Yes, you’ve been a big help, Joe Amerikkkan. Of course, like RAIM, we’re just itching to send your ass to Iraq for payback. But still, we never forget a favor.

1. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1851673,00.html
2. http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/layouthtmls/swzl_compresult_national_SC16000004.html
3. http://www.globalrichlist.com/

At the bloody expense of the world’s oppressed and exploited majority, these parasites will shop till they’re dropped.

DVD – search mininova for the title:

Surfin’ U$a

The “Hate America Campaign.” That’s what the United Snakes State Department called China’s offensive to eradicate bourgeois ideology in the ranks of the educators.(1) Would that those reactionary goons have been correct.

The Chinese Communist Party’s struggle to ideologically re-educate the educators began before liberation in the areas under CCP control. After liberation this effort became an all out nation-wide campaign.

Political classes were set up at all universities and all members of the universities – administrators, professors, students, and all staff – were required to attend. Similar political classes were initiated at primary and secondary schools. Revolutionary dramas were staged in the schools and other proletarian agitation was conducted. Criticism and self criticism sessions were held in which teachers were encouraged to examine their bourgeois ideas. Students were encouraged to criticize backward thinking of teachers. During school holidays teachers were required to attend special political classes. “Revolutionary universities” were established for the sole purpose of intense re-education of the educators. Teachers were also sent out into the villages to learn from the masses and to propagate proletarian ideology.(2)

Much of this campaign of ideological remolding was in name aimed at the “love America” ideology rampant among Chinese educators.

But … Well, here’s a representative example of the political line of the CCP in this campaign. This is from one professor’s self criticism.

Because of my worship-America and pro-America ideology, I forfeited my national stand during the anti-Japanese war and fell into the embrace of American imperialism. … When I spent my first four years in the United States, I was able to see only the superficial things, like the skyscrapers, the motorcars, and the shamelessly dissolute and free-spending life of the exploiting class, but not the tragic oppression of the toiling people by the monopolistic capitalists. I did not realize that the exploiting class had to squeeze the broad masses of the American people and to steal their fruits of toil before they could afford to live a free-spending life.(3)

This self criticism echoes the complaint of the Deputy Minister that we reviewed in Part 5b, that Chinese teachers “do not see the poverty of the American working people.” Here’s yet another educator who overlooked the amerikan proletariat. Who was right there in amerikkka for four entire years and still somehow missed that overwhelming majority of impoverished “American working people.” Who somehow in all those years just hadn’t come across the “tragic oppression” of those “broad masses” of “toiling people.”

The political line of the Chinese Communist Party in the educational rectification campaign (as in all other spheres) was just this: against imperialism and imperialists, for the general populaces of the imperialist nations, because those general populations were exploited “toiling people.”

This political line entailed the assumption that hundreds of thousands of Amerikan and European trained Chinese educators had each one just had a bit of bad luck in not encountering a first world proletariat in all their travels and studies. That was surely an odd coincidence of oversight, but it could be rectified by educating them (and the Chinese masses generally) as to what they had so curiously missed. So they were told by the CCP that an amerikan proletariat exists. They were told that “the exploiting class had to squeeze the broad masses of the American people and to steal their fruits of toil.”

Comrade Mao himself held this line. So, when criticizing those educators and other elements of Chinese society who spread the ideology of “love-America,” Comrade Mao himself formulated the accusation like this:

They are the very people who have illusions about the United States. They are unwilling to draw a distinction between the U.S. imperialists, who are in power, and the American people, who are not …(4)

The distinction demanded by the CCP line on the first world was in fact the demand for a trumped up class analysis that indicted the imperialists as exploiters but exonerated the first world labor aristocracy as exploited.

Here, of course, Comrade Mao is criticizing the line that exonerates the imperialists by not distinguishing them from their “good”, “exploited” populaces. Tragically, by explicitly letting the first world labor aristocracy off the hook, Comrade Mao’s and the CCP’s line implicitly lets imperialism itself off the hook. If the vast wealth of the first world aristocracy is denied, then the source of this wealth – the extent of imperialist super-profit extraction from the Third World – must perforce be denied.

And that vast first world labor aristocracy wealth was denied by the CCP, which just flat lied to the Chinese people in claiming that amerikkkans and other first worlders were “laboring masses” and “great” people.

