Recently, RAIM has moved away from calling itself a Maoist organisation. This happened without any official communication on the matter. RAIM will now clarify our intentions, and hopefully dispel misinterpretations of the move.

The communist movement in the west has shown a consistent lack of understanding about its own location in relation to imperialism. This lack has caused the choking of the communist movement with opportunism, and has generated a movement which is antagonistic to its own explicit goals. First Worldism has thus presented itself as an obstacle to the communist movement’s success in the west, and as the enemy of Third Worldist communists and anti-imperialists. For this reason, we do not see the primary dividing line in the communist movement today as one between Marxists of various tendencies, since most of the proponents of these various tendencies are in fact united around an acceptance of First Worldist ideology. At this stage of struggle, RAIM’s greater unity is with Third Worldists of any particular tendency, as at the current conjecture, the struggle against First Worldism is the principle internal struggle in the communist movement. This is why RAIM has ceased to conceive of itself as an explicitly Maoist organization.

RAIM has not “rejected” Maoism per se. The Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement is first and foremost a Third Worldist and Communist organization whose unifying principles include an analysis of political economy that identifies the imperialist subsidy of the “developed” world’s mode of life via the super-exploitation of the “underdeveloped” world. From this foundation, RAIM posits a global class analysis which illuminates the community of interest between the imperialist ruling-class and the great mass of working people in the “developed” world. All RAIM organizers are united on these basic principles; beyond this, we do not require our members to be Maoists, nor do we turn away Maoists from our organization. The glue that holds RAIM together politically is our Principles of Unity, rather than adherence to this or that Marxist tendency.

This does not mean that we render into a state of relativism those tools and contributions arising from the experience of the Chinese revolution, or of the subsequent New Left and New Communist Movement. On the contrary, those contributions which are capable of universalization, and represent the highest and most recent heights to which the science of revolution has been pushed, testify to both the creativity and scientific nature of Marxism when separated from the limitations of dogmatism.

To reflect on our conception of Third Worldism in a basic sense, we defer to the definition given in the Points of Unity:

RAIM sees Third Worldism as the analysis that the First World has economically, socially, and politically subordinated the Third World. We understand that we must “break up the colonial world” to liberate the Third World from the imperialist domination of the First. This is articulated through things like national liberation, collective self-reliance and cooperation between Third World nations, partisanship in solidarity with the Third World within the First World, and ultimately a kind of alter-globalization from a communist perspective, rather than the current capitalist form of globalization. We are of the opinion that if communism is the organization of the proletariat and its allies to abolish the bourgeoisie, and feminism is the organization of non-men and their allies to abolish “man” as a social stratum, then Third-Worldism is the organization of the Third World and its allies to abolish the First. Our role in this strategy is to share equally in the burden of making revolution and assisting in the liberation of both oppressed Third World nations and internal colonies trapped within the imperialist core; our goal is the decolonization of the colonial world, and the abolition of the First World.

To unify and strengthen the anti-imperialist movement we thus accept members so long as they agree with the fundamentals of our political platform. RAIM is an organization of Third Worldists, which comprise a variety of tendencies within Marxism. Our goal is to build a strong Third Worldist current within the broader left, and this cannot be achieved with sectarian and insular organization.

Solidarity,

Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement (RAIM)

littlegreenpills posted:

stegosaurus posted:

Je ne connais pas le boeuf

this french guy does not know what beef is

no it's that he doesn't know the beef. he knows what the beef is but he hasn't reached a level of understanding with the beef. to him, the beef remains inscrutable.

*cigarette puff*

stegosaurus posted:

can someone give some background to this. anything. urbandale. whats the deal

I know very little here. ZB at one point was of the key people in the MTW community and put together that Theory is a Weapon pdf a while back with a few other people. All RAIM work in the past 5 years or so is attributable to him+1/2 other people (RAIM is a reboot of an older organization but the new one claims continuity with the old, sometimes denying the old org died at all. They're largely based in Denver, like all the MTWs). There were several discussions between RAIM and NCP(LC) as to whether MTW and Maoism could operate together on some sort of framework. I don't know what the results of those discussions were.

Barbarossa posted:

perhaps these communist agitators should use language accessible to the people that they presume to represent

arabic and chinese are famously difficult for westerners to learn