This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.

Maoist Internationalist Movement

1997 MIM Congress Session II

Resolutions against Empiricism and Individualism

[Except #1, resolutions below passed unanimously--mim3@mim.org]

1. "Biological wimmin are oppressed" and "biological wimmin as a group are oppressed" are both true statements.

2. Margaret Thatcher is not gender oppressed. That does not mean biological wimmin are not gender oppressed.

3. Marbles and post-modernism

You have three friends who you trade marbles with and they always give you the same distribution of colors when you trade 100 marbles. Jill gives you 100 blue marbles. Jane gives you one hundred marbles exactly evenly divided along the color spectrum of light with an equal space between each marble in terms of the wavelength difference, so you legitimately feel like you have one of everything. Janet gives you five black marbles and 95 marbles exactly evenly divided into colors on the visible spectrum.

When reporting this in theory or newspaper articles in terms of the three Js, we will say, Jill gave us blue marbles; Janet gave us black marbles and Jane gave us a chaos or diversity of marbles. (We will accuse her of spontaneity at best.) We will not generalize about Jane, but we will generalize about both Jill and Janet.

The 95 evenly divided marbles from Janet will not cause us to dispute our generalization that Janet give out black marbles. We may choose to ignore Janet altogether because we have other things to talk about, but we will not ignore her tendency to give out black marbles if we do address her marbles.

The bourgeoisie is going to try to put people with 5 out of 100 marbles red in place of party leaders with 95 out of 100 marbles red. This is a matter of concern. The party wants better than 5 out of 100 marbles red, which is why party selection is very strict.

If the bourgeoisie gets its way with the leadership of the communist marble factories, people will always be short a few red marbles. The bourgeoisie and its white marbles will continue to bore the world if spontaneity or low-grade red leadership prevails.

4. In MN it shall continue to be correct to speak concretely of all strands of oppression or even pseudo-oppression without perfectly laying out exactly how it all fits together. Lenin believed the newspaper should be a tribune of the people and the people should learn that the communists stand on the right side of things, not necessarily that they would understand exactly why. This is not to say if an MN article succeeds in making a theoretical point it will be wrong, only that it is not obligated to explain every last difficult thought about three strands.

In MT we will continue to put forward three strands theory and make assertions where we are bound to receive a brutal beating, because we are anti-Liberal and we know we have to make assertive generalizations. Specifically MT articles will not be deemed incorect for leaving out the angle from the point of view of strands other than nation, class and gender.

MT will continue to permit discussions of the communist future where all potential strands are discussed. Such will be considered philosophical discussion, and will be stricitly contrasted with material generalizing about current or past history in which we will be obliged to put forward a theory opposing infinite-strand theory.

5. In theory work, if we DO talk about other potential strands as they exist currently or historically, we should do so only to herd people into the SCIENTIFIC anti-Liberal three strands camp, never just to water down a generalization about the three strands. It would be permissible to talk about current lesbian battering statistics to prove that three strands has it all covered.

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