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.

Reviewed Books


Sebastian Haffner, Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918- 1919, Banner Press, Chicago: 1986

This is an excellent book published in 1968 [unsure if book is from 1986 or 1968--18] by a German journalist concerned with why Germany never had its often-prophesied proletarian revolution.

Haffner explains why the right, the Social Democrats and even the Spartacists (communists) wrote attempted proletarian revolution out of the history books.

The military and the Kaiser of Germany had nothing but disdain for the uprising of the masses of Germany at the end of World War I. It was only so much chaos and rioting to them.

Social Democratic leaders who came to rule civilian Germany shared the traditional ruling class's contempt for the attempts at governance by the soldiers, sailors and workers of Germany, but added the element of betrayal. Haffner shows in no uncertain terms how the Social Democrats paved the way for Hitler and saw to the assassination of communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Finally, Haffner unintentionally detailed how Luxemburg and Liebknecht lagged behind the times. Despite a sympathetic after word by Richard Bruch, the overall impression of the book is that the Spartacists were too little too late. Nothing could be more indicative than that the party only formed after the initial events of the revolution.

It appears that Liebknecht in particular was in touch with the anti-militarist movement and even symbolized it, but he did not lead it, nor did his party.

The only hesitation that a Leninist could have with the book is Haffner's own tendency to see the period in terms of personalities, some more stupid than others. The book is excellent political history, but the underlying political economy of the period is left in the dark. On wishes there were a counterpart to Haffner's book on the political economy of Germany.

Overall Failure of a Revolution should be required reading on Germany because it teaches many political lessons chronicling a heroic but naive uprising against militarism and counterrevolution. (From MN 29, March 14, 1987)

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World Hunger: Twelve Myths, by Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, Grove Press, 1986.

This book seeks to prove that there is enough food in the world to end world hunger, but political structures perpetuate mass starvation.

In a brief 149 pages, the authors bring potent facts to bear to support numerous theories of theirs (taken from others) that could fill several books. For example, Lappe cites a World Bank study to show that overpopulation results from the conditions of the poor. When the poor enjoy a secure life, they no longer have so many children. (p.27) Another example used to criticize export-led development is that Kenyan export income quadrupled between 1970 and 1980, but malnutrition increased. (p. 87) Also, Lappe and Collins make an interesting feminist observation that where women are central to the economy and enjoy reproductive rights, hunger is lower. As such, women oppose the trend towards the cash- crop economy in their own subsistence interests. (p. 90)

Ultimately though, the book does not deserve to be on the MIM literature list in this author's opinion because it has a worked out line on capitalism and socialism. The Lappe and Collins support a populist capitalism against landlord oligarchies. They do not oppose private property, but only want the peasants to be able to use the land as part of their right not to be hungry. They do not oppose market society, but they support income redistribution so that the world's half a billion starving people can eat. (p. 81,82)

They have praise for Nicaragua, Mondragon and China. They side with the Eritreans. They criticize the struggle between the East and West blocs as detracting from efforts to end world hunger. Their line on the Soviet Union is that it is a "statist" society.

Lappe and Collins consciously oppose state intervention in the market except where necessary to save the market from statist revolution. They view "statism" as an "economic dogma" and they support civil liberties as necessary to ending world hunger.

If there is such a thing as progressive capitalist revolution against feudalism anymore, Lappe and Collins would be spokespeople for the ascendant capitalist class. On these grounds one could argue that the book deserves MIM's support as part of the two-stage revolution still required in parts of the Third World. Perhaps this review is only the beginning of a debate within MIM about the book. If so, cast this vote against distributing it. (From MN 30, May 29, 1987)

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Shenfan, William Hinton, 1984, Vintage Books, 790 pages.

This is the sequel to Fanshen which was about the liberation of China from landlord and Japanese imperialist rule. Shenfan is primarily about the Great Leap through the Cultural Revolution. There is a sprinkling of material both before and after this time period. William Hinton stands out above other China scholars for the length of time he has spent in China. He has lived in one village called Long Bow at various time periods for years at a time.

The work is dense with empirical detail and insights into everyday concerns of Chinese peasants. Aside from his descriptions, Hinton's interviews and reporting of conversation is excellent. He reports what the peasants say, what the Communist Party says and what the highest government officials say. By asking his questions at different time periods, he manages to obtain different answers from different people for each question. Even within each time period, he shows the lines of controversy.

