The Obama campaign:

The difference between proletarian division strategy and bourgeois politics

September 27 2008

Obama's campaign unintentionally raises the larger issue of whether there is a difference between division strategy and social-democratic strategy. "What difference does it make" is the question liable to come from pragmatists: "In both cases, I'm going to support Obama."

Some are saying to pit the blue states against the red states. We will leave aside the fact that Obama himself does not see it that way and calls his line "post-partisan." So then we back up from strategy into theory to see what the difference is between dividing red and blue states and believing in a 51% or more worker majority with a corresponding strategy of "gotta have 51%."

The social-democrats (including those falsely calling themselves "revolutionary communist") believe there is a progressive or objectively revolutionary majority. The only strategy that flows from that is mobilizing for Democrats to bring out the progressive thrust of so-called workers.

In the "revolutionary" version of the 51% strategy, putting in Obama will raise class consciousness of those with false consciousness. Then when Obama fails to solve imperialism's problems, the workers will rise another notch in class consciousness and overthrow imperialism upon Obama's failure. It's the same reason Lenin advocated for the Labour Party in England in his day.

In contrast, in the MIM version, there is no false consciousness problem. If the Amerikan people learn anything from Obama, it will be that liberalism is a failure and so conservatism and fascism as alternatives will have more callers. According to MIM, there is no class basis to learn a revolutionary message. For this reason, Kotecki is our second-best comrade in the united $tates. Meanwhile, communist association only jeopardizes the liberal option.

In a division strategy approach, there is no reason to opt for Democrats. One should just work wherever people will do best with their division work. Depending on resources, knowledge and the tactical situation it could be Ralph Nader. One might be able to cause particular problems by working with Nader. It all depends on the concrete individual. Wherever someone can exert some influence dividing the exploiters is where someone should go. Generally, it is best to skip them all in electoral politics.

Another difference between social-democracy and division strategy is the global influence. Those who really believe there is a 51% progressive or revolutionary U.$. majority are a negative global influence. Every time they speak, they delude the international proletariat, both on the nature of U.$. imperialism but also on the nature of "hard work" causing greater "productiveness" and a richer living standard. The question of the high U.$. living standard and how it arises is crucial for Third World people, if not for the "American Idol"-worshipping Amerikans themselves.

"Clinton cited an Associated Press article 'that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.'"(1)

MIM's critics have no basis to object to that.

In his 2007 campaign, Mitt Romney said: "When you take money out of the pockets of hard-working Americans and give it to government, you slow down the economy."(2) MIM's critics saying Amerikan workers are already so "productive" under capitalism have no basis to object to Romney.

In 407 articles in "Google News" on September 27, the words "McCain" and "hard-working Americans" appear. McCain got so tired of the rhetoric he invented new rhetoric to say the same thing. He started referring to the hard-working Americans as the "fundamentals of the economy."

"Speaking before a group of about 500 mostly Hispanic voters at the Asociacin Borinquea de Florida Central today, McCain said that the "American worker" is being "threatened today because of the greed and corruption that some engaged in [on] Wall Street."

"Responding to criticism over his comment from earlier in the day that the "fundamentals of our economy are strong," this afternoon McCain defined those fundamentals.

"My opponents may disagree, but those fundamentals, the American worker and their innovation, their entrepreneurship, the small business, those are the fundamentals of America and I think they're strong," McCain said."(3)

The media lambasted him, but it sure does get tiresome to say the same words of flattery all the time.

Let's get it straight: "hard-working" is and always has been codewords for imperialist chauvinism against the Third World. It is the economic equivalent of "terrorism" in reference to Third World people. There is no evidence that Amerikans are more productive than others, only evidence that Amerikans steal more resources including cheap labor from others.

So the point is if one is already saying the same exact thing as the top imperialist politicians pandering to Amerikkkan voters, there is no need for a separate Marxist analysis. It would be better if such people would call themselves Democrats or Republicans. One would have thought the Maoists would have caught on with every imperialist politician saying the same thing, but instead the would-be Maoists of the imperialist countries have been corrupted in toto.

