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January 16 2008
2008 is the 25th anniversary of the foundation of MIM with a founding document. We do not have to tell anyone that there was no revolution in the imperialist countries in the last 25 years, but what we can say is that we have received the chance to revisit various struggles, on an accelerating basis as the years pile up. We can also sum up some aspects of mass struggle.
Among prisoners, the mass line form of organizing is still valid with little modification, because prisoners have revolutionary potential and conditions have not changed socially in the time of MIM's existence except to get worse with the incarceration craze in the united $tates. The mass line says that Maoists should go to the masses for input, collect it up and then synthesize at a higher level to understand how to assist the masses' in reaching their own goals. Then implement that improved analysis and collect input again in a never- ending cycle till full communism. One reason that the mass line works so well with prisoners is that disruptions of the flow of information from the masses to the party are clearly the fault of the state. This forces prison organizers into understanding the value of two-way communication by pointing to what happens at the extremes.
As a tangent, we should point out that the struggle on behalf of lumpen in the united $tates is mostly located outside the lumpen, because the labor aristocracy is overwhelming in its numbers and abilities to oppress the lumpen in conjunction with the imperialists. The struggle proceeds with minority tactics based on truths outside the lumpen, by mobilizing support outside the united $tates for example and by dividing the exploiters inside the u$a.
To return to the main subject, elsewhere in the imperialist countries, disruption of the mass line occurs for three reasons: 1) language failure in reaching oppressed nations people because of translation difficulty; 2) analysis failure where the leaders err in counting enemies as masses; 3) ideological justifications disrupting the mass line.
The good news is that on the first two points, there is a globally increasing awareness of the impact of mischaracterizing the populations of the imperialist countries as oppressed and/or exploited. The MIM line has been put into practice in crucial struggles globally.
Where we continue to have difficulty is that we have people looking at what we are doing, but still do not grab a hold of science and practice it. Once we practice the science of revolution for a while, we see that scientific integrity requires guts. Without guts, science lies unapplied or even worse, breaks down into falsehood. Fear leads to ignorance.
We have not overthrown imperialism, but we have learned some things about how people perceive revolutionary struggle. MIM has been the vanguard in the imperialist countries these last 25 years. However, the only basis we have for that is upholding our historical summations of Russia and China and the nature of the imperialist country populations. If the struggle were further along with more people able to recognize exploitation when they see it, we might have to argue about other factors in evaluating vanguard status. With the communist movement so degenerated in the imperialist countries, such evaluations are pre-mature. Nonetheless, we look forward to the day when various cells arise and organizations contend significantly among themselves over advancing the proletariat, as duly and properly recognized.
We do claim to be vanguard as individuals also, but we do not expect anyone to believe that. The only reason we point it out is that so others can get some idea of how we will respond to them. For example, before MIM founded itself 25 years ago, it had already had run-ins with intelligence agencies of different continents. U.$. people said that MIM was an extremely grave threat, and even MIM did not believe it fully, at the time.
Another reason to make this assertion about MIM's background that cannot be proved is that people can use it as a hypothesis for themselves. So youth coming along in similar circumstances can take what MIM is saying with a grain of salt--though it is all true--and hold it in mind in case they run into what MIM was talking about, in which case they can apply what they heard from MIM for themselves.
When MIM founded itself 25 years ago, MIM saw many signs of hippy culture leftover from the 1960s. However, MIM did not see much by way of political action anymore and when MIM pressed people, there was not only no time, but no money for the revolution. So that creates a certain impression of the revolutionary struggle.
So now MIM is picturing youth arising in similar circumstances as MIM 25 years ago. Born under the Reagan administration, no one should accuse MIM of squandering anything major. There was nothing to squander, and as MIM has learned, the main reason for that is the super-profits giving rise to a petty-bourgeois population, thus buying it off.
MIM has little to give in some senses, no money or army divisions. Even for leadership questions, we say the exploited have not cleared the political space where people can really contend for leadership. MIM has to assert things about itself that people cannot prove themselves, but we do such asserting as little as possible.
Even on that point, MIM does a better job than others, because of how we assert our leadership. Others are saying to have a leadership battle, but over what one should ask. The Liberals ask for leadership battles over questions that people cannot confirm or deny independently. So it will settle in time-honored clothing, age, race and looks-based ways. However, there is no science where there is no possibility of independent verification. Hence, astute communists will wonder about these people continuously putting forward leadership battles while simultaneously saying that the party cannot organize without secret elements. It's in the very structure of the situation that their approach is wrong.
MIM has no quarrel with social-democrats and some breeds of anarchists, as long as they say they see no benefit to underground and semi- underground organizing. MIM's quarrel is with those who year in and year out seek to wreck science and thus the mass line by a focus on questions that inherently cannot be answered at this stage of struggle. Like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill again and again or a gerbil on a gerbil wheel, people waste their time on questions people are not allowed to have information on. Police provocateurs are in our midst raising these questions to divert energies and cause disruption of underground work. There has to be an ungovernable country or zone before the proletariat can even think of more open tactics for flow of information to and from the general population. Even in ungovernable places, the masses will have to learn to vie with imperialist spying and military interventions, which may require some secrecy. So one of the key things we have to get out to the masses is the scientific method, that truth to be produced has to start with accessible material. At this point in our history, if leaders assert too much about individual leadership, leaders lead people astray and open up avenues to anarchist, Luxemburgist and outright bourgeois spontaneous attacks. If we are to be Leninists, we must be smart Leninists, not the kind of wreckers trying to make Lenin look bad.
