VIII. Sectarianism
IX. White worker chauvinism
X. Celebrating victory

VIII. Sectarianism

We try to train ourselves to love the advance of struggle and above all the victory of People's Wars. We can honestly say that if we keep at it, we really do like the advance of the struggle against the bourgeoisie and start liking various decadent vices less. We find ourselves more absorbed in politics and less in other leisure time activities. We take pride in our small victories against imperialism.

A step forward along these lines may lead to a step backward to the evil of sectarianism, which is the putting of the party's interests above those of the international proletariat. An example of this sectarianism is from our opponents trying to run down MIM, not for our line, but for things we allegedly do. According to one critic, we spend "all our time" attacking other organizations. That critic comes from an organization using much of the same terminology that MIM uses also with a lot of Trotskyism thrown in, so shooting down that critic's ideology also shoots down a medley of revisionisms. In point of fact, MIM does "pick on" that particular organization bringing this up, but there are only less than 50 articles about it on our website with over 5000 articles, 300 newspapers and other pieces of art.

Since MIM's website has always had more traffic than our opponent's and since they are so pragmatist, they should be thankful for the attention. Our exposure of their numerically insignificant organization brings them more web traffic. They can siphon away all the subjectivists for their organization and keep them out of ours.

It felt good to that opponent of ours to say we spend "all our time" attacking his organization. It just so happens it wasn't true and so it was subjectivism leading to sectarianism. In point of fact, MIM has more readers than our opponent, both total and per comrade working in the two respective organizations. MIM is not afraid to say that both organizations are pitiful if we are thinking only in terms of numbers. However, at least ours opposes exploitation.

It would be tempting for MIM to say that our opponent spends "all the time" attacking MIM, because sovietrevolution.com went out of business just as our opponent's line was being exposed, and, because public and non-public recruiters of our opponent did not take a firm line against open police informers and fascists on the Internet when doing so would have backed what the MIM was doing. They've also set up two more entire websites mostly dedicated to attacking our line in addition to the minority of space they dedicated to attacking MIM in their website dedicated to their own program. Yet, even so, MIM would never say, "all their time" is spent attacking MIM ideologically. People in MIM do not get such a closed-circle mentality, because we are trained against subjectivism for issue after issue.

That particular organization needs to come clean and take a stand on the police informers and fascists on yet another website called the ISF and answer why they sabotaged that struggle or whether people sabotaging that struggle were not really who they said they were and whether MIM was correct in that struggle at least in retrospect. Some of the youthful RCP=U$A fans opposed the fascists, but it looks like there was a disconnect at another level with others in RCP=U$A. It's important for them to take a stand on the case of open police informing and fascism that MIM has revealed to them. It could be that that opponent of ours is led by cops or it could be that subjectivism led them to sectarianism of a form that undercut the struggle against fascism and police informers (and then they have the nerve to call us "passive"!). RCP=U$A, is it true that your line is to befriend fascists and police informers, to "win them over"? When someone runs a "hate Niggers" poll on a website, is that an opportunity to befriend "workers" with false consciousness or is that an enemy attack that must be countered? The RCP=U$A says it's an example of "false consciousness."

IX. White worker chauvinism

One of the main reasons for being passive in the face of fascism and police operations is the labor aristocracy line. According to this view the white "worker" is supreme and nothing can be done without him/her, for the same reason that Trotsky said Third World peasants and workers should wait for the Western proletariat.

The line goes that 90% of the public (in the imperialist countries that actually have majorities of exploiters) is our "friends" and so we should try to work things out with them and not denounce fascism and police activities, by implication, because they are so common in the u$a in particular, what with the millions of police, soldiers, prison guards and veterans.

People disarmed by white worker chauvinism might be thinking "how could we do anything if we denounced fascism all the time," perhaps because they work with fascists as an excuse for why they don't attack exploitation in its full extent. That's connected to their opportunist view opposing standing for principle in the face of the white majority in most imperialist countries.

