I N T E R N E T ' S  M A O I S T  M O N T H L Y

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     XX XX  XXX  XX XX   X   X  XXX  XXX  XXX  XXX
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     X V X   X   X V X   X X X  X X   X   XX   XXX
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         THE MAOIST INTERNATIONALIST MOVEMENT

  MIM Notes 62                      MARCH 1992 

MIM Notes speaks to and from the viewpoint of the 
world's oppressed majority, and against the 
imperialist-patriarchy. Pick it up and wield it in 
the service of the people. support it, struggle 
with it and write for it.


IN THIS ISSUE:
1.  MOHAWK WARRIORS HELD AS POWS
2.  WELFARE CUTS BOOST AMERIKAN NATIONALISM
3.  BIG BROTHER BUSH ORDERS HAITIANS SENT BACK
    HAITIANS PROTEST DEPORTATION
4.  LETTERS
5.  CHINA'S CAPITAL MILESTONE
6.  SINGAPORE BOUND
7.  ELECTION RESULTS, ALMOST
8.  WHITE PRIVILEGE EXPOSED
9.  ACLU VS. ACLU
10. WHITE COP GETS OFF ON MURDER
11. EURO-AMERIKKKANS FORM STUDY GROUP
12. SIGN AND SCREW
13. OBITUARY: A DEATH AS HEAVY AS MOUNT TAI
14. ISLAMIC VICTORY UPSETS ALGERIA
15. ARAB STATES SELL PALESTINE
16. AMERIKA AND JAPAN: A PACT SIGNED IN ... VOMIT
17. REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY: FROM THE ASHES OF A MASSACRE...
18. COMPUTER POLITIKS
19. REVIEW: CYBERPUNK: OUTLAWS AND HACKERS ON THE COMPUTER  
    FRONTIER
20. UNDER LOCK & KEY: NEWS FROM PRISONS AND FROM PRISONERS


The Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM) is a 
revolutionary communist party that upholds 
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, comprising the collection 
of existing or emerging Maoist internationalist 
parties in the English-speaking imperialist 
countries and their English-speaking internal 
semi-colonies, as well as the existing or emerging 
Spanish-speaking Maoist internationalist parties 
of Aztlan, Puerto Rico and other territories of 
the U.S. Empire. MIM Notes is the newspaper of 
MIM. Notas Rojas is the newspaper of the Spanish-
speaking parties or emerging parties of MIM.

MIM is an internationalist organization that works 
from the vantage point of the Third World 
proletariat; thus, its members are not Amerikans, 
but world citizens.

MIM struggles to end the oppression of all groups 
over other groups: classes, genders, nations.  MIM 
knows this is only possible by building public 
opinion to seize power through armed struggle.

Revolution is a reality for North America as the 
military becomes over-extended in the government's 
attempts to maintain world hegemony.

MIM differs from other communist parties on three 
main questions: (1) MIM holds that after the 
proletariat seizes power in socialist revolution, 
the potential exists for capitalist restoration 
under the leadership of a new bourgeoisie within 
the communist party itself. In the case of the 
USSR, the bourgeoisie seized power after the death 
of Stalin in 1953; in China, it was after Mao's 
death and the overthrow of the "Gang of Four" in 
1976. (2) MIM upholds the Chinese Cultural 
Revolution as the farthest advance of communism in 
human history. (3) MIM believes the North American 
white-working-class is primarily a non-
revolutionary worker-elite at this time; thus, it 
is not the principal vehicle to advance Maoism in 
this country.

MIM accepts people as members who agree on these 
basic principles and accept democratic centralism, 
the system of majority rule, on other questions of 
party line.

"The theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin is 
universally applicable. We should regard it not as 
dogma, but as a guide to action. Studying it is 
not merely a matter of learning terms and phrases, 
but of learning Marxism-Leninism as the science of 
revolution."
-- Mao Zedong, Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 208


* * *

MOHAWK WARRIORS HELD AS POWS

At the end of January, three Mohawk Warriors came to trial in the 
Que'bec superior court, in the district of St. Jerome. The Mohawks 
were scheduled for sentencing on Feb. 19, convicted of a myriad of 
bogus charges, including assault and possession of dangerous 
weapons.

The Mohawks were also charged with rioting and obstructing justice 
during the August, 1990 standoff between the Mohawks and Canadian 
federal troops at Kahnesatake territory. The Warriors stood in 
defense of their land when the town of Oka, Que'bec began building 
a golf course and condominium on sacred Mohawk burial grounds.

But the case is an old one--centuries old, in fact. Indigenous 
people resisted imperialist expansion onto their land, the state 
brought in the army and the police. And the trial for justice is 
inverted--the imperialists bring the people to trial for behaving 
badly during imperialist aggression.

The Warriors stood mute throughout the trial; the Mohawk Nation 
does not recognize the legitimacy of the Canadian legal system. 
The Canadian government has gone all out to disgrace and discredit 
the Mohawks, who stand as a revolutionary inspiration to 
indigenous peoples all over North and South Amerika.

Said Mohawk defense attorney Owen Young, "The Mohawks are so high-
powered, if they got away with it, then there would be Okas all 
over the country--that's the feeling." The imperialists' nightmare 
is the revolutionary people's goal--that the 500-year-long 
imperialist war against indigenous people will end in a victory 
for the people.

MOHAWK WARRIORS INTERNED AS POWS
by MC67

On Jan. 22, the more serious of the two Mohawk Warriors' trials-- 
resulting from the 1990 imperialist invasion of Mohawk lands in 
Oka, Que'bec--came to a close. The three Warriors in the Ronald 
Cross trial are political prisoners. The Mohawk Nation does not 
recognize Canadian government jurisdiction and these trials are 
but one of the state's attempts to intimidate the Mohawks and 
destroy their economy.

Convictions and sentences

At press time, the three Warriors were scheduled to be sentenced 
on Feb. 19 in the Que'bec superior court, in the district of St. 
Jerome. The Montour trial involves 40 Mohawks and begins in March. 
The defendants are being charged with rioting, obstruction of 
justice and possession of dangerous weapons, according to Mohawk 
defense attorney Owen Young.

When the Oka town council announced plans to build a golf course 
and condominium on Mohawk territory in the spring of 1990, the 
Mohawks built barricades to prevent the construction. On July 11 
of that year, 500 members of the Que'bec Provincial Police (QPP) 
attacked 1,200 Mohawks who lived in Kahnesatake territory, 
charging the barricades the Mohawks had put up to secure their 
land from imperialist expansion.(1) Just exactly what kind of 
"justice" was being obstructed?

According to Young, the three defendants in the Cross trial 
originally had 59 different charges against them; the most serious 
were rioting and obstruction of justice. Ronald Cross alone faced 
50 different charges and got convicted of 17. Gordon Noreiga was 
convicted of five of the 40 charges against him, while Roger 
Lazore was acquitted of all 12 charges he faced.

The rioting and obstruction charges were thrown out due to lack of 
evidence. Both Cross and Noreiga were convicted of assault; Cross 
was also convicted of possession of dangerous weapons.

The Cross trial

Not recognizing the legitimacy of the Canadian legal system, the 
three Warriors stood mute throughout the trial. And since for lack 
of evidence the state dropped the main charges of rioting and 
obstruction of justice, the defense chose not to create a "circus" 
trial.

Owen Young explained, "They dropped the charges that were the best 
basis for launching that kind of thing ... The opportunity had 
been there to present the full defense, particularly for rioting 
and obstruction ... But that problem did not come up, because the 
charges were dropped; it became a bit academic."

The Canadian jury was all-white and English-speaking. While many 
felt that an English-speaking jury (as opposed to French-speaking) 
was to the Warriors' advantage, an all-white jury was not a jury 
of their peers; there were no Indians on the jury.

Public opinion about the Warriors among white settlers was 
characteristically hostile. "The francophone press was generally 
distressed that there were not more convictions. The attitude was 
that they got off lightly," said Young.

Kahn-Tineta Horn, coordinator of the Mohawk Nation legal defense 
fund, is one of the defendants for the upcoming Montour trial and 
will be defending herself. She told MIM Notes that the settler 
press wanted to see the Warriors tried for conspiracy. During the 
1990 standoff, thousands of whites chanted racist slogans and 
burned Indians in effigy at the Mercier bridge in Montreal where 
neighboring Indians blockaded the bridge in protest.(1)

But calling for decadent golf courses and condominiums on Indian 
burial grounds, the imperialists are the real criminals--the ones 
that should be charged for conspiracy. What the Warriors got for 
such defense of their sacred lands was military invasion and 
continual state repression.
  
Repression on Mohawk lands

Having wreaked genocide on indigenous people of North and South 
Amerika, the Amerikan and Canadian imperialists recognize the 
revolutionary potential of these oppressed people, and so it is 
not surprising that today the enemy continues to control and 
repress them by force.

"We've had them [the police] for almost two years. They surround 
the territory; they've got a permanent presence now. Around this 
territory, around Akwesasne and around Kahnesatake. [There are 
seven surrounding Mohawk territories] It's the Surite' de Que'bec 
(S.Q.) which is the police force of Quebec and the RCMP [Royal 
Canadian Mounted Police], which is the federal force.

"They surround us and they cut off all our economy. They destroyed 
the economy that we used to have here. Like people that used to 
come here, any patrons that come off the territory get stopped and 
harassed ... and we get harassed all the time. For all kinds of 
stupid things, impounding our cars for nothing. There's hundreds 
of incidents," Horn said.

"Because it was the Mohawks, who have been on the front lines and 
such high-profile amongst other Indians, the reaction seems to 
have been an attempt to disgrace them," said Young, "as a lesson 
to all others who might want to follow those footsteps. The 
Mohawks are so high-powered, if they got away with it, then there 
would be Okas all over the country, that's the feeling."

Notes:
1. See MIM Notes 43 for first-hand coverage of the Mohawk Nation's 
armed defense of their land.

* * *

ONLY A REVOLUTION WILL FIX WELFARE

In the past year, states across the country have slashed welfare 
and other social services programs right and left. Payments under 
Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and General 
Assistance (G.A.) have plummeted--some states have eliminated G.A. 
altogether. George Bush and all the Democratic presidential 
candidates are endorsing this trend.

Politicians are getting considerable mileage from welfare-bashing, 
as they cash in on the Amerikan people's hatred and contempt for 
poor people and oppressed nationalities. The popular--and 
incorrect--perception is that most welfare recipients are Black. 
And projecting this image is enough to rally the Euro-Amerikan 
troops behind reactionary nationalism.

Never mind that welfare payments account for only 3.4% of state 
budgets, or that Black families are less than 40% of welfare 
recipients--Amerikkkans want to see it stopped.

MIM does not organize to pressure the Amerikan government to give 
the people more band-aids for the structural poverty of 
capitalism. Instead, we are building a revolutionary party to 
create independent power of the oppressed.

WELFARE CUTS BOOST AMERIKAN NATIONALISM

by MC42

In his State of the Union address, George Bush assured New Jersey 
Gov. Jim Florio and Assemblyman Wayne Bryant that he would help 
remove federal regulations which limit welfare "reform." (1) This 
move comes as part of a recent trend to cut welfare and increase 
restrictions which control the behavior of welfare recipients.