As Maoists-Third Worldists we cannot shirk our duty to the international proletariat by calling this trumped up class analysis anything other than a flat-out lie on the part of the CCP. We cannot pretend the CCP was somehow unaware that first worlders were among the world’s richest people. Whole generations of China’s elites, responsible for imparting information about the world to the young, had known and preached about the rich “American way of life.” Hell, we’ve already seen that Peng Zhen, mayor of Beijing and Secretariat of the CCP Central Committee, made widespread Chinese knowledge of first world labor aristocracy wealth the very basis of his own nefarious push for capitalist restoration.

In the context of such widespread knowledge of first worlder wealth, the CCP’s false claims about “laboring masses” could only serve as a stamp of approval for imperialist parasitism, a wink and a nod at first world labor aristocracy exploitation of the Third World. The CCP’s fabricated first world class analysis opened wide the door to a bogus “acceptable” explanation of first worlder wealth, the theory of the productive forces.

We are not at this point prepared to claim that the CCP’s promotion of first world labor aristocracy ideology was the most powerful force paving the road to capitalist restoration in China. We’ve already acknowledged the ongoing presence of other reactionary ideologies in China against which the genuine Maoists of the time were forced to contend. At the same time, we question whether even feudalism, bureaucrat capitalism, and Confucianism combined could begin to offer the illusory payoff of material riches (in exchange for forgetting class struggle) held out by the bloody hand of the international theory of the productive forces as powered by the first world labor aristocracy.

To be sure, we are only in the infant stage of investigating and analyzing the role of the pernicious ideology of the international TOPF to the defeat of socialism in the People’s Republic. That we are only now initiating such critical studies is itself a testament to the victory of this imperialist ideology over the ICM throughout the last century.

But the international proletariat is done with the deadly revisionism that waves the red flag with one hand and the reactionary flag of the first world labor aristocracy with the other. It is past time to name names and call out the bullshit.

The Chinese Communist Party claimed they could build socialism while embracing the international theory of the productive forces as powered by the first world labor aristocracy. Maoism-Third Worldism calls that out right here and now as bullshit.

Today even Third World forces professing People’s War claim they can achieve proletarian victory without an all out fight against the first wordlist ideology that was instrumental in defeating socialism in China. In Part 6, Maoism-Third Worldism calls out those bullshitters as well.

(1) The “Hate America” Campaign in Communist China (Washington, D.C: Office of Intelligence Research of the United States Department of State, 1952) cited in Stuart Fraser (Ed) Chinese Communist Education: Records of the First Decade (Nashville, 1965), p.140.

(2) Hsia, Adrain. The Chinese Cultural Revolution (New York, 1972), pp. 78-80.

(3) Chou P’ei-yuan, ‘Criticizing My Decadent Bourgeois Ideology’ in Stuart Fraser (Ed) Chinese Communist Education: Records of the First Decade (Nashville, 1965), p.142.

(4) Mao Tse-tung, ‘Cast Away Illusions, Prepare for Struggle’ in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1969), vol. IV, p. 428.

Here’s what we’ve got so far.

- In the early 1970’s, an international communist movement so mired in mistaking parasitic first world populations for class allies of the world proletariat that even otherwise genuine Maoists in China were committing the same deadly error.

- An international proletariat highly suspicious that in the 1970’s it was already quite late in the material day for communists to be fucking up on this issue on such a grand scale.

- An international proletariat highly suspicious that this grand fuck up can be attributed to a massive ideological lacuna afflicting the ICM throughout the 20th century, that lacuna itself being symptomatic of virulent infection of the ICM by a particular form of bourgeois ideology, the theory of the productive forces.

- A global form of the theory of the productive forces that draws its pernicious and lethal potency from the showcase populations of the first world labor aristocracy.

- And, finally, the lie behind the lie, the root deceit propping up this international form of the enemy lie of the TOPF: the lie that the whole world can have a first world standard of living. The succinct version being, that the whole world can live like amerikkkans.

Simply put, the theory of the productive forces is a lie in prescriptive form peddled to the oppressed and exploited: do this, and you’ll get that. The “this” is the invitation to forget class struggle, to focus instead on building up the forces of production, acquiring technology, etc. – in fact, it’s the invitation to do anything but remember class struggle. The “that” is the proffered reward to the oppressed and exploited for this good behavior. And the international form of the TOPF offers a stunning illusory payoff: hey, you’ll get to live like amerikkkans, because that’s how they got where they are.