Recently we had a fan of another party crowding into our bit of the political spectrum say twice that what MIM says about the white workers "goes against our hopes and dreams." Later it was:

"The thing is, you see all these proletarian people with nice Nikes, dvd players, big-screen tv's, vcr's, nice-ass trucks, and all these 'rednecks' waving their American flags and sayin' 'Kill then ragheads! Nuke Baghdad! Yeeeeehaw!!!'... seeing that as the majority of white proletarians really makes it hard for me to see their revolutionary potential. So, yeah... that's why MIM's line and Sakai's thesis really seems to make sense to me... I don't WANT to believe it, but to me it really makes sense (as well as the fact that MIM has tons of facts, figures, statistics, and a lot of convincing quotes by Lenin and Mao to back them up)... "(4) So the key here is that the comrade appears to have been won over by the MIM line, but he does not "WANT" it to be true.

The point is with this as every other example in this essay, we have to look at where that want/desire came from. Did it come from objective analysis aiding the international proletariat or did it come from some feeling we have that came from the oppressor nation? Upholding the white worker as a proletariat without facts proving their exploitation is every bit as subjective as heroin addiction but worse.

This comrade and some others are at the point where they admit that MIM has provided a "blizzard" of facts, statistics and related math to disprove that white workers are exploited. After so many years of MIM's wiping the floor with our opponents in this pseudo-"debate" it's about time we recognized that it's not really a rational debate at all and there's a reason that other supposed Marxists do not show us how they calculated the overall surplus-value being sucked out of the Third World. That reason is the subjectivism of white workers that they pander to and the sinister social- imperialist plans of the leaders opposing MIM.

White worker utopianism is one step bigger and hence more dangerous than Liberalism toward our persynal friends. A persyn can only have so many friends to give favors to that may damage the revolutionary struggle. Yet if we allow subjectivism to rule on the question of the white "working" class, the central object of the struggle is destroyed. In military terms, it would be even worse than the Iraqis trying to take back the city of Baghdad from the occupiers, but failing, because as the Iraqi liberation forces approached from outside the city, the enemy flashed a hologram of the city that led the liberation forces away from their very goal. Fortunately, such a diversion is not working as we speak as I'll touch on in a minute.

One of our counterrevolutionary opponents correctly says the following only to have some credentials to use to cover up his party's subjectivism: "Lenin talked about how one of the hallmarks of revisionism, one of the main features of revisionism, was the viewpoint that 'the movement is everything, the final aim is nothing.' And you see this repeatedly. People get into a movement, and yes, it's great to have a movement-- it's great to be part of struggling against the enemy, it's great to be debating questions--this is all tremendously important. And there is a real element of why people should draw inspiration from this and love it more than the horrible daily grind of this system. But we can never get intoxicated with that to the point that we forget about or lose sight of the final aim--of the need to overthrow and bury this system and bring a whole new world into being. Everything we do has got to be part of building toward that, or else it all gets turned into its opposite. In the final analysis we don't need 'the movement is everything, the final aim is nothing'--we need to carry out the final aim and we need to build the movement always toward achieving that final aim, wherever we are in the process."(5) This thought referencing the struggle against Edward Bernstein is mostly correct, but no where is the struggle against Bernstein's revisionism applied on the question of white "workers" except in MIM. Raising tactical or strategic doubts or subjective concerns of individual comrades against MIM is in fact Bernstein revisionism, where the goal of ending exploitation is nothing.

It's to the point, where more than once defenders of the exploiters' line have said that lies, illusions and myth are a good thing for white "workers," and we surmise because they are too ideologically old to figure out how to organize white "workers" without having them oink for more gravy. They believe it is better to withhold the whole truth even from youth, because they believe that the youth will not be able to come to a solution including the details of a problem as big as the more than 200 million exploiters living in the u$a.

White "worker" illusions are not a good thing. Those illusions prop up imperialism. They already exist and do not need to be fanned further. It is only by popping their bubbles that white "workers" can actively climb down from their opposition to the international proletariat and make a choice that says they don't believe the imperialists really have a winning strategy for the "War on Terror." That is our job in the imperialist countries: to count the imperialist country petty-bourgeoisie as aligned with the imperialists, but to show them a stark choice so that at least some can vacillate away from the imperialists in a reflection of the global power of the international proletariat. If we do not tell the imperialist country petty-bourgeoisie it is enemy, it has no way to know what backing down into neutrality is. Yet, that is what our particular role in the imperialist countries is--offering a stark choice to make the petty-bourgeoisie vacillate as much as possible. The truth is that we can only expect a portion of it to vacillate in our direction in the current economic context--mostly on the basis of long-range views of war, terrorism, the environment and peace.

