Response To Rashid on Our Logic and Opportunism

This is a quick response to Rashid’s recent response to us titled, “MIM (Prisons) Preaches Logic but Practices Petty Bourgeois Opportunism (2016).” Rashid is the Minister of Defense of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter, which we have a history of both work and struggle with. While we appreciate the time ey has put into responding to us, we continue to find eir responses to be largely unhelpful. Here we give some comments on this document, section-by-section. It won’t be too useful until you’ve at least read Rashid’s latest article, but you should probably also read 100 Reasons Why Rashid Needs to STFU About MIM(Prisons), which is a line-by-line response to Rashid’s essay “MIM or MLM?”. In Rashid’s article above ey says ey is only responding to our article Study Logic, Don’t End Up Like Rashid. The section headers below all come from Rashid’s latest polemic.

We Got MIMP’s Line All Wrong

If you read our full response you’d see examples of this, for example Rashid wrote:

“MIMP maintains the position that there is no First World proletariat as one of their ‘cardinal points’ and declares anyone who even ‘consciously disagrees’ with it their enemy.(1)16 Which is problematic and anti-Maoist on several points. First it demonstrates that MIMP determines friends and enemies not by class but rather by one’s willingness to blindly and uncritically accept whatever they say. And not only must one not speak out in disagreement, they must not even disagree in conscious thought. Even the liberal bourgeois doesn’t take thought policing this far! The U.S. constitution is even interpreted by its bourgeois courts to protect one from punishment for their beliefs(2). We need only go as far as the quote at the beginning of this article to see that Maoists don’t repress contrary views, not even those of actual enemies and reactionaries(3). But MIMP opened their polemic contending that they ‘cannot forgive’(3) us for daring to disagree with their class analysis of Amerika and VLA line. But let’s look at the PB.

And we responded previously:

MIM(Prisons): 1. No, this is a lie. See the note number 16, and please tell us where is the word “enemy.” Rashid is looking at the criteria to join the United Struggle from Within, and extrapolating that to who we consider enemies. 2. Whoa, MIM(Prisons) is PUNISHING people for their beliefs? That’s amazing! Maybe instead of punishing prisoners we should start punishing the mailroom staff who censor our materials for being “gang related.” Or maybe we should start punishing the cops who shoot oppressed nation people dead in the streets. To say we have the power to punish anyone is ridiculous. This is liberal anti-communist propaganda. 3. Did we hurt your feelings? What is the punishment we are exacting on you?

Not mentioning “USW” doesn’t mean you didn’t confuse aspects of USW with our study courses. And again, you misstated MIM(Prisons)’s line as well. You go on in your latest essay,

“They implicitly admit [that their membership is petty-bourgeois, white, Amerikan settlers], but accuse us of playing identity politics for bringing it up, which is odd and hypocritical; since it is they who charge this group to be enemies…”

That would only be hypocritical if we subscribed to identity politics and didn’t understand statistics, neither of which are true. So yeah, you’re still playing into identity politics with this very statement, and you don’t understand how we look at things differently.

Personalizing Politics

“MIMP then argues that we shouldn’t base the correctness or incorrectness of a position on who stated it. Curiously – and again self-contradictorily – their entire polemic from title to text emphasizes ‘Rashid’ as who said this and that…”

Uh yeah, you wrote the article we were criticizing. We didn’t say it was right or wrong based on who you are or whether you were right or wrong in the past, as you imply that we should do later in your article. Your attempts to prove your grasp of logic here are not panning out too well.

The rest of this section cites old Marxist texts in an attempt to refute our line. We already addressed this as dogmatic and non-dialectical. If you are as familiar with our work as you claim, you’ll know that we have plenty of quotes on our side too.

Are We Fishing for Information on MIMP’s Members?

There’s some good counter examples to critique our position on security brought up here. But since Rashid approaches this from a completely antithetical class analysis of our conditions, there is no point in having a debate with em on this topic. Of course Rashid would propose an organizing strategy that is the same as those who were successful in revolutionary situations because ey believes we are in a potentially revolutionary situation in the United $tates.

