[mim3@mim.org comments: The 1994 Congress was consumed with issues of internal organization, which MIM already reported in MT#8 on anarchism. However, some other issues also arose and we present some of the resolutions here.]
The conclusion of the 1994 MIM Congress in August brought to light that N. Amerikan* youth have made a remarkable pledge to the international proletariat: to make up the ground lost by the older's generation's revisionism.
The CPUSA is now well-known to have frittered away the lives of many one-time revolutionaries by falling into absolutely decrepit revisionism. Thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union, now the CPUSA's descendants of the Committees of Correspondence sit around debating if Leninism (not Maoism of course) has any relevance at all.
Of the 1960s generation, the Black Panthers were smashed and the descendants of SDS often seem half-baked when SDS managed to leave anything behind at all. Today, MIM celebrates the generation of punk, grunge and rap, not the generation of Woodstock and we pledge that this generation of youth will make the difference, and succeed where our predecessors did not stay the course or failed to have a realistic approach. MIM will do this where a commitment of a whole life time to mundane tasks may be necessary without even seeing socialism.
With grim and ceaseless dedication, a new generation seeks to put the Maoist parties of N. Amerika on the map--with little help from anyone over 40. While the Third World proletariat has heard of the "collapse of communism" and the supposed invincibility of "the American way," let it also hear that the youth of N. Amerika already know better.
We at MIM do not wish to overestimate our accomplishments or brag at the expense of the international communist movement. No, as all Maoists know, Mao counseled that there be no armed struggle in the imperialist countries until the bourgeoisie is "completely helpless." This is a great disadvantage of our parties in N. Amerika--no serious experience in armed struggle.
We must also remind our readers that it would be a lie to tell our Third World comrades that there is a revolutionary Euro-Amerikan proletariat. No, that would only lead to alliances of betrayal and the wasting of any hard-earned successes of the international proletariat.
Nonetheless, we at MIM are proud of some things we believe unprecedented in the international communist movement. One is our ten year success in recruiting youth and putting youth in responsible positions. In many parties throughout the world, the tradition is not to recruit a comrade until properly seasoned and beyond age 25. Prior to that time, youth take roles in youth leagues, where among other things, they do not observe democratic centralism. MIM means no disrespect to those parties with this tradition, but N. Amerikan youth have decided to dedicate themselves to MIM and take up responsible posts in order to make good on the ground lost to revisionism and counter-revolution. MIM and its predecessors have always had teenagers for editors and people in their twenties as ambassadors to foreign communist parties--in addition to other highly honorable youth who do not join the party but take up a joint practice as MIM associates.
Where Amerikan culture is summed up by "What does the billboard say? Play, play and forget the movement" some N. Amerikan youth have given up their play time to live under strenuous rules of democratic centralism. Yet, when we look at our young Third World comrades give their lives in armed struggle against U.S. imperialism, how can we deny that N. Amerikan youth should also make sacrifices?
Something else we are proud of at MIM is that we have managed the leadership transition problem. History shows in all the major communist parties in the world, the death or imprisonment of communist leaders is a great moment for the revisionists to make their move and kill the communist movement from within. Meanwhile, we at MIM have had teens and twenty-somethings move in and through the leadership again and again. It is not accomplished without difficulty, but it is something we are gaining ever greater experience in.
To accomplish these great things would be enough, but MIM has also managed without a personality cult. Admittedly in our first years we were too anarchist in not crediting individual leaders at all--so comrades did not even have pseudonyms, because there was complete anonymity. Yet, now we do hold comrades responsible and give them credit for their lines and we manage this without a personality cult.
In China, where individualism was never popular, the personality cult of Mao was almost a good thing opposing Confucianism. In comparison with the situation in N. Amerika where Anglo-Saxon individualism is so rampant, we have had to stress processes affecting the whole party and the need to follow leaders, even to the point where we manage transitions so far without multi-candidate elections. Such elections in many countries may be culturally progressive, but in N. Amerika, they come with considerable baggage that MIM will put up with only reluctantly.
The MIM youth do not walk into a huge organization like the Communist Party of the Philippines, which has a myriad of non-party mass organizations under proletarian leadership. Instead, the MIM youth know that they must study and train even more arduously than their counterparts in China and the old Soviet Union, because of the failure of their elders.
For some comrades so young, it is unreasonable to ask that they have already read "a dozen or so" or "a few dozen" Marxist classics as Mao advised even when he opposed book-worship. Yet, the MIM youth take responsible positions and pledge to make up the ground. When questions of theory come up, they do not shirk them, because it is only with science that it is possible to stand one's ground firmly as a communist and answer the many challenges that arise, especially for communists in N. Amerika. For this reason, the vast majority of youth at MIM were able to rebuke the anarchist wind raised by X at the 1994 Congress. For all youth in the party, the anarchist wind raised anew the issue of how to defend MIM's cardinal principles without fail both in recruiting and in internal struggle against revisionism when that becomes necessary.
In short, it is a great burden to shoulder for the youth and the whole party seeking to play catch-up so that we can join our comrades in Peru and the Philippines in a more equal way. Walking into MIM is to walk into arduous struggle. It can be hell, but we know it is the hell bequeathed to us and we cannot wish it away. The hellfires we walk through are still as yet nothing compared with gunfire the liberation struggles in the Third World face. Without the benefit of enemy gunfire, we must temper ourselves even more through criticism and self-criticism or we will surely wilt under real fire if we don't fall into reformism first.
As for youth, likewise for the people who happen to have a female biology in MIM. The bourgeoisie says that women and youth cannot rule, but MIM disproves it on a daily basis. For some time, MIM has had a leadership composed of at least two-thirds women, not by quota, but thanks to arduous struggle.
We did not get here by taking classes with social workers or by studying Gloria Steinem on self-esteem. Instead, as fierce as the struggle against revisionism, there is a struggle against pseudo-feminism. Again, in the battle against pseudo-feminism, we have learned that there are rewards of struggle. The biological women of MIM have countered both the decadent ideology of leisure time in N. Amerika and the related notion that women should sit back and enjoy patriarchy. In this struggle, the MIM comrades have not forgotten for a single minute that they lead a relatively privileged life--a male life--compared with women of the Third World.
The MIM youth and women have pledged to go through hell's fires--leadership transitions, obeying democratic-centralism, criticism and self-criticism, fighting pseudo-feminism and steeling themselves in theoretical study. When they are done with the devil, they will be ready like Mao said "to storm Heaven itself."
*N. Amerika refers to that geographic entity usually known as the United States and Canada, but which in fact contains a multitude of nationalities. We exclude Mexico from this rendering of "North Amerika" with a "k," because Mexico is an oppressed nation, and not one benefiting from imperialism and imperialism's national chauvinism.
Contact MIM by writing mim@mim.org