MIM Notes 211 June 1, 2000 PAPER TIGERS Barbie for President! The toy manufacturing giant, Mattel, is now marketing "Barbie for President 2000". She wears a blue power suit, pearls, and high heels. Mattel's press release said the idea of Barbie for President is to "'broaden girls' vision of what's possible.'" Former Colorado Democratic Representative Patricia Schroeder complained in an op-ed piece in the New York Times that this Barbie sends the wrong message to girls and wimmin because the message really is: "the only way to imagine a woman in the White House is to put Barbie there." According the Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, the average Amerikan girl has eight Barbies. MIM looks forward to the day when the average girl has as many volumes of Marx, Lenin and Mao and is arming herself with revolutionary knowledge. MIM agrees with Schroeder that Barbie for President shortchanges wimmin the way other patriarchal messages do. But we also say that the wrong message is to encourage wimmin to head to the White House. The real road to wimmin's liberation from patriarchy is not through the Amerikan political system, but through the overthrow of imperialism and communist revolution! Notes: The New York Times, 1 May 2000, p. A27. The Boston Globe, 1 May 2000, p. A19. MIM recommends reading MIM Theory 2/3, Gender and Revolutionary Feminism, for more about liberation from patriarchy, and MIM Theory 7, Proletarian Feminist Revolutionary Nationalism, for more about proletarian feminism and national liberation. Both are $6 from the address on page 2. Police and neo-Nazi nationalists commit executions in France In Lille, France, an unarmed Algerian was shot and killed by the police. As is often the case, the police claimed self-defense.(1) The next day, in the south of France, the police shot and killed an armed Romanian bank robber.(2) The lesson of these two summary executions is clear: while state killing of prisoners has been illegal in France since about 1984, summary execution is, here as elsewhere part and parcel of ordinary police procedure. As if this violence were not enough, nationalists in Brittany are suspected in the recent terrorist attack on a McDonalds which killed a young worker.(3) Our critique of these first two deaths is simply that summary execution is unfair and must be stopped. We also critique the terrorist attack in Brittany for the simple reason that terrorism without propaganda is a recipe for disaster. Further, many neo-Nazi Celtic nationalists are in fact reactionary and are not at all revolutionary. They seek independence for Brittany from France and the subjection of wimmin, the return to traditional authority and the same Nazi pipe dream which led to the blood bath of 1939 to 1945. The practice of the nationalist reactionaries in Brittany not only targets the wrong persons, it also does so with little propaganda and even less line. The reaction of the Celtic nationalists to capitalist oppression is introversion and irrational violence. Without a serious reconsideration of their fascist ideology, they will be isolated, ignored and ridiculed as they kill the wrong people for the wrong reason. We look forward to their progressive isolation, treachery, and destruction by our common enemy, the international capitalist elite. Unless the Celtic nationalists understand their fundamental errors we will be only too happy to see them go. Notes: 1 Reuters, 16 April 2000, fr.new.yahoo.com/00416/3/bn01.html AP fr.new.yahoo.com/00416/3/blol.html 2. AP fr.new.yahoo.com/00416/3/bsij.html 3.www.liberation.com (attentat) Search terms 'police, banque, mort' and 'banque, marseille' Patents on gas help destroy environment by a MIM-led study group In the u.$. innovation and invention only take place if you bribe people. That's the idea behind the patent system, which is as old as the u.s. constitution. The writers of the constitution decided to remand inventors with a monopoly grant over their patented invention. This means no one else can build or sell the invention without the patent owner's permission. If someone invents a cure for cancer and patents it you can't use it unless you buy it from them. Recently, a California court ruled that Texaco, Chevron and Exxon have to pay $69 million to Unocal Corporation for violating Unocal's patent when they made lower emission gas.(1) This means companies can't make environmentally friendly gas without paying Unocal. Regulations require that gasoline sold after June 1, 2000, would have to meet new environmental standards. This helps Unocal reap even more cash at the cost of the environment. Companies that say they would sell gas that meets the regulations now say they won't. They claim to be outraged that Unocal dared to patent a recipe for a commodity like gasoline, but they are more likely just upset that they didn't think of it first. Unocal defends itself by pointing out that other companies patent safety features like seat belts and air bags. Of course, for all their complaining, the other gas companies admit they plan to pass any costs on to consumers -- who are in turn reaping benefits from imperialist super-exploitation abroad. The state of