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

Replying to Ward Churchill: A Note on Party History

by a veteran comrade, January 2006

Recently Ward Churchill spoke in public to how he has criticized Maoists in the past, thanked MIM in public for our work on his case and incidentally named MIM as a spin-off from another organization.(1) He probably found some justification for this, because the existing history document on MIM develops an answer to only one question--why things did not work out with one organization and MIM. By answering one question that some people had on their minds, we distorted by omission our own history.

MIM members were never members of an organization to form an offshoot off of. It would be more accurate to say that we were an offshoot from the Guardian (a now defunct independent radical newspaper) or Monthly Review (an academic press), because more comrades had contact with those than the parties under consideration. So in evaluating an organization in the 1980s, we could look at Mao to compare with but also Monthly Review or the Guardian. In the end, H.W. Edwards, J. Sakai, Arghiri Emmanuel, Mark Selden (in spite of himself), Charles Bettelheim and Catharine MacKinnon ended up being more important to MIM than any particular party inside u.$. borders once the state smashed the Black Panthers. It was the Black Panthers who did the most to advance all struggles in the 1960s, but once they were gone, the baton fell into the hands of academia.

There was only one MIM predecessor comrade truly wondering why a party claiming to oppose Soviet revisionism and upholding the Cultural Revolution would not be the one to join. The other comrades could see the reasoning, but had scattered doubts which we hoped to resolve at that time. MIM predecessors also came out of different organizations with different political orientations.

In particular, one comrade who evaluated the writing and speaking of the particular organization in question considered that organization opaque. Today we would say that comrade was correct: they are opaque because they have nothing concrete to say. It's a case of the politics driving the poor English, not the other way around.

In retrospect, it is perhaps interesting that one comrade held that a party should be able to do a better job addressing the concrete conditions of the class structure than academia could. If not, it was still the duty of the comrades to join a party and fix that condition was the reasoning. Now, we see that not every organization calling itself a party has the capability like Mao did of knowing reality better than academia. There is no automatic property of parties that says they will do a better job than Monthly Review; even though, Mao himself did a better job than the non-party intellectuals of his day.

MIM came to the discussion of the Cultural Revolution and Soviet revisionism via many sources, but the best source was Monthly Review. Mark Selden put forward the split between the pro-Mao forces and the pro-Deng forces in China. Based on such academic sources, one comrade predicted there would be a party inside u.$. borders upholding the so-called Gang of Four and went looking for it.

Monthly Review author Charles Bettelheim argued with Monthly Review editor Sweezy on why capitalist restoration was possible and what the theory behind it was. On the other hand, Sweezy was in a geopolitical haze which disabled him on the question of the Soviet Union. He could not say the USSR was state-capitalist while he was standing in New York. As a result he made a lot of twists and turns that he should not have. As a result, we cannot go back to his work and say "he told us so." We can only give him the credit for making his press available for that discussion.

In retrospect, there was an error that could have been addressed more quickly. One might expect a party to do a better job pulling together an analysis of the class structure than a writer named Arghiri Emmanuel for the Monthly Review, but it is not necessarily so. It could just be true that at a given time, the analysis of party-activists was not that advanced relative to what could be found in academia. Alternatively, in the day, Mao did a better job than what one would have found in academic discussion of class structure in China. We should not presume that just because some people say they are a party following Lenin that they actually can carry out anything close to what they are saying. The reverse is also true: when the true intellectual history of the 1980s comes out, the pro-Deng Xiaoping party of the time will get a write-up as pivotal figures in the struggle for post-modernism in academia.

Since the 1980s, MIM has identified in the open the problem with the Wang Ming line. At the time, the original comrades had a hard time believing that any party would simply reproduce the Wang Ming line while calling themselves scientific communists. When anarchists and religious pacifists independently and without prompting said that they could understand what MIM was saying as "concrete," we could see this was a slap in the face to the party one of us sought to join. (This particular article is a theoretical history, but the question is how one speaks at public events of people from various backgrounds.)

The belief in MIM predecessor circles at the time was that the activists needed more time to explain themselves or that somehow we MIM comrades must be in error, because no one could possibly take the Wang Ming line wholesale today-- with Wang Ming's evasion of concrete conditions and, as was to become relevant in 1984, the emphasis on the need for a Comintern. MIM comrades quite expected concrete analysis from the scientific communist organizations to surpass that of Monthly Review. The party should be able to say with the facts at hand how the u.$. conditions differ from the rest of the world's conditions.

Instead, when we read the newspaper of the Wang Ming followers at that time, we would see talk about workers in general, but nothing specific on their conditions. On the one hand, the justification was to oppose what Lenin called economism. On the other hand, there was nothing concrete about anything covered. The same occurred with the distinction between the labor aristocracy and the proletariat. There were these two groups--but nothing interesting done with them. We fully expected to be swayed by concrete analysis that the white worker was in fact exploited and we expected to see detailed evidence in articles about white worker struggles. Yet reading the newspaper of the party in question we never saw anything like that. Other organizations have formed taking the opposite stance, that the silence on concrete detail is indicative of why there needs to be new pro-white worker organizations, so in a sense the Wang Ming problem can also be seen as not good enough for some labor aristocracy activists. Some prefer a shrouded approach to con oppressed nation people into the labor aristocracy movement while others prefer an open chauvinist appeal.