Hinton is of Marxist inspiration and has some strong words for the current regime. On the other hand, he spends several hundred pages detailing the Cultural Revolution as a merely opportunist power struggle among individuals and ultimately factions of millions of people. This book is not appropriate for special distribution efforts. His analysis of power struggle is rather too simple and does not offer an alternative. Still, Shenfan is very valuable for the reader interested in China. (from MN 31, July 7, 1987)

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Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Bebe Moore Campbell, G.P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1992

by MC12

Here is a novel that gains its power from the assumed authenticity of its portrayal, its attention to details of daily life, and its supposed basis in historical events. Despite writing that is at times powerful and provocative, the book is ultimately a fraud, as much for its phony depiction of Black helplessness and white helpfulness - as for its mistelling of history.

The novel is based on the killing of Emmett Till by white supremacists in Mississippi in 1955. The killing is at the beginning of the novel, and the rest of the story makes up the lives of those involved from 1955 to the present.

The real lynching

The Supreme Court had just released the Brown v. Board of Education decision that supposedly ended school segregation, and the white yahoos of Mississippi were pissed. They lynched Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black man from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Mississippi. On a dare from friends, he had called a white women in rural Mississippi "babe" after bragging about a white girlfriend up North. A few days later, he was abducted from his family's home, driven around and threatened for hours, beaten and finally shot. His body was found several days later in a nearby river, a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire, his testicles cut off, his head crushed, and one eye gouged out.(1)

A white man's jury - who in real life (though not in the novel) drank beer in the jury box - returned a verdict of not guilty against the known perpetrators after an hour's deliberation.

Campbell moderates the lynching markedly. Her Till ("Armstrong Todd") is beaten and then shot right in the yard of his relatives. His body is not sexually mutilated or dumped in the river; he is not taunted and terrorized for hours.

Campbell is intent on humanizing all the players in the story, on making them real and likeable. She even paints the murderer himself as an emasculated poor white man who really only gets dragged into the crime by his goading older brother - a brother who has always held his father's attention more, who always seemed to do everything right.

While Campbell's murderer is dirt poor and only gets poorer after the crime, the real criminal was paid $4,000 by a white journalist to tell the true story after the trial, an event that doesn't fit into Campbell's scheme of things.

The killer's helpless wife, a crucial martyr in the story, is also a kindly and likeable woman, who really wants to be friends with Black people. Everything she says and does toward them is friendly except that she says "nigger" a lot. She is abused by her husband (not unlikely) and eventually moves in with her daughter, who by the 1980s is an integrationist labor activist.

In this depiction, the only benefit gained by white women from lynching and white supremacy is a fleeting sense of importance that is quickly dwarfed by guilt and humiliation. In words right out of a women's studies textbook, the white women in this story wake up and realize that white men don't lynch for them, but for themselves. This is to make clear that white women are really in the same boat as Blacks, and just need to get over some cultural barriers before getting down to some serious integration.

In real life, however, white women gain a whole system of privilege by virtue of their position on the elevated end of white-supremacist chivalry - even as they remain subordinate to the white men who wield the whips.

Perhaps worse, however, is Campbell's transformation of Blacks into emotion-dominated victims incapable of rational collective action. Local Blacks and national organizations, and even family members, militantly fought the Till lynching and others like it. Till's cousin's grandmother put her body between the lynch mob and the young man, before she was knocked out by a shotgun butt - an incident that also doesn't make it into the book. Because rather than take advantage of that militant history to turn the novel into an inspiring tribute to their heroic efforts, Campbell writes it out of the story to create needy and self-absorbed Blacks.

Till's mother, Mamie Till, fought to have an open-casket funeral for her son, so his mutilated body would be a signal to the world. In the novel, she sneaks his body out of town under cover of night.

Mamie Till spent several years touring and speaking on her son's death. In the book she becomes a recluse who devotes herself more than anything else to replacing her son. The most public thing she does is show up at memorials for her son and cry.

Black effort betrayed

In 1955, Medgar Evers of the NAACP and other anti-lynching activists dressed as sharecroppers to talk to local Blacks and collect evidence to be used at a trial, at great personal risk. They also worked to drum up support from the Black press to get the case publicized.

But in the novel a single white journalist, who happens to be the son of a rich plantation owner, takes it on himself to call the New York press and convince them to send reporters, which sparks nationwide press attention.