So not surprisingly, people who have abandoned the science plus guts formula necessary for vanguard leadership call for a vanguard party loving a leader. They wreck the mass line again this way by blurring the lines of communication from the masses to leadership. That is lethal, because the communist leaders need the best information from the masses that they can get.
MIM has 25 years of experience, so let's get nitty-gritty. It should be apparent that people who love a leader instead of loving science are going to do moronized work, zombie-style work. That by itself is enough to sink the whole idea and wreck the mass line, but there are also ideological reasons for rebuffing the love-the-leader line in imperialist countries at this time.
We had a recruiting situation with a female once, where she had a serious romantic relationship with a revisionist. The scientific judgment of this female told her that the party was correct on line. She also had persynal friends in the party and suspicion was, potential boyfriends in the party as well. The party told her to bag the revisionist before she could join the party. Inherently, then, there is a possibility in any recruiting situation where it could benefit the party persynally. Now what if in addition to that, MIM had told the comrade, bag the boyfriend and love X the way other parties do that. The result would be effed up. We would never know if the comrade would put Maoism above her love life, her gender privilege. It's bad enough that there is no way out of that competitive situation, at a group level, but then other parties are consciously downplaying the role of science and telling people to fuzz questions. By the way, in the relationship in question, the result was not a new member but a long-lasting relationship with a revisionist, so love came first there, but at least with a real result. In actuality, the fact that an individual makes such a choice is not nearly as bad as the party's not putting out a reference point line in the first place, as if there were no question there. Someone without the correct priorities cannot be vanguard, but can still be more progressive than otherwise if the party did not struggle, with writing off being an important struggle tactic. For this individual, there is a retrospective "what-if" to ask.
Now look at the converse situation, and we have a reverse situation we learned about only recently with people being more frank about past struggles as the years recede from errors of youth. If the party puts loving the leader first, perhaps the masses will attack with hating the leader first. This particular error does not have to occur because someone is concretely in love with an individual leader, because once the fuzzy idea is out there, it can go in all directions. So we had a lesbian outside the party one year who was interested in a female in the party, but she wanted the female out of the party. So in that situation, it is persynal interest where she attacks people in the party, to shake loose someone she wants to date. And as it turns out, this was a disaster situation for the party, involving four females all knowing the party and three triangles or potential triangles among them, in addition to more females who knew the four romantically or potentially romantically involved. So again, one should think about what that means just ideologically when the party encourages people to abandon science in connection to the party. How could the enemy possibly come up with a better wrecking scheme on the organizational level?
Now there are people who are weak-kneed, like Julia Kristeva, who stayed with the "Communist Party" of France, despite subjective feelings of being more radical, only because the "Communist Party" controlled her academic career. To this, MIM would say, that sort of dynamic is OK for anti-war and environmentalist organizations, but we need to pitch people from the party, so they get the message to think harder before they do something like Kristeva did.
Here we in the imperialist countries, we must make proper use of the economic surplus and not just take the negative aspects of being bought off. We need people to realize, "hey, in the Third World, maybe some comrades have to depend on a party salary or Soviet job, but not me here." That can mean greater scientific independence, with the only drawback of having no proletarian motivation to use that potential independence. Of course, all things equal though, having resources makes it easier for a scientist to stand independently and carry out the science plus guts formula, instead of fearing being fired or not climbing a career ladder. Not getting used to taking up the wrong line to gain a paycheck can also free up resources for others with less access to surplus-value.
Kristeva had every capability of reaching a higher level of class consciousness, but she did not get the message of how she needed to be dumped until she could think for herself, so she degenerated into a complete non-communist with a focus on therapy for change. Even among lumpen, we can tell them to follow a Huey Newton, because he knows how things work on the street in relation to the enemy. We do not have to tell even the most illiterate oppressed persyn to "love Huey Newton." We want the lumpen to use its brains, but we can imagine that it's a total travesty to go to a Kristeva with a love-the-party line, because it encourages scientific passivity and gutlessness, as if there were not enough of that going around. Besides which, one cannot assume that once that line is out there that Kristeva would not actually decide to pick a party based on who she was in love with and people need to think a lot more concretely about the implications of something like that. Scientists or potential scientists like Kristeva are also flesh-and-blood people. If the standard is set low, by basically saying, "no one, not even the party has figured out any guiding light on this question," then that's another way that science goes out the window. If the bourgeois intellectuals Lenin said would compose the party throw out science, it's over with. The party will become a counterrevolutionary impediment.