The New Jersey plan would deny additional payments to mothers who 
have more children while on welfare, and tighten policies about 
marriage and work.(1)

In the past year, 16 states have cut Aid to Families with 
Dependent Children (AFDC) payments, tightened eligibility, or 
both. Six states have cut General Assistance (G.A.), for single 
adults, and in October, Michigan eliminated G.A. for 80,000 people 
altogether. Maryland might soon do the same.(2) Last year, 
California cut welfare by 4.4%, and Gov. Pete Wilson is currently 
pushing for more cuts and restrictions for welfare recipients.(3)

Cuts help government

Although welfare cuts hurt recipients in the short-term, welfare 
programs never really change anything. On the whole, welfare 
doesn't make or break you; no one moves from the proletariat to 
bourgeoisie on their monthly checks. Rather, welfare serves as a 
distraction: creating the illusion of a "safety net" which helps 
obscure the reactionary nature of the U.S. imperialist government. 
Capitalism is unreformable, and it must be destroyed.

During a recession and an election year, welfare cuts and other 
means of "controlling" the poor fan the flames of Euro-Amerikan 
nationalism. Incorrectly identifying it solely with Black people 
and their inherent "laziness," Amerikans hate welfare.

But white families actually made up 38.8% of the total families 
receiving AFDC in 1988; Black families, 39.8%; and Latino 
families, 15.7%. Both Blacks and Latinos are thus 
disproportionately welfare recipients, but neither group is the 
majority in absolute numbers.(4)

White workers hate that their "hard-earned" taxes contribute to 
welfare for poor Black people--witness the support among them for 
David Duke's rhetoric. Communists must challenge both the notion 
that people with high wages earned them--either through hard work 
or, in the case of white workers, political battles --and also the 
erroneous belief among so-called Marxists that white workers are 
on the side of Amerika's most downtrodden.

More cuts, more control

States say they're broke and need to cut social services to 
balance their budgets. For example, Gov. Pete Wilson of California 
said welfare costs are rising at 12% per year.(3)

But welfare payments account for only 3.4% of state budgets; the 
government's desire to cut welfare is primarily ideological. 
During a recession, who wants to see poor folks get a "free" 
ride?(5)

The total cost of welfare benefits has been dropping in recent 
years. In constant 1990 dollars, total welfare payments have 
dropped to $16.7 billion in 1989, down from $20.7 billion in 1973. 
Inflation has eroded the average welfare benefit by about 42% over 
the past two decades.(5)

Adding to the structural paternalism of welfare, some states are 
now imposing more specific penalties for certain behaviors--trying 
to control even more aspects of poor people's lives. Workfare, 
Learnfare, Wedfare and other programs use financial "incentives" 
to "encourage" welfare recipients to work, stay in school, get 
married more, get their kids immunized, have less kids, etc.(3) 
The specifics of these programs are irrelevant; their very 
existence is part of an elaborate mechanism of social control over 
people who depend on welfare.

State-by-state cuts

One state just follows another in coming up with bigger welfare 
cuts and more invasive and manipulative rules. In December 1991, 
Gov. Wilson proposed cutting benefits by 10% along with other 
penalties and bonuses attempting to get people off welfare 
quickly, stay in school, and have fewer children.(3)

Wisconsin already has a similar plan, which would also "encourage" 
marriage. That is, single parents on AFDC who get married would 
not lose all their benefits after they get married.(3) New Jersey 
is pushing for a similar plan.

In Maryland, parents lose 30% of their payments if they do not get 
preventive health care, pay rent or keep their kids in school.(3) 
Does the government check to see if they brush their teeth 
regularly?
A proposal in Kansas, which failed, would have given $500 to 
mothers receiving welfare if they used the Norplant contraceptive 
implant.(3) David Duke's similar proposal in Louisiana also 
failed.(6) (See MIM Notes 61, "Norplant: birth control or 
coercion?")

Pennies a day

In October, 4.6 million families were receiving AFDC. In January 
1991--before this recent round of cuts--the national average 
benefit for a family of four was $367 per month.(5) $367 can 
hardly support a single adult in Amerika, let alone a family of 
four.

Approximately 5% of U.S. families received welfare in October 
1991. The percentage of U.S. children who receive welfare had 
risen to a record level of 13.5% in that same count. Sixty-five 
percent of children in Amerika live below the federal poverty 
line.(5)

Capitalism benefits from providing welfare, and from cutting and 
restricting welfare. Welfare programs control, distract and 
suppress potentially revolutionary groups. Welfare recipients are 
closely monitored--facilitating police repression while making 
community organization difficult.

As imperialist nations become more fascist with the continual 
deterioration of the capitalist economy, welfare cuts satisfy the 
gasping white nation. Scape-goating welfare "queens" for hard 
economic times is the state's way of concealing what communists 
know--that capitalism itself causes recessions, and capitalism is 
ultimately unsustainable.

Welfare cuts have also spurred protest movements-- some for 
resistance and others for reform. Like any grass-roots organizing, 
these movements can help build awareness, encourage people to 
think, act and work together, and can contribute to the 
revolutionary skills and analysis of those involved. 

But organizing the people to beg for imperialist hand-outs is not 
progressive. Self-help movements, like the Black Panther Party's 
free health clinics, Breakfast for Children programs, and clothing 
drives of the late 60s and early 70s, were very progressive. 
Programs like the Panthers' build independent power of the 
oppressed and break the control and repression of welfare.

Notes:
1. New York Times 2/4/92, p. 9.
2. NYT 10/7/91, p. 1.
3. NYT 12/18/91, p. 12.
4. Family Support Administration, 1988 AFDC Recipient 
Characteristics Study:  Demographic Characteristics of AFDC 
Recipients, 1988, pp. 2-3, 53.
5. NYT 1/10/92, pp. 1, 9.
6. NYT 10/19/91, p. 15.

* * *

BIG BROTHER BUSH ORDERS HAITIANS SENT BACK
HAITIANS PROTEST DEPORTATION

On Jan. 31, the Supreme Court voted to forcibly send Haitian 
refugees detained at the U.S. Guant‡namo Bay Naval Base in Cuba 
back to Haiti. Upon return, the refugees are photographed and 
fingerprinted by the military--just for the record.

Haitians all over the United States organized protests and 
demonstrations against the Court's decision; on the evening of 
Feb. 7, more than 20,000 people marched in Times Square, according 
to the Haitian Affairs Committee in New York. Earlier that day, 
the Committee held a press conference in Mayor David Dinkin's 
office, where activists showed a graphic videotape of the Haitian 
army torturing and murdering a man for his support for ousted 
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The Haitian Affairs Committee works with many other Haitian groups 
in the USA and Canada, Belgium, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. Inside 
you'll find a MIM Notes interview with a spokesperson for the 
organization about the future of the Caribbean island nation.

HAITI HOGTIED
by MC42

Feb. 7 would have marked one year of Jean-Bertrand Aristide's 
presidency in Haiti--if he hadn't been ousted in a military coup 
five months ago. In response to the would-be anniversary, Haitian 
communities in New York, Boston, Miami, Chicago and other cities 
organized demonstrations calling for Aristide's return to power.

The coordinator of the Haitian Affairs Committee (HAC) in New York 
City told MIM some of the goals of their demonstration in Times 
Square: "The unconditional return of President Aristide to Haiti; 
that the embargo be enforced --reenforced; and that the [Haitian] 
refugees be granted political asylum."

The demonstrations were also in protest of the deportation of 
Haitian refugees which began on Feb. 3, when the first 360 people 
were forcibly returned to Haiti.(1) More than 10,000 Haitians have 
been detained in camps at the U.S. Guant‡namo Bay Naval Base in 
Cuba, while trying to get asylum in the United States. On Jan. 31, 
the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 to allow the refugees to be 
forcibly returned to Haiti.(2) In the first two weeks of February, 
more than 2,300 Haitians were sent back to Haiti--and more than 
1,000 new refugees arrived at Guant‡namo Bay.(3)

As of Feb. 13, more than 4,000 Haitians in the refugee camps had 
been told that they might get political asylum and can go to the 
United States to argue their cases further.(3)

The Haitian Affairs Committee says that all new Haitian refugees 
coming to the United States should be granted political asylum--
until Aristide goes back home. The Committee has videotapes and 
other proof that Haitians are being persecuted, tortured and 
killed by the military government in Haiti because they support 
Aristide.

Fake embargo

The Committee is working on the assumption that an economic 
embargo against Haiti could put enough pressure on Haitian 
military leaders to get Aristide back in power--if it were 
actually enforced by the United States, the United Nations and the 
Organization of American States (OAS).

A spokesperson explained, "It has never been enforced because the 
waters are guarded only by the U.S. Marines. Since the U.S. 
government is part of what is going on down there--of course those 
people [Haitian military] can have whatever they want. There has 
never been any embargo. They [the U.S. Marines] are the ones 
helping these guys get whatever they need--gasoline and 
everything."

The vast majority of Haitians has always been extremely poor, so 
an embargo would not make their standard of living much worse. The 
HAC Spokesperson said, "People living in Haiti have always been 
living under the embargo. Only 3- 4% of Haiti is wealthy.... So 
now [the poorest Haitians] are going to start to wonder why it is 
that they are hungry?"

The United States' recent move to partly lift the embargo, so that 
Amerikan factories can re-open and 40,000 Haitians can return to 
their jobs, is a political show. The embargo has kept out 
"luxuries" like condensed milk and toilet paper--commodities which 
poor Haitians never had before anyway.


MIM: Was the U.S. government involved in the military coup which 
overthrew President Aristide in September?

HAC Spokesperson: We know that they were. We have a letter that 
was written by the Haitian Congress, which says exactly what the 
U.S. Ambassador to Haiti [Alvin P. Adams] has been doing in Haiti 
ever since they had the coup d'e'tat. The U.S. media has the 
letter, but they have never used it. They don't want their country 
to look bad.

MIM: What do you think the United States wants with Haiti?

HAC: That is my main concern. They keep saying there is nothing in 
Haiti. "Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere--
Haiti has refugees, Haitians are Black, Haitians are poor." I 
don't know exactly what they are looking for down there. I don't 
know if it is that they want [another base] to replace Guant‡namo. 
We don't know exactly what they want. All I'm asking them is to 
leave us alone.

MIM: U.S. businesses in Haiti depend on the cheap labor for their 
super-profits.

HAC: Also, in the Dominican Republic there are many sugar cane 
processing plants. When Aristide came to the U.N., one of the 
things he said in his speech was, never again would Haitians go to 
the Dominican Republic and be treated like slaves. Those companies 
need these slaves. Without Haitians going to the Dominican 
Republic to work, they will have a lot of trouble finding 
Dominicans to do it for them.
And they are all U.S. companies. As a matter of fact, we also know 
that they contributed a good deal to the coup d'e'tat.

MIM: For a while it seemed like the United States was going to 
push a deal to get Aristide back in, but with no real power--as a 
U.S. puppet.

HAC: But they have also created a monster. These men down there, 
like Cedras or Michel Fran�ois [military leaders], were going to 
have to leave the country--and they don't want to leave. They were 
dealing with the U.S. Ambassador. As long as they thought that we 
were not going to have any reaction--as long as they thought that 
we were going to get tired of fighting...

