Critique of Maoist-Third Worldism needed

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

A comrade from r/communism who is a member of a Communist Party in Poland posted this recently

I am an important person in a big marxist-leninist organisation in an eastern european country. Obviously living here on 2 dollars an hour in a very exhausting job is not very easy, but that's not the point.
There's been a group of strictly sectarian third-world maoists who have been critisizing our postulates to increase the minimum wage, because in the third world they earn a lot less. They call us nationalists for wanting a better life in our own country, which is allegedly part of the richest 20% of the world population, and "ignoring" what happens in the third world, despite remembering and celebrating important dates in the workers' movements in the third world, altough they critisize even that, because "remembering revolutionaries like Ibrahim Kaypakkaya by a first-world bourgeois organisation like this is hypocritical".
The problem is, they literally have no life. They spent 24 hours on Facebook trying to argue with leftist organisations, and they write (or as I suspect, they copy and paste) large paragraphs about how fascist we are. They live in large mansions, they are themselves part of petty-bourgeoisie, they deny fighting for workers rights in our own country, and they boycotted the general strike which happened today.
I am quite confused. Should we basically ignore them or try to argue with them? Most of our members work and it's really hard to find time to argue with people who are prepared to never go off the internet. And it's really discouraging to listen to critisisms by self-called communists on everything you do.
Maybe you have some good articles which would help in polemics with them? Or maybe some good arguements to prove that they are nothing more than dogmatic sectarians who only stop our working class from being conscious? Anything would help, really..

So I apologize for bugging you with a matter from another forum but if the person is a part of the organization as he says he is, which I do believe he is because we have legitimate representives from other organizations visit us from time to time such as MIM prisons, the Signalfire collective, the Red Youth, and the Canadian Marxist Student's Association, to name a few, then I think that it is important enough to cross post.

So, do any of you have any good critiques of Maoist-Third Worldism? As a side note, I do think that the theory of Labor Aristocracy is a valid and important contribution to Marxist theory, but there's no need to reject it in rejecting M-TWism.

[cyu]

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7020/6668113277_bf653d62cd_z.jpg

Funding fascist organizations on the one hand is obvious. Less obvious is stuff like attacks meant to distract - such as funding attacks on tangential issues like abortion. Or redirecting social unrest into lukewarm and toothless "liberal" organizations. Or funding fake radicals to create fake disunity.

But you have to realize the goal of such efforts. To distract attention away from capitalists. The more they fund these other efforts, the more it's a sign that they fear attention. So personally, I'd just redouble attacks against capitalism itself.

Capitalists don't really give a rat's @$$ whether abortion comes out one way or another, but they do care about capitalism. More serious threats against capitalism would only take their attention back from their attempts to distract the general population.

[ind_com]

A comrade from r/communism who is a member of a Communist Party in Poland posted this recently

I am an important person in a big marxist-leninist organisation in an eastern european country. Obviously living here on 2 dollars an hour in a very exhausting job is not very easy, but that's not the point.
There's been a group of strictly sectarian third-world maoists who have been critisizing our postulates to increase the minimum wage, because in the third world they earn a lot less. They call us nationalists for wanting a better life in our own country, which is allegedly part of the richest 20% of the world population, and "ignoring" what happens in the third world, despite remembering and celebrating important dates in the workers' movements in the third world, altough they critisize even that, because "remembering revolutionaries like Ibrahim Kaypakkaya by a first-world bourgeois organisation like this is hypocritical".
The problem is, they literally have no life. They spent 24 hours on Facebook trying to argue with leftist organisations, and they write (or as I suspect, they copy and paste) large paragraphs about how fascist we are. They live in large mansions, they are themselves part of petty-bourgeoisie, they deny fighting for workers rights in our own country, and they boycotted the general strike which happened today.
I am quite confused. Should we basically ignore them or try to argue with them? Most of our members work and it's really hard to find time to argue with people who are prepared to never go off the internet. And it's really discouraging to listen to critisisms by self-called communists on everything you do.
Maybe you have some good articles which would help in polemics with them? Or maybe some good arguements to prove that they are nothing more than dogmatic sectarians who only stop our working class from being conscious? Anything would help, really..

So I apologize for bugging you with a matter from another forum but if the person is a part of the organization as he says he is, which I do believe he is because we have legitimate representives from other organizations visit us from time to time such as MIM prisons, the Signalfire collective, the Red Youth, and the Canadian Marxist Student's Association, to name a few, then I think that it is important enough to cross post.

So, do any of you have any good critiques of Maoist-Third Worldism? As a side note, I do think that the theory of Labor Aristocracy is a valid and important contribution to Marxist theory, but there's no need to reject it in rejecting M-TWism.

That particular piece of argument is easy to refute. Let us consider a people's war in a third world country, say, India. Look at any revolutionary assault on imperialism/feudalism here. When the PLGA or mass-militia destroys and loots a Coca-Cola factory, or drives back a land-grab campaign, or forces a company to raise the workers' wage, then what do these capitalist groups do? Coca-Cola opens a factory elsewhere, polluting their environment. Compradors get lands elsewhere, driving the peasantry there to unemployment and starvation. The company lowers the wages of workers elsewhere illegally. So, the gains of the working classes in one region can lead to the loss of those in others, until they too join the resistance. Until the working class in a region consumes more than the surplus value it generates, it is never at fault. They are not regionalists or nationalists for pushing back capitalism. In fact, the excuse of working classes having it worse elsewhere is reactionary itself, because it opposes class struggle where it is developing and has prospects.

[AConfusedSocialDemocrat]

The problem is, they literally have no life. They spent 24 hours on Facebook trying to argue with leftist organisations, and they write (or as I suspect, they copy and paste) large paragraphs about how fascist we are. They live in large mansions, they are themselves part of petty-bourgeoisie, they deny fighting for workers rights in our own country, and they boycotted the general strike which happened today.

Has anyone ever met a a person who claims to be a Maoist third worlder, who is not an upper-middle class-mid teens-white boy?

[ind_com]

Has anyone ever met a a person who claims to be a Maoist third worlder, who is not an upper-middle class-mid teens-white boy?

Yes.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Let's not stray into this area, please. This is in reference to the above two posts.

[ckaihatsu]

So, do any of you have any good critiques of Maoist-Third Worldism?


Yes -- compared to full-blown world communism, Maoism and Third-Worldism is just a red herring since they consistently duck the question of industrial mass production and instead divert attention to mere farm production.





We [...] know that real productivity comes from factories, yielding mass production and the potential for mass worker control -- agriculture is 'non-productive' in material-economic terms since its yield is *socially necessary* for the mere upkeep of the (industrial) proletariat.

[Die Neue Zeit]

MTW is a caricature of a fundamental ignorance of a political dynamic in the Third World: the existence of reformist parties. The original "fundamental ignorance" was an argument about the existence of reformist parties solely in developed countries.

[Grenzer]

Die Neue Zeit is referring to Lenin's theory of labour aristocracy. Lenin tried to explain away reformism by stating that it was only possible in the heavily industrialized, western countries by virtue of "super exploitation" of colonies. Most Trotskyists and Marxist-Leninists seem unaware that this was the original context of the theory, which has been proven wrong by the existence of reformism in countries that most would not identify as 'imperialism' and do not have access to 'super profits'.

The Maoist-Third-Worldist position just takes the initially flawed premise and runs away with it.

[Noa Rodman]

On the economics there is this critique;

http://libcom.org/library/international-exchange-law-value-isaak-dashkovskij

On the politics;

http://libcom.org/library/critique-comintern-program-vladimir-smirnov

You see how Maoism has its basis in Stalinism.