Letters



Typing volunteers needed

I got your address on the net 
(http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bpp) At the bottom of the page 
it says: These articles had to be retyped from xeroxes. If you 
would like to volunteer your typing time or pay for others to 
type, write to P.O. Box 3576, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-3576

I would love to volunteer my typing time!

-- a new friend in the Midwest

MIM responds: This writer is responding to a flyer about the Black 
Panther Party. We have many rare and important historic 
revolutionary documents that need to be typed in so that people 
can have access to them and to build public opinion toward Maoism. 
Contact us if you want to help.

*****

Reader defends social democracy

I must disagree with your derisive characterization of "Z" 
Magazine in the MIM Notes 216, August 15, 2000, page 9.

You term it an "insipid social-democratic magazine", a description 
that ignores the Marxist, liberation socialist and anarchist 
contributors and writers that have been features in "Z" over the 
years. You claim that " "Z" magazine regularly whitewashes U.$. 
style democracy", a bogus criticism that flies in the face of the 
facts. Noam Chomsky, Edward S Herman, Holly Sklar, Michael Albert 
and other "Z" contributors regularly criticize the electoral 
system and political economy of the United States of America. 
"Whitewash" is the last word to come to my mind when I consider 
the thoughtful, impassed denunciations and profiles of the 
institutional structure and political administration of the USA 
that "Z" magazine has featured steadily.

Elsewhere in the same issue, on page 6, you assert "To the 
majority of the world's population, however, the social democrats 
represent the same old imperialists." I find this a questionable 
assumption, as it doesn't necessarily seem to be the case in 
various developing nations. While I can see there are 
revolutionary - or potential revolutionary situations in Peru and 
the Philippines, but in Haiti, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic 
and other developing countries, the great majority of people 
appear to embrace electoral democracy.

While yours truly admires and respects MIM Notes for raising and 
purveying unpleasant truths and inconvenient facts, this series of 
attacks on other, less doctrinaire segments of the Left is really 
too much. As a democratic socialist, I beseech you to be more 
considerate and merciful in your appraisals of "Z" and social 
democrats and Greens etc.

There are non-violent, incremental ways of bringing about 
substantive socio-economic change.

Thank you for your consideration,

 -- a reader in the Amerikan North East.

P.S. My ex-roommate, a leading member of Boston PLP, thinks highly 
of "Z" magazine, showing that it has revolutionary communist 
tendencies.

MIM responds:  MIM does not dispute that various social democratic 
publications sometimes print material that exposes the electoral 
system or other aspects of imperialist Amerika. But what this 
reader fails to address is MIM's major criticism of social 
democracy: it offers the people no alternative to imperialism. 
Exposing the failure of a two party system only to uphold 
electoral politics by supporting a third party candidate leads the 
people down a failed road. Suggesting that electoral politics can 
work is whitewashing the system, it's lying to the people and 
telling them that revolutionary change is not necessary.

As MIM pointed out in one of the articles this writer is 
criticizing "This is the trap that social democratic parties and 
activists in the U$ are falling into. Becoming a national 
political force here can only come by making concessions to 
imperialism." These activists can expect the support of the labor 
aristocracy and the middle class but these people are demanding a 
bigger piece of the imperialist pie at the expense of the majority 
of the world's people.

The recent elections in Haiti actually prove MIM's point. While 
the people may be fooled into thinking that imperialist-backed 
elections could help make positive change, they quickly learn that 
this is not true in practice. The voter turn out in Haiti has been 
abysmal and the electoral process has fallen apart as the people 
have lost faith in the system.