Let’s once again go over the broad economics of this to see just how very stunning such an offer is. The first world populations are far and away the richest on the planet. Nearly every single first worlder is part of the world’s richest 15%. The majority of amerikkkans, that paradigm population of parasite “prosperity,” are among the world’s richest 10%. Even those at the economic bottommost of the first world nations live whole levels above the world majority, who by contrast live at subsistence level and less.

So naturally at this point the video says, in referring to these first world parasite populations, that they are “the wealthy few of the planet.” Because that’s beyond refutation.

Continuing on then, the video says, “And, as Maoists, we know that the wealth of the few comes from thievery.” You just don’t get much more elemental in your basic Marxism, your basic proletarian internationalism, than that: the wealth of the few derives from the impoverishment of the many.

Marxists are supposed to know this. So Maoists are supposed to know that the TOPF is, in all its forms, local and international, a lie. The first world populations did not obtain their riches in the manner their TOPF prescribes to the world’s oppressed and exploited majority. First worlders did not acquire their wealth by building up their productive forces and becoming technological whiz kids. There is nothing “innovative” in the genocide by which they stole a continent. There is nothing “new and improved” in enslaving a nation to build your own nation. And the military/political agenda of the few (the first world) dominating and exploiting the many (the Third World), well we know, if we’re Marxists, that that’s old hat, not high tech.

Of course, as with all things of first world origin, the opposite of what is claimed is true. It is only the centuries old continuous theft of wealth from the Third World and all oppressed nations that makes possible all that gleaming blood-drenched first world advanced technology.

Not for one instant in all those centuries did the first world populations forget class struggle. It was by keeping class struggle against the oppressed nations topmost on their political program – keeping the politics of oppression and exploitation in command – that got these parasites the riches of decadence that they possess today. 

So the international theory of the productive forces is a lie because Marxism is correct: exploitation exists. And therefore the entire world cannot live at the economic level of the world’s richest 10%, or the world’s richest 15%. The international TOPF is a lie because, for the entire planet to live like the first world, like amerikkkans, a whole new planet, several times earth’s population, would have to be discovered, conquered, oppressed, exploited and sucked off of just as the first world for centuries has sucked off the Third World. That’s not hard to see. For a rich minority to become a rich minority, they have to oppress and steal from an oppressed majority. And, yes, the same thing goes for the process of remaining a rich minority.

The lie of the international TOPF is just not that theoretically complex, and the raw facts of the worldwide class analysis it entails are not hard to come by. Is anyone arguing that nearly all of the first world is not part of the world’s richest 15%? Is anyone arguing that most amerikkkans are not part of the world’s richest 10%? Is anyone arguing that nearly half the world does not live on less than $2 a day? No, the facts of first world hegemony are all just common, everyday prima facie stuff.

But then we come right back to the international proletariat’s nagging suspicion that the parasitic nature of the first world populations has been prima facie stuff pretty much throughout the entire last century. How long has it been, for instance, that amerikkka has been globally acknowledged as the land of milk and honey? Not just for the rarefied tip top economic strata of amerikkkans, but for all amerikkkans – the land of money, honey. How long has it been, for another instance, that the economic disparity between the first world populations and the Third World has been, shall we say, conspicuous?

And so the international proletariat is to be forgiven for then asking quite bluntly, where in the fuck was the great bulk of the international communist movement for the last century while it was tasked with exposing just such pernicious enemy lies as this international theory of the productive forces?

Further, the international proletariat is to be forgiven for its as yet un-allayed suspicion that the bulk of the ICM was in fact for most of that century asleep at the wheel, drugged out on dreams of the oppressed and exploited “advancing” toward a parasite first world standard of living. Just plain drugged out on the international TOPF.

We explained in Part 3 that the potency of the international TOPF derives from the showcase populations of the first world labor aristocracy. You can think of it this way. Would any proletarian forces buy a bit of this lie if the vast majority of the first world lived on $2 a day? An international TOPF like that, that promised do this (forget class struggle) and you can get this (a subsistence level existence just like the one you have now), would ring up precious few sales among the oppressed. 

