*See also, "What are you doing about sectarianism?"

In general, MIM Notes stories inform the public of the facts of current events they need to know to perceive reality in a Maoist way. Ideal MIM Notes stories require no theory at all except in the mind of the writer. Many stories that appear on the ETEXT website are too turgid to be perfect MIM Notes material and not all MIM Notes stories are perfect examples of public opinion building either.

Good example: The rebels in X city faced repression from Y backed by U.$. imperialist agency Z.

Bad example: The people of the Third World have an interest in uprising because of semi-feudalism and the exploitation by imperialists and labor aristocracy.

The bad example is bad because it requires a knowledge of theory already. The good example is good because it causes people to theorize about why the actions might have occurred. So our task in MIM Notes is to get people to theorize about the right things, not to spell it all out there.

We've tried hard lately to get people to understand the sectarian implications of party- building as a focus and how it holds back scientific advancement in the people. Party- building may become important in a moment of revolutionary upsurge when millions are looking for a specific revolutionary line, because they are already decided on being revolutionary. 1968 in many countries was a year when one might argue that party-building should be on the agenda as a principal task.

Party-building could be an appropriate proletarian task as principal task when there is already a revolutionary fighting force. At that moment, theoretical differences among organizations claiming to be revolutionary are important to the masses, and not something dismissed with an easy answer as we usually see now in the majority- exploiter countries.

In an article about the English and U.$. bombing of Dresden during World War II, we said:

If drawing attention to Dresden results in a revulsion that leads to a favorable impression of Stalin, then that's OK by MIM. So is anarchist- pacifism, another possibility from thinking about Dresden. Yet in a sense, these are both recruiting questions, not really handling public opinion as it exists in its own right. We are unlikely to win someone to anarchist-pacifism or communism strictly on the question of Dresden alone and that's what makes Dresden commemorations this year an agitation/public opinion question, not one of party-building. Dresden could be a last straw only for someone who is already thinking about a host of issues concerning imperialism.

In building public opinion we want to cause a fermentation that may lead later down the road to other things. It is the electoral politicians and other assorted opportunists who simply cannot distinguish between public opinion work (best thought of as done anonymously with unseen consequences) and direct recruiting--and that inevitably worsens sectarianism. One of the reasons for MIM's public opinion effectiveness is that before MIM speaks, MIM always wades in and knows the relative proportions of opinion from surveys and also through confirmation talking to thousands of Amerikans in all walks of life.

In another quote discussing a persynality cult as a replacement for a vanguard party, we said the following after some discussion of the success of MIM's web page in readership statistics:

Anyone who thinks young, lesbian wimmin cannot be heard, for example, because it's a white male dominated world--we invite you to contribute to MIM public opinion building: you may not be a leader, mainly because of what's in your own head, but you will contribute to public opinion building. There is a difference and we have increasing evidence that the masses understand for example, the difference between an ad hominem attack and a line struggle-- again, thanks to MIM's particular style of separating the party from public opinion building sufficiently so that the masses can see that difference clearly. We should be clear, that before there was a MIM, no one in the field was doing that, and this is a big and unique advance that MIM has contributed for some years, one contribution we have made to the international communist movement. This advance is making working "at arm's length" possible and it is emphasizing the relative strengths of the proletariat against the imperialists.

Our approach contrasts with parties that have no People's War going and no state power but nonetheless build a cult of persynality. Organizations that make building popularity of the leader their goal can have as an unstated corollary that vacillation and having things both ways is a good thing, because that is the way to build maximum popularity for an individual leader--to say whatever the audience wants to hear. It goes without saying that such parties will be petty- bourgeois at best. Some are capitalist parties trying to get politicians elected.

Now contrast how MIM goes about interaction with the public. We are infamous for our monikers such as "HC116." We have a degree of individual responsibility by comrade number, but we do not accept any arguments from people saying individual identity is important. We've said many times that if people would not argue with or acknowledge a correctly programmed computer in a basement somewhere, then we are not interested in the resulting discussion. This is a major hurdle to get over, but there is no choice in reaching the level that a vanguard party discusses issues. It does not mean people not agreeing with us cannot read what we have to say on their own, but in terms of recruiting or discussion, the discussion is pretty much over at that point, and it's important to realize that is most of the time in the imperialist countries.

Other parties including those running for election stress that the voters or audience knows them persynally and can "relate." Even the most radical sounding of these are just Liberals.

This raises the next point which is that pre- scientific propaganda manipulation does work. There is a lot of study on that. We can do a Google search for "fundamental attribution error" or "attribution error," and we should realize there is a lot of survey work done that shows a majority of imperialist country people cannot get past a whole level of identity/persynality/ad hominem reasoning. It has to do with the poor education of the imperialist countries, especially the Anglo-Saxon ones.

In the Third World countries where Liberalism still has some progressive role to play, we do not have to worry as much about the attribution error except in the party itself. In the imperialist countries, we communists are not really contributing anything but our own degeneration if we play into the same underlying problem that generates the popularity of Liberalism and identity politics. MIM's separation of public opinion and recruiting work is unique in assisting individuals to break through their weak reasoning habits.

At the one extreme, we have those who see cult-building, party-building and public opinion creation as all the same thing. These are the ones who are going to have the most problems overcoming sectarianism. If cult-building and public opinion creation are the same thing, then sectarianism is going to be the result across-the-board. And as MIM has pointed out before, it does not matter if it's "friendly" sectarianism: the point is that it puts the organization above promoting the truth. That introduces a whole dynamic into political work that twists everything.

We should contrast that idea with what we said above about Dresden. There is some substantial truth to what anarchist-pacifism has to say about Dresden. The danger is that in a sectarian approach or in any approach conflating party-building and public opinion creation or conflating theory with agitation, the approach will rule out various ways of exposing u.$. imperialism for its crimes. So this comes down to having a proper grip on the united front. If there is nothing but theory and party-building or cult-building, then there is no united front or it gets added in later as an afterthought in a haphazard way to make up for errors in not separating public opinion creation and party-building in the first place. The purest way of separating public opinion building and party-building consists in anonymous anarchist tactics for spreading public opinion. MIM does not go that far all the time; hence, we have a newspaper and website that say "MIM" on them. Nonetheless, we do find that it is very important to have a clear distinction between public opinion work and theory work.

There is another extreme in contrast with sectarian cults-- where people give up having political definition at all--not even for a persynality cult. So MIM Notes has another rule we have we call the "Guardian test": if the article is non-controversial enough that it could go in Mother Jones or Workers World, we don't publish it. We rewrite it to piss people off. That does not require publishing theory, but it requires a knowledge of what facts do not jive well with preconceived Liberal Amerikan opinions. So for example, we need not mention the labor aristocracy theory at all to print facts on pension ownership. We don't have to mention what a gender bureaucrat is while we report what NOW says about rape and contrast that with other stats that we have researched. So choosing what to talk about is where theory comes in: it informs our writing. Theory does not have to appear in our MIM Notes writing. It can be there implicitly. In the earliest MIM Notes writings, that was what was there, short snippets on news items that point the reader in the Maoist direction without long-winded theoretical writing, the effect of which is often contrary to the necessary principal task of today which is independent public opinion creation and building the independent institutions of the oppressed, through division tactics where necessary.