California asked the court to reconsider the case because Unocal helped get the regulation passed and then secretly got a patent that took advantage of the regulations. The lesson to be learned here is not that Unocal is some bad company that took advantage of everyone. A system (read: capitalism) that says that ideas should be owned and not shared, even at the expense of health, welfare and safety, is wasteful and destructive. Under capitalism, this is the only way that inventors get motivation. After capitalism is wiped out, ideas can be used to help everyone without requiring a profit motive. Notes: The Wall Street Journal, 1 May 2000. Liberals' hypocritical privacy rhetoric exposed On May 1 the Klinton Administration made military quality tracking signals available to civilian and commercial users. These signals provide five to ten times greater accuracy than previous technology. Though the military signal has been distorted, downgrading the 30-60 ft accuracy signal, users of the civilian technology will be able to track a person within a 300 foot radius. The so-called deregulation of this Global Positioning System (GPS) technology allows for greater state surveillance of the masses. Although the state currently uses this technology in its military and intelligence operations, so-called deregulation puts it in the hands of more users. The threat is that the government may require users to divulge information -- and many users may be happy to do so. For example, FCC regulations obligate cell phone companies to answer to pig demands for cell-user locations.(1) In related decisions, Klinton is pushing for more expansive protections for consumers by restricting commercial access to individuals' financial and medical records.(2) Such restrictions could play an important role in bourgeois society -- for example, they could block setting up prisoner DNA data banks. But these restrictions also illustrate the fundamental shortcoming of liberal privacy rights rhetoric: Only those who can actually afford to have medical and financial records need protection. It is clear that the U$ government has no interest in really upholding so-called rights to privacy. While trying to put on a good show for the petty-bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie spies on oppressed peoples, revolutionaries, and even itself. MIM says that there are no rights, only power struggles. The only people who will receive access to rights are those who have access to power. On a tactical reason, this is why MIM is an underground party. Since the oppressed masses do not have access to power within the belly of the beast, we must assume that the pigs are putting all efforts into making sure the masses don't get power.(3) Notes: 1. The New York Times, 1 Mary 2000. 2. The Boston Globe, 1 May 2000. 3. See e.g. "What is a pig question?" in What is the Maoist Internationalist Movement? ($2). Wheeler Snow Charges Chinese State with Degeneration The Los Angeles Times recently reported that Lois Wheeler Snow, the widow of Maoist-sympathizing historian and author Edgar Snow, has threatened to remove his ashes from Beijing University. Wheeler Snow rightly points out that the Chinese government has degenerated from a revolutionary socialist state to a security state concerned primarily with maintaining its power. To this we would add that the Chinese state's degeneration into state capitalism also threatens to secure China as a neo-colony of the imperialist system. Edgar Snow's book ITAL Red Star Over China END, which the Times refers to as one of the best read books of non-fiction in the 20th century, chronicled the growth of the Chinese Communist Party and the revolutionary, anti-imperialist movement during the 1930s. Edgar Snow was the first westerner to interview Mao and other Communist Party leaders. The significance of the book lies just as much in Snow's own discovery that the growing strength of the Party was due to its unwavering commitment to the oppressed Chinese masses and to building the anti- imperialist struggle against the Japanese. Wheeler Snow points to the crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989 as evidence that "basic human rights are being trampled underfoot." Leaving her husband's ashes there, where they have been since his death in 1972, she says, "makes a mockery of all that he stood for." While this is true, MIM again stresses that Chinese Communist Party degeneration began not in 1989, but in 1976, when the state capitalist counter-revolution derailed the socialist revolution. The LA Times unwittingly supports this by pointing to the cause of increasing social unrest in the countryside. Referring to state suppression of a rebellion by 20,000 laid off mine workers in northeast China, the Times writes, "There may be more such episodes if China proceeds with its [capitalist] economic reform program and, in the process, lays off more people." To this we respond, "yes, exactly right!" Note: Los Angeles Times, 5 April 2000. For more on Chinese state capitalism order The Capitalist Roaders are still on the Capitalist Road ($10) or The Political Economy of Counterrevolution in China: 1976-84 ($10) from MIM.