Via The NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit from the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM) MIM Notes, Issue 70: November, 1992 Guardian bites the dust by MC5 In September, the Guardian: Radical Newsweekly apparently published its last issue. According to a bookstore that carried the paper, the Guardian issued no press release or explanation for its dissolution. The Guardian had made large fundraising appeals earlier this year claiming it would go defunct if the appeals were not met. Even if the Guardian eventually comes back in some newly reorganized form, MIM would say the Guardian has been politically dead for years. >From MIM's perspective, the principal reason the Guardian fell to an unsustainable circulation has to do with losing its revolutionary roots. In the late 1960s, the Maoist upsurge radicalized the Guardian, which carried favorable articles about socialist China. At this time it garnered the largest circulation of any newspaper on the "left;" closely rivaled by the Black Panther papers and the Progressive Labor (circ. 90,000 in 1970).(1) The Panthers were smashed; and PL careened into Trotskyist oblivion, but the Guardian chose a slow opportunist death. The Guardian is an excellent example of what MIM calls the problem of "sizeism" and "pragmatism" -- bourgeois influences that say moderating one's political line and watering down the truth are the best way to unite large numbers of people who can then fight for a watered down goal. In 1973, the Guardian had "sponsored a series of forums . 'What Road to Building a New Communist Party.'" At that time, a Maoist-influenced but eventual turncoat Irwin Silber said, "Today, Marxist-Leninist forces in the U.S. are moving inexorably towards the creation of a new communist party."(1) One thousand people attended one meeting of these conferences on building an anti-revisionist, non-Trotskyist, non-anarchist party. It appeared that Maoism was going to lead the "movement" inside U.S. borders forward; however, as we have detailed elsewhere, a lack of political development and rampant rightist and ultraleftist opportunism crushed the Maoist forces who were trying to regroup after the state smashed the Panthers. At this time, the Guardian had quite a presence, including coin-operated newspaper boxes and a professional staff. To get to this point, the Guardian had to break with something of a more opportunist past. However, by 1973, the Guardian was having other kinds of internal breaks: the Maoists from the Revolutionary Union were kicked out of their jobs on the Guardian. The articulate Irwin Silber of the Guardian also took to bashing Maoism, almost as a lecture-circuit profession. In particular Silber took advantage of naive and moralizing revolutionaries who thought the world ended when Mao shook Nixon's hand. Silber's efforts were to culminate in the early 1980s when a number of Maoist-influenced forces like the Communist Labor Party and Communist Workers Party lined up more clearly with the pro-Moscow revisionists. Other previously Maoist forces lost their orientation completely or dissolved. Eventually the Guardian gave up its "Marxist-Leninist" pretensions and simply adopted the word "radical" in its masthead. Many fence-straddlers, individualists and opportunists have asked MIM to do the same thingDincorrectly viewing the legacy of Marx, Lenin and Mao as an albatross that must be tossed aside. Time and again we revolutionaries are told we isolate ourselves by taking definitive stands on the large historical questions of our time. Yet, while the Guardian was watering down its line and taking an eclectic stance -- attempting to tail pseudo-feminism, reformism and anything else that moved -- MIM Notes was growing with a tiny fraction of the budget that the Guardian had. The more it watered down its line and confused its readers, the more the Guardian itself went down the drain. Despite the support of some key wealthy backers, the Guardian's eclecticism only encouraged the lack of political commitment and confusion that ended its existence. It is not likely that racist and pro-white working class social-democracy will die. Nor will the idealist-nihilism of Trotskyism and anarchism die. These ideologies have solid material bases. However, the niche of the far left claiming to be eclectic, anti-anti-communist, "radical" and "effective" is sustained only when the bourgeoisie seeks to undermine successful and genuine communist movements. One factor in the Guardian's demise was a decline of the international communist movement, and the second factor was the Guardian's own internal political death. Where there is a vibrant communist movement and a petty-bourgeoisie vacillating in response, a paper like the Guardian can thrive for a time on eclecticism, opportunism and any politics just short of real commitment. Since the Guardian did not base itself in the revolutionary science of Mao Zedong Thought, it did not have a basis in the revolutionary class, the most desperate and determined fighters for anti-imperialism, anti-militarism, anti-patriarchyDthe international proletariat. Like the CP of the late 1930s, and the Black nationalist movements, the Guardian found that the more it strayed from its revolutionary roots, the more able it was to attract occasionally large financial backers, but the less able it was to sustain large movementsDa supreme irony considering that political opportunism is almost always advocated as a matter of attracting support. With the collapse of the Guardian and a number of other radical organizations, our own commitment to building MIM Notes is underscored. The blatant slide of the ex-Soviet Union into pro-Western capitalism is winnowing the field of "radical" organizations. MIM welcomes aboard ex-Guardian supporters and others who have analyzed the relative success of genuine communism compared with mushy, opportunist movements. Notes: Jim O'Brien, "American Leninism," Radical America. 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