The kind-hearted liberal goes on to spend thousands of dollars helping local Blacks over the rest of his life, and even runs a small school out of his office. The white journalist who in real life paid the murderers $4,000 for their story somehow doesn't make it into the novel.

In the end, Campbell's Blacks emerge as weak and disorganized, incapable of escaping personal angst and their own rage in the face of overwhelming oppression.

Campbell is too concerned about bringing the Blacks and whites in the story back together to pay attention to the historical imperatives of the period and the events she treats. Historical fiction can be a great tool for changing reality. But in this case readers who want to learn from history would be better advised to read factual accounts and devote their imaginations - and their efforts - to making a better future more reality than fiction.

Notes:

1. This account of the killing is from Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, eds., Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. New York: Bantam 1990. pp. 1-15. And from Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press 1984. p. 29.

(from MIM Notes 82, November 1993)

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The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science, by Pat Shipman, Simon and Schuster: New York, 1994. 319 pp.

by MC12

By a paleoanthropologist, this new book brings debates and discoveries about human evolution to a non-academic audience. Readable and informative, Evolution runs from Darwin, through eugenics and Nazism, right up to the Human Genome Project and the Violence Initiative. Still, it's not as good as Stephen J. Gould's (less current) The Mismeasure of Man, which has a better analysis for political purposes.

Her biggest weakness is a naive liberal quest for value-free science, and bemoaning the fact that biological theories get caught up in the politics of the day. For her, power struggles belong outside the realm of science, and scientists can't do good science if they are going to be held accountable for the political implications of their work.

DARWIN BEATS THE CHURCH

While Charles Darwin's The Origin Of Species (1859) struck a progressive blow against the hegemony of the Church, it did not undermine hierarchy among humans. It was falsely used (though not against Darwin's will) to explain differences in wealth and power between different human populations. Darwin himself thought non- Europeans were not fully human.(1)

One of the first widespread misuses of Darwinism was in its application to human society - for which Darwin had not offered any evidence, for there was none. In Germany this idea was developed by Ernst Haeckel, in Britain by Herbert Spencer, who coined the term "survival of the fittest" and applied it to all aspects of social life. This thinking - Darwinian evolution reflected through bourgeois ideology - obviously continues to the present.

The term "eugenics" (breeding to improve the human race) was introduced in 1883 by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton. "Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?" he asked.(2)

By the time Darwin died in 1882, he was convinced of the necessity of eugenics; and he was rehabilitated by the Church: "Once berated as an enemy of morality and religion, Darwin was now sanctified and transformed into an icon acceptable to all aspects of society," writes Shipman. Darwin's son Leonard went on to be president of the Eugenics Society in England from 1891 to 1928.(3) Darwinism had "adapted" to capitalist society.

Eugenics got a big boost in Amerika and Germany just after 1900 with hundreds of thousands of dollars donated to research by big capitalists (Carnegie and Krupp).(4) Their goal was to collect records on individuals and families for the purpose of sterilization and matchmaking to improve their "race" (synonymous with nation, for them).

So they collected records for everyone they could find, on such "genetic" traits as: "insanity, epilepsy, alcoholism, pauperism, criminality, tuberculosis, goiter ... feeblemindedness ... nomadism, athletic ability, shiftlessness and thalassophilia (love of the sea)." All of these were assumed to have hereditary causes.(5)

This research in turn contributed to laws restricting immigration, and formed the basis for the first IQ tests, which were intended to identify the "intelligence" required for every different position in society - and then force children into those positions. Finally, the research led to forced sterilization, with the Supreme Court's blessing and laws in many states.

In both the United States and Germany, Shipman makes virtually no effort to connect these biological and medical theories to imperialism and the motivations of the capitalist class and patriarchy; without that analysis it becomes too easy to justify eugenics and genocide as "mistakes" based on primitive scientific understanding. In fact, the scientists were coming up with ways to justify actions that reflected the demands of the politically powerful at that time.

WHY THE "RACES" AREN'T

Visible (phenotype) traits used to define current "races" are not linked to each other at the genetic level. Someone can have the hair of one "race," the eyes of another, the skin of a third, etc. So "races" identified by visible features would be different from those based on blood types, for example.(6)

Evolutionary biology now recognizes that a species is any group capable of reproducing together, and "the action [of evolution is] at the species level," where genotype (underlying genetic traits), not phenotype, is what matters.(7) And contrary to popular belief, evolution is *not* the process of species becoming "more adapted" or "better" than they were before. While individual species adapt, life on earth is no better adapted overall.