Simultaneously, in the early and mid-1980s, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin started receiving major bourgeois press. In the earliest 1980s, MIM predecessors divided on MacKinnon but basically concurred that the Christian Right was too dangerous to ally with as MacKinnon was doing. Later, when MacKinnon started talking about Marxism and when she started taking heat as "Stalinist," MIM's attitude changed through intervention by non-party people.

Even though the media reactionaries called MacKinnon and Dworkin "Stalinist" and started blaming them for the line "all sex is rape" by 1986 (2) and even though MacKinnon herself said theory was necessary for the feminist movement and advocated study of Marx at the time, there was another huge silence from the Wang Ming followers inside u.$. borders. The hoopla was so great that non-party types of people told MIM in all seriousness "you'll probably like MacKinnon" based on the correctly perceived sense that MIM was pro-Stalin and in favor of a structural approach to gender, not a lifestyle approach. In other words, the subject had become heated enough that even non-party types of people were saying that the Marxist approach to social structure went with what MacKinnon was saying at the time. It was another case where non-party people reading MacKinnon in academia or following the media uproar were more advanced than the people belonging to alleged vanguard parties.

Here was a chance to jump in on something that caught the public's imagination, and MacKinnnon/Dworkin discussion came with some catchy slogans, but all the other organizations ideologically descended from SDS passed on it. So for this, it would be impossible to say MIM is an offshoot from any organization.

Recently, the largest faction from SDS issued about a paragraph on MacKinnon almost 20 years too late. Another organization still existing not only passed on the subject, but takes up the topic soley to spread ad hominem attacks on MIM. You will find no line from them reviewing Catharine MacKinnon, but you will find their top-ranking leaders and rank-and-file busy spreading lifestyle criticisms of MIM in league with the state. These same exact people were in league with the state when it spread the now-documented COINTELPRO type criticisms of Huey Newton becoming gay in prison. We've heard these kinds of criticisms before. For people of female biology, it was "people who take up the MacKinnon line need a good f***" with the corollary that in their sub-reformist organization, they will get it. The traitorous males who took up the line must not "be a good f*." Next came the vulgarizations that since all sex is rape, so sex should not be done--again coming from the busy-body Wang Ming slanderers who never said the petty- bourgeoisie should quit their businesses or professions as individuals! In 2006, discussion is still at that level among organizations calling themselves vanguard parties other than MIM--which by itself is a complete vindication for why MIM absolutely has to go on taking the heat for "all sex is rape." People who cannot handle any question apart from the psychological motivations for saying it need a bribe if at all possible to stay as far away from vanguard parties as possible. That is the trashy condition of the Amerikan individualist so-called Left today and many Liberal currents in the Third World as well.

It was OK for many to point out the abolition of foot-binding in China, but the Wang Mingers fronting for the exploiters saw the MacKinnon line on gender as too divisive for their Comintern-building aspirations. They passed on MacKinnon completely while simultaneously boosting light-weight theorists of the Freudian persuasion for the wimmin's movement. Those organizations that did say something about MacKinnon equated her with the Christian Right only, the way today's Liberal Freudians also associate MIM's line with Christianity while simultaneously attacking MIM in Christian fashion when it suits them.

When later in the 1980s, MIM formulated its cardinal principles and separated from revisionism, the question of whether the labor aristocracy being the majority should be one of them came up. The other cardinals had to do with the Soviet Union and China, when the echo of Mao's struggle with Wang Ming came to mind. It was about time to name something in our own conditions as cardinal. And if there were one question to separate on, it should be the labor aristocracy and imperialist exploitation standing at the intersection of both class and nation. Prior to that time, MIM was itself too much under the influence of the Wang Ming line to have questions internal to imperialist countries as cardinal questions. Today we see the same thing with some other organizations, including some who talk about People's Wars. They want to make Peru or Nepal cardinal, not what they are doing themselves in their own countries.

When we say that there is no white proletariat and that the labor aristocracy is actually the majority inside imperialist country borders excluding Russia, we are making a report on concrete conditions. It's either true or it is not and it is not a theory question. The hundreds of millions of people in question either appropriate labor or they don't. It could be a difficult question to observe, but it is observable and concrete. It is not an airy discussion of mechanisms or definitions. It's also something one cannot have both ways: a majority cannot both be exploiter and exploited at the same time. So the nature of concrete, materialist analysis is that it has an edge and cannot be manipulated to be two things at once.

One organization in the 1980s was attempting an airy Wang Ming approach to Mao and downplaying the concrete conditions of u.$. imperialism hugely. The Wang Mingers whitened Mao sufficiently for international Trotskyist consumption. Other organizations did attempt to synthesize a scientific communist approach to U.$. conditions. One very influential leader in MIM circles was Jerry Tung. However, what he contributed that was unique quickly turned out to be false and his organization dissolved in the sense of being a scientific communist vanguard. Since that organization and some other relevant organizations are not around anymore it becomes easy to over-simplify the past and say that everyone is an offshoot from an organization that is still around. There was a plurality of organizations and given the difficulty the imperialist countries had in dealing with economic and gender privileges, we should also credit various academics as more advanced than anything we see in the imperialist country parties other than MIM and its allies.

Note:
1. http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct05/Frank1010.htm
2. http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinno.htm ; Despite MacKinnon's denials, it's pretty clear from reading her works that "all sex is rape" is there some times word-for-word, as her critics pointed out.

Other times, MacKinnon should have had greater political courage or confidence in the international proletariat. When asked if "all sex is rape," MacKinnon should have said "yes."