It's ironic, but on the other hand, our counterrevolutionary opponents have also said this: "If, in the realm of politics and science, you were to say, 'This is what will happen in the future,' you would be acting in an irresponsible way if you were not just making certain broad-based predictions, drawing from trends that were already apparent but instead were attempting to paint a whole scenario of what will happen in the future and moreover you were insisting that this be accepted, in all its essential details, as how things will actually develop. In other words, if you had no scientific basis to do so, but you presented your predictions not as science fiction but as scientific fact (or scientifically grounded and completely accurate predictions), then you would be misleading people and you would be irresponsible."(6) In that particular organization they hold a confused medley of beliefs glued together by their chairman's persynal popularity. They don't use materialism over there for anything. Their view of white "workers" is science fiction by their own chair's reasoning.

On the one hand, they say they oppose Edward Bernstein for saying the "movement is everything" and the goal nothing. On the other hand, their rank-and-file and circles across the united $tates consistently raise the size of our organization, tactical concerns and individual subjective longings against MIM as if those were reasons for choosing or not choosing a communist organization.

On the one hand, our opponents say they are communists; yet on the other hand, they believe the class structure is an "academic" question and that we can lie our way out of the question of exploitation. These are all evils that arise once subjectivism is let in the door.

This brings us to the worst form of subjectivism that we have in the united $tates. If a comrade does too much LSD, s/he may be incapacitated. It's as if you had a comrade at your elbow in battle, but s/he disappeared, effectively neutralized by the enemy. The subjectivism of drugs takes our forces and reduces them. Yet even though a comrade disappears into some escapist cloud, that is only one comrade and the fight goes on, because even in the "Matrix," the enemy could not put everyone into the stupor. In contrast with drugs, white worker subjectivism is opening gaping holes in the armor of the international proletariat and inviting the enemy to shoot a raft of sugar- coated bullets right through. White "worker" subjectivism is far worse than drugs, because white "worker" subjectivism eliminates the entire goal of the struggle--the end of exploitation.

Stopping sugar-coated bullets in their tracks will require victory over subjectivism.

When we know we have no overall facts to support our cause and we keep at it anyway, because we fear to puncture our own myths, like Bush and the WMDs, we set up a credibility problem. MIM is happy to be unpopular because we stand with the Iraqi people in their fight against occupiers. We would not be happy to be like Bush, caught spinning and lying his way into a war. Likewise, when our critics said white "workers" would rise up in revolution in the 1980s, and put up a poster that said "go for it," they were not working from what they had at hand. They were creating a credibility problem for everyone calling themselves Maoist. It suited the subjective needs of a few people in a small organization, but the people thought they were crazy-- and not even because they claimed to have wanted a world with no borders and classes. Genuine communists should only be unpopular in the imperialist countries for their views, not because they lied about the balance of forces the way Bush did when he promised that Iraqis would be throwing roses and rice while cheering "hurrah!" The masses are rightly suspicious of such types.

It's OK to be unpopular for the substance of our views, but not for saying we have greater strength at the moment than we do. People are apt to look around and see no swarms of revolutionary white workers and decide that Maoists are full of shit-- not to be trusted in real world struggle--when it's really the phony communists who should not be trusted in struggle. The masses will forgive us for "alternative" views to a great extent especially when presented with such horrific things as in Iraq, but no one deserves credibility after lying about white "workers". Bush too could make use of idealist dialectics: "we will find WMDs 'some day.' The Iraqis will have democracy 'some day.' And 'some day' it will be true that Iraqis don't resist," Bush could say. Some day there will be no bourgeoisie, but we have to attack it now. Some day there will be no petty- bourgeoisie allied with the imperialists in the imperialist countries, but we have to attack it now. Some day the oppressed nation petty- bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie will turn against us, but we have to win it over now and expect a portion of it to side with us. These are all correct materialist approaches. When it comes to white "workers," RCP=U$A just can't adopt a similar one.

The Democrats handed us a great gift by voting for the Iraq War very clearly. Now MIM is able to go to the public and say, "1) look, we told you about Democrats; 2) we told you about WMDs; 3) we told you there'd be resistance to occupation; 4) we told you the peace movement could be big but not succeed in preventing the intensified war, because the movement is too petty-bourgeois and complacent; 5) we told you it would be Blacks going against the war in the majority and whites supporting it." All of that we predicted and correctly. Now we can go to the masses and say, "why are you still listening to them?" Our critics cannot do this, because they're there saying white workers are revolutionary when everyone knows its a lie, except for the fascists who know what kind of revolution they have in mind.