In other species, races are frequently the precursors to splitting off new species; population separated geographically for long enough eventually develop enough differences to loose *interfertility* with the others. Since the early 1960s there has been a consensus in biology that, "Because the races are fully interfertile, because different races frequently live together in the same regions, and because humans are so mobile, pure races do not exist and the races cannot diverge into separate species."(8)

But genetic studies still threaten the oppressed in Amerika. The predominant recent example of this is the Violence Initiative, which tried to identify genetic "causes" of violent behavior, with the intention of identifying potentially violent children and "treating" them preventively. Shipman devotes the last part of her book to this controversy.

The proponents and followers of this research make the very common error of looking at a behavior that appears common in a certain group and assuming it has a genetic basis - rather than a social and economic one. If MIM behaved this way, we would be looking for a gene for imperialism or parasitic social behavior, and we would conclude - with strong circumstantial evidence - that white Amerikans have a genetic predisposition to oppress other people.

Frederich Goodwin, the highest ranking psychiatrist in the government (head of the Alcoholism, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration), said in 1992: "If you look, for example, at male monkeys, especially in the wild, roughly half of them survive to adulthood. The other half die by violence. That is the natural way of it for males .... There are some interesting evolutionary implications of that because the hyperaggressive monkeys who kill each other are also hypersexual, so they copulate more ....

"Now, one could say that if some of the loss of social structure in this society, and particularly within high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the civilizing evolutionary things that we have built up and that maybe it isn't just a careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities jungles, that we may have gone back to what might be more natural..."(9)

In other words, without proper "social control," Black males "revert" back to a "nature" of behaving like monkeys! Goodwin's statement was too outrageous (it wasn't even true of monkeys). So, after much protest, he was demoted - to director of the National Institute of Mental Health!(10)

A University of Maryland professor, David Wasserman, was among those promoting this research. He tried to organize a conference called "Genetic Factors in Crime," for which he received federal funding, which he advertised with this text: "Genetic research ... gains impetus from the apparent failure of environmental approaches to crime - deterrence, diversion, and rehabilitation - to affect the dramatic increases in crime, especially violent crime .... Genetic research holds out the prospect of identifying individuals who may be predisposed to certain kinds of criminal conduct ... and of treating some predispositions with drugs and intrusive therapies."(11)

Apparently, for Wasserman, "environmental approaches" don't include self-determination, employment, education relevant to Black people's lives, etc. So it can be concluded that these approaches have failed! This also raised enough of a stir (including by anti-psychiatric medication psychiatrist Peter Breggin, some NAACP chapters and others) to cancel the conference. But the research continues.

Shipman does a good job of presenting the debates, but her opinion of them is liberal and idealistic. She is upset that "objective" research is being stifled because of the "volume" of the debate and the knee-jerk reaction to anything that could have racist implications. Readers of *The Evolution of Racism* should be prepared for some annoying anti- "politically correct"ism, as well as a useful presentation of the facts and issues.

NOTES:
1. Shipman, p. 1.
2. Ibid, p. 111.
3. Ibid, p. 121.
4. Ibid, pp. 123-132.
5. Ibid, p. 125-6.
6. Ibid, p. 148.
7. Ibid, p. 154.
8. Ibid, p. 195.
9. Ibid, pp. 237-8.
10. Ibid, p. 238.
11. Ibid, p. 246.

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How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev, New York: Routledge, 1995

review by MC5

If this were a work of fiction, the character of John Binns would, along with other radicals, jump on the Jackson bandwagon when it made its first appearance in 1822, and be rewarded by a government post through which he dispensed public works jobs to working-class Irish while upholding the slave system and helping to subjugate the free black people of the North.

-- How the Irish Became White, p. 70

Ignatiev's book is a positive contribution to white labor history which serves MIM in a timely way as we expand our work in Europe. Our readers will recall that J. Sakai has already explained in The Mythology of the White Proletariat why Andrew Jackson's name is synonymous with anti- First Nation pogroms and racial hatred. Ignatiev is not as clear theoretically as Sakai or H.W. Edwards, author of Labor Aristocracy: Mass Base for Social Democracy. How the Irish Became White reveals some confusion surrounding race, nationality, bourgeois democracy and the state; but these concepts are not really central to Ignatiev's book. MIM recognizes this work as an important contribution because Ignatiev did much of the research we would have wanted to do on the question of Irish integration into the white nation.

