines, we would like to support anyone in not discussing Nepal as part of some leadership contest with Ely. If Nepal's CPN(Maoist) wants multi-party democracy and peace frameworks, it does not have to be held up as an example. Let that party accomplish something and then get back to the world. The real reason the RCP=CIA should not discuss Nepal is that it cannot get Iran straight. There is no point for non-anti-imperialists to discuss the merits or demerits of revisionism in Nepal with such an urgency that there has to be a libertarian leadership struggle. Our duties in the imperialist countries toward Nepal are internationalist as Ely says, but proletarian internationalism is anti-imperialist. If we can get anti-imperialism down, and the concept of united front down, then we can handle Nepal correctly, not before that.
So MIM says this comes down to judgment. Movements at the tail end of Russia's and China's monarchies were much better for intellectuals, relatively speaking.
In a party of bourgeois intellectuals, we need the ability to judge that the imperialist countries are parasites and there is no exploited majority around which so much of politics is premised. We also need the ability to recognize concretely, shall we say it--strategically and tactically--ugly truth says that the CIA outnumbers us and significantly frustrates us, not to mention the NSA and FBI. After a couple judgments like that, we can weed people out and suddenly we have only a tiny minority of a tiny minority left. Finally we have people with judgment ability and not just their own profound wishes which amount to self-love.
In countries where there is an armed struggle of the exploited going on, many assumptions can be relaxed. Here we have to weed out people other ways.
We can call it "behaviorism." If someone goes public against MIM cardinals or denies our relative tactical position even compared with just the CIA alone, then we need to purge him. It does not matter what his specific rationalizations are on the cardinal questions. Let people sort out how they got to their subjective positions themselves. We have research to do if we are a vanguard party!
More on Ely's Nine Letters
We do not know if Ely's split from RCP=CIA was intentional in order to make RCP=CIA look good. We hope he gives up Marxism and follows Howard Dean, because to be an open bourgeois is much better than to be a revisionist.
We will say that Ely's emphases do make RCP=CIA look good in rejecting the "mass line" idiocy as if imperialist countries had mostly masses instead of mostly enemies. Ely's description of the struggle over changing the line on gays also makes RCP=CIA look good. Going further, Ely seems to take the blame for MIM's charges regarding the CIA, which is something MIM cannot fully evaluate. Again, has anybody at the RCP=CIA thought about super-profits, hard? No. Has anyone there thought about the implications of how the public can hold RCP=CIA accountable on the CIA question? No, because reality is it cannot be done at the individual level.
We do agree with Ely that there was sectarianism as opposed to internationalism in the foundation of RIM. Again, we would not go sofar as to justify his approach to struggle over that. There are many loose questions floating around out there, but it is not hierarchical evil every time a leader shuts up about certain countries.
It's one thing when MIM says that RIM has a false class premise and dependency on the CIA. It's another thing when Ely says he agrees with the underlying class program but merely believes he has a document going beyond the RCP=CIA head honcho's; therefore, some want to air dirty laundry to put an individual in charge of basically similar class forces, the empire's petty-bourgeoisie.
The public has no way of knowing if Ely's characterizations of internal RCP=CIA politics is correct. The whole idea of the RCP=CIA's of a leadership contest is opportunism, as the public cannot intersect it. If the public could intersect it, the party would not be following Lenin.
On Ely and research
Ely has a good point on the priority of research at our stage. Again, we have no idea if he got his points from Avakian or himself. So even at the theoretical level, this contest of individuals is not working. We at MIM also do not know if Lin Biao really always pulled for protracted People's War or whether Mao assigned him to go to leadership meetings and speak for such a position. How would MIM really know? Again the point is not encourage a blind love for Lin Biao but always to teach people about how to think systematically and then act accountably. People mired in biographical pragmatism by definition cannot be accountable.
