The four quadrants of struggle and the joint
dictatorship of the proletariat
April 25, 2004
When it comes to the struggle against revisionism,
the worst material conditions for success are
found in the imperialist
countries. Here we will talk about why the
struggle against revisionism has advanced the least
in the imperialist countries in the last 20 years.
The bad 'ole 1980s
When MIM formed in the 1980s, we
had to adopt positions against Soviet and Chinese
revisionism and for protracted People's Wars that
were unpopular globally. We can say that in Peru at
the same time the masses were just taking up the question of
People's War, but in most of the Third World, the
kind of line MIM was putting forward was yet to
become an issue for the masses. The victories
against colonialism were too fresh historically as
were the devastating lessons of revisionism in
China. It seemed a round of People's Wars was
bubbling up as a possibility, but not as anything
definite and well-organized.
On the question of Soviet revisionism, again the
MIM position was unpopular. We even heard
intellectuals refuse to break with Soviet revisionism on
the basis that we could not oppose revisionism as
long as Reagan denounced the Soviet Union. Such
people sacrificed the long-run goals of the
international communist movement for short-term
comfort. Today, we hear more or less the same thing
from the intelligentsia saying we must echo the
Democrats and social-democrats on the conditions of the
"workers," who are in fact bought-off labor aristocrats
whose demands lead only to justification for predatory
wars.
Nor can it be said that the influence of Soviet
revisionism was only in its homeland and the u$a.
Brezhnev revisionism influenced all armed
struggles throughout the world. Even in the Philippines,
where the people are well-aware of the
similarities of their conditions to the situation
in rural China, thoughts about dependency on
Soviet aid and urban insurrection distorted the
process of the people's struggle.
The international situation for anti-revisionism today
That was the 1980s, an ugly decade in many ways.
Today there is People's War in Nepal, India,
Turkey, the Philippines and Peru-- and maybe more
places that we are uncertain of. Excluding China
because it's in another quadrant of the struggle,
the masses have already brought forward the issue
in the countries comprising the majority or close
to the majority of the Third World. The conscious
forces for People's War are well on their way to
spreading the fire throughout the oppressed
nations and they stand in a place of relative
strength compared with the other quadrants of
struggle for the international proletariat.
The death of the social-imperialist Soviet Union
cleared the way for progress to reach the
revisionist-led quadrant. It is sad to say that
many Maoists and would-be Maoists had to see this
happen before they took up Maoism. Today we are facing
a similar situation in the imperialist countries,
where many are waiting to see what happens instead of
lending far-sighted ideological aid where it is needed in the
struggle against revisionism.
The material facts of
life have led to a process of evaluation and re-
evaluation of Soviet history. Despite the wishes
of the imperialists, it is inevitable that a
proletarian pole will again arise in the
revisionist-led quadrant. Already Maoist texts in
the Russian language have been furnished by the
Russian Maoist Party and comrades in Yugoslavia
distribute "Is Yugoslavia a Socialist Country,"
also by Mao. All of this has to do with clarifying
when there was and was not a socialist camp.
With the examples of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the
"Gang of Four" concretely existing in those countries,
it's only a matter of time before the youth turn their
attention to subjects that were "uncool" in
the Brezhnev era.
Stalin and Mao also told us a large question
matter globally for the communists was handling
the contradiction among imperialist powers
correctly. This indeed is a troublesome area,
because with the collapse of the Soviet bloc,
there is an appearance of imperialist unity under
one u.$. leader. Yet even on this question, the
proletariat is in relatively good shape, because
the imperialists themselves are ad-libbing as they
go along, as the case of Iraq and the "coalition"
led by the united $tates proves. Contrary to Hardt
and Negri who wrote Empire,
we do not believe that the united $tates
succeeded in making itself the global culture with
one completely interlocking network of
imperialism. Questions regarding the European
Union, China and Russia are still hot on both the
imperialist and proletarian agendas. The national
question and ideologies such as Pan-Africanism are
going to become more important with time, not less,
because of how super-profits are shaping the
political boundaries of the world.
There is a reason that the imperialist countries
are now the place where the struggle against
revisionism is at the greatest relative disadvantage. As
Mao pointed out, the semi-feudal, semi-colonial
countries are more or less in a permanent state of
conditions suitable for revolution. As de-
colonization recedes in time, we see another round
of People's Wars arising, this time with even more
precise consciousness than the de-colonization
struggle. Likewise, on the question of Soviet
revisionism, the entire country collapsed. There
could hardly be a better basis for defeating
revisionism and when it comes to the European
Union, China and Russia, the international
proletariat is only equally in the dark with the
imperialists themselves how the new intra-
imperialist struggles are going to shape up to the
advantage of the proletariat.
Hence, although MIM is now on more favorable
international ground than when it formed in the
1980s, still many people who joined in the 1980s
quit MIM circles: they degenerated. Numerically
there were a lot fewer degenerates than from the
1960s, but nonetheless, we have seen people
willing to take on the Reagan-Bush years fall away
from struggle. We said there was a bourgeoisie in
the party in the Soviet Union and that it faced
cyclical crisis. We quickly proved right when the
bourgeoisie in the party restored outright
capitalism in the Soviet Union and Albania.
We said an intense level of class
conflict is going on in the Third World and the
new round of People's Wars arose. Yet despite
being right about these facts, people who joined
the MIM-led struggle during more difficult times
have quit our struggle! This is something not so important
in numbers to the international proletariat, but more
as an illustration of something more general about
social-democracy, revisionism and outright apolitical
consumerism in the imperialist countries.