But with the actual first world labor aristocracy on parade – millions of Dicks and Janes who look for all the world like garden variety “regular folks” but who enjoy a standard of living stratospherically above the world majority – then you’ve got a huckster’s shill that’ll draw in a crowd. And that, the international proletariat suspicions, is exactly what happened to the ICM. The promise of first world richness for the world majority was too enticing to turn down, to disbelieve, so by the multitudes the ICM stepped right up, forked over a goodly portion of their precious revolutionary responsibilities, and bought themselves a heaping helping of the lie of the TOPF, the bogus amerikkkan dream peddled to the oppressed and exploited.

Now, discerning readers will have noticed that we’ve continued to stress the proletariat’s suspicions about the ICM’s errors on the international TOPF in the 20th century without mentioning that today the ICM is for the most part every bit as fucked up on this question as it has been for the last century. By all means we’ll get to that.

But we cannot fully understand the enemy’s contemporary ideological victories via the TOPF if we do not fully grasp the power and reach of the international TOPF as fueled by the first world labor aristocracy. And that means comprehending the enormity of the ICM’s past defeat by this imperialist ideological weapon, a defeat that extends back over scores of years and has been nearly absolute. And the efforts toward the investigation and study aimed at fully comprehending that defeat have, sadly, begun only recently.

Fortunately, we have some good and capable comrades leading the way in this investigation and study. The international proletariat demands to know what part this massive enemy ideological victory has played on the two main fronts of the proletarian struggle: the struggle for national liberation of the oppressed nations, and the attempts to build socialism in the former socialist nations. In Part 5 we will consider the possible damage done by the international theory of the productive forces in a particular instance of latter area, the murder of socialism in the People’s Republic of China.

In that Part we will make much use of Prairie Fire’s fine article posted at MSH, Some notes on lines within the Chinese Communist Party in the Maoist period. This article is an excellent example of the kind of theoretical and investigative work demanded by the international proletariat to assure the defeat of the imperialist weapon of the international TOPF and to hasten the defeat of the first world itself. So read that work well in the meantime.

A letter regarding On “On the Theory of the Productive Forces,” Part 3:

Sorry but my english are not so good to follow this article completely but let me ask this:In many communist papers the following statement is always wriiten: “proletariats of all countries,opressed nations unite”Is this statement accurate?Does it express the way the communists around the world should think?

A guest correspondent replies:

That phrase comes from the end of  The Communist Manifesto. In English, it is usually expressed as “Workers of the world, unite!” In some other languages, it is closer to “Proletarians of all countries, unite!”

The phrase was correct when Comrade Marx wrote it in 1848, and it is still correct today in 2008. But we need to be clear on the meaning of “workers” and “proletarians.” Not “all countries” have significant numbers of proletarians. Amerikkka, for example, has no proletariat at all (although there are some Mexican and other non-Amerikkkan proletarians within U$ borders).

So we can and do say “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” but it is important to understand who is a proletarian and who is not. The “workers” of the First World are petty-bourgeois or even bourgeois. The exploited proletarian masses of the Third World should NOT unite with the pro-imperialist “workers” of the First World; rather, they should unite AGAINST the First World and overthrow it.

Before publishing the video “On the Theory of the Productive Forces” we recommended some pertinent readings for optimal viewing pleasure. For this series of articles we’re adding to that list a work by Prairie Fire recently posted at MSH. The list:

Some notes on lines within the Chinese Communist Party in the Maoist period

The Lin Biao Centennial, hooray! 

Peking Review: “The Essence of “Theory of Productive Forces” Is to Oppose Proletarian Revolution” (1969 September 19)  

Lin Biao excerpt on the theory of the productive forces  

Peking Review: “U.S. Imperialism Steps Up Ruthless Plunder and Exploitation of Latin American People” (1969 September 3)

Now, the video says:

Maoism is the science of remembering class struggle, because Maoism is the ideology of the oppressed and exploited. And only by class struggle will the oppressed and exploited win. That’s why the oppressors and exploiters want the oppressed and exploited to forget class struggle. So the enemy tries to peddle this shit to the world’s oppressed and exploited majority. This is the theory of the productive forces, an enemy lie.