Ignatiev fills in the picture on how the Irish in Amerika maneuvered their way up out of the proletariat and in to the labor aristocracy. Some early Irish-Amerikan organizing was progressive. Later organizing was characterized by anti-Black chauvinism and opportunism.

Early Oppressed-Nation Consciousness Yields Split With White Chauvinism

Daniel O'Connell founded the Catholic Association, which Ignatiev says was the first mass political party. O'Connell toured making speeches against slavery, saying he didn't want any support for Irish nationalism that was not against slavery. Despite wavering on this commitment at one time, O'Connell remained fairly true to that idea until he died. Furthermore, 60,000 Irish in Ireland signed a statement opposing slavery in 1841.(p. 6) Thus while fighting for their own parliamentary government independent of England's, many Irish saw themselves as allied with other oppressed peoples.

O'Connell's dividing line, that Irish nationalism must be anti-slavery,(p. 24) was a high standard. As a result of this, organizations stopped their contributions to the Irish nationalist cause. One explained that "'as we must choose between Ireland and South Carolina, we say South Carolina forever!'"(p. 26) Lacking confidence in the possibilities of change outside the existing national institutions, many argued that Irish- Amerikans had to be more careful and couldn't afford to be seen as opposing U.S. government institutions with the wishes of foreign countries. Those making such reformist, assimilationist statements of strategy were outdone in the streets where Irish-American mobs attacked Blacks, as in Philadelphia in 1842.(p. 23) The mob "heroes" later became important politicians.

Slavery Question Reveals Assimilationist Treachery

After O'Connell died, a new generation of pro-U.S. leaders reflected what was going on in the United Snakes, instead of what was going on in Ireland. One such leader, John Mitchell, led a revolt in Ireland in 1848, only to fail and go to the United Snakes where he supported slavery and had a son die on the Confederate side of the Civil War. Irish nationalist organizations in the South and Midwestern United Snakes thought it wise to side with the slave owners and obtain their support for the Irish cause against England. Later, after the Civil War in a crucial moment of history, a congressperson put in power by Irish supporters ended the progressive phase of Reconstruction.(p. 173-4)

Irish-Amerikans made a deal with the Democratic Party to oppose Black people's rights in exchange for jobs and a pro-immigration policy.(p. 76) The labor unions were important institutions for the Irish: "From 1850 to 1859 the total was 2,700,000. Of these, the Irish formed the largest group, 41.4 percent of the total immigration. If the unions of the 1830s headed largely by native-born and British Protestants, functioned at that time as schools for teaching the Irish the meaning of whiteness, the unions later were to become to a considerable extent Irish institutions."(p. 116) Sadly, the major Euro-Amerikan labor unions famous for their assistance to the CIA in the Third World also created much of the chauvinist image of all oppressed nation people as strikebreakers.(p. 119)

It is true that the Irish arrived in North America by the millions at a time when the Irish themselves were starving in famine. A good portion died on the trip over to North America and another portion shortly after arriving. It has been pointed out that the Irish felt the whip to conform immediately in order to feed themselves. When the Irish first arrived many white Amerikans believed the Irish to be lower than Blacks, because they were more poorly dressed and were starving.

This historical reality of the predominantly lower- middle class Irish who made it to North America reinforces the thesis of the difficulty of maintaining a proletariat where there is a larger mass of workers influencing them towards assimilation. It is difficult for a pocket of exploited workers to maintain its identity and uniqueness as a class. When the Irish arrived they were indeed proletarian, but as they looked around they saw adequate examples of why they should conform to the white ethnicity. Ignatiev's book demonstrates that they also found adequate opportunity to assimilate.

(from MIM Notes 107, Dec. 1995)

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Bad As I Wanna Be, Dennis Rodman with Tim Keown, NY: Delacorte Press, 1996

This autobiography of basketball star Dennis Rodman covers all the most titillating aspects of Rodman's life--sex, fame and money. He has a chapter about his romance with the music star Madonna and speaks freely about many famous people in basketball.

We at MIM do not find Dennis Rodman so very unusual. He is simply right about all the stupid conformity in basketball and life in general. With the huge sums of money infused into professional sports we find that the management of the San Antonio Spurs and the National Basketball Association (NBA) generally value conformity, and safe messages for its audience, more than winning the game or playing it with greater athleticism. As such, Dennis Rodman becomes a symbol of how ruling class demands for conformity stifle sports and the economy (through analogy).

