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.

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

Have a cow

Not by Bart Simpson

Cartoon character of the "Simpsons" TV series, Bart Simpson tells his parents not to "have a cow" over things that should not overly concern them. In truth, it often seems that people's priorities are misplaced. MIM is here inventing the "have a cow scale," from one to five, to describe an emphasis of priorities.

5 cows out of 5 in today's proletarian world according to Maoists refers to: Imperialist invasion.

5 cows out of 5 in the bourgeois world would be: Death.

A 4.5 cow situation for scientific communists would be feudalism, a situation where surplus in the economy is not great enough to have produced industrial domination. Destroying feudalism is a high priority goal for us Maoists.

For the bourgeoisie, a 4.5 might be having a friend steal one's boyfriend or girlfriend and be twisted about it--one of the worst things that can happen in an ordinary bourgeois life. So a 1 cow situation would be losing the boyfriend or girlfriend (significant other) and then a 2 cow situation would be having a friend take the boyfriend or girlfriend. Then a 3 cow situation would be having the new couple rub it in.

So it hurts much at first, but one can lose a significant other--a totally legitimate one cow situation by bourgeois standards. Questions arise when a friend is involved in taking away the significant other. Now imagine a situation where we lose a significant other and three or four years later, our ex-best friend makes a point of calling us to the bar. There our ex-best friend parades our ex-significant other past us and decides not to sit with us at the bar. Then we think: wow, three or four years later and still trying to rub it in. These are twisted people! And we begin to wonder about social matters based on this-- maybe a theory of sadism. That would be at least a bourgeois three out of five cows situation. When we realize that we chose these people as our best friends and ex-significant others, maybe we get more than three out of five cows!

An interesting aside about pornography, had our friend gotten up at the bar and admitted to the world his/her evil without mentioning our name, we would consider that an act toward friendship. If our name came out, it could be that our drunken ex-best-friend was still just trying to enjoy the situation as pornography. So when we think about these matters, it is possible one may go from a bourgeois with stress to reading Marx for theoretical purposes. Yet just because a high-stress bourgeois decides to read Marx and does a thorough job, it does not mean that any of the concerns of the high-stress bourgeois are proletarian concerns.

No matter what other problems a people may have, Mao said they would not be able to resolve them as long as an imperialist invasion was going on. So whatever priority we Marxists might subjectively attach to various oppressions, Mao said we have to take care of the invasion first. In this way Mao gained his reputation as the theoretician of Third World nationalism. MIM still upholds Mao on this point and combats those seeking to take away the Third World's champion for bourgeois purposes.