What MIM does is say that even what we are calling "workers" is subject to research. Marxism is concrete or not at all as Mao said. That means to call someone an exploited worker, there needs to be proof, empirical proof connected to theories produced by application of dialectical materialism. Without the understanding that everything is concrete and that there is no substitute for being correct about the concrete, we will not be able to avoid pre-scientific errors of patriotism, majoritarian dogmas, libertarian dogmas and other ideas people take up for subjective reasons unconnected with how to best advance the species. Those ideas can only fall apart with correct investigation of the concrete. It used to be called finding a proletariat and in today's U$A language, we call it finding a vehicle most approximating what the species needs with the least influence of "special interests."
On promoting and popularizing
One thing we have to be careful about is that RCP=CIA is training people in frontism--saying nice things to people to boost credibility for frontist activities aimed at people who seek happy-face leadership and cannot understand underlying political substance disagreements. So for many robots, the way it works is that if RCP=CIA goes somewhere, it spouts that organization's line or at least praises the organization. It keeps on a happy face and then drags away robots for the RCP=CIA. It's the same thing a minority portion of the CIA does when it is spying of course, the adoption of camouflage. In contrast, McCain's "Straight Talk Express" is to be preferred as having a higher honesty quotient. There is a whole netiquette-to-CIA dynamic going on.
MIM is all for promoting and popularizing the proletarian camp. RCP=CIA is not there. We are all for loving the anti-war movement, but the RCP=CIA leadership strategy is not aimed at the anti-war movement but at subverting scientific leadership.
Unlike Ely we would not say that his ex-leader "failed." He simply led the wrong class. There was little attention to class at all by that leader and but there was much attention to jumbling conspiratorial aspects of Lenin's line with underlying ultra-democratic and Luxemburgist assumptions.
This confusion is underlying all the "Committees of Correspondence" type splinters such as Mike Ely seems to be repeating. Amerikans cannot handle the Leninist party idea.
The basic problem is that we cannot blindly copy Lenin. There are a couple binary questions that we answer the same way as Lenin: should there be conspiratorial tactics or an open emphasis on organizing a majority like Luxemburg said? One or the other, we choose Lenin. Another binary question, should the vanguard party itself be membership restricted on the basis of judgment abilities or should anyone be able to self-declare. Again, we side with Lenin against self-declaring, because scientific substance matters.
Workers World organizes many open demonstrations and gains much support that way. The problem for Leninism is knowing a successful underground struggle when we see it. Without that, the pressures from ultra-democracy invariably creep, first via Luxemburg and finally whole-hog liberalism or social-democracy. This comes down to pure historical political knowledge: is the conspiratorial political struggle possible or not? Has it ever worked? People who do not really know are going to end up with the 50%+1 strategy one way or another and they will justify it with bullshit about MIM pessimism instead of accurately seeing it as faith in the oppressed nations, not Amerikkkans. Most considering this point are not really communists but patriots disguised as socialists. MIM is not slightly sectarian via the international proletariat's interests to dismiss such people out of hand.
Ely's criticisms should be refiltered through a comparative lens. If all movements failed broadly speaking, then we must somehow adopt an idea of what success is, and it will have to be relative as MIM has said. Relative is not size-wise or passing out biographies but impact on moving the class struggle forward. That is a more difficult comparison to make than uniting liberals behind an anti-Bush slogan, selling t-shirts or even handing out papers. Since no proletarian or pseudo-proletarian organizations are able to make the scale of difference that the proletariat would be able to recognize if it saw it, we are stuck at the level of research and finding like-minded researchers and research-popularizers, to build that critical mass of bourgeois intellectuals for a party and if we are lucky, keep a finger in the lumpen pie as well.
Success at this stage of history is having a minority of bourgeois intellectuals. Organizationally, success means the Lenin theory of vanguard party modified for our conditions. Luxemburgism is more wrong today than it was in 1919, because there is no class basis for an open onslaught toward socialism in the imperialist countries right now. Luxemburgism is simply another female tokenist denigration of Lenin with no other reasonable basis for popularity today. It leads to Hillary Clinton. It is a form of pure dogmatism that cannot recognize the difference between World War I and Germany's aftermath and the conditions today disallowing the majority-oriented approach. Those who read that with a feel-good lens and say "pessimism" need to be tossed out of range. We either have historical knowledge of minority struggles, as in the American Revolution, French Revolution and MIM or we do not. Those with judgment ability already know that the minority struggle is delivering more than open-onslaught oriented approaches, especially now that the 1960s is gone.