Readers who’ve accomplished the assigned readings will recognize at a glance that the graphic sums up the essentials of the theory of the productive forces. Fundamentally, this enemy lie hawks elevating the forces of production over the relations of production, economics over politics, advancing technology over advancing class struggle.That’s the theory of the productive forces generally. But readers who’ve been both diligent and astute in their homework will recognize that the graphic also depicts clearly the TOPF in its most urgent international particularity: an enemy lie powered exclusively and in its entirety by the existence of the first world labor aristocracy.

We’ll be talking about this particular form of the TOPF. We’ll be talking to those who are already diligent and astute in their revolutionary studies, and we’ll be talking to those endeavoring to become more diligent and more astute in those studies. We won’t be talking to these folks: “…people calling themselves Maoist who can’t say anything about what ‘theory of the productive forces’ refers to and who Liu Shaoqi was because they don’t remember their leader talking about them …” (1) Or these: “…many who can mouth some words against Liu Shaoqi and the theory of the productive forces as it was manifested in the past, but don’t actually uphold the lessons of the struggle against the new bourgeoisie in China and the world-wide struggle against revisionism.”(2) Bottom line, we won’t be talking about the international form of the TOPF as powered by the first world labor aristocracy to those who haven’t even been diligent and astute enough to know that the first world populations are enemy to the world majority. You know, pearls before swine and all that.

So then, for our remaining readers, let’s consider how the existence of the parasite populations of the first world fuels the perniciousness of the theory of the productive forces.

First, what’s the point of a labor aristocracy anyway? Well, of course one function is just that of providing more bodies committed to brute defense of imperialism – like more of those parasite cuties above to peddle deadly lies to the proletariat. But the more important labor aristocracy function is to provide a showcase population. A showcase class position that can be paraded before the desperate eyes of the oppressed and exploited. A seemingly attainable showcase class position to which the proletariat can by all appearances aspire. As actually unattainable as the carrot dangled right up close in front of the workhorse, and serving precisely the same function. For the proletariat, getting tricked means death.

That’s where, and we’ll come back to this more than once, the international TOPF gets its power, from the living and breathing, decadent, globally in your face labor aristocracy “proof” of the efficacy of the TOPF. Without the first world labor aristocracy there is no international form of the TOPF, only “local” or “domestic” forms. With the showcase population of the first world parasite populations you get an epidemic of mutating international forms of the TOPF that can augment, rival, or even put to shame the “local” and “domestic” forms of this enemy lie. You get international variants of the TOPF like these, as parsed by MIWS:

-          Lack of clarity on whether First World wealth is due to domestic productive forces or exploitation of foreign workers leads to implementing the theory of the productive forces, because of the objective divorce between practice, on the one hand, and knowledge of the relations of production, on the other, and because of the tendency to, by habit, continue engaging in production without transforming the production relations.

-          Assuming that First World worker so-called productivity is due to different levels of development of productive forces is an expression of the theory of the productive forces, because of the conception of the productive forces in isolation from international economic relations; there is inevitably a resulting underestimation of how decadent imperialism is.

-          Comparing First World living standards and Third World living standards without adequately addressing the role of parasitism in the difference is an expression of the theory of the productive forces, because the aspiration to reach the level of the First World living standards is not connected to correct knowledge of the role of productive forces — in relations to production relations — to those living standards.

-          Treating First World workers as if they were more productive than Third World workers, because of technology and training in the First World, is an expression of the theory, because of the assumption that Third World workers could generate the same amount of wealth with the same technology and skills, and because of the frequently held notion that technology produces value or enables workers to create more value.

-          Treating First World parasitism as insignificant while welcoming foreign investment to improve backward productive forces in the Third World is the theory of the productive forces in action, because the overall pattern is one of allowing world imperialism to continue plundering the oppressed nations under the pretext of developing the productive forces to imperialist-country levels.(3)

Yes, the pathogen of the TOPF seeks to metastasize amongst the proletariat in a variety of configurations and articulations. Here we’ll simplify. Underlying and propping up all these forms of the lie of the theory of the productive forces is yet another lie: that the whole world can live at first world standards. More specifically, that the whole world can live like amerikkkans. That’s a lie of such gigantic proportions as to deserve its own series of articles. Right now we’ll devote just one, next.

(1) Peking Review: “The Essence of “Theory of Productive Forces” Is to Oppose Proletarian Revolution” (1969 September 19)

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid.