MIM Notes No. 202      January 15, 2000

Letters

IWW member hates MIM

Dear MIM Notes,

Never before have I been more insulted than after reading your poor 
excuse for a paper. Boy, who else do you want to alienate? Us "so-called 
workers" should just let you vanguardists fight the revolution while we 
stand and enjoy the fruits of our slave-labor.

So you're gonna seize power through armed struggle? Have you told the 
rest of us, or, strongarm us into abiding into your totalitarian program? 
Do you have all the guns you need? Do you have your 3rd world proletarian 
army reading "Guerilla Warfare"? But you seem so keen on dictators (Mao; 
I guess all we need is a prolific 'leader' to show us the way.)

As far as your use of the term, "Maoist," what an insult to the Chinese 
people that were terrorized by statists and rulers before, during, and 
after Mao's tenure. Those people have endured more than you will ever 
have to in your cozy, phony academic environment.

Any praise of the "Cultural Revolution" just makes me wanna gag. Do you 
think killing anyone in such a jack-booted fashion will build or lend 
credence to any movement? Your proposed tactics reek of right wing 
militia ideas, except they have guns.

I don't even know why I'm wasting my time with you. You're either a 
police front or just so god damned stupid. Why do you use aliases anyway? 
The state has already won by making you think that you have to become 
some kind of underground faction. How do you think that you can actually 
reach people if you don't tell them who you are?

"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There 
can be no peace so long as hunger are found among millions of working 
people and the few who make up the employing class have all the good 
things in life.

"Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the 
world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, 
abolish the wage system, and life in harmony with the earth...

"It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with 
capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for the 
every day struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when 
capitalism is overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the 
structure of the new society within the shell of the old."

Excerpts of the preamble of the IWW constitution. (Yes, I'm a member).

--Minneapolis reader, October 1999

MIM responds: IWW stands for Industrial Workers of the World, an acronym 
that should be reserved for an organization that stands for the interests 
of the majority of the world's workers. This IWW member demonstrates his 
First World chauvinism so well in this letter it is almost unnecessary to 
study the history of the IWW at all (but we do refer interested readers 
to the book Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai for 
a good look at the chauvinist failure of labor union organizing in this 
country. Available from MIM for $10.)

The part of the IWW constitution quoted in this letter is correct that 
the battle between the two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, 
must go on. But the IWW fails miserably to carry out a materialist 
analysis of these classes. And they continue to run after the Amerikan 
supporters of the bourgeoisie: the white working class. The Amerikan 
labor aristocracy has been bought off as a class and it does not have a 
material interest in revolution. But the IWW hopes that if they call this 
labor aristocracy proletariat enough times it will magically turn into 
one.

This Amerikan worker is terrified of armed struggle and totalitarian 
dictators interfering with his comfy life and telling him what to do. So 
ignorant of history is he that he thinks the conditions for the people of 
China were the same under all those "statists" including Mao. He ignores 
the tremendous improvements made by the Maoist government. Under Mao the 
Chinese experienced dramatic increases in life expectancy. They made 
tremendous advances in equality for wimmin. There were remarkable 
improvements in health care. And there were many other changes made in 
Maoist China that saved lives and improved standard and quality of life 
for the peasants and workers which are apparently meaningless to this 
chauvinist anarchist who clings to his phony Amerikan freedoms for dear 
life.

Our comrades in the Philippines, in Peru, in India, Turkey, East Timor, 
and all around the world who are fighting against imperialist backed 
fascists know the difference between a terrorist dictatorship of the 
bourgeoisie and a people's dictatorship of the proletariat. To them there 
is a very real difference between life and death, between starving and 
having food, between dying of preventable diseases and having health 
care. To them the utopian ideas of the anarchists are no better than a 
religion offering the people false gods to worship while they die.

The lives of the communists who have been killed because of their fight 
for equality of all people, including the Black Panther Party members who 
were shot in cold blood or thrown in prison for life, the Young Lords 
Party members, the American Indian Movement members and all our other 
comrades who have been locked up or killed because they were fighting 
against imperialism, are meaningless to this IWW chauvinist. With the 
Amerikan government on the side of the Amerikan labor movement, it's no 
surprise the reader thinks security precautions like aliases are 
unnecessary.

While the IWW chauvinists will sit around in their comfortable Amerikan 
world, enjoying a standard of living only possible with the exploitation 
of the Third World, waiting for the Amerikan workers to act against their 
material interests and join the anti-imperialist struggle, the Maoist 
parties around the world will continue the long and real battle to defeat 
imperialism once and for all.

RYCL(b) accepts an anarchist: Russian comrades update situation

Dear MIM:

Concerning the RYCL(b), the Maoist Platform and us two MIM comrades to be 
mentioned in your proposed article for MIM Notes: No, you can't say "the 
advancement of Maoism in Russia by the RYCL(b)." That is simply not true. 
The RYCL(b) is becoming more and more of an agglomeration of young 
leftists of every shade and hue, not even necessarily Marxists.

Do you know about the case of Larissa Shchiptsova, the famed Anarcho-
Communist jailed in Krasnodar for alleged preparations of a terrorist 
attack on fascist pig Governor Nikolai Kondratenko? Although the case was 
obviously framed and Larissa was a womyn of delicate health and in the 
last months of her pregnancy, she was given a harsh prison sentence 
(something like 8 years) and her son was born behind prison walls. 

Well, now she has been released (thanks to public pressure on the 
authorities) and ... has become a member of the RYCL(b). She is a heroic 
womyn and a living legend of our Left, but she entered RYCL(b) _without_ 
renouncing her Anarchism. Which means that being a Marxist is no longer a 
necessary precondition for membership in the RYCL(b).

Besides, as we told you, we had a powerful crypto-Trot faction (now 
rooted out, but not entirely); there are those orientated towards the 
Russian Communist Workers' Party (dogmatic, pre-Maoist, Stalinism plus 
some Brezhnevite and neo-Trot overtones); perhaps, these form a slight 
majority; there are New Left people (the Frankfurt School, situationism) 
and many others, up to and including fans of Muammar al-Qaddafi.

The RYCL(b) has plainly no coherent ideological or programmatic line now. 
A Trotskyist criticizing our organization maybe had something there when 
he called its line "Stalinist pluralism". The RYCL(b) is not MIM, not 
even PLP -- it is the late-sixties SDS in a very attenuated form.

--MIM comrade in Russia

December, 1999.

[mim3

mim.org notes: To assist MIM comrades in Russia, send money to MIM and 
mark it for the ex-Soviet section.]