Translating for the Boomers
The reputation of Baby Boomers (people born after World War II but by 1964) comes out in the Budweiser commercials regarding the heroism of slacker youth as interpreted by a boomer in reaching for Bud beers. The point of the commercial series is that more casual grunge generation types with their "so what" attitude need to be recast. When a slacker reaches for a beer there is a whole narrative tale of sacrifice and struggle to be told, according to Boomers drinking the same beer.(2)
Of course, grunge-generation people compared with Boomers are correct that most of what imperialism hypes should in fact be tuned out. On the other hand, of course at MIM we are for struggle and hence some Boomer attitude about the glory of struggle. However, if we were to tell MIM's story starting from a Boomer angle, it would lead in unanticipated directions.
So if we were to start as RCP=CIA does it and translate for Boomers we would say, "MIM's leadership is cardinal." We would add that only people with the requisite judgment ability and attention span would be able to know that MIM is in fact the most significant communist organization of the imperialist countries and has been for decades.
So to continue with the analogy we would say, if one has an attention span and judgment ability, then one already knows that MIM is the most significant scientific communist organization since the Black Panther generation. If people do not know that, they lack scientific discernment, and that includes people who could not figure it out without state assistance. We have to judge people not after we release documents that MIM does not release, but before, because not everything can be done openly. There is an ultra-democratic pressure against discernment that we must resist.
We are outraged by some people who claim the right to criticize MIM when they were not there ever supporting us. It's amazing how our movement does not even get that yet. MIM's practice has in fact already transformed history, and maybe 20% of that is semi-public. People should support the MIM. That they do not is another outrage.
So what should we do, take up "mass line" as if it applied to everyone inside U.$. borders? MIM's accomplishments are vastly, vastly understated going back a whole decade, and before that we did not bother with summarizing them. Yes, we will do our best Boomer-style imitation of Lenin and claim it fully. Is MIM full of shit? How can it be accountable for what it claims? Does the population know about MIM's most important accomplishments? Not at all, and so, the whole dispute is pointless except among the self-anointed. This is where the RCP=CIA circles spend all their time crying, on the question of leadership instead of understanding that there is a disruption of the cycle of perceptual knowledge leading to rational knowledge among the "masses," one could say. If the united $tates were an ungovernable place like China was for Mao, MIM would be wrong in allowing the breakdown of the cycle of perceptual knowledge leading to rational knowledge that is also key to the mass line.
The imperialist country disruption of mass line and knowledge production is imposed by the enemy and cannot be overcome by bowing to ultra-democratic and Liberal pressure. Bowing to such pressures worsens the problem by taking us away from the interests of the exploited and sidestepping the true knowledge that people need.
The reason for the disruption of mass line is that there are too many enemies, so we have to rely on those in the superstructure who arise because of international factors, a thin reed, a few bourgeois intellectuals, in addition to the lumpen on the very bottom. That in turn means we adjust our strategy while still representing the exploited. It cannot be done the other way around where we pretend we are peasants in a new democratic struggle in an ungovernable country so we can keep the old strategy we had with Mao. There are few who understand even this much about the relationship between theoretical analysis and strategy. Such pretending about conditions leads straight to patriotic errors, love of an unlovable population. Quite the contrary to Mao's situation, the imperialist state is modern, unbroken and as yet stocked high with surplus. It is the strategy that must adjust, not the analysis of conditions.
The RCP=CIA's moronic reading of Lenin is that he just kept people jazzed for revolution with whatever lies or spin-job he could cook up. So then they say reading MIM makes them "pessimistic" and it brings out their capitulationism. The problem is that everyone already knew the Russian Revolution was coming. Even without World War I, monarchy was due to be gone, just based on other international experiences alone. At that time, being in a mental state of tautness regarding the possibility of seizing power was really necessary. At the moment, one has to be uninformed not to know the difference in the relative strength of the imperialist state then and now. So the constant jazzing for tasks that are not appropriate results in the emptying out of our research work, writing and cryptic struggle. This past year, even MIM has writing block, because of the state's encapsulation, and what we say appears even stale to us. The mix in MIM's tasks has had to change, but for others including youth, we say that we are not going to be able to win the critical mass of bourgeois intellectuals if we start from our favorite strategy and then work backwards. We have to accept where we are including the real balance of forces and then challenge intellectuals with analyses of our present conditions that they have not come up with yet. As time goes on, we hope people realize there really is a flame beneath all the MIM smoke and that there is in fact a whole outline of intellectual tasks that needs to be done.
MIM has taken history up a whole notch, and intellectuals are not ready, because if they were, right now they would see MIM at the basket like Michael Jordan and start bouncing passes off the backboard for MIM to jump up and slam in. However, our intellectuals lack political capability to understand what it is MIM can and cannot do right now and how to assist. That is holding back the struggle right this very minute, in addition to other crap MIM has been denouncing forever, but which people persist in. There are in fact many people talking to MIM about things without getting that ball up in backboard range. This is another outrage, that people do not know how to work with MIM. MIM has said it before, but in fact the defection of even individuals has changed history.
The above paragraph is where the Boomer parallel ends. We can say it, but we already undercut ourselves, because we know what the public knows and does not know. More importantly we know how certain facts play in terms of public opinion.
So when someone comes to MIM and says, "prove that your leadership would be better than this other guy claiming to be communist," MIM cannot. We operate anonymously and only our enemies are attempting to disrupt that and may succeed. What we say is that leadership is created, not even by individuals. It stems from the judgment abilities of the public, which are lacking. Love for Giuliani is not lacking. Judgment ability is lacking entirely.
That's why we say to others leading parties, to toss all the "mass liners" simpering about activity about the exploited inside U.$. borders. Let every last one of those go to the Workers World or better yet, their IAC or the Committees of Correspondence or the like. Toss those who cannot see that the U.$. is composed of exploiters and toss those who mix Lenin's party methods with Luxemburg's strategy.
It is not the same as in Lenin's situation, that because Russians loved monarchy so much that the party must simulate that authoritarian mentality. That's not as much our problem here, but secrecy is still crucial for different reasons, mainly that we operate in a sea of enemies. Against us are capitulationists who say that precisely because there are so many spies and class enemies, we should abandon secrecy, give it up. Again, we say let the capitulators give it up. Better yet, let them join Howard Dean and give up calling themselves followers of Lenin. What a joke that Ely says an accomplishment of Avakian's was to give up Stalin's "popular front." The popular front was a paragon of proletarian virtue compared with RCP=CIA tailing of Democrats while fronting for the CIA.
In conclusion for the Boomers, what they need to understand is what the masses can know and what they cannot. It's not that MIM does not know how to be assertive of leadership. MIM handles accessible questions as cardinal questions--the nature of the class structure. Our task questions are also accessible, how to defend against CIA infiltration for example. There is nothing that others cannot access directly and thereby compare reasoning with MIM. There is no love trick inserted, such as "love Bob Avakian." The Hezbollah, Hamas and Osama Bin Laden line for Islam is much more honest and in the open than "love Bob Avakian" campaigns. That does not belong in an imperialist country vanguard party. What is not accessible cannot produce unity of the oppressed. Islam is a cultural knowledge of over a billion people and inseparable from Arabic language. Islam now provides a means of access to a billion. "Love Bob Avakian" campaigns have no such comparable merit, and lead to sectarian destruction, frustration, historical idealism and Liberalism at the cost of a proper emphasis on Lenin's Jacobin teachings still relevant for our context.
Notes:
1. mikeely.wordpress.com
2. http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/01-31-2007/0004516859&EDATE=