MIM NOTES No. 196        October 15, 1999	

Pot rally needs proletarian politics

Forty thousand people attended the Pot Rally of Boston, September 
18th according to bourgeois television and 60,000 according to the 
rally organizers. MIM and RAIL attended specifically as a part of 
the End the Amerikkkan Lockdown month to build consciousness 
around the criminal injustice system. We injected some proletarian 
politics into the event dominated by libertarians and the local 
radio station, WBCN, 104.1 FM. We brought a banner opposing the 
"Amerikkkan lockdown," handed out over 1,000 flyers for upcoming 
events on national oppression and distributed hundreds of MIM 
Notes.

The Libertarian Party provided speakers and a large banner across 
the main podium at the event. Libertarians believe there should be 
"less government" and more persynal "liberty" to smoke pot and do 
other things as long as they don't harm others. They tend to 
overlook the harm that people with private property do, such as 
destroying the environment for profit. They do not understand that 
the cause of the growth of government is underlying social 
conflicts. As long as anyone's life is endangered by other people 
and as long as there is not economic cooperation giving rise to 
peaceful social relations, there will be those seeking to build 
governments to repress others. In fact, we communists ourselves 
will build governments and do so openly (thereby accountably) -- 
knowing that we cannot do otherwise until we succeed in creating 
economic cooperation of the nationalities and an end to 
patriarchy.

Conflicts over property etc. must be resolved in order that 
government may disappear. The Libertarians and Republicans in the 
United $tates talk a lot about reducing big government, but they 
never address the underlying causes for why big government arises 
and so they are consistent failures as judged by their rhetoric or 
original principles. Only the communists address the causes and 
have an actual scientific plan for abolishing government in the 
long-run.

We do not want people to smoke pot, because we believe it is 
mostly a form of escapism. The solution is to address why people 
feel such a need to escape. Yet the need to escape is also caused 
by the existence of repressive government and boring workplaces -- 
again something addressed fully by communism.

The reactionaries talk about pot as a "gateway drug," which means 
they believe smoking pot leads to using other more dangerous 
drugs. Yet, if the government were more accountable or gone 
completely, there would be no pseudo-rebellion and no "cool" 
factor in smoking pot. Pot would be no more a gateway to serious 
drugs than caffeine is.

The widespread use of pot signifies the people's distrust for 
scientific and school authorities who warned for decades about the 
dire consequences of using pot. Just as religious politics blocks 
the proper teaching of evolution in biology classes, high school 
students can see from experience that the marijuana-related 
science of their teachers is a poor excuse for politics of another 
sort.

We Maoists of North Amerika believe the government's war on pot is 
a huge waste of people's time and money for the benefit of those 
who police and prosecutors do not dare to hassle. The waste of the 
criminal injustice system is much greater than the damage of pot-
smoking escapism.

"Of the 695,200 marijuana arrests in 1997, approximately 87% 
(604,824) were for simple possession. The remaining 13% (90,376) 
were for "sale/manufacture", an FBI category which includes 
marijuana grown for personal use or purely medical purposes. These 
new FBI statistics indicate that one marijuana smoker is arrested 
every 45 seconds in America."(1)

As usual there is no way to pretend that the laws are enforced 
equally. Hence, the marijuana laws are just another tool of 
national oppression. "Blacks and Hispanics make up 20 percent of 
the marijuana smokers in the United States, but comprise 58 
percent of the marijuana offenders sentenced under federal law 
last year."(2) 18 million U.$. people have smoked marijuana in the 
last year, but the law targets those oppressed nationalities that 
have not been caught for other offenses. The law is not serious 
about putting 18 million people into prison; it only serves as 
another excuse for the police and prosecutors to put away whoever 
they want -- as proved by the national chauvinist results.

White people should look out, because the rush to lock up so-
called minorities rubs off on them too. Even without counting 
oppressed nationality peoples, the United $tates would be the 
second-worst state in the world per capita imprisonment-wise. The 
war on pot is one big reason why.

The attendees of these rallies organized by the libertarians and 
NORML (the lobby effort to legalize marijuana) are usually very 
open minded. However, they lack the drive or political 
consciousness to bring victory very quickly.

We dare surmise that if 50,000 people had shown up in Boston 
"waving pictures of Chairman Mao" as the counterrevolutionary 
Beatles used to say, there'd be some reforms thrown their way in a 
hurry. Every year the marijuana activists organize huge rallies 
and fail in their narrowly focussed goals. Only now with the help 
of the medical establishment are they making headway in 
California, Arizona and New Mexico.

Beyond the embarrassment of organizing so many people with so 
little to show for it, it's about time the pot rally organizers 
started to notice some deeper aspects of U.$. society. For 
instance, they should not talk about preserving liberty in a 
country where the rate of imprisonment is the highest in the 
world. The libertarians in particular just do not get it. There is 
nothing in their philosophy that prepares them for the fact that 
it is the United $tates that leads the world in imprisonment, 
contrary to "free country" rhetoric being spewed everywhere. The 
Maoist analysis of the class and nation reasons for repression are 
necessary to understand why government is so big when it comes to 
cracking down on pot and everything else. 

Notes:
1. www.norml.org/legal/index.shtml
2. www.norml.org/facts/index.shtml