From: Maoist Internationalist Movement <mim3-AT-blythe.org>
Subject: MIM replies to Wei En Lin on US Profits
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 1996 17:43:11 -0400 (EDT)


Comrade  Wei En Lin,

Your contribution to the List was in the true spirit of 
opposing sectarianism. You don't agree with MIM, but
you put forward the truth on surplus-value transfer from the Third World.
In that spirit, stay tuned, because later I am going to quote something from
a recent CP-USA book that is actually correct on an aspect of unproductive
sector workers.

As regards the issue of unity, the imperialist country peoples
are much more corrupted than the toilers
of China. Mao surrounded the cities from the countryside, but the
imperialist countries are even more corrupted than Chinese cities.

Imagine the consternation if Mao had ignored that China was mostly
peasant and proceeded to speak vaguely about  the workers all the time,
like Jack Kemp and Bob Dole do today.

In the Philippines today, we have the same problem when some criticize the
CPP for still seeing a peasantry at all. Such people just don't
have a grip on economic reality society-wide. At best, some of these 
critics substitute their knowledge from their own narrow personal 
practice in Manila for what Mao called practice or social practice. 

According to the COMINTERN though, office-workers are semi-proletarians
and semi-proletarians are more far removed from proletarian interests
than peasants are. Hence, to ignore the semi-proletariat and its share of the
the population here in the imperialist countries is worse than ignoring the
existence of the peasantry, from the proletarian point of view. As we just
posted, in England, the share of office-workers is nearly 60% and 
among the white workers in the united states, that figure surpassed 50%
in the 1980 Census for the first time.

The history of this question in the imperialist countries is seen in the 
Second International and it involves a contradiction with the enemy.
Those claiming Marxism in the imperialist countries but cannot 
find the strength to say outright that the semi-proletariat is majority
in the imperialist countries--such are enemy. They seek to corrupt
Marxism for the interest of the labor aristocracy.

Those claiming Marxism who can admit that the semi-proletariat is the
majority in the imperialist countries
should be our friends in the class struggle in the imperialist
countries. There will be differences over how to proceed in that camp,
but they are contradictions within the people.

In terms of the class itself, MIM has invited comments to its now finished
1996 Congress on the question of a program for the middle classes.
We do believe that the road to unity with the middle classes includes
issues like the environment where the proletariat and semi-proletariat
share nearly similar interests. On the other hand, just as peasant hoarding
was not tolerated by either Lenin or Mao, because it was against
the interests of the urban proletariat, there are class demands of the
semi-proletariat that we cannot abide by, and in fact, on the question of
driving a hard bargain with the semi-proletariat, we must be frank in 
rejecting the majority of its class demands, including
most especially its stance of negotation with
imperialism. Such demands the semi-proletariat negotiates
sometimes by using the proletariat as leverage include 
expansion of military and prison employment, the closing of borders to 
proletarians and peasants and the deportation of competing foreign 
workers. The reason is  not hard to find, like the apartheid white 
workers, the semi-proletariat wants to retain the cushy jobs of global 
apartheid. Such a reality cannot be wished away
and to remain in line with the international proletariat, we must attack 
these interests of the semi-proletariat while simultaneously appealing to 
it in other areas like the environment.

P.S. I am sorry not to have replied to your posts on China.



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