Right now they have a lot of problems. Fran�ois doesn't take 
orders, he has his own army, he pays his army from his own pocket. 
He says he is not going to leave Haiti. Even if the U.S. 
government would like to send Aristide back home--which I'm sure 
is not true--Fran�ois would fight. Because they gave him money to 
do what he did-- now they want to kick him out? He's not going to 
go along with it.

MIM: What do you think about the debate over Aristide's prime 
minister?

HAC: According to the [Haitian] Constitution, only the president 
can choose the prime minister. Right now it seems to me that the 
military soldiers and the U.S. government through the Ambassador 
to Haiti are the ones who can choose the prime minister ... Do you 
know what they call the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti?--the "Governor 
of Haiti."...

One of the first things they wanted to do was make Aristide look 
like a fool, like he is a hard-headed man. So Aristide has made a 
lot of concessions. But now he has made so many, that he has 
decided that he is not going to make any more.

What the United States wants is for Marc Bazin [the U.S.-supported 
candidate in the December 1990 Haitian presidential election] to 
be prime minister. Then when Aristide goes back home, they can 
kill him and then Bazin will be president of Haiti and can sell 
Haiti to the U.S. government....

I have never tried to be nice to the U.S. government because they 
have never been nice to us....

We want Aristide back. We are going to fight until Aristide comes 
back. Myself, if it takes two years, two days, 10 years, 20 years-
-I will fight as long as I am alive. And we all are deciding to do 
the same. We are not going to give up.


The Haitian people are engaged in a struggle for self-
determination, which includes choosing their own leaders. But 
elections under terrible conditions, like the elections which 
brought Aristide to power, don't really represent the people's 
will. To wrest their nation out of the jaws of imperialism, 
Haitians will ultimately have to rely on themselves--not Aristide-
-to create revolutionary change.

Notes:
1. Christian Science Monitor 2/5/92,   p. 1.
2. New York Times 2/3/92, p. 7.
3. National Public Radio, All Things Considered, 2/13/92.

* * *

LETTERS

RATIONAL POLEMIC TURNS AN ANARCHIST INTO A MAOIST

Dear MIM,
I have been reading your paper for a while now (over a year), and 
it has had an influence on my thinking. Most significantly, your 
polemic regarding single-issue organizing [available from MIM for 
$1], combined with my own frustrating experiences with single-
issue organizations, convinced me that I should join a 
revolutionary organization. I would like to join MIM.

Also, your willingness to engage in rational polemic with 
anarchists, combined with the average anarchist's refusal to 
return the favor (witness Fifth Estate's letter in MIM Notes 60, 
in which they parrot U.S. imperialism's "Mao as mass-murderer" 
line and uphold the politics of the Beatles) has largely shifted 
my allegiance from the anarchist milieu to the communist milieu. I 
believe the communists and anarchists need to pay more attention 
to each other's analyses. MIM has been ahead of the rest in this 
regard. 

Anarchism's strength is its ability to provide an idealistic 
utopian vision. Without a vision, change cannot happen. But a 
vision is not enough. The communist method of materialism can get 
us from here to the stateless, classless society. Idealism alone 
will get us nowhere.
Enclosed is a copy of my zine. I'd like to think my politics have 
improved since I produced it. Also enclosed is $2 for your new 
literature list.

Keep fighting the power--one winnable battle at a time.

Love and Rage,
A new comrade in the East
January 1992

WHICH WAY WITH THE PARIS COMMUNE?

MA20 asked MIM about the Paris Commune a few months ago, 
questioning how advanced this struggle was towards building 
socialism. French workers effectively liberated the city of Paris 
for a brief time, calling the city a "commune." The following is a 
revised version of the response that MIM offered.

Engels called the Paris Commune the Dictatorship of the 
Proletariat;(1) it was the first practical experience to hold that 
title. It is identified as a proletarian movement because as of 
its formation in 1871, capitalism in France was developing 
consistently, and had been since the bourgeois revolution of 1789. 
The new ruling class oversaw the development of capitalism in 
France and witnessed the growth of an urban proletariat, the group 
which launched the Commune.

By Marx's description, the Commune was not a seizure of state 
power by the proletariat. It was the experience of the Commune 
which led Marx to the conclusion that "the working class cannot 
simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it 
for its own purposes."(1)

The Commune Constitution addressed questions of solidarity within 
the Commune--it dissolved the standing army, replacing it with a 
National Guard of the workers; it instituted elections for all 
public offices and developed structures through which its leaders 
and officials could make self-criticism and expose their 
weaknesses and the weaknesses of the Commune structure to the 
scrutiny of the masses.(2) But the Communards failed to address 
the question of broad state power--leaving structures outside of 
Paris intact, and free to make war on the Commune, which they did.

One of the most basic lessons of the Commune is the way 
reactionary forces consolidate to crush proletarian movements. 
When the French military was ordered to fire on the Commune 
members and destroy the Commune, the soldiers remained loyal to 
the workers and refused their orders. The French government then 
called in the Prussian army, which complied.

The destruction of the Commune illustrates what Lenin pointed out 
in his essay "Two Tactics of Social-Democracy," that "the slogan 
of "revolutionary communes' is erroneous, because the very mistake 
made by the communes known to history was that of confusing the 
democratic revolution with the socialist revolution."(3) This was 
evidenced in Paris when the workers chose to build what they 
called revolutionary socialism in one city, not recognizing that 
the bourgeois democratic government would use every means at its 
disposal to crush the movement. The "revolutionary" Commune 
forfeited the development of the workers' state when it wasted the 
opportunity to build the broadest possible proletarian movement.

While we understand the problem with a provincial view of 
revolution, MIM recognizes the importance of building socialism in 
one country at a time. Trotskyists--who hold out for world-wide 
revolution in which all the imperialist powers are smashed in a 
single towering revolutionary inferno--are dreaming, as are the 
anarchists, who wait for the state to fall away piece by piece.

Two outstanding failures of the Commune were that it didn't seize 
the French banks, and it didn't have a comprehensive revolutionary 
program.
First, although the Commune leaders seized control of some of the 
means of bourgeois rule--as in the creation of the National Guard-
-they left the French banks intact, opting to stay outside the 
Bank of Paris rather than go in and seize control of the country's 
finances.(4) The Commune allowed the bourgeoisie to sustain and 
then restore itself through its financial base.

The bourgeois government of France--at the time still a 
constitutional monarchy rather than a full parliamentary 
"democracy"--was allowed to stay alive through continued 
exploitation of the French people.

And secondly, while the Commune claimed responsibility for 
building a workers' government and militia in Paris, it left the 
fate of the rest of France to anarchist revolution. Communards 
expected workers across the country to rise up and seize control 
of local power structures. They expected the workers to waste 
their efforts "fight[ing] separately in every town and province 
for one and the same advance."(5) When the workers in Paris could 
have expanded into the countryside and other French cities, 
spreading revolution and pushing local struggles forward, instead 
they chose to remain in Paris and build socialism there, in 
isolation. This anarchist program could not make a successful 
revolution.

It left the path clear for the bourgeoisie and its armies to come 
into Paris and overrun the Commune.
A Midwest Comrade
 
Notes:
1. Freidrich Engels, Introduction to "The Civil War in France," in 
Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, 
Norton, NY, 1978, p. 629.
2. "The Civil War in France," in Tucker, pp. 632, 640.
3. "Two Tactics of Social Democracy," in Robert Tucker, ed., The 
Lenin Anthology, Norton, New York, 1975, p.136.
4. "The Civil War in France," in Tucker, p. 626.
5. Karl Marx, "Address to the Communist League," in Marx-Engels 
Reader, p. 509.


"NO THANKS, I'M A STALINIST!'

Dear MIM,
As a recalcitrant commie of many years (Venceremos Brigade, RYMII 
[Revolutionary Youth Movement II], Y.I.P., DC's Voice From the 
Mother Country magazine) I find your mag to be a delightful 
injection into the so-called "Alternative" Press (we know they are 
no such thing).

Your political analysis is astute and unabashedly direct. I 
especially enjoyed your comments on the Trots (W.V.) [Workers 
Vanguard]. Though it's a lie, whenever one of those petit-
bourgeois white kids tries to sell me W.V. I always say "no 
thanks, I'm a Stalinist!" It freaks them out much more than 
telling them I'm a Maoist.

I'm not qualified but a Maoist assessment of contemporary music, 
artists, recordings, videos similar to your film commentary might 
be a good column. 

I'm enclosing a SASE and a couple of dollars and asking for a copy 
of "Combat Liberalism" since I figure you must have one around.

Dare to Struggle
Dare to Win
Dare to Giggle
Dare to Grin!
A friend in the West 
January 1992 
 
A VOICE FROM ERITREA 

Dear MIM,
First and foremost I would like to express my sincere appreciation 
for the courageous comrades who dedicatedly advocated so long to 
restore socialism and for the total emancipation of world workers 
in general.

These, who lost their beloved lives will be remembered forever, as 
revolutionary martyrs. I would like to introduce myself; I am from 
Eritrea. I had been in the Eritrean revolution for several years, 
but due to the disintegration of the fronts, the Eritrean 
revolution has been split into different factions. So I am a 
representative of the Democratic Movement for the Liberation of 
Eritrea (DMLE)--the only one left to advocate Marxism-Leninism as 
its guidelines. I have seen your publication, and I see some ideas 
in common, but for my further study and knowledge about MIM would 
you please send me some of your documents and previous 
publications? After that, regardless of what my decision is, I 
will send my subscription fee for one year.
Eritrean revolutionary 
January 1992 
 
MC17 responds: MIM was not aware of the existence of the DMLE. We 
will keep our readers informed of any new information that we 
learn about the situation in Eritrea and the positions of the 
revolutionary and non-revolutionary groups working in Eritrea.

DOES MIM ACCEPT ESSAYS? 

Dear MIM,
Bastards! You had a revolution and didn't send me an invitation! 
Send me "What is the Maoist Internationalist Movement?" Payment 
Enclosed. I thoroughly enjoyed MIM Notes 60. Yours is an 
informative and provocative paper. Do you accept essays?
A friend in the East 
January 1992 
 
MC67 responds: MIM thanks the comrade for the order of "What is 
MIM?" and also recommends our literature list for $2. People 
interested in a party's politics often refer to the lit list to 
see where a party is at.

Yes, MIM accepts essays from everyone. At this time we are 
particularly interested in domestic articles on police brutality, 
Amerikan culture, feminism, and articles related to oppressed 
nationalities. We are seeking to make MIM Notes a paper with 
original domestic stories serving the oppressed masses in this 
country. Our model is the prisons page with its self-generating 
articles largely written by prisoners.

MAs (MIM Associates) who work for MIM--whether it is distributing 
or writing articles for the paper--in return receive a theoretical 
essay or pack of essays twice a month. (These can also be ordered 
for $2/month). As an MA, you can also contribute by writing 
theoretical essays for discussion among MIM cadres and associates.

MIM encourages all comrades to help out the revolution by writing 
articles and distributing the paper.