We find that public attention to Rodman's supposed antics is in fact a means of control by the owners of basketball teams set on delivering non- controversial family entertainment--even if that means the sport of basketball should be damned. What we end up with is not the best basketball, but the basketball that generates the most revenue according to the guess of conservative entrepreneurs. Rodman spells it out that big money goes into hyping players such as Michael Jordan, Shaq and Grant Hill. The referees also know what entertains the public and they cut certain kinds of players slack to do certain kinds of thing in the game if the public will be more entertained. One job of the referees is to call fouls--to make those subjective judgments which nonetheless make and break careers.

Also important are the fines imposed by the organization of the league. Fines and bad press from owners are the ways in which basketball players come to go along with the charade of competitive sport. Dennis Rodman may not play any differently than anyone else, but he can be ejected from games, called crazy, have his capitalist lifestyle cut back and get condemned in the press. If a player gets ejected from the games or fouls out of the games, that player still gets his guaranteed salary but he may lose out on other perks and his next contract may be impossible to obtain. Meanwhile, players such as Shaq and Grant Hill who the NBA thinks will bring in the entertainment money have the way cleared for them to be stars before they leave college and join the NBA. Such is the influence of money on sport.

We at MIM believe in amateur sports over spectating. Too much energy of spectators goes into sports like football, baseball and basketball which the masses should be playing themselves instead of watching. That is not to say we oppose professional efforts at human achievement. Stalin believed that all kinds of sporting, science, art and other feats should be publicized and backed with state funding. For instance, the feat of trekking to the North Pole or climbing a mountain was something that Stalin believed in giving media to. This was Stalin's way of leading the people to understand their own capabilities in a concrete way.

Such feats can be organized and massively supported with resources without the spectator craze we have in the profit-mad entertainment industry in the imperialist countries. Currently the money and the sexual rewards for athletes and other famous entertainers take on a life of their own, as Rodman himself explains of both the case of basketball players and music stars like Madonna. Rodman correctly believes there are many sick aspects to such fame and fortune.

Rodman himself is cashing in on the decadence of imperialist society that leaves people searching for stars in sports and music to fill a gap in their boring lives. We do not believe there is anything particularly radical about anything he says about being bisexual-minded or wanting to play his last NBA game nude. He is just making himself more of a commodity with that and his colored hair and female clothing stunts. (We do applaud his speaking out against homophobia.)

However, he is astute in calling himself a "sports slave" and comparing himself to prostitutes and models (p. 81). In the imperialist countries, we have this phenomenon of the Madonna and the Rodman. While biological females dominate the modeling and prostitution businesses, biological males dominate the sports. In both cases the body is the center of attention for entertainment and in both cases the stars are selected for their unique or dramatic physical characteristics.

It takes the free time that goes with money in order to have physical characteristics become sexual privilege. Somewhere in our leisure-time culture Rodman goes from being a 220 pound 6 foot 8 Black man to being a sex symbol. Rodman and Madonna are not sexploited, but in fact they hold privileges connected to their own exceptional bodies and the imperialist system of gender oppression. The issues of able-bodiedness and access to the human body are important parts of leisure-time life that form the bulk of what we call gender oppression. Men in prison may have similar physical characteristics to Rodman, but they are gender oppressed because their access to sex and the human body is completely controlled by the state.

Other so-called communist parties shy away from saying that having a harem like Rodman or Madonna is sexual privilege. They talk about "bourgeois feminism" all the time without ever talking about gender oppression. For example, most phony Marxists side with the players in the sports strikes and believe Madonna is sexploited because she is a sex object. In fact Madonna is part of the ruling class in the sexual hierarchy; she has access to the human body in leisure-time and the means of production, both to the utmost degree.

(from MIM Notes 126, Nov. 1996)

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The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets For Capturing The Heart Of Mr. Right, by Ellen Fein & Sherrie Schneider, 174 pp. 1995

According to USA Today, The Rules is 20th on its best-sellers list. The book has sold over 455,000 copies and constitutes a statement about the realities of gender in a system incapable of real progress.

There is not a single fact in the book about the subject of romantic relationships. It consists entirely of 35 rules of dogma concentrating the nature of the romance culture. Among the points of advice -- never ask men out, never stare at men or otherwise indicate attention, never return phone calls, never spend more than 10 minutes with a man on the phone and always be the one to end a date. These kinds of pseudo-power games are a reflection of the fact that power is considered sexy, that we adjust to the fact of domination in society more generally and find it pleasurable thanks to the culture of the dominators.