When it came time for Deng Xiaoping to seize power, the Western pseudo-communists had already prepped him for thinking that Western workers are "so productive" under capitalism, that Deng Xiaoping wanted to give it a try. The critics of MIM have no basis to be opposing Deng, who easily influenced more than a billion people in the world with his rehash of what he heard from Western pseudo-communists and bourgeois politicians alike. At this very moment, we are not surprised to hear about a Third World party working with a U.$. organization that opposes the Cultural Revolution. It's predictable given that that Third World party never figured out why MIM was correct.

Exploitation can never end if the exploited believe that the exploiters are more productive than the exploited. That justification can always work to forestall socialism. Lying about the labor aristocracy is spreading bourgeois ideology.

There is a big difference in selling the 2008 election as a faction fight of exploiters versus a situation where a progressive majority is striving to put a Black in power. As soon as a "progressive" or "social Europe"-style persyn comes to power, all the U.$. occupations stand legitimized in that way. Countless Third World people will be confused.

Global public opinion is liable to fantasize that Amerikans are closing the gap with global public opinion. Delusional theses about "re-proletarianization" and "re-polarization" of society coming out of "Bush fascism" are custom-made for the State Department. Whenever there appears to be a decrease in the gap between U.$. public opinion and global public opinion, the State Department celebrates for having a product less difficult to sell.

In contrast, MIM says to global public opinion, "oh, yes, we are doing something here inside U.$. borders, but you out there don't be thinking this is progressive or revolutionary change." The reason for that is that the global 90% is decisive, not the 90% inside U.$. borders. There is class struggle against the united $tates that has to occur, not merely intra-bourgeois fighting within the united $tates. The class struggle against the united $tates is decisive, while the class struggle inside the united $tates is only progressive on behalf of prisoners and migrants, two groups which the major parties take turns pissing on to obtain 51% of the vote from oppressors.

MIM itself has said we have had a 1905 this year, a dry run for a 1917, because the banking collapse is an example of something bigger that could happen down the road. We said that, but we did not say there is any re-proletarianization going on here.

Lin Biao wanted to surround the united $tates and cut off its resources globally, at a time when the industrial sector of the united $tates was more influential and when the civil rights movement was cresting. In contrast, Deng Xiaoping wanted to increase the labor resources available to the united $tates in order to strengthen China through entry into a global division of labor.

Had Lin gotten his way, and had the Black Panthers continued with their growing success, then perhaps U.$. super-profit sucking would have declined. It turned out that there was much more cushion than that and once the united $tates withdrew from Vietnam, the revolutionary movement receded. Then Deng restored capitalism and injected Amerika with all the surplus-value he could find.

In this battle between the Lin road and the Deng road, hopefully someone at the time said, "with the Deng road, the Amerikans are going to be more contented. It may be harder to rouse them for an anti-militarist cause." No matter what Lin or Deng wanted and no matter which of them won their political struggles, there was no way Deng could eliminate contradictions for imperialism, as we see now, despite a few years of difficulty where it seemed that capitalism was triumphant for all of history. It was Deng Xiaoping who substantially bailed out imperialism, but his success is temporary.

We cannot locate China in a socialist strategy anymore, but we can count it as part of a Third World strategy. One last reason we reject the 51%-strategy of social-democrats is that Marxists insist on theoretical coherence.

Amerikans always patch things together ad hoc without over-arching theory. In the process, racism and national chauvinism seep in, even if there is no over- arching plan for such.

For example is this "re-polarization of society" thesis of everyone to MIM's immediate right. It's the same people putting that forward and rejecting the "Three Worlds Theory." When the crypto-Democrats went to "drive out the Bush regime," they said it's progressive and revolutionary to collaborate with imperialists, but when Mao wanted to work with the equivalent of Abbas, it was class collaboration in their eyes. These philistines have always preferred their own labor aristocracy and imperialists while kicking and screaming about a thin stratum of comprador bourgeoisie or sometimes just national bourgeoisie.