FLYING HIGH

To MIM,
My name is XX. I'm a Libertarian but I work with a lot of Workers 
World Party people. Because I'm in the military (USAF) and working 
against the government while I'm still in, all I can say is I'm so 
sorry for all the pain, suffering, genocide and lies I have been a 
part of. I've been active for just over a year (in the movement to 
overthrow the government). Though I may not agree on everything 
the communist party stands for I respect it and accept it and its 
people as a part of change that must happen to better the world, 
and this change will and can only come from a well educated, 
allied and armed struggle from the people. I wish to meet and swap 
info I have collected over the last year. Please contact me.
A friend in the Air Force 
January 1992

P.S. An alliance must form; there are just too many people with 
different viewpoints out there to stand alone. But they all agree 
Bush and the government must go before all of us can live in a 
democratically diversified country.

MC17 responds: MIM is glad that this comrade is showing interest 
in our politics. Fundamentally MIM agrees with this comrade that 
it is necessary to build a united front to combat imperialism. But 
MIM does not wish to include groups in this front that are not 
anti-imperialist. MIM will only ally with groups that are fighting 
imperialism, including those fighting for national liberation.  

MIM has some big disagreements with the Workers World Party, 
which, for one, often chooses the tactic of working within the 
electoral system. This practice deceives the masses into believing 
that reform is possible and revolution is unnecessary.

MIM hopes for the opportunity to correspond with more people like 
this comrade in the air force, whose political understanding is 
advanced, but who agree with the politics of Workers World Party 
or any other self-proclaimed revolutionary group.

Write to MIM for essays on your favorite revolutionary group or 
send $1 for a copy of "What's Your Line"--a pamphlet overview of 
the Amerikan left.

* * *

CHINA'S CAPITAL MILESTONE

Capitalism in China is reaching a new landmark, as the southern 
city of Guangzhou (ex-Canton) is prepared to open the country's 
third stock exchange, according to the deputy mayor.

The new development, though, is the advent of Class B shares, 
which are available for direct sale to foreigners. They were to go 
on sale in Shanghai on Feb. 20, and in Guangzhou soon after. 
Foreign banks will also be permitted to open branches in 
Guangzhou.(1)

Meanwhile, the majority of the 1,200 Hong Kong-based industries 
surveyed which operate for profit in southern China say they will 
stay there even if the United States decides to revoke China's 
most-favored nation trading status.

While acknowledging that they would lose valuable export markets 
from such a sanction, most said that the money in Guangdong 
province, near Hong Kong, is good enough to make up for the 
possible loss. Hong Kong-based capitalist enterprises employ more 
than 2 million Chinese workers in China.(2)

The state-capitalist regime in China, in power since 1976 and 
currently led by Deng Xiaoping, has used the southern province as 
the vanguard of capitalist restoration.

The border city of Shenzhen has grown from less than 100,000 to 
more than 2 million inhabitants in that time, and is now home to 
rampant crime, and "a limitless supply of prostitutes of both 
sexes," according to one gleeful Western reporter.(3)

But the restoration of capitalism has not been confined to the 
"special economic zones" in the south. State enterprises, which 
accounted for about 80% of China's industrial output in 1979, 
declined to 54% in 1990, and should drop below 50% this year.(4)

The debate over U.S. policy toward China today, heightened by the 
visit of Premier Li Peng to New York in February, has nothing to 
do with how to "deal with communism." Instead, it's a debate over 
how best to make a buck on corporate opportunities in China 
without hurting the U.S. trade position. --MC12

Notes:
1. Wall Street Journal 2/3/92.
2. WSJ 1/31/91.
3. Economist 10/5/91, p. 19.
4. Economist 6/1/91, p. 16.

* * *

SINGAPORE BOUND

The United States remained the biggest foreign investor in the 
Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore's manufacturing sector 
last year, though Japan and the European Community (E.C.) were 
close behind.
U.S. investment ($590 million) made up 33% of the manufacturing 
total, while Japan had 24% and the E.C. had about 22%.(1)

Singapore is a good investment for U.S. manufacturers who are 
tired of paying for VCRs and vacations for their workers. 
Production workers in Singapore, on average, cost companies 22% of 
the cost of U.S. workers (compared to, for example, 12% for 
Brazilian workers, and 16% for Mexican workers).(2)

The profits there are good enough for U.S. investment in Singapore 
overall to almost double from 1980 to 1988, to $2.2 billion, with 
more than two-thirds of that in manufacturing.(3) --MC12

Notes:
1. Wall Street Journal 2/4/92.
2. 1991 Statistical Abstract of the U.S., p. 851.
3. Ibid, p. 797.

* * *

ELECTION RESULTS, ALMOST

Official fundraising totals in the presidential election campaign 
don't look good for the Democrats. The top five had together 
raised less than $9 million by the end of 1991, to President 
Bush's $10.1 million (before he even said he was running).

In order of appearance, here are the candidates. We've tried to 
explain the differences among them as best as we could:

Bill Clinton: $3.3 million. Sex scandals and draft-dodging are 
good for name recognition.

Tom Harkin: $2.2 million. White working class hero. Choice of the 
social democrats, he is after a bigger share for Euro-Amerikan 
workers and increased exploitation to pay for it. Screw the 
Japanese and the Germans, Harkin's gonna cut all that wasted aid 
money: bad-mouth the rich, take from the poor and give to the 
well-off.

Bob Kerrey: $1.9 million. Nah. Vietnam vets are out.

Paul Tsongas: $1.1 million. No way. Bags under his eyes. Greek 
from Massachusetts.

Jerry Brown: $471,000. Says he'll only take $100 at a time. Says 
elections are rigged by the rich and powerful. He's right. He's 
one of them.

Your name here: Fifth place is up for grabs, for as low as $1 
million.
Elections have never in history changed the fundamental structure 
of any society--ever--and we see no evidence they ever will. --
MC12

Notes: Wall Street Journal 2/4/92.

* * *

WHITE PRIVILEGE EXPOSED

Baltimore held its first Black Gay Pride Day recently, drawing 
several hundred people. The city's mainstream pride day in June 
became a center of controversy when community members protested 
the fact that the pride day program was composed almost entirely 
of images of white gay men.

Despite the fact that the population of Baltimore is almost 80% 
Black and includes other oppressed communities as well, the pride 
day committee was made up exclusively of white men. The pride day 
program also contained a full page advertisement from a mayor who 
was running on a blatantly racist campaign platform. The committee 
admitted that, "most of us, when putting together a volunteer 
committee, ask our friends."

Many gay and lesbian pride rallies across the country are 
organized by white men and do not project an anti-patriarchy and 
anti-imperialist program. Instead, organizers call for yuppie job 
protection against gay discrimination. And like the pseudo-
feminists, these gay men simply fight against their own particular 
oppression, oblivious of their First World privileges and most 
importantly, of the oppression of Third World people.

MIM welcomes members of all sexual orientations; we fight against 
all oppressions, including oppression of gay men and lesbians. But 
MIM refuses to cheerlead for gays and lesbians who do not fight 
against patriarchy and imperialism, but only want a bigger piece 
of the imperialist pie. We ask all progressive and revolutionary 
gay and lesbian activists to circulate this statement and 
distribute MIM Notes. --MC67
Notes: Rites Magazine via Angles 12/91, p. 12.

* * *

ACLU VS. ACLU

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California has 
recently threatened legal action against the feminist group Always 
Causing Legal Unrest, whose acronym is also ACLU, stating that the 
group is violating trademark laws. The feminist group has parodied 
the American Civil Liberties Union in political leaflets, buttons 
and most recently a handbook entitled "Nemesis: Justice is a Woman 
with a Sword."

Always Causing Legal Unrest was founded by long-time feminist 
activist Nikki Craft, and Tara Baxter. This Rancho Cordova, 
California-based group wants to educate people about the place of 
violence in women's lives.

The American Civil Liberties Union professes a First Amendment 
fundamentalism to protect freedom of speech and freedom of the 
press. In the past, the group has defended pornographers, Nazis, 
KKK members and flag-burners--all with the liberal illusion that 
all forms of speech and the press carry equal weight and must be 
equally protected.

Now, in outright contradiction to their stated principles, the 
civil libertarian group wants to suppress the political speech of 
Always Causing Legal Unrest.

In a letter dated Nov. 28, 1991 and signed by the executive 
director of the ACLU in Northern California, the group threatened 
that it "will take every legal effort" to protect the American 
Civil Liberties Union's name. The civil libertarian group set a 
response deadline on Dec. 15, 1991, the date of the 200th 
anniversary of the Bill of Rights.

Always Causing Legal Unrest, in a clever response to this threat, 
handed out leaflets at the American Civil Liberties Union's Bill 
of Rights Day fund-raising event on Dec. 15, at a San Francisco 
hotel. The women were protesting the ACLU's attempt to suppress 
the organization.

In a further irony, the seven women who were handing out leaflets 
at the event were physically and verbally accosted by angered 
members of the American Civil Liberties Union.

MIM's initial impression is that this group is correct. Its 
education about violence against women, its advocacy of self-
defense and its repudiation of the other ACLU's brand of 
liberalism, give the group far more effective potential than 
existing rape-crisis centers and shelters. --MC67

Notes: off our backs 2/92, p. 18.
Always Causing Legal Unrest, P.O. Box 2085, Rancho Cordova, CA 
95741-2085.

* * *

WHITE COP GETS OFF ON MURDER

On Feb. 11 an all-white jury in Teaneck, New Jersey found white 
cop Gary Spath not guilty of manslaughter for the murder of Black 
teen Phillip Pannell in April 1990.(1)

Spath shot Pannell dead while "investigating a report that 
[Pannell and his friends] had a gun." The cop said Pannell made a 
move, and the state came up with a gun said to have been in the 
youth's pocket.
The murder sparked a violent reaction from Black youth in the 
neighborhood, who overturned police cars and broke windows of 
public buildings near the shooting.

Crime and criminals are social constructions. To white cops and 
white juries, young Black men hanging out on the street are by 
definition criminals: they refuse to be cowed by state authority, 
display little respect for private property "rights," and assert a 
strong public image which contradicts their assigned role as the 
politically and economically weak.

Who doubts the cop? The people.

Despite medical evidence that Pannell had one or both arms in the 
air when he was killed, MIM does not need to know that he was not 
attacking the cop to call his death a murder. The white cop was 
part of the occupying army of the Black colony. From the people's 
perspective, the cop's presence was itself a criminal act, an act 
of war.

On the same day in a Milwaukee court, testimony revealed that 
police twice entered the apartment of mass murderer Jeffrey 
Dahmer, who has admitted to the murder of 17 young men--most of 
them Black--without considering busting him.

Despite the smell of dead bodies from the next room strong enough 
to have bothered the neighbors, the police returned a 14-year-old 
boy who had escaped from the apartment. Or, more precisely, they 
"dropped the boy on the couch." Dahmer killed him that night.

In at least four direct confrontations under obviously suspect 
conditions, the police never seriously questioned Dahmer--even 
when he was stopped on the way to the dump with a body on the back 
seat of his car. Why would they stop him? One pig said he "seemed 
normal."
Seemed white, maybe.

Phillip Pannell and countless others have paid the price for a 
definition of crime tailored to fit the needs of the Amerikan 
nation and its oppression of the internal colonies, while untold 
numbers of Jeffrey Dahmers go free. --MC12

Notes: New York Times 2/12/92, p. A9.

