Where do modern Maoists get their politics? Doesnt look like it's from Mao

I'm reading this excellent essay by Rashid Johnson, a member of the largely prison based New Afrikan Black Panther Party, and he is bringing up points and quotes by Mao that completely contradict everything I've heard from contemporary Maoists in leftist circles and forums. For example:


This is in direct contradiction to texts like Settlers, which while I knew was shoddy, I thought had at least some basis in actual Maoist thought. How the fuck did they go from Mao saying "working class and poor white Americans are natural allies of the oppressed nations within their borders" to preferring some corny second rate theorist preaching that race isnt only as important as class (a worthwhile discussion in countries like the US and Brazil) but MORE fundamental to class, and saying that the white proletariat does not even exist?

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I think MTWs and their ilk base their ideology on a bad interpretation of Mao’s three world’s theory, which is generally seen as a break from his previous work. Other Maoists like MLMs reject it for example.

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Here's the essay btw, highly recommend. Sorry for the doublepost mods pls delete other thread

Can you not delete it yourself with the button pictured or is it broke for everyone?

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Not necessarily race, but more along the lines of "oh shit they have vidya, and basic healthcare, the revolution is lost"

Pic related. Preach man.

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I tried, it said "wrong password" but I have no password at all

Yeah I get that too as of recent, the site must be fucked because it used to be randomly generated.

COINTELPRO

I've detailed this before in pic related but I can go into this in a bit more detail. When MIM started in 1980 they were beefing with RCP-USA from pretty much the beginning. This may sound tangential but there is a relationship here.

You see, in the mid-70s there was a group called Revolutionary Union (RU) that was based primarily in the white industrial working class. RU was probably the closest the US would come to rebuilding a true communist mass party like the CPUSA. It only had a few thousand members but that was already considerable following considering how much damage had been done in the movement during the Red Scare years of the 50s.

As a major leader in the RU, Bob Avakian helped lead a misguided campaign to "smash busing"–i.e. school integration which helped discredit the party but wasn't the only source of its downfall. Many critics have weighed in but one fact that many people, especially MIM, avoids mentioning is the relationship between this action and the ideology of the group. Busing was viewed as a collaborationist sell-out of the black nation and therefore should be opposed. MIM viewed Avakian as a crypto-trotskyist and also saw the efforts of the RU and other non-Maoist orgs to reach out to the white proletariat as proof that the subject itself was similarly contaminated.

I think its worth noting that while MIM is skeptical that proletariat even exists in the US they also hold that gender and nation are the "real" contradictions in US society today and work can be done on those lines. Who will do the work of radical feminism or anti-imperialist nationalism if there is no proletariat? MIM has no answers, they come close to saying the lumpen but with small numbers relative to the total population and p.roblematic aspects of their own even they are skeptical.

Reasons exist to be skeptical of the oppressed nation thesis within US borders (barring perhaps Puerto Rico) imo and putting focus on it above serving the proletariat seems to lead to autism like the type MIM displays. Although MIM in recent years has expressed criticism of identity politics they've proposed no coherent alternatives to it because in practice they agree that gender and race are more important than class in the US.

I think it's worth noting that MIM was founded at Harvard and that its actual hold on the proletariat is probably less than even Avakian's thoroughly discredited RCP-USA–which is still active at the street level even in the current year. The whole beef could be just cops fighting cops tbh but that doesn't mean the trends the two groups exemplified hasn't done real harm to the movement.

Other works of literature influencing MIM's stance was H.W. Edward's Labour Aristocracy, Mass Base of Social Democracy who there is also scant information about. But even H.W. Edwards never went so far as to claim there was no Western proletariat, in fact, he viewed the labor aristocracy as temporary. He was also, probably the first to doubt the revolutionary potential of black America because as he pointed out in his book (written in the 60s) the black proletariat, with all its disadvantages, was about as wealthy as the British proletariat was during that time.

Interestingly, Bromma, another pseudo-anonymous writer on the labor-aristocracy, goes farther than even Zak Cope and claims there's a Third World labor aristocracy. That's not a novel claim either, it actually goes back to Frantz Fanon and other post-colonial writers who disdained the proletariat of the global south in favor of the peasantry. It would definitely be too much to say that they influenced MIM but MIM has certainly influenced them.

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Not according to Unruhe. Apparently it includes rejection of three worlds theory.
maoistrebelnews.com/2015/12/09/the-french-gonzaloists-vs-the-llco/

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Are you serious? Is this a troll?
Are you barely now realizing settlers is bullshit? I mean, can you even find a picture of j.sakai anywhere? In the internet age even. Wouldnt be surprised if the whole thing is a CIA psyop.
The whole premise of settlers can be destroyed by a bob marely song

youtube.com/watch?v=S5FCdx7Dn0o

J sakai is a fucking hack who ignores the parts of history that dont correlate with his "all white people are evil, even the lower class" crypto fascist bullshit

No, I always disliked Settlers, but I still gave it a chance because it is taken very seriously but a large part of the contemporary left and did not want to dismiss it entirely just because I was put-off. That's why I did some research and now am wondering what the connection between Sakai and Maoism is at all. It does seem like bad practice to say Sakai is a cop just because he was probably using a pseudonym. His book has rightly or otherwise inspired a lot of rage and doubtless people would have been picking fights with him and endangering him. It's just generally fucked and creates a paranoid unproductive discourse to accuse people of being feds, especially if their argument is as weak as you say, we should be able to combat it easily. It would be easier to just believe he's COINTELPRO than to engage with it but unless you have any more convincing info I'm not going to buy that.


Thank you, this is a very good and informative post. Are Mao's later writings regarding three worlds theory significantly more similar to modern Third Worldist/Maoist rhetoric? Or is Third Worldism just drawing from several different sources? I do really like Fanon, even if he himself was not even explicitly a socialist, I think his anti-imperialist and anti-colonial position is invaluable, as well as his observations about the psychology of race. But Third Worldists (at least the ones I'm familiar with) seem to have such crudely developed dogmatism I can't imagine their reading of Fanon being a very good one. I can even imagine the value of a not-explicitly-socialist third world independence and unity movement, seeing as the process of development and historical progression is still very opaque, but a Third Worldist movement that denies the potential and necessity of socialist revolution in the developed world is fucking idiotic and reactionary.

What? Fanon absolutely was a socialist, in the wretched of the earth he specifically says national consciousness must quickly advance to class consciousness or else the proletariat will see all of its new gains lost as the national bourgeoisie capitulates to the imperialist countries. I would recommend actually reading Fanon, he is a Marxist after all

Waiting for someone to actually propose to a correction to the MTW labor aristocracy thesis, if anyone here is capable. Sakai isn't even the main source of the economic argument here, someone try to refute what Zak Cope or Samir Amin have had to say about this. Frankly Sakai is tangential to the whole argument anyway, he's merely trying to read American history in light of these categories that have already been created to describe the world system.

Sakai wasn't a Maoist was apparently some type of weird anarchist that fetishized anything vaguely resembling non-white nationalism whether it was Marxian or not. Which is why he may lionize the panthers or some Marxist-influenced group in the book and then turn around and shit on say the USSR or Stalin. There isn't really a connection between Sakai and Maoism per se beyond the fact that MIM started pushing his work hard in the 80s.

Sakai may have been his real last-name since he claimed to be of Japanese heritage but really we won't know anything much about him. While I don't think its concrete proof he's a cop I don't think the fact that his work is controversial really justifies him hiding his identity from the public for so long. Huey Newton actually spoke out about anonymity in general because it made activists unaccountable to the people.

We've discussed his work at fair length before over the years. Likewise, when you put a lot of seedy shit together there's reason to be suspicious. I do think the case exists that he's likely a crypto-fascist, some blatantly anti-semitic passages in his work were dug up on ☭TANKIE☭ twitter but I don't have it unfortunately.

His book was almost completely unknown until recent years. And, it isn't that well-known outside of left-circles, within left-circles I would say there has been an overchartiable reception of it. Most of the /r/communism subreddits have received his work favorably and believe me, talking to Sakai fanboys on reddit is like talking to a complete NPC. It isn't enraging so much as it is frustrating.

No, Mao's three world's theory is a geopolitical strategy and not Twist in the way you might intuitively think. It was just Mao saying that the US and the USSR were the big super-powers so they needed to be opposed. He proposed that the Third World enter into an alliance where possible with "second-world" countries like France and other European countries. He uses the political terminology in a different way than the economic geography suggested by those terms.

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I really don't know how to deal with MTW statements like "we only have high wages because Nike sweatshops" "cheap coffee and bananas from Honduras keep people from rebelling" "universal healthcare will be bought with the blood of the third world" etc. beyond the emotionality of them, third worldist theory betrays a static zero-sum understanding of economy that is alien to Marxism. Products can become cheaper while wages rise due to productivity gains and the capitalist cycle. As Marx showed, profits can even increase when wages rise due to this fact. There's no proven correlation that a rise in first world wages leads to a decline in third world wage-growth or vice-versa.

With Zak Cope, whose book I've read cover-to-cover, the major hinge of his argument rests on unequal exchange–which is a completely un-Marxist concept. It's just based on nonsensical assumptions that goods don't trade at their real-values and therefore there's a hidden value-transfer. On the surface, it appears large logical, if you took 14 hours to grow a can of coffee and you trade it for an oil filter it only took my firm an hour to make then you were ripped off, right? Not necessarily, because your labor was far less productive per unit. Plus, both were made under capitalist conditions with the local capitalist taking his cut in both cases. And, empirical evidence has shown, profit-rates are higher in the Third World, so remember that can of coffee made under conditions of drudgery, low-productivity and low-pay? The African capitalist took home more of the profit from it than the European capitalist took on the product he sold.

We then move to the notion of monopoly-capitalism and for all its theoretical merit there are some grave flaws here. We come to the notion that there are high-prices for the goods produced in the global north and these are exchanged for cheap-products from the global south. This has to be significantly modified in the current era now that the global south no longer produces primary products to the extent that it used to.

So, we come to the fact that say a Bangladeshi t-shirt factory owner may produce a shirt worth $12 dollars while a Western car company may produce a car worth $30,000 dollars. This is clearly wrong, right? A gross mis-use of monopoly power? Well, it begs the question, because if the car could be more cheaply produced by a smaller company perhaps even located in the third world itself–then why isn't it? Of course, I don't mean the same model car but cars aren't new tech by any means.

Over time, many products produced by monopolies, cars, TVs, smart-phones, oil etc. are becoming more affordable. So, its a question that only seems to be asked within dissident bourgeois economic circles–do capitalist monopolies actually act like monopolies? Do they intentionally withhold products and put upward pressure on prices. The evidence is lacking, it seems that monopolies actually reduce prices by leveraging their economies of scale on magnitudes that it seems many firms in the global south can only compete with by sweating their labor forces–if they can at all.

Are Western employees of these firms beneficiaries of this monopoly-power? It's true they pay more than average; they also tend to pay more than local rates when they set-up in the developing world. It's telling that big business based in developing nations acts the same way. The wage-differential between Indian workers at big companies versus those employed by small-ones is 200%! Are they beneficiaries of their firms imperialist monopoly power on the Indian market?

Cope estimated in his own work that the average industrial worker in the world is entitled to around $33,000 a year in output. Many OECD workers don't make this but built into this is the rather foolish assumption that all industrial productivity is equal and it certainly isn't. Even China is below the US in labor-productivity per hours worked–but certainly not output.

Western industrial economies like that of the US, Germany and Japan are actually still enormous. So, the question remains if the Western proletariat produces no or very little surplus-value, why does so much industry still remain?

As for whether the divergences in standard of living is solely the result of imperialism this is extremely doubtful but I don't want to go into that whole debate. There was more to my argument laying out the history of labor aristocracy theory but I had to trim things down–the key thing is there's nothing in the classics to support the notion that they would have agreed with applying the labor aristocracy concept to the whole proletariat or the majority of the proletariat in developed nations.

