From the MIM Theory editor, MC5
MIM Theory stuff is too long to go with the story conference idea. MIM Theory is more like an academic journal. You submit stuff. You do stuff never done before. There is a lot of gross pragmatism in people coming to me and telling me they want stuff assigned (and then not doing it anyway).
I know that people implicitly hate to do a lot of work and then have someone say this or that is obviously wrong and probably be right in the assertion. There is no way to avoid that kind of ideological struggle and it should not be avoided on general questions of line that we are going to put out for the masses. Remember "fear no criticism."
The solution is not to try to guess in advance what each of us in the party is thinking down to the last detail, especially on questions where our thinking is relatively impoverished. Generally if we need some theory of our own it's cause we want to go beyond what we have. The solution is to do a thorough study of what we are talking about before we write about it. Someone who gets all the pamphlets together on the national question is going to do a better job on the national question than anyone else in the party who doesn't do the same arduous reading. You can have all the great conferences and editors you want, but it will still amount to the ignorant leading the misdirected. Committees and editors can not substitute for reading when it comes to research for written propaganda. Some day we'll change all that, but right now the best science is in the printed word; although you have to do a lot of sifting in this bourgeois world to get some nuggets of proletarian science.
Of course, I can tell you in a general way what is hot out there and you can tell me the same. Obviously we have to do "Soviet bloc collapse," the "failure of socialism" and the national question. At this time of year we also know that there are the Take-Back-the-Night marches. It doesn't take a genius or a committee to see any of that, so we shouldn't waste our time with it.
I rather like what I saw XX do on Workers World and Workers Vanguard. THAT'S AN EXAMPLE OF HOW YOU KNOW WHEN SOMETHING HAS TO BE DONE, FROM STRUGGLES, not from MC5 or a committee telling you what to do. That's how you're going to have the most enthusiasm too. It's what Mao called getting your own bearings. If you are out there in struggle with the masses somehow (and there are a billion ways to do it), you know what people are saying and then you realize why you have to nuke certain lines. Implicitly you want to nuke certain lines because you have a different sense of reality more in line with that of the international proletariat. You want to nuke incorrect ideas because you implicitly want to extol something more correct that you have already seen or read about, something going toward communism. You bum out when people you know, maybe right under your nose, go for some bourgeois, chauvinist shit with a history of oppressiveness.
XX had struggles with opportunists, revisionists and misled people and then realized the crying need to say something, for people like the youth sucked in by Workers Vanguard. In this case, XX noticed a debate, looked into it, took sides and then wrote something.
That's what everyone needs to do. I think when they do, they'll realize the need to keep up with sectarians and pseudo-feminists and liberals on a number of questions in fine detail all the time. They'll also realize what particular work they can do beyond what MIM has already done/distributed. Also from struggling with the masses, people can come to grips with what priorities they should place in their work. I have the job of plugging theoretical work, but theoretical work has its place relative to other work.
The question IS NOT what work needs to be done. Everyone knows we should be reviewing every so-called communist paper and journal in every issue of MIM Theory, not to mention pseudo-feminism, nationalism, bourgeois propaganda on the formerly socialist countries etc. That's not to mention getting up-to-date and thorough on the movements abroad. No one needs anybody to tell them that all that needs to be done.
That stuff alone would occupy a lot of comrades. The question is what are people inspired to do: that has a lot to do with struggle and believing that you are capable of advanced theoretical struggle. When you can connect what you are doing to struggles with the masses and the impact that can have, that's when you realize you need to do some theoretical work.
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