There are people who never understand that science is a life-and-death question. Rumsfeld said that the Iraqi insurgents were "dead-enders." He was wrong with his prediction, because conditions caused a steady flow of insurgent recruits. On the other hand, there are some kinds of revisionism that imperialists could "mop-up" if they wanted to. They do not want to, because the revisionists spreading illusions divide the proletariat, while the real communists cannot be mopped up, because they represent real exploited and oppressed people of the Third World. Capitalism cannot end exploitation without giving up its class character, so there will continue to be a stream of communists, not just dead-enders.
Another example of the mass line we have learned about, even in connection to intellectuals is Ward Churchill. The University of Colorado said Ward Churchill could just be removed, and it was Lynne Cheney behind that. So ideas about dead-enders went from the White House to the University of Colorado.
On the other hand, we can imagine if we had gone to the University of Colorado and said, "love Ward Churchill," this actually would have set back the scientific struggle. So in this case, we the proletarian side are not dead-enders, but for the immediate future, neither are the imperialists. That means in that context, we absolutely have to give the imperialists their shot at Ward Churchill. So if they say Ward Churchill is like diseased excess toe-nail that can just be removed without recurrence of disease, we have to listen to them say that and let people chew on that, let them try to prove their point. If we say "love Ward Churchill," we sabotage him by making him look dumb. We say Ward Churchill is not a dead-ender, because the oppression of the First Nations cannot be extirpated from history, despite casino and Uncle $am money being spread around to promote profits of Disney productions on the North American natives.
As it turns out, there was no scientific substance in the University of Colorado's Law School-led report and the University of Colorado had to admit that its report on Churchill compiled by several scholars has no academic merit--none. It took a long time for the University of Colorado to figure that out, but hey, it could have been worse. Hence, the University of Colorado position is that Churchill's scholarship is accountable for its truth-value, but the University of Colorado has yet to come up with any reasons to fire him that have truth value. At least they did not wait till he was dead to pay attention to the critics of Churchill's critics. The University of Colorado administration admits that it wants Churchill purged for ideological reasons, not truth reasons.
As we stated in the example of a lesbian outsider attacking the party, the reverse is also true concerning love/fuzz logic. Some people go for years without letting a Churchill state his case. They do not read what he says or maybe they have a question that Churchill never was asked to confront. That is a breakdown in mass line and it can come as a what-goes-around-comes-around from denying truth. If we say KKK leader David Duke is wrong when he says 2+2=4, then we cannot be surprised when people tune out Ward Churchill for equally stupid reasons.
In this case, it's gutlessness in Churchill's attackers. They do not read Churchill's works and MIM's defenses. Yet the attackers are prepared to nuke him, with all the international consequences. This is a breakdown for emotional reasons, and MIM always said fear leads to ignorance. What difference does it make if we "love Ward Churchill." Whether or not smallpox killed as many as Ward Churchill says maybe even months or years after a settler leaves a place is a question that can be asked of third party public health professionals, as many as one could want. It has nothing to do with Churchill in a certain way, but one must have the guts to ask. MIM did and published the result on our web page. The scholars at the University of Colorado did not ask the question, and the result was racism. MIM has been vindicated on this point time and time again, but only among people who cool off enough to ask, and fortunately they do, sometimes years after a struggle, as our 25 years can attest to.
It's not an accident that these parties involved with "love X," their leaders are also involved in calling enemies "masses." MIM refers to its circles as masses, but contrary to other organizations, when we see them getting fuzzed, we "write them off." Before MIM writes someone off, critics may accuse MIM of struggling too hard. So sometimes even with the same individual, MIM gets it from both sides, for struggling too hard and also for writing off.
Sometimes people will not admit their real reasons for opposing the party. Other times they are too fearful to know. In yet other cases, enemies orchestrate a whole series of attacks on the party under cover of being dumb racists, when in fact they are smart chauvinists. Worst of all are the people who say they trust you or agree with you to your face but act on something different. The reason for some could be as simple as wanting to show "left face" to someone in the party she hopes to date and it could be as complicated as someone's serving an intelligence agency. If we leave someone in MIM circles as "masses," but he is fearful and thus clogging information flow, chauvinism and racism will be the inevitable result. If the enemy is not removed, there can be no mass line. There are way too many possibilities at any given time to always have the leaders hand-holding so-called masses and predicting what the eff is wrong. Sometimes what is wrong is simply spy infiltration.
MIM pointed out where love of country leads in a recent review on patriotism. Patriotism is one kind of love/fear thing that can make people dumb and often it is covered for by pseudo-feminism, as we point out in another review.
To return to our point about vanguard status, much of what has happened to MIM MIM will not discuss in public. MIM asserts that it has a "tested" quality since before the foundation of the organization. We do not expect people to believe that to the extent or degree that we would say that is true, but if they interact with us, that's what they can expect is our self-image and they can expect predictable behavior along those lines. People who trust us at one point and then fuzz over at others can expect to be written off as de facto white chauvinist. The mass line breaks down when questions are settled at levels of trust and love. Only by purging the fuzzed is the mass line restored.