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Can we stop treating Jason as some sort of theorist that one could quote-mine? The guy has shown himself to be utterly incompetent and uneducated, he's hardly a source that could tell you anything about anything. He's also been quarreling with RAIM and Leading Light and whatnot, showing that even disagrees with their line. He's an autist in his basement making videos but he does not adhere to any mass movement (by "mass" I mean more than 100 people on the globe).


This is an extremly selective, American-centered view of MLM.

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Is uruhe a complete retatard
I am not even a maoist but i atleast know not to conflate the three worlds of westerners with mao's theory
According to Mao(or maybe not wtvr) there are the two superpowers(ussr and usa) that oppress other states ,second world that are mainly allies of the main powers in the 1st world, and lastly the third world…

Have you read Divided World, Divided Class by Cope? When he goes to "prove" that the vast-majority of the profits in the OECD come from the Third World he uses unequal exchange to account for the vast majority of his claim. I believe going off memory here that he shows $2.2 trillion interest payments and profits from FDI in the developing world. It is a large sum but it doesn't even come close to making up the majority of OECD profits. Cope's case that the first world worker contributes rather very little to the profits of the ruling classes hinges on the unequal exchange argument.

Quite wrong. It's actually exactly what they mean because the level of financial exploitation of the third world is not at a scale that can justify their ridiculous arguments. It's true there is exploitation but the world economy has never returned to the massive pre-WWI levels of capital-export as a percentage of the world economy that Lenin described in Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism

The two most powerful financial powers on Earth, Britain and the US, are both net-capital importers. It seems that the main thing they specialize in is helping the third world bourgeois store their ill-gotten gains in a safe place. Switzerland, as the core of the continental banking system, does a similar thing. When Gulf monarchy oligarchs buy up properties in some American city or in down-town London, and help drive-up rents in the process, they do expect something in-return. Who pays for the increased valuations and rental-values of their properties? Any direct link between that payback and Third World exploitation seems doubtful. Third world tax evaders also expect interest/profit on their capital when they invest it in the shadow banking system. What happens here maybe imperialism but it is definitely not of the type that Lenin described in his famous work.

If you sold it directly to me then you got the full-value of your labor, if you are a capitalist then you would have gotten the full-value of your product. Maintaining that just because something took a long time to make makes it value flies in the face of Marx's emphasis on socially-necessary labor time–otherwise, the neoclassicals would have a point about how wasting time would make things more valuable according to Marx's theory–as you see in the strawman of pic related.

How could I imply that when I specifically said that capitalists employing workers in less productive conditions in developing countries are more profitable because of the extraordinarily low-pay in developing countries? We would actually expect low-wages to lead to the type of irrationalities you described in the Moroccan case.

Huh? There's a quite rich literature on this. India, for instance, has 130 billionaires as of last count. And is probably closer to Bangladeshi, Indonesian conditions etc. than it is to even China. Comprador/national bourgeoisie are pretty iffy terms and definitions mainly born out of the political necessities of the communist movement in China imo libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=0B2A919133D54740FA21927EEF8C6875
Lack of a middle class simply means lack of a well-paid segment of the working class. Economic liberals actually admire these countries for being far more "entrepreneurial" than Western developed countries.

And this is important, why? He strips his workers of far more of their surplus-value than even the factory owner in Switzerland. They starve, die of disease and overwork so that he can have a plushy bourgeois lifestyle, so that his profit-rate will be above his competitors, domestic and foreign.

Actually, I was describing the price-scissors theory that was popular in the 60s and is a sort of precursor to unequal exchange theory.

You didn't answer the question though. Outselling and outproducing the competition isn't imperialism. Monopolies simply are more efficient than Pajeet's hardware shack. I've actually read that pdf before and its very good material, great even. But the conditions that it describes and ours today are not the same. Likewise, foreign investors in that period were those concerned with the largest effortless return on bonds/securities. A domestic industrial capitalist in Britain probably still had a higher return than the 7% or so you could get on foreign securities.

That's the claim of Cope and MTWists in general.

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