MIM gives ACT-UP San Francisco web page mixed review June 5th 2001 marks the 20th anniversary of the official recognition of the AIDS emergency (not yet named AIDS) by the U.S. government.(1) It is appropriate at this time to review the web site of the ACT-UP San Francisco.(2) Organizer David Pasquarelli has already written to MIM to criticize MIM for taking a drug company view of the AIDS crisis, but MIM believes that Pasquarelli has thrown out the baby of science with the bathwater of imperialism, and this is something that millions of people cannot afford to do. On the one hand, we agree with Pasquarelli that the drug companies brainwash the public into viewing health and illness in ways that are most profitable to them. For this reason, there is a grain of truth in saying that AIDS is not caused by the HIV virus. Death from AIDS occurs from a lack of education, poor nutrition, poor health care, overwork and MIM would add--a lack of drugs. On the other hand, ACT-UP San Francisco disagrees with MIM and points to the personal experiences of some individuals who have survived with HIV for 20 years without taking any of the drugs offered by drug companies. MIM believes this type of thinking to be rampant in settler society, where historically each oppressor individual had a patch of land stolen from Indians. The struggle and focus on private property has so contaminated thought that even in the midst of record college enrollments many of the most educated settlers can not understand statistical reasoning--only individual pseudo-truths. It is of course true that some individuals have survived the whole AIDS epidemic with the HIV virus and without taking drugs. Likewise there are smokers who smoke their whole lives without getting lung cancer. The real question is whether an HIV positive persyn has a higher percentage chance of surviving with or without the drugs. ACT-UP San Francisco calls the AIDS drugs "poison."(3) Pasquarelli and ACT-UP San Francisco offer no evidence on this point, so we disagree squarely with their view that the AIDS epidemic is over and that talking about it is just so much gay-bashing. In itself, this is to lack a certain internationalism in perspective. While there is definitely anti-gay/lesbian hysteria, the focus of the epidemic is now where the principal contradiction has always been--between imperialism and the oppressed nations. On other issues--we do not disagree with the San Francisco ACT-UP much. It favors animal liberation and points to a very interesting article about primates that can now speak English;(4) there is also a plug for freeing marijuana and getting over the hype of "reefer madness"; the organization correctly attacks Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist preacher organizing a faction of the New Right, and, finally ACT-UP San Francsico also favors opening the gay/lesbian sex houses/ bath houses and says that straight ones are still open in San Francisco. On all these points and above all the overall social causes of disease we can agree with Pasquarelli and San Francisco ACT- UP. At the same time, there is a difference of priorities in our work. All the above issues are exactly the most popular of the marginal issues that people of the oppressor nation concern themselves with while millions of people in the world starve every year. It's not so much that we disagree but that we have proletarian priorities. Right now, as with all health issues, the people of the Third World bear the brunt of imperialism's distribution of AIDS. The way forward is not to be found in post-modernist identity politics but in the example of the Cultural Revolution in China where the proletarian-led masses destroy the bourgeois agenda of science without throwing out the application of science itself. Notes: 1. http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/aids/ 2. http://www.actupsf.com/index.htm 3. http://www.actupsf.com/nav/aids/aids.htm 4. http://www.actupsf.com/nav/animal/animal.htm. For MIM's position on veganism and animal rights, see http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/wim/cong/vegan.html.