* * *

EURO-AMERIKKKANS FORM STUDY GROUP

"The group's aim is to raise the ethnic consciousness of white-
skinned Americans of European heritage, largely by peppering the 
media with letters opposing the use of such words as white, Anglo, 
Caucasian--not to mention redneck, lily-white and hillbilly--as 
insensitive, politically incorrect racial slurs ... "Call us 
European American' is the group's main message."

The study group is protesting the common perception that, 
"European Americans are a monolithic group that look alike, act 
alike, come from a country called White Land and speak white-
speak."

"The group is concerned about what it perceives as distorted 
negative depictions of Europeans--for example, harsher depictions 
of conquerors from Europe than those from other cultures."

"We don't expect immediate success," said [the study group 
leader], "We realize this is all new to people."(1)

MIM is sending the study group a copy of J. Sakai's Settlers: The 
Mythology of the White Proletariat (C.O.D.), in order that they 
may rectify their spelling error. --MC86

Notes: San Francisco Examiner 2/2/92, p. B4.

* * *

SIGN AND SCREW

In the ambiguous world of sexual relations where all sex is rape 
and where no sometimes means yes and yes doesn't always mean yes, 
a Toronto woman has come up with a progressive solution: a written 
consent form.
Warning that "dating can be dangerous," she has created documents 
that come in a wallet size booklet, for people to sign their 
consent to have sex. Signers can also stipulate where and when sex 
will occur, what method of birth control will be used and whether 
the parties will be using drugs.

Too many rape crisis centers put out the line that anything a 
woman says is true and that "verbal coercion" is rape. MIM thinks 
that is a crock. This line reduces women to weak morons, incapable 
of sticking up for themselves and in need of counseling and police 
to serve and protect them.

The truth is that only revolution can solve women's problems. Such 
a consent book dumps romance where a man and a woman are supposed 
to "naturally" interpret each other and then consent to sex. This 
is a direct, political way for women to insist on some parity in 
political power.. --MC¯

Notes: Detroit Free Press 1/25/92.

* * *

OBITUARY: A DEATH AS HEAVY AS MOUNT TAI
by a comrade

On Jan. 3, revolutionary activist Muhammad Kenyatta died from 
diabetes complications at age 47. MIM believes the most 
appropriate way to remember Muhammad Kenyatta is to review the 
specifics of his life of thought and struggle. He was a Black 
priest, an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating 
Committee (SNCC), law student leader, law professor and 
independent revolutionary.

One of the first civil rights organizers in the South during the 
1960s upsurge, Kenyatta had to leave because of the threats to his 
life from white supremacists. But he stayed with the civil rights 
struggle throughout his life.

At Harvard University, Kenyatta led the Black Law Students 
Association, among other groups, and he saw to the distribution of 
RADACADS literature--including "Harvard and South Africa" and 
"South Africa and the United States." Along with the Revolutionary 
Internationalist Movement (RIM), RADACADS was one of MIM's 
predecessors.

Although Harvard Law School is one of the handful of places where 
the bourgeoisie trains its future rulers, it was once a hotbed of 
radicalism. Re-igniting the struggle against U.S. ties to 
apartheid in 1982 and 1983, RADACADS work impacted even more at 
the law school than among the undergraduates. Kenyatta, along with 
African student leaders and some radical whites, made Harvard Law 
School a big headache for the bourgeoisie. These law students 
exposed the bourgeoisie on hiring discrimination, apartheid, 
militarism and the invasion of Grenada. When Muhammad Kenyatta 
spoke at events on these subjects, he pointed to capitalism as the 
source of the problem.

Kenyatta organized demonstrations, talks and literature 
distribution. When he was working at a table handing out 
literature one day, he explained to the RADACADS that he always 
thought the Cultural Revolution was a good thing and that he was 
an admirer of Mao Zedong.
Kenyatta regarded MIM's predecessors as "an inspiration for [his] 
life." He also pointed out that the young people in RADACADS/RIM 
"were out of line in these goose-stepping times" of the early 
Reagan years. Kenyatta thus gave testimony to the ongoing strength 
of Maoism and the struggles of the oppressed. The struggle may 
have its highs and lows, but experienced activists know that the 
imperialists will never live to see the struggle and its history 
wiped out.

In practice, Kenyatta's biggest difference from MIM was that he 
did not make a vanguard party a center of his life. This did not 
stop him from working with communists, while he kept himself 
firmly planted in various struggles of Black people and struggling 
for internationalist goals as well. In another disagreement with 
RADACADS, Kenyatta said that as a younger man he was angry with 
Martin Luther King, Jr., but that as he got older he learned to 
appreciate what King did. A sophisticated unity of progressive 
forces was always Kenyatta's goal.

In the early 1980s, MIM's predecessors absorbed the negative 
lessons of Progressive Labor Party's (PLP) role in Students for a 
Democratic Society (SDS). The RADACADS ended their direct 
organizational leadership of the South Africa Solidarity Committee 
(SASC) and provided increasingly broader political leadership 
instead. By this time, RADACADS, and then RIM, had brought the 
struggle to the point where hundreds of people in all Harvard 
schools and in the greater Boston area were involved. It would 
have held back the development of newly awakening forces to lead 
the movement as single-issue leaders.

This decision by the RADACADS was not without costs. White 
opportunist elements in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) 
took over SASC and watered down the organization's principles. The 
DSA-controlled SASC published an article in the student paper, The 
Harvard Crimson, calling for negotiated and peaceful change in 
South Africa--dropping the group's previously explicit support for 
the armed struggles of the Azanian masses.

The old SASC leaders were disgusted by this backsliding and they 
wrote a letter to the student paper. Kenyatta was one of the co-
signors. For weeks after publication of this letter, DSA 
opportunists organized meetings and essay-writing just on this 
subject to rationalize why Black people should not pick up the 
gun.

Later, when the RIM had changed its name to MIM, Kenyatta gave one 
more critical push to the struggle--critical to MIM's development. 
MIM's core membership had learned its so-called feminism from 
white feminists who placed the gender contradiction above class, 
nation and "race," seeing only unity between white women and women 
of color.

Kenyatta sent MIM some articles he published about the family. He 
clearly pointed out that Black women have interests that are not 
just different but directly opposite those of wealthier white 
women.

MIM realized that Kenyatta was correct on this very important 
issue. Wasn't it clear that in Azania, the oppressor directly 
attacked the Black family? Didn't the white supremacists separate 
the Black male workers from Black women who stayed in the 
"Bantustans" while men worked in the mines and other industries? 
In Azania, the white supremacists destroyed the Black family so 
that wages would pay for just the subsistence of its Black male 
workers (and not even pay for that) while it forced Black women to 
scavenge for themselves and their children in the "Bantustans."

So the simple "abolition" or "destruction" of the family--which is 
what radical so-called feminists since the 1960s have wanted--was 
not in the interests of oppressed women. The oppressor has seen to 
the "destruction" of the family many times in history with no 
gains for the oppressed.

Within the United States, the Euro-Amerikan state-enforced 
destruction of the Black family also happened, but with less 
severe consequences than in Azania--where Black people are among 
the most oppressed in the world. While it may be in the interests 
of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois white women to "destroy" the 
family and gain "freedom," this is not the case where the 
oppressor has been destroying the family of the oppressed for a 
long time. After people have lived under socialism for a long 
period, the time may come when abolition of the family will take 
on the meaning supported by Marx and Engels. But right now, 
abolition of the family under capitalism is part of the decadence 
of imperialism.

Kenyatta was a primary influence on MIM's gender analysis until 
Catharine MacKinnon's Feminism Unmodified --which pushed MIM's 
analysis even further. The actions and impact of Kenyatta and the 
revolutionary activists who worked with him--will live on in our 
revolutionary work of today.

* * *

ISLAMIC VICTORY UPSETS ALGERIA
by MC99 & MC44

Armed clashes flared up in Algeria between the army-backed 
government and "fundamentalist" Islamists, as anti-government 
riots have swept capital city Algiers since mid-January. Dozens of 
police and civilians have been killed.

There are two types of conflict. The first is between two factions 
of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), which led the 
nationalist struggle against French colonialism only to 
deteriorate into agents of neo-colonialism. One faction, headed by 
former President Chadli Benjedid, supported the January elections, 
and democratizing Algeria in general. The other faction wanted to 
retain control through more authoritarian means.

The second conflict is between the FLN as a whole and the Islamic 
Salvation Front (FIS)--a populist Islamist movement which was 
poised to win power in the canceled Jan. 16 elections.

On Jan. 11, President Benjedid "resigned" under pressure from old-
guard FLN members who opposed his plans to go forward with the 
second round of national elections scheduled for Jan. 16, which 
would have virtually ensured  an  FIS  victory.

The new government, which calls itself the High Security Council, 
has the support of the military, including senior army officials. 
Benjedid himself may have been complicit in the change of power, 
which the FIS and the other leading opposition party, the Front of 
Socialist Forces (FFS), are describing as a coup d'etat.(1)

Alarmed over the results of the last round of elections on Dec. 
26, in which the FIS won 188 of the 430 parliament seats, the 
Council canceled the January elections and nullified the results 
of the December round.(2) The move halted the tide of a glasnost-
type "democratization" which Benjedid began in 1988.

New government, same power structure

The High Council includes Prime Minister Ghozali, the head of the 
armed forces and four senior government ministers. The High 
Council has also established a Council of State, which could 
remain in power until the end of 1993, when Benjedid's term was 
supposed to run out.

The most powerful and well-known member of the Council of State is 
Minister of Defense and former head of the armed forces General 
Khalad Nezzar. Leading the body is the lesser-known Mohaled 
Boudiaf, a hero of the 1961 revolution against France. Boudiaf has 
been living in exile in Morocco for 28 years.(3) He is a 
strategically sound choice for a leader, because of his 
association with revolutionary nationalism--not the corrupt 
baggage of the FLN.

The state-clergy conflict

The FIS was officially formed in 1989, when Benjedid instituted a 
first phase of "democratization" by legalizing political parties 
other than the FLN.(4) But the current conflict between the FLN 
and the radical Islamist movement arose from 30 years of 
unsuccessful mediation between the clergy and the post-colonial 
state. The current conflict is the explosive result of that old 
relationship, which could no longer remain unresolved.

Islamic ideology was a mobilizing force in the wartime rhetoric of 
the FLN during the 1961 revolution, and the people who now make up 
the FIS fought alongside the FLN. The FLN has governed Algeria as 
a state-capitalist neo-colony: the economy was planned and 
controlled by the state, and dependent on aid from the Soviet 
Union and business with Western imperialists. When it was 
politically profitable to do so, the state alternately emphasized 
its "socialist" or "Islamic" affiliations. But Algeria was never 
socialist; the FLN made no attempts at self-reliance or worker 
control.

Since the 1970s, the FLN employed an accomodationist policy toward 
the rising tide of radical Islamists. Although the FLN was 
technically the sole overseer of all religious activity,(5) the 
party's laxness toward the clergy allowed the FIS to end up 
controlling 8,000 of Algeria's 10,000 mosques.(6) Those mosques 
have been sites of politics as well as prayer--a big power base 
for the FIS.