“The masses’ right to know those who presume to lead them and represent their interests, and to supervise them is a ‘people’s tactic.’ Hiding from the people while claiming to represent their interests without their say so and supervision is an elitist ‘pig tactic.’ Especially, as MIMP doesn’t dispute that it’s absurd and an insult to the people’s intelligence for them to act as if they believe that the pigs don’t know who they are.”

We must ask Rashid, “right to know” what? Most of our work is quite public, and we get so much feedback from the masses on it that we struggle to keep up with it all. But Rashid seems to feel that they need to know what we look like, where we live, what TV shows we watch, in order to fully judge us as leaders. Our position is the complete opposite, that we must train the masses to judge people on political practice and line, and to ignore those other things. Those other things are what lead people to be seduced by misleadership for subjective reasons.

And we’ve addressed the “pigs already know everything” line as being incorrect elsewhere. In short, they don’t know everything, so them knowing something is not a reason to disregard security. Second, if you’re good at security, the pigs that know stuff are not the kind of pigs that are going to attack you until you start to wield some real power.

Do We Know MIMP’s Political Line?

Are we still fighting over the “rags” line? All we did is state that we thought “lumpen” usually translated to “rags” and not to “broken” as Rashid claimed. Nowhere do we put that forth as our definition of lumpenproletariat. We stand by the article in question addressing the labor aristocracy as being more correct than Rashid in defining proletariat, when we quoted Marx as calling them those “who have nothing to lose but their chains.”

It’s funny that Rashid wants to keep claiming that we have not printed eir articles in our newsletter. Yet ey has not shown us any newsletter where ey has printed our articles. And we’d wager that we’ve distributed more copies of their previous article “MIM or MLM?” (with our comments inserted) than the NABPP-PC has distributed of that same article.

MIMP’s Mass Work… Or Lack Thereof

We could hypothesize that we do more mass work than the NABPP-PC based on our having members in the free world. But we don’t really know their practice in all that detail. So we don’t talk shit about it. And again, we don’t even agree on a definition of the masses, so what’s the point of debating who does more “mass work”?

MIMP’s Opportunism

First of all, people change, that’s dialectics. Their politics change. You could be a great Maoist theoretician and then start promoting all kinds of revisionism. It happens. It is metaphysics, and promoting a cult of persynality to argue otherwise. Secondly, the study pack on Dialectical Materialism by Rashid that we’ve distributed in the past was a basic overview of the topic. It does not demonstrate an application of dialectical materialism in analyzing the real world. As far as the praise ey pulls from our review of Defying the Tomb, it should be noted that the following paragraph reads:

“Rashid’s book is also worth studying alongside this review to better distinguish the revisionist line of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party - Prison Chapter (NABPP-PC) with the MIM line. While claiming to represent a dialectal materialist assessment of the world we live in, the camp that includes the NABPP-PC, and Tom Big Warrior’s (TBW) Red Heart Warrior Society have dogmatically stuck to positions on the oppression and exploitation of Amerikans that have no basis in reality. We will take some space to address this question at the end, as it has not been thoroughly addressed in public to our knowledge.”

We wrote that five years ago, and it has been even longer that we have openly considered the NABPP-PC to be revisionist. So our more recent critiques of Rashid’s writings are consistent with our long-held position on their work. With this latest essay it seems maybe we were wrong that Rashid wasn’t familiar enough with our work to write eir previous critiques, ey just insists on misrepresenting us and then calling us opportunists when we only agree with some of the things ey has said.

We opened this can of worms of critiquing each others’ methods with the idea that we’d use it as a teaching moment for our readers. And studying logic is certainly useful. But going back and forth about how the other side is illogical maybe isn’t. The main issue here, the dividing line question between MIM(Prisons) and the NABPP-PC is the labor aristocracy question. And we’ve given up debating that point with them unless they put forth an actual analysis of real world economics, and not dogmatism. So if you want to understand our line there, don’t spend your time studying these articles, instead check out our resources on the labor aristocracy. Or, if you’re looking for some lighter reading on the topic, MIM’s white proletarian myths page is a good place to start.