From MSH: Dear Maoist-Third Worldist… Will First Worlders benefit from socialism?

(monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com)

Dear Maoist-Third Worldist,

Will First Worlders benefit at all from socialism?

Thank you for writing.

Socialism will lead to a lower-material standard of living for First World peoples. First World peoples earn many times more than the value of their labor. They earn many times more than an egalitarian, socialist distribution worldwide would entail. First World populations get more than their share of the pie. They live off the labor of the Third World. Under socialism, First World populations will have to give up their privileges, their lives of luxury, based on extracting super-profits from the Third World. The Joint Dictatorship of the Proletariat of Exploited Nations (JDPEN) will occupy and rule over the First World until First World populations can live as contributing members of global society. Here are some positive things that the JDPEN has to offer First Worlders:

1. Healthier lives. Even though socialism will entail a drop in the overall standard of living of peoples of the First World, in some ways life will improve for First World populations under socialism. With socialism, the capitalist food industries will not be free to control the diets of the population. First World peoples, generally, do not want for food. However, the food they consume can be extremely unhealthy. This is especially true of fast food and snacks. This has led to some of the highest obesity rates in the world being amongst First World populations. This situation won’t be allowed to exist under socialism. People will come before profits under socialism. Thus science will govern the dietary choices that people have available to them. In addition, socialism will encourage and may even require exercise as part of the work or school day. Time at work or at school may be allocated for an exercise regimen. In addition, people will receive health care under socialism. Health care should be considered a human right under socialism. Thus First World population, even though materially poorer, will generally lead healthier lives. A healthy population is a happier one.

2. Meaningful lives. Maoists in China thought that people could change. Maoists had a strong belief in people power. Under the Maoists, Chinese society was seen as a giant school of Maoism that had many elaborate practices that all aimed to educate and remold the entire population, both friends and enemies. These elaborate measures ran the range from criticism and self-criticism before the masses to Mao Zedong Thought teams and classes to labor and prison reform. In labor reform, people were sent to do hard work alongside the masses to be humbled and to learn. This was often the prescription for communist cadres who had acted as high-handed bureaucrats toward the people. Such cadres were sent to the countryside to be humbled, to learn of the plight of the masses, and to learn from them. This practice was an old one, it pre-dated the Cultural Revolution. It went at least back to the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s. It was also practiced, with limited success, during campaigns such as the Socialist Education Movement prior to the Cultural Revolution. However, the Cultural Revolution raised this practice to new levels. An entire system of May 7th cadre schools were set up at the height of the Cultural Revolution as part of the process of rehabilitating and remolding cadres through labor. In addition, an entire generation of red guards was sent down to learn from the peasantry from 1968 onward. Many of these red guards would participate in the radical push to reestablish the collective economy of the countryside from 1968 to 1970. Just as those who needed to be humbled and reeducated were sent to the Chinese countryside, First Worlders too will be sent to the “global countryside,” the Third World, to do work for and alongside the truly oppressed. This process need not be one that is seen as punishment. Rather, this process will be one that ends the empty, decadent, and often boring and dreary lives of First Worlders. Instead, First Worlders will be sent on an adventure to reinvent themselves alongside the masses of the Third World. What is more exciting than self-reinvention and creating a whole new, just world? Capitalism limits the horizons of people, socialism will open First Worlders up to new possibilities. What is considered the good life should not be endless consumption, it should be a life of adventure, excitement, creativity, and doing good by humanity. Capitalism offers meaninglessness. Socialism offers meaning.

3. A future. The First World way of life is not sustainable. If First World populations continue to live as they do, then they will not only destroy themselves but also the entire planet. Socialism entails a more sustainable, balanced relationship between man and nature. Capitalism ensures a future that is an ecological hell. Socialism ensures that future generations will be happy and prosperous.

4. Peace. Capitalism is a system that has generated countless wars for profit. Many First World people die in these wars. The worst wars of this century were intra-imperialist wars, both World War 1 and 2 killed tens of millions, including many First World peoples. Socialism will guarantee that nobody will die in a war over profit. Nobody will die to maintain a class of parasites. Nobody will die in this senseless way. Socialism will provide peace from imperialist war.

Unfortunately, these benefits of socialism do not establish First World peoples as a social base for revolution. First World peoples are, and will continue to be, the most reactionary populations in the world for the time being. However, socialism is not about punishment, it is about liberation. However, we cannot let sentimentalism stand in our way from setting the world right. Let there be no mistake, liberation of humanity will entail the destruction of the First World way of life. In the end, in the long run, this will even be good for First World peoples themselves.

Review of ‘Overturning the Culture of Violence’

by Serve The People and End Imperialism

part 1 of ‘Overturning the Culture of Violence’ by the Uhuru Movement

part 2 of ‘Overturning the Culture of Violence’ by the Uhuru Movement

Overall, this video in two parts from the African People’s Socialist Party based in the U$ is excellent.  We have several major points of unity with APSP.  In particular, we strongly defend APSP’s insistence that the white working class is historically and up until today both a beneficiary and a vicious protagonist of Amerika’s system of white supremacy.

There are, however, three objectionable points made by the video.