There are about two rules that MIM agrees with: 1) Men don't change. 2) Don't talk about the book with your therapist.

MIM knows that men don't change, because that's the system we live in. Efforts of individual biological wimmin to get individual men to change are indeed futile. Men as a group are in a constant flux, but they do not change on account of individual efforts.

MIM thinks that people shouldn't talk about this book to their therapists because no one should be talking about this book to anyone, which is less useful than toilet paper. The authors do not want psychologists to challenge their book, recognizing that even though psychotherapy is about convincing women into being happy with their gender roles in relationships, even therapists find their drivel manipulative beyond the pale.

Most of MIM's readers will immediately scoff at The Rules and some will wonder why MIM takes it seriously. We answer that this book has sold more copies than any MIM book; it has received serious reviews and is in no way meant as a satire of our culture. The book is written by the Archie Bunkers of the gender aristocracy and the authors mean what they say; they spend much of their book talking about the need for determination to follow The Rules to the end.

Even the richest of people are no exception in their culture. In fact the romance life of Charles and Di or Donald Trump is the poor example that the ruling class sets for the people in the capitalist system. Indeed, following the romances of the ruling class is itself a multi-million dollar tabloid and television industry in itself. We cannot be surprised that the media conglomerate Time-Warner -- which is also the money and power behind pseudo-feminist leader Gloria Steinem -- published The Rules.

In an interview with USA Today, famous imperialist wimmin's author Erica Jong could not find the strength to condemn the book and admitted she had ambiguous feelings about it because she believes "it works" in finding Mr. Right and that men have always been "predators." Erica Jong should have developed this excellent point about the book: it sanctions men as predators. This would not be very important to MIM in itself, because dating culture is not inherently a life-and-death issue. It's a subject of leisure time activity. (But somehow our romance culture has managed to become the single largest cause of murder as defined by the FBI.) Of course, relative to other kinds of imperialist murder through starvation, war and environmental destruction, "relationship" murder is unimportant, but MIM still does not sanction it. MIM is concerned with toppling the patriarchy, not with making dating more fun or productive under capitalism. What should not be at all important involves antagonistic contradictions between the people and an enemy that is very difficult to pin down -- all men and the biological wimmin socialized to be men.

According to Fein and Schneider, men who really love their wimmin will chase them with dogged determination, and they should be forced to prove that obsessive determination or they are not worth wasting time on. The marrying kind are the ones who seek a "challenge" -- the "impossible" womyn that is "hard to get."

MIM translates: don't bother dating anyone who isn't stalking you.

We must state firmly that these Feins and Schneiders of the world should be busy working to overturn the laws against stalking passed this year. They won't, because to them it's the men who will risk crossing the pseudo-feminists and other p.c. fascists that are the most determined suitors worth settling down with. Instead of working to dismantle the patriarchy, Fein and Schneider are holding seminars on The Rules so that they can provide personal instruction to wimmin desperate for a "real" relationship. All the women participants interviewed for a Washington Post article Style section (Oct. 21, 1996) refused to give their names for fear that their potential dates would find them out.

Capitalist romance culture teaches people that love is worth risking stalking/being stalked and killing/being killed over. That is the reason this book has sold so many copies. There are tens of millions of people so lacking in any absorbing and worthy goals -- thanks to the profit-mad capitalist-system which sets people's sights so low -- these people actually go out and buy books like The Rules.

The wimmin who buy into The Rules tend to be gender privileged -- so gender privileged they won't rock the boat on even the smallest points, to the point where they can't even ask men out. The petty nature of these concerns combined with their doggedness reminds MIM of the labor aristocracy and its outlook against the proletariat and lumpen- proletariat.

Tens of millions of people absorb books like The Rules, but these same people are no where to be found with such a passion attacking the causes of disability preventing romantic life. Physically disabled and diseased people have their sexual privilege curtailed. Other millions of people wrongfully imprisoned also have their "rights" to access to the human body for leisure time drastically cut back. These are the kinds of people who want to change the patriarchy. Children (or young adults) who are owned by their parents until they are 18 are also an especially important vehicle of change under imperialist patriarchy.

(from MIM Notes 126, Nov. 1996)

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