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Maoist Internationalist Movement Wikipedia

The Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM) is a Marxist-Leninist-Maoism|Maoist group based primarily in the United States. It lists Los Angeles, California as its main headquarters, with its primary publication, MIM Notes, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

MIM calls itself a "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 Maoist Internationalist parties in Belgium, France and Quebec and the existing or emerging Spanish-speaking Maoist Internationalist parties of Aztlan, Puerto Rico and other territories of the U.$. Empire." MIM was founded in 1983. It originated in RADACADS, which worked with splinters from the Students for a Democratic Society. Originally known as the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), MIM changed its name in 1984 to its current name after the Revolutionary Communist Party (USA) took the name "RIM" for its own international organization. MIM was unique in its rejection of the homophobia found in much of the international Maoist movement.

It is through its analysis of the "labor aristocracy" that MIM differentiates itself from other leftist parties in what it terms the imperialist countries. The labor aristocracy today, MIM argues, is that class of workers in imperialist countries that receive more than the value of their labor by sharing in the superprofits exploitively extracted from the Third World. MIM sees the principal contradiction in society to be that between imperialism and the oppressed nations and upholds the right to self-determination for oppressed nations.

Although it allows that there are "scattered" white proletarians, MIM considers most white workers in the U.S. to be members of a labor aristocracy, meaning that they benefit so much from the system of imperialism that they are bought off, thus cultivating no revolutionary potential. They developed this analysis in part from the book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai. MIM thus believes that revolution is impossible in the U.S. with just the white working class. This causes many other communist groups to question the point of MIM's existence, though MIM claims RADACADS originated in a "majority of national minorities and a majority of women."

MIM's newpaper, MIM Notes, is anonymously written, based at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan|Ann Arbor, and distributed across the United States, including on university campuses. The writers may use the moniker MCX (MIM Comrade X), where X is a number. MIM is known for its unusual spellings, such as womyn, persyn, I$rael, Kanada, and united $nakes of ameriKKKa, which reflects MIM's approach to language questions. MIM also holds the unusual position that sex under patriarchy is rape due to power relations in patriarchal society. They have drawn on the theoretical works of feminist author Catharine MacKinnon in coming to this analysis, though MIM has criticized MacKinnon's work. MIM leads a mass organization, the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League (RAIL).

Last Modified:   2005-11-07