Firstly, it is not true that all African people are one people everywhere on the planet.  People of African descent living within U$ borders (Blacks) are of a different nationality (a Black nation) than people living in, say, Mali, or even African, Haitian or Afro-Cuban migrants who come to live in the U$.

Secondly, Blacks are certainly an oppressed internal semi-colony (and not, as the video corectly states, merely victims of white racist ideology).  However, Blacks are no longer exploited; they are exploiters living off the imperialist pillage of the Third World.  The oppression they face is brutal and real, as are the extra profits (as distinct from surplus value) that U$ capitalism makes from their semi-colonial oppression.  Yet most Blacks are defenders of the United $tates’ society, economy and polity and are “white in outlook”, that is, they are exponents of much of the same chauvinistic oppressor ideology that jU$tifies Amerikan parasitism.  The APSP is certainly fighting an uphill battle trying to make revolutionary capital out of the national oppression of Blacks.

Thirdly, reparations are not an appropriate means of compensating Black people living in the U$ for the crimes of the system of slavery.  In general, no amount of money could redress some of the crimes of the imperialist nations, such as the outright extermination of some First Nations by the Amerikkkan settlers.  Money won’t bring those nations back from the grave.  Furthermore, the imperialist nations couldn’t possibly pay reparations for all that they have stolen over the past few centuries.  And even if they could, the transfer of wealth would create an imbalance that would itself be antithetical to socialism.  There have quite recently been greedy calls from Blacks for the united $nakes to make “reparations” for slavery in the form of a million-dollar check to each Black person.  That is nothing more than a very Amerikkkan something-for-nothingism.  If a small oppressed nation suddenly received reparations in the amount of millions of dollars per person, it would become part of a sort of “national aristocracy”.  From a strictly material point of view, the Black nation will be a debtor, not a creditor, when the time comes to right the inequalities among the various nations under the JDPEN.  To repeat: Black people living in the U$ have already been paid handsomely, particularly in the last half century, from the imperialist plunder of African, Asian and Latin American labor and resources.  Instead of calling for reparations (which nonetheless may have a certain agitational propaganda value) we should see to it that nations get what they need: land, food, infrastructure, schools, health care, linguistic and cultural rights, industry, mechanization, etc.  We can’t turn Kathmandu into Paris overnight, but we can arrange to improve things greatly.  We should see to it that Blacks living in Amerika receive the national territory that they are historically entitled to.

1.  http://blip.tv/file/484106

2.  http://blip.tv/file/390550

Outline Updated

Mirza Sultan-Galiyev was (to be) the founder of the “Colonial International”, but was shot for violations of democratic centralism in 1940

Guerrillero Heroico: The raw and original, uncommercialized, unglorified version of the iconic Ernesto “Che” Guevara photo

The JDPEN research project entry has been updated to reflect the rejection of a potential revisionist line in III., A., 3.

Also, we introduce  “D. Others glimpses of the JDPEN in history” with an exploration of  1. The Plan(s) of San Diego, 2. Mirza Sultan-Galiev and the proposed “Colonial International”,  3. Che Guevara’s “Many Vietnams” and Focoism.  “Where we go from here” is now moved to “E.”, which under “2. JDPEN being far more than ‘One Big Gulag’ ” contains the new bullets “a. Deportation of the First World Parasites tho the Third World for re-education” and “b. When does the reparations regime become a fetter the advance to communism under JDPEN?”.

NEW 6/12/2009:  III., A., 3. replaced as well as III., B., 1., c. being totally dropped.  These changes reflect what our research thus far indicates according to the Maoist-Third Worldist scientific method:  The problem with Soviet occupation was not that it was too mean, but that it was too nice to the German labor aristocracy.  That isn’t to say that there weren’t instances of anti-proletarian behavior amongst the Red Army at times, but to highlight it as some kind of fundamental flaw of the exploited’s exercise of dictatorship over the parasites tends to throw a blanket over the 27 MILLION Soviet peoples killed by Nazi Germany.  IJC has no use for bourgeois sensationalism clouding the issue here, thus the dropping of the whole entry.

These corrections and extra historical comparison help sharpen the political line of the Red Dawn draft programme.

El Alba Roja: El Nuevo Plan de San Diego

Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magon, Mexican revolutionaries and the inspiration of the original "Plan(s) of San Diego"

Red Dawn: The New Plan of San Diego is the working title of IJC’s Maoist-Third Worldist programme for the Joint Dictatorship of the Proletariat of the Exploited Nations (JDPEN) over u.$. imperialism, to be released in the coming weeks.  We will attempt to synthesize the original Plan(s) of San Diego (1915-1916) with the experience  of the Soviet occupation of Germany after World War II.  Imagine what could have been if Mexico had had the benefit of a Villa/Zapata led socialist state backing (assuming they were leaning proletarian) to the original Plan of San Diego.  Imagine what could have been if the Soviet Union kept on throwing its resources towards the exploited nations (via its own “Plan of San Diego” in Europe) and stopped trying to placate the former Nazi German labor aristocracy (and Europeans/Amerikans in general) in the post-Stalin era .   Imagine what could have been… and imagine what will be!

Therefore, let us think about what is to be done now!