It's hard enough to communicate politics effectively. All the organizations giving communism a bad name by talking about an imminent uprising of white "workers" ought to back out of politics, but they won't because they share the same fundamental outlook as the bourgeoisie. Just as Bush and Kerry know better than they say, these so-called communists should know better than what they say, and people will pick up on that. The people are tired of politics as usual, and they are going to turn to fascists if we do not try to escape the parliamentary mode of spinning, deceiving and kissing babies. The population is going to get sick of all that and try the most difficult "solutions" at some point and back dissolving Congress and the Supreme Court or similar parliamentary institutions in other imperialist countries. The question is whether the hard solution the population picks will be one posed as fascist or communist. If people do leave the parliamentary democracy outlook in the majority-exploiter countries, it's going to be for clear alternatives that the Democrats and Republicans (or their like in other majority- exploiter countries) find too unpleasant to discuss or even mention right now.

It's not going to be possible to come to power and not know how much super-profit U.$. imperialism is extracting and then abolish that super-profit sucking. We are not going to come to power and then be able to skip the question of the extent of parasitism factually speaking--not mythologically speaking. If the social-imperialists come to power, the oppressed will find that life does not change as much for the better as they had hoped. They will still be exploited and poor, this time in the name of communism. The exploited with false consciousness will not be able to figure out that it was the fact that the social-imperialists never took responsibility for calculating the full extent of super-exploitation. Such a future we want to avoid. It's happened before.

Fighting revisionism is not just cheerleading the Russians to criticize Khruschev, and the Chinese to see through Deng Xiaoping and Hua Guofeng. Even combined with upholding the People's Wars in the Third World that is not enough of a fight against revisionism. As Mao explained in "Is Yugoslavia a Socialist Country?" we in the imperialist countries have to take on the question of the labor aristocracy and get it right. We have to understand revisionism when we see it in our own backyards and so we cannot settle for a subjective opinion on why white "workers" are exploited.

X. Celebrating victory

In the section on sectarianism, we pointed out that an unwillingness to expose fascism, eugenics and police plots by the RCP=U$A may be because of the labor aristocracy line advocating constant tolerance of the enemy of the proletariat. We hope to point this out to anyone communist-leaning looking at any other organizations other than MIM. That brought us to the whole question of white "worker" chauvinism and that is not something restricted to the RCP=U$A by any means. We only pick on RCP=u$A phony communists and police agents because what they are saying is representative of the rest of revisionism and is most dangerous for sounding most like MIM out of the dangerous revisionisms out there.

Learning not to "like" white "worker" chauvinism conversely means celebrating advances that do occur. The Red Army invasion of Germany to end World War II was one of the greatest days of celebration for the proletariat in the 20th century, rivaled or surpassed only by the communist-led revolutions themselves. The social- patriotic RCP=U$A seeks to hush up that a small minority of Germans did play an important propaganda role in the days leading up to the end of Hitler. That minority did not succeed in budging the imperialist country petty-bourgeoisie into socialist revolution against Hitler, but it did bring about the end of the regime in the Germans' own language.

The fact is that the German people during World War II had reached a very backward, enemy position. Though the communists tried to coax the labor aristocracy, they ended up as little more than the tail on the dog with some tactics of infiltrating the Nazi Party and its unions.

In many cases, Germans well-known to Germans reassured the German people while also instructing them not to keep fighting. Just because these German communists did not do a majority of the fighting or direct a majority of the fighting, these German communists did not quit or feel depressed as the RCP=U$A advises. These German communists kept fighting and doing their internationalist duty, because they had what Mao called "strategic confidence" on the global level. Anyone restricting "strategic confidence" to Germans themselves would have oriented the struggle in Germany during World War II toward mass suicide. To whatever extent the German petty- bourgeoisie could vacillate, the German communists were there to remind everyone of the historical situation and how the petty-bourgeoisie chose Nazism and took a wrong turn instead of choosing the road lit by Lenin and Stalin.