What it means is that the Democratic Party and its appendages in the bourgeois People's Wars oppose Abbas, Mugabe, Arroyo etc. in the name of opposing class collaboration even if the target would be the united $tates in the case of Mugabe, Abbas and many others. Meanwhile, the crypto-Democrats trust Cheney, Kennedy, Daley and Obama. That's the confusion that results when one has excessive pride in the Euro-Amerikan so-called working class. That's what we mean by ad hoc, pragmatic incoherence.

It's definitely chauvinist incoherence, and we should add that Obama is certainly capable of perpetrating racism. He has power now that he has a huge nine digit campaign budget and the Democratic nomination. Obama can draw on racism to benefit his persynal agenda. In fact, Obama is now in a position to invent new racism where there wasn't any before.

So anyway, crypto-Democrats have long felt the pressing need on behalf of Kennedy and healthcare for Amerikans to distinguish between Turkish Maoism and Turkish Hoxhaism and to eliminate Three Worlds Theory. They have commented on countless ideological disputes in which the underlying class distinction they would be trying to draw would at best be within the Third World camp. Meanwhile, crypto-Democrats have covered up and honored working with Cheney, Daley and Clinton. It all boils down to subjectivism, that anything that the great crypto-Democratic leader does must be OK, while those Third World parties all fail to appreciate the great revolutionary thrust of the Euro- Amerikan worker about to finish the permanent revolution and make all the Third World struggle unnecessary.

Scientific incoherence is OK for Anglo-Saxon individualists, pragmatists and Democrats. It's not OK for Marxism. People who put forward the "re-polarization of society" thesis for Amerika and oppose Three Worlds Theory can only do so because of racism or chauvinism. It's another example of chauvinism's reaching up into the method itself.

Lenin's thesis was that imperialists are decadent. They are the last class anyone should ally with. Hence, it can only be done as a matter of dividing the enemy. Mao's "Three Worlds Theory" includes two worlds populated by imperialists. He dedicated two-thirds of the space to imperialists and Soviet satellites, because he wanted two thirds of the space in the theory to be dedicated to dividing enemies. For the same reason, he distinguished even between pro-Japanese comprador bourgeoisie and pro-Amerikan comprador bourgeoisie in China. In the Three Worlds Theory, Mao also wanted to pit Soviet social-imperialism against U.$. imperialism.

Bourgeois pragmatists answer MIM by saying it is demoralizing to tell the First World the truth. Instead, MIM teaches youth how to recognize opportunities to divide the labor aristocracy from the traditional petty-bourgeoisie when they arise among many other possibilities. Our critics answer a class question with a tactical answer about fearing to demoralize people with the extent of U.$. exploitation. That is called lying. Such systematic lies are what is demoralizing and they can only attract the most decadent of the imperialist country population while repelling those capable of making contributions to the struggle. We want the people who can thrill in division work, not the people who have character most prone to lying about a whole class. People with that sort of character will introduce all kinds of problems into work in the movement.

Mao himself taught people to appreciate division strategy, even in China, not to mention a country like the united $tates with a much higher percentage of exploiters. Today, the bourgeois pragmatists and social-democrats masquerading as Marxists call it demoralizing. It is demoralizing--for the bourgeoisie.

The "progressive 51%" thesis has to be pitched for the non-Russian imperialists. It results in counter-insurgency. People can work with Obama, Daley etc. only as part of a division strategy and anyone working with such an iffy division strategy had better be shutting up about the Three Worlds Theory, because it was also a division strategy. People working for Obama and opposing Three Worlds Theory earn our utter contempt as Amerikan nationalists and counter-insurgency specialists.

Notes:
1. http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-05-07-clintoninterview_N.htm
2. 12July2007, http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Romney%3A+At+this+historic+crossroads%2C+the+right+choice+is+crucial&articleId=caebfcaf-b8f4-4ba6-9e96-3d173ef0ecf7
3. http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/09/15/1401952.aspx