I don’t know if it’s just me or that I spend too much time reading YouTube comment sections or occasionally the enemy’s subreddit that is has given me a distorted perception of the masses or if it’s actually true that the broad masses are as reactionary and fascistic as they seem online and in media. It gives a kind of paranoia, a correct paranoia, that the Soviets felt in the 30s. I guess what I’m asking or looking for is whether my view of the American masses is distorted because of what I see online or if my view is correct. I prefer to be wrong on this.
Here in China, I often tell people that it isn’t the US government they have to be afraid of, but the entire population. The tendency is always for anti-US forces around the world to try and at least claim their beef isn’t with the “American” people, but with their government. This isn’t a bad thing to say for political purposes, but it simply is wrong, and I always tell this to Chinese people who say these kinds of things.
One thing I remember from my early student organizing days, when our little student activist group was first flirting with student government politics, is that we went through the effort to put the question of supporting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on the ballot. I think the anarchists in our group who did it thought about using it to bolster the view that the wars were unpopular, but as it turned out, more than half of the student population voted in support of them! And this was right in the middle of the largest wave of anti-war protests going around the country at the time. I had read MIM way back then, but didn’t make the connection myself until years later. It took many more years of anti-war activism, and a much fuller theoretical exposition of the labor aristocracy thesis than MIM ever attempted, to get me to finally see the “American” people for what they are.
Yes, the “American” population is awful. Short of a civil war where millions of people died, there is no possibility of a communist revolution in North America, outside of a Balkanization scenario, and even then only in the territories not controlled by the English-speaking European nation. Communists in North America should probably model their activity off of anti-Nazi resistance in occupied Eastern Europe, or anti-Franco resistance in Spain, rather than say, the Russian or Chinese experiences. But even there, communists could recruit people to actually fight the government, whereas this is all but impossible in North America (though hopefully this is starting to change, but I wouldn’t hold my breath).
MIM?
The Maoist Internationalist Movement. I read their articles evaluating other groups in the US, and some of their defences of Mao and Stalin back in the day. I thought they were kooky, mainly because of their “All Sex is Rape” line (which today, I’m absolutely positive they didn’t actually believe, but would say it just to keep certain types of liberals out of their organization), but I also didn’t accept their labor aristocracy line, until years after their founder Henry Park went crazy and died. When I finally came back to them after years of student activism, I found they actually do some have some interesting stuff on the topic in their old newsletters, but really, they were not very good at putting forth the position.
Anyway, here are the archives of their site, hosted by the only remaining cell still operating of MIM, MIM Prisons. Warning: it is possible they have altered some stuff here and there, and have themselves admitted to doing it when former members requested to have their writings removed from the site. But I think 99% of it is there and unaltered.
https://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/
Right, I come from a largely liberal state and you’re alot less likely to see Nazis walking around my city for sure. But despite that the internet you’re more than likely to be exposed to those fascists. It is bound to give a distorted view of the broad American masses but it is in fact those broad masses that are reactionary.
The black panther party is a party I as an American uphold to a very high degree. The Maoists among them had the right idea and they had the right idea of converting the Lumpen into proper Proletarian vanguards. The urban Lumpen seems to me the most revolutionary of the masses here; the ruining of their party by the reactionary government and the opportunism of the NAACP weakened the party. The BPP was in the early stages of building dual power. I fear that while BLM showed alot of promise early on -they pushed forward a radical line- they no longer have proper leadership since it’s been coopted. There is no centralized structure to BLM so there’s no way to join it and teach or influence. Being a Marxist Leninist I believe in joining as broad an organization as possible to fill their ranks up with really radical lines.
But I’m just rambling, I think I need to spend less time reading reactionaries online and just try and focus on the real world struggle.
I was in highschool when the US invaded Iraq and afghanistan, and I remember at least half of the students in my class were pro-war. Being anti-war was considered “against the troops”, and the army encouraged classmates who signed up to wear their army fatigues on certain days. You are 100% right that the enemy is not just the US government, its also its citizens.
The fact that they learnt nothing from that experience and are now doing it again with the PRC further bolsters this idea.