There is a reason for that degeneration process we
still see in the imperialist countries. While many
conditions internationally are more favorable to
us at MIM, especially given our long-held stances,
parasitism has further increased since the 1980s.
There was nothing like the collapse of the Soviet Union
to directly affect the imperialist country petty-bourgeoisie.
We can thank Deng Xiaoping for handing over
massive surplus-value to the imperialists to keep
them alive another generation. While death-blows
to revisionism continue to rain down in the ex-
Soviet bloc and the Third World, 90% of those
calling themselves "Marxist" in the imperialist
countries still do not show any sense of the
changes in the last two decades. They remain unaware for
instance that the industrial workers in China's
export sector aimed at imperialist countries alone
are much more numerous and producing more
surplus-value than any imperialist country.
Request for ideological assistance in the struggle against revisionism
Today we face a point where it makes much more
sense for the People's Wars in the Third World to
lend ideological aid to the struggle against
revisionism in the imperialist countries than
vice-versa. History shows that we Maoists cannot
surrender a quadrant of the struggle without
consequences to the other quadrants.
The failure to generalize the MIM line to the
international level has the most consequences in
our struggle with the ex-Soviet people, the
Chinese people, the national bourgeoisie and the
educated members of the Third World. These groups
are all special targets of imperialism shooting
sugar-coated bullets via consumerism. The ex-
Soviet people must be made aware of the facts of
political economy, that the failure of consumerist
bourgeois Liberalism in the ex-Soviet Union and
Soviet Union is not an accident. Economic
development occurred in the imperialist countries
thanks to generations of genocidal militarism
against First Nations and Blacks followed by
countless wars on the Third World. These facts
generated super-profits and a decadent
consumerism, but it is not possible for the whole
world to do what the world's elite 10% has done.
It is not that early capitalism produced such
decadent wealth. It was the imperialism that made
these capitalist countries rich. These countries
accumulated their old wealth that way and more
than half of what they consume today comes from
the Third World.
Without accurate knowledge of surplus-value flows
as indicated by the MIM line, intra-proletarian
fighting is apt to break out across the world as
in ex-Yugoslavia. It is often the case that a
slightly different average economic position
coincides with ethnicity. In many places, it is
even possible to find a 10% national minority that
is better off than the rest of the proletariat in
a country. That minority often finds itself the
target of a violent struggle; even though that
minority is not mostly exploiters. The true
picture of imperialist exploitation and the
sources of global poverty and uneven economic
development must be known and that means a
decisive struggle against imperialist country
revisionism.
A failure to grasp this question can even give
rise to bourgeois humynism in the Third World
People's Wars. By this reasoning, and counter to
Peking Review under Mao, we should
lie about the class structure in the united $tates
and count the petty-bourgeoisie allied with
imperialism as "brothers and sisters" of the
international proletariat. Doing this we will make
excuses for the more than 90% of Amerika that
actively favors ongoing armed action against
Afghanistan's liberation fighters. Supporting
bourgeois humynism is helpful to the bourgeoisie,
because it minimizes the support we can gain for
the People's Wars by paralyzing the so-called
Marxists who have to attack the labor aristocracy
as part of the revolution against active enemies.
What is more--should a party come to power in the
Third World using People's War, but without
getting the labor aristocracy question straight,
such a party will become the new comprador prop of
social-democratic leaders of imperialism. The
labor aristocracy or petty-bourgeoisie allied with
imperialism is merely another doorway to
imperialism.
This brings us to why we have to have a joint
dictatorship of the oppressed nations over
imperialism including the legally-working
population of imperialism. The exploiters have to
stop exploiting before they are ready to join in
the dictatorship of the proletariat. For that
reason, there is a task that has to be completed
before we can establish the dictatorship of the
proletariat. As Lenin said, without distinguishing
from the labor aristocracy,
dictatorship of the proletariat is impossible.
The general facts should be known to the Third
World comrades. In 1980, a majority of whites in
the u$a became white collar for the first time. Trends toward the
white-collar sector developed to make the
unproductive sector 75% or 80% of the population
in the majority-exploiter imperialist countries.
These two facts alone are sufficient to justify
all of MIM Thought formulated for most of the
imperialist countries.
All the rest of the complaints against MIM stem
from our critics' hatred of Marx, Engels, Lenin,
Stalin and Mao. Some representatives of the labor
aristocracy babble on about "workers" exploited by
producing above the value of their labor-power
with miraculous powers of productivity
granted by a rejuvenating and ever-powerful imperialism
and its technology. However, Lenin had already settled
this question: white-collar workers are not proletarians.
They are less revolutionary according to Lenin and Stalin
than the agrarian petty-bourgeoisie known as
peasants. The party that does not know this is
not aiming at dictatorship of the proletariat or
is not lending ideological aid to the struggle in
the imperialist countries.
For the foreseeable future,
there is no material basis for thinking
that a proletarian party can seize power in the united $tates
and continue to overpower the ex-imperialist country petty-bourgeoisie
by itself. All those oppressed nations with an interest
in the overthrow of imperialism must see to the job themselves
as the multinational Red Army of the oppressed and exploited
did in Germany with the aid of a minority of German comrades.
International comrades! It is time to check
yourselves! We need your help in the struggle
against revisionism. Are you going to help us
in the imperialist countries? Did
MIM give you the wrong information about the
extent of white-collar employment in the United $tates,
England, France etc? Did you intend to revise
the definition of "proletarian" and "dictatorship of the
proletariat" to be counter to Lenin? Did you fall for
generations of gradual revisionism from Amerikans and
social-democracy from Europeans? If not, then how can
any party oppose the MIM line for the imperialist countries?