The German communists aside from speaking German, being known to Germans and serving as walking historical textbooks were also important to the international proletariat. If there were no German communists, the international proletariat would wrongly start to doubt science itself. The international proletariat in its generous spirit would wrongly doubt its invasion of Germany, because the question of putting new oppressors and exploiters in place is a profound one in the mind of the international proletariat. Without the German communists armed with Lenin's theory of imperialism, the international proletariat would have wavered and possibly allowed a restoration of Nazis to power in Germany.

Some organizations such as the RCP=U$A are training their youth to be depressed by the thought of how German imperialism came down. In the name of strategic confidence in white "workers," the RCP=U$A is now just teaching social-patriotism and opposing invasions of imperialist countries. In contrast, Engels taught us that "freedom is the recognition of necessity."

The RCP=U$A keeps harking to 1968 in France when it did not turn out to be a 1905 and when after double-digit raises, the French "workers" voted in DeGaulle to prove that they had achieved what they wanted and wanted to conserve it. At the same time, the RCP=U$A is running down the positive example of how the end of Nazi Germany came about and how the Black Panther Party contributed more than the white "worker" obsessed parties to shaking imperialism. Aside from teaching the wrong history and without comparative context, the RCP=U$A is thus not preparing the subjective element for revolution. The German communists, the Red Army and the Black Panthers must be celebrated. The French "workers" in 1968 who could have had a revolution, could have drawn off soldiers from Vietnam and instead chose a larger share of the super-profits should be spit on. They are nothing compared with the German communists, the Black Panthers or the Red Army invading Germany in 1945. The French of 1968 only show us the best possible vacillation of the petty- bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries that we could hope for. The fact that the French petty- bourgeoisie had every perfect physical opportunity to make revolution in May 1968 only proves the true nature of that class.

The RCP=U$A believes we should befriend the petty- bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries today; even though the petty-bourgeoisie in the majority- exploiter countries is even more parasitic than in Hitler's day. The tactics the RCP=U$A uses do not aim at the end of exploitation--usually in the name of some future stage of communism. They fail to recognize that it is not possible to skip the stage of de-parasitization, the re-civilizing stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat of the oppressed nations over imperialism. The RCP=U$A acts like the German "workers" should have went from rampaging one day in 1945 to jumping up and building socialist revolution the next: otherwise, it's too "pessimistic" for the RCP=U$A. The German population had some serious untwisting to do before it could build socialism in eastern Germany. The ones taking advantage of contrary views were ex-Nazi leaders all too willing to say they should stay at their posts to faithfully build socialism.

The fact is that the German people needed to have an internal reckoning and accounting. Ex-Nazis cannot just be treated as proletarian friends with false consciousness. Doing so would have justified handing over state power to them. It's not the dictatorship of the party elite, but the dictatorship of the proletariat. That's why we ask the imperialist country youth to picture it: picture being in Nazi Germany and seeing the Red Army enter your country. Now after years of being elbow-to-elbow with millions of active Nazis, do you really think you should act like they were your friends all along? What kind of precedent for future racism and chauvinism will that set? (Imagine, "I lynched your brother, because he is Black. Now forgive my false consciousness and testify why I deserve a prison guard job, please." Somehow the whole "friend-false-consciousness" paradigm is not going to cover that or this: "I voted to bomb your country in 2003, now please let me teach your children.") Do you really think that if only yesterday they actively bought the Nazi bullshit, today they are ready for state power? Again, the real secret of the "RCP=U$A" has gotta be some drug they are giving out to make people believe that.

It's not to say that the united $tates could not eventually get itself into a situation that makes it look like a larger version of the Six Counties of Ireland. After 50 years of a very grinding low- intensity war fought in u.$. air, water and land, perhaps re-proletarianization would occur. It's not impossible, but it has not happened yet. We cannot fantasize about such a future as an excuse for avoiding the stage of struggle we are in now. It would amount to irresponsible science-fiction. Where we are now, the stage of de-parasitizing the petty-bourgeoisie of the majority-exploiter countries is a necessary stage and precondition for the active and positive participation of the oppressor nation in the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Notes:

4. http://awip.proboards23.com/index.cgi?action=displ ay&board=theory&num=1076178827&start=0
5. http://rwor.org/a/v23/1100- 99/1104/bobavakian_1104.htm
6. http://rwor.org/a/1211/baonmyth.htm