The High Council in early February outlawed all political activity 
in mosques, and outlawed the FIS altogether. But the Council 
cannot turn back the clock: this latest move is simply too late.

Collapsing economy

First World creditor nations and banks have been making loan plans 
to help Algeria refinance $1.5 billion worth of commercial bank 
debt, hoping to foster political "stability" and in turn fuel 
investment opportunities.(8) The ruling establishment has implied 
that foreign capitalists can get a good deal on investments in oil 
and gas,(9) the basis for Algeria's economy.

Their chances for an electoral victory thwarted, the FIS said it 
wants to throw the ruling FLN compradors out of office. When asked 
for a comment by the press, an FIS spokesperson said: "No comment. 
If you want a comment go to the centers of power, like the French 
Embassy, the army or the so-called government."(10)

Apparently, the poorest people in Algeria support the FIS. The 
Western bourgeois press explains this widespread support by 
portraying all Arabs as irrational and naturally prone to 
"fundamentalism." But one only has to look at what the FIS has 
done to get a materialist analysis for Algerian support of the 
FIS. From its timely assistance for Algiers earthquake victims in 
1989 to its "network of medical clinics and other services in the 
poorest neighborhoods of Algeria's crowded cities,"(4) the FIS has 
a better track record of responding to the masses' needs than does 
the FLN.

Bad economic conditions are often the basis for political 
instability, and Algeria's economy is in dire straits. Seventy 
percent of Algeria's population is under 35, and 50% of those 
people are unemployed.(11) The population of Algeria has also 
tripled since the revolution.(12)

Communists have to hold the FLN responsible for the mistakes of 
its 30 year tenure--for not building self-reliance, for 
discrediting socialism and for remaining tied to Western 
imperialism.

The Algerian people want a change of government. But out of a 
country of 36 million people, only 3 million people voted for the 
FIS in December.(11) Much of the FIS's "support" is actually a 
registered lack of support for the corrupt comprador FLN.

Revolutionary opening

Among the 300,000 anti-fundamentalist demonstrators in Algiers on 
Jan. 2 were Algeria's largest union, several women's organizations 
and members of the press. The demonstration was organized by the 
Front for Socialist Forces.(12) Wanting to help solve Algeria's 
unemployment problem by purging women from the workforce, the FIS 
has a patriarchal agenda which intends to substitute one oppressor 
for another.

The current political struggle represents a revolutionary 
opportunity for progressive nationalist and socialist forces 
within Algeria. But Islamic "fundamentalism" is in the long run no 
friend of the proletariat.

Notes:
1. Middle East International 1/24/92,
p. 5.
2. New York Times 1/16/92, p. 5.
3. MEI 1/24/92, pp. 4-5.
4. Middle East Journal, Autumn 1991, pp. 578-79.
5. MEJ, Autumn 1991, p. 577.
6. MEI 1/24/92, p. 3.
7. Arab News 1/15/92.
8. Africa Confidential Vol. 33 No. 1.
9. Africa Confidential Vol. 32 No. 18.
10. NYT 1/26/92, p. A5.
11. MEI 1/24/92, p. 2.
12. The Nation 2/10/92.

* * *

ARAB STATES SELL PALESTINE
by MC18

The recent third round of Mideast peace talks exposed the 
alliances between many Arab states and the West. With billions of 
dollars in trade, loans, and military agreements at stake, 10 Arab 
states have realized that their economic and political future in 
the New World Order hinges on conciliation with the Western 
imperialists and Israel--and abandoning Palestine.

Algeria and Yemen were the only Arab countries which joined the 
Palestinian delegation in boycotting the Moscow talks; 10 others 
did not. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Tunisia, 
Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and Mauritania all complied with Israel's 
request for the exclusion of delegates from East Jerusalem or 
those living in exile.

Algeria and Yemen unofficially cited solidarity with Palestine as 
the cause of their absence from the talks. Israel says that the 
ban on East Jerusalem residents and exiles as spokespeople applies 
to multilateral talks such as those in Moscow.(1) But the fact is 
that Israel doesn't want to consider East Jerusalem at all, and is 
only willing to address the West Bank and Gaza. 

Secretary of State and chief U.S. whip James Baker III encouraged 
the Palestinian delegation to return to the table, assuring them 
that he would support their request for inclusion of spokespeople 
from outside the recognized "Occupied Terroritories," of the West 
Bank and Gaza Strip. But at the talks, Baker reneged on this 
promise.(2) The talks set up seminars forming the basis of future 
talks planned for later this year, on regional security, economic 
development (hosted by the European Community), water resources, 
environmental issues, and refugees.(2)

The payoff for Arab capitalists

Arab states are realizing the benefits of trade with Israel. 
Compliance with Israel and the imperialists on the Palestinian 
issue is one more way for them to smooth out relations--good 
business for all capitalists. 

Despite the facade of hatred for Israel, many Arab governments 
already know that the future of Mideast capitalism lies in a more 
unified trading area. Aside from Egypt, which bans Israeli 
products for use in the state sector (80% of the Egyptian 
economy), many of Israel's other neighbors are vigorously pumping 
trade with the settler state.

Iraq is a big importer of Israeli tomatoes that pass through West 
Bank distributors and Jordan. Libya purchases superior Israeli 
irrigation equipment. Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the Persian Gulf 
states purchase a variety of agricultural produce and equipment. 
Often the goods pass through other countries, losing their Israeli 
or Arab markings before moving across the borders. Israel, for 
instance, imports Iranian pistachios via Nairobi, marks them 
"product of Israel" and ships them to the United States.

This trade, which boomed during the 1982-83 Israeli occupation of 
Lebanon (which Israel used as a distribution center for shipping 
goods into other Arab states) continues today at $1 billion per 
year.(3)

The relaxing of the Arab trade boycott with Israel has benefitted 
Western imperialists and Japan. Now, without risking their large 
markets in Arab states, Pepsico and Toyota are exporting products 
to Israel. Saudi Arabia offered to end its boycott completely--
contingent upon ending Israeli settlement expansion in the 
Occupied Territories,(3) but this is meaningless. The number of 
Israeli settlers in the West Bank has doubled to 120,000 since 
1987.(4) Under Ariel Sharon's housing ministry, housing starts 
since last summer have quadrupled to 800 per month--there's no 
sign of slowing.(5)

Syria has adopted a similar, but more apologetic, attitude. While 
Syria maintains its claim to the Golan, which Israel seized in 
1967, it is unconcerned about the rest of the Occupied 
Territories. The Syrian government is happy to do business, 
conduct peace talks and coexist peacefully with Israel while 
Israel occupies Palestine. Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Sharaa 
calls recovery of the Golan a matter of "dignity," but his 
willingness to sacrifice Palestine to Israel shows that it is 
really a matter of property.(6)

Even Jordan--Palestine's official partner in the negotiations--
seeks conciliation with Israel, which is why Jordan abandoned 
Palestine and participated in the Moscow talks. Jordan's main 
priority is the construction of the Unity dam on the Jordan River, 
for which it needs Israel's cooperation.(4)

By selling out Palestine, Arab capitalists get economic benefits 
which seem to outweigh all else. While much of the bourgeois press 
still defines the struggle as the "Arab-Israeli conflict," and 
while Arab states mouth resistance in the U.N. to Israel's 
occupation of Palestine--the actions of the Arab states show they 
are more concerned with opportunities for business, both with 
Israel and the West.

Notes:
1. Washington Post 1/29/92, pp. A23, A28.
2. Washington Post 1/30/92, p. A17.
3. The Economist Report on Business 1/92, p. 40.
4. The Economist 1/25/92, p. 41.
5. The Economist 1/25/92, p. 42.
6. The Economist 1/25/92, p. 40.

* * *

AMERIKA AND JAPAN: A PACT SIGNED IN ... VOMIT
by MC86 & MC42

A confused mess of Japan-bashing, "Buy American" campaigns and 
general Euro-Amerikan fascist-oriented nationalism, has spread its 
malignancy through the United States--taking its heavy toll on the 
people of oppressed internal nations. This rising white 
nationalism is a symptom of a fatal disease--capitalism. As U.S. 
world economic power slips and U.S. brute force becomes more in 
vogue, oppressed people inside and outside of Amerika's borders 
will take advantage of the situation.

The war against Iraq couldn't satisfy the rape-and-conquer ego of 
the frustrated white nation--so the foreigner-bashing tactics have 
come home. Now the enemies are Latino immigrant workers who steal 
jobs, "lazy" welfare recipients who steal tax money, and all 
Japanese companies (and all Japanese people) which steal profits 
here and abroad. And make no mistake about who Amerikan 
nationalism includes: the white labor aristocracy benefits from, 
and helps to construct, the current anti-Japan sentiment.

1991

Japan's trade surplus with the United States hits $43 billion in 
Japan's favor. Japanese direct investment in the United States is 
$84 billion (less than Britain's). Amerika consumes more goods 
than it produces. Japan produces more than it consumes. Amerikan 
imperialists initiate anti-Japanese propaganda campaigns to 
disguise their historical collaboration with Japanese imperialism. 
Amerikan public goes nuts trying to find quality Amerikan products 
to consume.

Eight major Japanese auto makers employ 30,000 Amerikan workers in 
eight states.(1)

Highlights 1992

With the approval of local Washington state governments, the 
Japanese-American-owned Nintendo Corporation, employing 1,400 
people in Seattle, offers to buy 60% of the Seattle Mariners 
baseball team, to keep the team from moving to Florida.(2)

The Amerikan public is outraged-- nightly news reports include 
sound-bites like, "First it was Rockefeller Center; now the 
Japanese want to buy the Amerikan pastime."

Bush goes to Japan, is told to piss-off, and vomits on the Prime 
Minister: "Instead of opening new markets or breaking down trade 
barriers, Bush won a handful of concessions for U.S. automakers, 
including Japan's tentative agreement to buy 20,000 U.S. cars [two 
days production at GM] or $10 billion worth of auto parts."(1)

Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa says that Amerika "lacks a 
work ethic" and that Amerikans "have forgotten how to live by the 
sweat of their brow."(2) The Amerikan press has a field day. 
Luckily, a Liberal comes to the rescue by printing Miyazawa's 
actual (and quite innocuous) words in a New York Times editorial. 
But the damage has been done. TV car commercials respond directly 
to the Prime Minister's allegations, and anyone else who wants to 
mess with an Amerikan worker.

House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt introduces protectionist 
legislation requiring Japan to eliminate its trade surplus with 
the United States in five years or face deep cuts in Japanese car 
imports. (1)

Japan's Minister of International Trade and Industry "said he had 
heard that Americans would not buy a Detroit-made car that was 
produced on a Friday or a Monday, because on those days workers 
were either preparing for a weekend of play or recovering from 
one."(2)

Los Angeles County Transportation Commission cancels Sumitomo 

Corporations $121 million contract to build rail cars for the 
city.(1)
"Town leaders of Greece, N.Y. discovered that a Komatsu Ltd. 
excavating machine they rejected was made in the United States and 
a John Deere Co. model they chose instead used an engine from 
Japan."(3)

Ford owns 24% of Mazda and all of Jaguar. GM owns 38% of Isuzu and 
all of Lotus. Chrysler owns Lamborghini. All three import steel 
from Japan and are moving production abroad.

Mr. Kawamoto of Honda: "This is the first time since World War II 
that I have seen a reaction like this. What a pity, a great nation 
has come to such a pass."(4)

Notes:
1. US News & World Report, in San Fransisco Chronicle 2/3/92, pp. 
A13-14.
2. New York Times 2/4/92, p. A10.
3. Associated Press 2/2/92.
4. Fortune Magazine 2/10/92, p. 86.

MIM Notes 61 has an article on the General Motors layoffs and the 
Amerika working class. Check it out for only $1.

* * *

REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY: FROM THE ASHES OF A MASSACRE...
by MC86

Sharpeville, Occupied Azania [South Africa], March 21, 1960: 
During the first weeks of March, 1960, thousands of Azanians went 
up against the South African settler-state regime to protest the 
"pass-laws." These laws forced Black people to carry detailed 
"pass-books" for instant identification upon pig-demand. If a 
person was found to be outside a certain area--s/he was 
imprisoned.

March 21, 1992, marks the 32nd anniversary of the Sharpeville 
Massacre. On this day in l960, South African police attacked an 
anti-pass-law demonstration in Sharpeville, a township near the 
city of Johannesburg. Firing into the crowd, the pigs murdered 67 
people and wounded 186. Many, including children, were shot in the 
back.

This mass murder exposed the evil apartheid regime to the world--
as people all over Occupied Azania began burning their pass-books 
and refusing to submit to the oppressor. In resistance, 30,000 
Blacks marched in central Cape Town as the government panicked and 
briefly suspended the pass-laws. Regaining its composure, the 
military enforced a "state of emergency" and thousands of 
community leaders were arrested and driven into exile.

Fifteen years to the day after Sharpeville, the South African pigs 
did it again. On March 21, 1975 the military ambushed a funeral 
procession in Langa, killing 20 people and wounding 27. The 
township of Langa was razed to the ground.(1)

The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) emerged out of these and 
similar class struggles. Steven Biko, a leader of this 
revolutionary nationalist organization, was murdered by the 
apartheid apparatus on September 12, 1977. Today, revolutionaries 
springing from the BCM lead the resistance movement in the 
townships and bantustans--in the face of the surrender of the 
African National Congress to the continuation of apartheid and the 
capitalist exploitation of the people.

Despite many losses, the Azanian people have taken every 
opportunity to chop away at capitalism. In the 1970s and again in 
the 1980s, townships like Soweto became semi-liberated 
territories, as the youth beat back the pigs and administered 
people's justice to traitors and poverty-pimps.

Maoist revolutionaries note the anniversaries of defeats as well 
as victories, because we know that defeats inevitably turn into 
triumph. We are realists, and do not expect the final victory to 
come without pain. As Steven Biko said, some months before his 
assassination:

"You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are 
dead, you can't care anyway. And your method of death can itself 
be a politicizing thing. So you die in the riots. For a hell of a 
lot of them, in fact, there's really nothing to lose--almost 
literally, given the kind of situations that they come from. So if 
you can overcome the personal fear of death, which is a highly 
irrational thing, you know, then you're on the way."(2)

Notes:
1. Mufson, Fighting Years, Beacon Press, 1990.
2. Biko, Steven, I Write What I Like, Harper & Row, 1978, p. 153.

* * *

COMPUTER POLITIKS
by MC¯

The proliferation of personal computers, coupled with the ever-
expanding network of larger computer systems--accessible in many 
cases with no more effort than a local phone call--has made for a 
mushrooming of a computer subculture since the late 1970s. 
Computers increasingly represent a means of mass communication 
that is not monopolized by the media empires of newspapers and 
television.

While one might expect a liberated culture to rage ahead of the 
mainstream in the same way underground magazines politically 
outstrip anything available from media corporations, computer 
counter-culture remains mired in liberal illusions. The politics 
of the computer underground, from the hackers to the academics at 
major universities, boil down to an acceptance that many people 
should not have access to large computer networks and that 
computer security facilitates smooth interaction online.

Means of communication

The two most common uses of computers as a means of communication 
are through bulletin board systems (BBS) and computer networks. 
BBSs can be run with almost any computer from a $200 microcomputer 
to a large mainframe. Frequently, they are established by 
hobbyists or special interest groups. This type of set-up might 
have a microcomputer with a modem and only one phone line.

The networks such as Usenet, Internet or BITnet link large 
computers at universities and corporations together. These often 
have common discussion areas where millions of users can 
potentially read messages of interest. Software and electronic 
journals are commonly published through both the nets and BBSs.

The technology itself can be used quite socialistically. Modern 
computers can be integrated together easily and the "time" or use 
of the computer can be shared among many users. Establishing a 
computer bulletin board is much cheaper and easier than printing 
and distributing a newspaper. With this technology in the right 
hands and guided by the correct ideology--computers have the 
ability to be very progressive.

What politics?

There are two common political lines in the computer world: First, 
liberal academic types, including many system operators (sysops), 
believe that privacy and security create freedom. This liberal 
academic view wants anyone who has an account to enjoy easy use of 
many computers, fostering a sense of community amongst computer 
users. 

Second, hackers, who certainly can't be lumped all together, 
generally want more access to systems and share a curiosity of all 
the various systems and information on the networks.

Cliff Stoll, a graduate student at the University of California at 
Berkeley, is an outspoken advocate for the liberal academic 
viewpoint in his book Cuckoo's Egg. The book chronicles Stoll's 
work as a sysop at Lawrence Berkeley Labs where he started to 
track down a routine accounting error and discovered that someone 
had hacked into the system and was using the network without 
authorization. Stoll pursued the hacker, who turned out to be in 
West Germany, for more than a year, cooperating with the CIA, 
National Security Agency, Sprint, Pacific Bell and the FBI to 
eventually bust the hacker.

Cuckoo's Egg is valuable reading, as it shows some of what the 
authorities are capable of in terms of Big Brother technology and 
inter-police agency cooperation; it also shows many of the state's 
limitations.

Stoll's anger at seeing the hacker read private mail on government 
and university computers, and at other sysops' responses--
increasing security--turns Stoll rabidly anti-hacker. Stoll is 
further outraged when the hacker examines some medical data which, 
if altered, could result in injury to patients. The fact that the 
hacker, obviously a skilled programmer, leaves everything 
unchanged doesn't temper Stoll's anger.

Stoll is honest about his change from Berkeley lefty to pro-cop 
ally of the FBI. "A year ago, I would have viewed these officers 
as war-mongering puppets of the Wall Street capitalists ... Now 
things didn't seems so black and white. They seemed like smart 
people handling a serious problem."(1)

The fallacy of the liberal academic view is that they assume 
anyone can become a legitimate user. To experience the "freedom" 
of the network, one must be granted a password or access by those 
who own or run the system. This means you have to belong to a 
corporation, be a student at an elite university or pay $12.50 an 
hour to a usurious online service such as Prodigy. The academy is 
happy with its own little insular world. And Stoll is right, as 
long as most academics on the computer nets fall into line with 
his political beliefs, they have nothing to fear and will gain 
greater freedoms.

Most BBSs, even the small ones, use the authoritarian policy of 
requiring users to identify themselves with name, address, phone 
number. Others require additional ID such as birthdate and social 
security number--everything necessary to hand the state a complete 
hit list.

This is true even on the boards that discuss politics. People seem 
oblivious to the possibility of a crackdown. The computer 
networks--in part because of the upper class nature of many of 
their users--have not yet learned the lessons of McCarthyism and 
the lessons of Amerika's hundreds of political prisoners.

The hacker view is often a version of liberal academia, but with a 
more adventurous spirit. Most hackers have great respect for 
computer systems and varying degrees of contempt for the social 
system behind the technology.

Hacking, loosely defined as exploring systems--phones (commonly 
called phreaking), computers, locks, the U.S. Postal Service--is 
generally fraught with individualism. Hackers attack many systems 
just for the challenge and ego of it and with little other motive. 
Sure some hackers have crashed systems intentionally, especially 
in response to rude actions by the authorities. Some hackers have 
collaborated with foreign governments interested in gaining 
information. But in the main, the politics of hacking resemble 
their liberal academic counterparts.

One trend in hacking, exemplified by 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, 
aims to close security holes in the system. A recent issue of 2600 
exposes the ease with which a group of Dutch hackers could break 
into a U.S. military computer. It also demonstrates how the push-
button locks, popular on mailboxes used by Federal Express, can 
easily be cracked in spite of the manufacturer's claims to the 
contrary. In both cases 2600 wants security increased.

In explaining its decision to circulate a video demonstrating the 
log-on procedures for a U.S. military computer, 2600 writes: "We 
should stress that the vast majority of unauthorized access does 
not involve computer hackers. Since we have no ulterior motives, 
other than the quest for knowledge, we openly reveal whatever we 
find out. Unfortunately, this often results in our being blamed 
for the problem itself--confusing the messenger with the message 
... Were we not to expose the flaws in the system, they would 
still be there and they would most definitely be abused."(2)

So 2600 sees hacking as providing a service, albeit embarrassing, 
to the military and Fortune 500 companies. Not much revolutionary 
here.

Hackers demonstrate that the bourgeoisie doesn't have perfect 
control of all its equipment; these technologies represent a new 
frontier for the revolution. MIM needs people who want to publish 
MIM Notes electronically and provide a safe haven for Maoists and 
other revolutionaries to hold discussions.

Notes:
1. Cliff Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg, New York: Pocket Books, 1989. p. 
278.
2. 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, Autumn 1991.

* * *

REVIEW: 
CYBERPUNK: OUTLAWS AND HACKERS ON THE COMPUTER FRONTIER
by Katie Hafner and John Markoff
Simon & Schuster, 1991, 368 pp., $21.95
by MC¯

An overweight social-reject breaks into computer systems around 
the country, harassing people over his ham radio, and wreaks havoc 
on the phone company's computerized switching equipment. 

The Chaos Computer Club in Germany breaks into U.S. military 
computers at first out of curiosity and later to sell information 
to KGB agents, using the money to buy drugs.

An Ivy League genius tries to create a worm--a program that will 
propel itself through the computer networks. But the program 
contains an error that crashes a majority of the systems on the 
Internet--the world's largest computer network. With the 
dispassionate gaze of "objective" journalists, Katie Hafner and 
John Markoff's new book,  Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the 
Computer Frontier, paints a picture of computer hackers as 
brilliant but misguided or maladjusted souls.

The book, although it is thorough and includes interviews with 
hundreds of hackers, fails to understand hacking, or why alienated 
youths who are so talented would hate, for example, the greedy 
bureaucracy of the phone company while ultimately respecting the 
phone system itself. The book also must be faulted for its 
reliance on psychological reasoning.

Hafner, a former Business Week writer, and Markoff, the computer 
reporter for the New York Times, love to profile the looks, eating 
habits and family relations of the hackers and sources they 
interview. This leads to stupid assertions about people who hack, 
such as broken homes or obesity causing this innate curiosity. 
Psychology blinds Hafner and Markoff to the truth: The world is 
being taken over by various technological monopolies and some 
people, who are in part alienated by the way things are, will look 
for ways to subvert the system.

So in answering the question "Why hack?" Cyberpunk opts for 
psychological traits instead of the central reason: Hacking is a 
source of power. The interviews in the book--in every case--back 
this up. Some hackers use the computer as a means of communication 
between many different people. These people don't have access to 
the media the way Hafner and Markoff do. Other hackers, or 
phreaks--people who manipulate the phone system--break in to place 
free phone calls. Some people hack systems just to prove they can 
get inside.

Hafner and Markoff smear the principal Amerikan hacker who is used 
as an example of why hacking can be evil. Kevin Mitnick--the only 
one of a trio of hackers who has his real name exposed in the 
book--is portrayed as fat, arrogant, uncaring and deserving of the 
jail sentence he eventually gets for copying software out of 
Digital Equipment's computers. What the authors never mention in 
the book is that Mitnick, who they never interviewed, declined to 
participate because he could not be compensated for his time. 
Cyberpunk, however, goes into great detail about many of Mitnick's 
actions based on the assumptions of various computer security 
experts and others who have motives to depict him as "the dark 
side hacker."

Mitnick wrote a letter to 2600: The Hacker Quarterly blasting 
Cyberpunk.(1) In her response in another journal, Hafner acts as 
though real journalists never pay sources, a standard practice at 
the parent companies of both authors.(2) Printing only the fact 
that he refused to be interviewed, without the accompanying 
dispute, is part of the distortion required to make their 
psychological profile of a depraved hacker complete.

Cyberpunk does provide an overview of hacking in the last 10 
years, if you are willing to pardon the digressions into sex, 
clothing style and flavors of ice cream. But one can always tell 
that Hafner and Markoff's view of hackers is parental. They hold 
that they are a talented bunch of kids, in most cases gone astray, 
and that if they just grow up and protect the privacy of the 
computer systems, the world will be a better place.

Notes:
1. 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, Summer 1991.
2. Computer Underground Digest, Vol. 3.35, 10/4/91, file 2.

* * *

UNDER LOCK & KEY: NEWS FROM PRISONS AND FROM PRISONERS

PRISONER PAYS IN BLOOD

Prisoners at Westville, Indiana's new Maximum Control Complex went 
on a hunger strike in October to protest state brutality against 
them. (see MIM Notes 59). After the prisoners successfully built 
up public opinion against the prison administration, the ACLU got 
in on the act, purporting to negotiate for the prisoners. "We 
don't want to be confrontational," an ACLU official told MIM Notes 
in November, "We're just looking to negotiate, and the warden has 
been very reasonable."

Now, apparently, the defenders of liberalism and Amerikan civil 
liberties have backed out on the Westville prisoners, who are 
still beaten, sprayed with chemicals, and locked up for days at 
freezing temperatures. The following is a copy of a letter MA102 
sent to the ACLU.


Dear ACLU Board Members:

Since for what I understand to be financial reasons, you 
wouldn't/couldn't help expose our inhumane treatment through court 
proceedings, I felt if the ACLU, after acknowledging some 
violations here, was just based on money values, I felt we here 
owed you for three trips in September, October and November 1991. 
Since I (we) have no finances to pay the ACLU, I'm giving you 
something much more precious. Indigent human beings shouldn't have 
to suffer due to imprisonment in a biased backward state without 
funds in Amerika.

How much is your price on decency?

How much is your price on humanity?

In case one has forgotten, we are human too! If we have violated 
your Amerikan standards, then we should be immediately executed, 
not tortured and treated like laboratory rats. We are human, too!

"Our struggle is in consciousness--theirs is in separating." 
Simama lazima sisi pamoja.


MA102 also sent MIM a copy of a State of Indiana Department of 
Correction form indicating that his package to the ACLU was 
confiscated. According to the form, it "contained legal mail and 
fingertip of Mr. xxx's left hand, fifth finger." The prison 
classified such material as "a danger to the safety of an 
individual(s) or security of the institution" and as "contraband 
or prohibited property."


MC11 replies: MIM echoes our comrade's impassioned cries against 
the liberalism that enables groups like the ACLU to step back and 
let the prisoners suffer. But the ACLU isn't worth a finger.

The ACLU and other liberal groups can be good allies in small 
reformist fights, but ultimately they're only trying to make 
cosmetic changes to a system they fundamentally support. While 
those on the outside should take note of the extremes to which 
prisoners are driven in their attempt to draw attention to their 
struggle against injustice, prisoners--and everyone who wants to 
see an end to the cruelties of capitalism--should know not to 
count on ACLU-type methods to do it for them.

Our fingertips are better used for working to build the revolution 
than for telling the liberals where to shove it. (Although MIM has 
nothing against expressing that sentiment in a less self-
destructive form!)

JURY AQUITS ATTICA MURDERERS

Attica prisoners who recently fought a futile battle to win 
justice in Amerika's imperialist courts put themselves in a 
similar position as MA102. After delaying the trial for 20 years 
following the bloody massacre of 32 defenseless prisoners by New 
York state troopers and prison guards, a jury cleared one official 
who oversaw the murders, couldn't decide on the guilt or innocence 
of two others and found one a little bit guilty.

On Sept. 9, 1971, about 1,300 Attica prisoners seized control of 
the prison's D-yard, putting forth demands ranging from more 
humane living conditions to transportation to a non-imperialist 
country. Four days later, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and his top 
prison administration goons ordered their troops to retake the 
yard. State troopers dropped tear gas from helicopters, a task 
force of 211 state troopers fired on the prisoners from the roofs, 
and soon hundreds of wounded prisoners lay strewn across the yard. 
(MIM Notes 56 contains a special supplement on the lessons of the 
Attica uprising. Order today for only $1.)

The jury's verdicts on the class-action suit, filed on behalf of 
the survivors of the massacre against the four state officials 
responsible for the killings, were issued Feb. 4, after four weeks 
of deliberation. During this time, the presiding judge took off 
for a vacation in Barbados and consulted with the jurors by phone.

A separate trial will be held to determine the amount of damages 
owed the prisoners by Karl Pfeil, the former deputy warden who was 
found liable for his complicity in the brutal reprisals against 
prisoners in the aftermath of the uprising. The pig who gave the 
orders, former Corrections Commissioner Russell G. Oswald, was 
found innocent of any wrongdoing. And the members of the jury (all 
but one of whom were white) apparently found it too tough to 
decide on the guilt or innocence of former warden Vincent Mancusi 
and Maj. John Monahan, the state police commander who led the 
operation to retake the prison.

What did the former prisoners expect from the system that put them 
behind bars, treated them like animals, tried to murder them when 
they protested, and tortured them in retaliation? What does it 
take to prove that the Amerikan justice system is designed to keep 
the oppressed down and the capitalists in power? Surely, the 
history of the Attica prisoners' struggle is enough.

But liberals keep right on banging their heads against the walls 
of a system that has proven itself fundamentally unreformable. "We 
will continue to fight," the prisoners' lawyer, Elizabeth Fink, 
told National Public Radio. "We will do whatever we need to do to 
see justice served."

In that case, MIM expects to be hearing from Fink soon. Because if 
she wants more for society than the inherently skewed justice of 
capitalism, she sure as hell isn't going to find it through the 
Amerikan legal system. Had the jury found the four pigs guilty, 
would justice have then been served? MIM doesn't think so. People 
in search of justice must look elsewhere: they must help build the 
revolution. --MC11

STATE SENTENCES PRISONERS TO DEATH BY SUICIDE

"We have an elaborate, aggressive program to thwart suicide, but 
in reality, no matter what you do in this line of work you will 
have suicide," said the deputy chief of corrections at the Du Page 
County Jail in a recent interview with the Chicago Tribune.(1) The 
suicide rate among prisoners is more than double that of the 
population at large, and that's not even counting the prisoners 
who hang themselves with a little help from the guards.

In 1988, the Criminal Justice Sourcebook shows that there were 
69.4 suicides per 1,000 deaths.(2) The U.S. Statistical Abstract 
shows that, in the same year, the rate in the population at large 
was 30.4 per 1,000 deaths.(3) Prison is a major downer, and some 
cons off themselves rather than endure the inhumane conditions in 
the big house.

The Tribune report on the difficulty that jails encounter in 
"preventing" suicide takes the typical liberal stance that the 
prison system actually has something to do with "corrections."

The report discusses measures to prevent suicide, such as cameras 
in each cell, clear plexiglass (read: no privacy) cells, extra 
guards to watch all the prisoners and detailed psychological 
screening. But the deputy chief of corrections, like anyone who 
has been around the block once, knows that this is a bunch of 
crap.

"If they're really determined to kill themselves, they're not 
going to let you know about it before hand," he said, indicating 
the weakness of psychological profiles. "If they've been in jail a 
while, they know the things you're looking for, so all they have 
to do is mask their intentions."

Scientifically, if the state were the least bit interested in 
preventing suicide they would release all prisoners, making it 
more than twice as likely that they would not commit suicide. Of 
course, the 1989 murder of Comrade Johnny Augustine by the fascist 
guards in Angola State Prison --carefully arranged to look like a 
suicide--demonstrates the real coincidence here: when prisoners 
become too radical and begin organizing against the state, the 
pigs need a convenient excuse like suicide on which to hang their 
murderous plots. --MC0

Notes:
1. Chicago Tribune 1/30/92, p. 1. 
2. Criminal Justice Sourcebook 1988, p. 620. 
3. Statistical Abstract of the United States 1991, table 115.

NEW YORK TIMES CLAIMS GENETICS LINKS CRIMES

Backed by the imperialist statistical stooges at the Justice 
Department, the New York Times struck a blow for racial purity. A 
front-page story last month propagated the bogus findings of a 
study showing that both juvenile and adult prisoners frequently 
have family members who have done time. To the "experts" that the 
Times chose to interview, this suggested that either poor family 
structure or else genetic factors create "the criminal 
personality."

Printing such an article plays on the false idea that some people 
are "criminal" and in need of "correction," ignoring the fact that 
crime is defined and dictated by economics and the social 
relations fostered by capitalism. This is just one of the ways 
that corporate media supports the bourgeoisie's effort to imprison 
the lower classes and the Black and Latino nations inside the 
United States.

"More than half of all juvenile delinquents imprisoned in state 
institutions and more than a third of adult criminals in local 
jails and state prisons have immediate family members who have 
been incarcerated," according to the study.

One expert notes, "This shows that where you learn delinquency 
from is from your family. These children grow up knowing their 
parents and siblings are criminals." If this is the cause of 
crime, then why do crime rates go up and down with the short 
swings in the economy?

Criminal psychologists--who believe in genetic causes of crime the 
way Hitler believed in the genetic inferiority of the Jews--try to 
argue that there is no need to prove genetics is independently a 
cause of the criminal mentality. "You don't have to choose between 
genetics and the environment. Both are there and over time are 
cumulative," said a Fordham University professor.

The New York Times wields great power in convincing people of the 
"facts" that are put on the front page. But a critical look at any 
given story, especially those about prisoners, typically reveals 
justifications for a criminal justice system that 
disproportionately locks up Blacks, indigenous people and the 
poor. --MC0

Notes: New York Times 1/31/92, p. 1.