Responding through abridging the chapter on MTW in JMP’s ‘A Critique of Maoist Reason’.

First, the outline of MTW:

in short, [MTW] claimed that the working class of the imperialist countries had become an ally of the ruling class due to its privileges in the context of the global capitalist system. Its objective interests were closer to those of West- ern capitalists than to those of the exploited and oppressed masses of the Third World. Therefore, the Western working class could no longer be considered a revolutionary subject. Only the masses of the Third World posed a threat to global capitalism by rebelling against the exploitation and oppres- sion they were suffering.

Critique: what is the value of First World workers to capital if they are not exploited?

So what if these abstract exercises supposedly “prove”, with statistics and positivist equations, that there is no proletariat at the centres of capitalism? Bourgeois economists can also “prove” that the third world is not being underdeveloped, or that capitalism is working, by making recourse to the same analytic toolkit––a toolkit that every major Marxist revolutionary has recognized as unscientific since the time of Lenin.

if the revolution can only happen else- where, and agitating for revolution in the first world must always fail due to an intrinsic counter-revolutionary tendency that overdetermines praxis at the centres of capitalism, then the third worldist living within the “belly of the beast” (where, to be clear, third worldism generally finds its home) is justified in failing to mobilize the masses around a revolutionary strategy––the masses are in the third world and it is thus impossible to practice the mass-line in the first world

Main Critique: The core contradiction of Maoist Third Worldism is the fact that it is primarily a first world phenomenon that attempts to speak for third world revolutions. That is, third worldism is intrinsically first worldist. This contradiction is not a dialectical contradiction (it does not produce motion/change or even exhibit the relational unity of opposites) but is a formal contradiction and thus, when excavated, reveals an unsettling logical incoherence. The fact that there may be some MTW organiza- tions at the global peripheries, their activities and influence only appear on third worldist websites and thus seem to be as significant and organ- ically “third world” as the third world branches of the average Trotskyist organization. Generally speaking, the theoretical development of third 88Critique of Maoist Reason worldism remains a first world phenomenon. The reason the first worldist origin and hegemony of third world- ism is a troubling contradiction is because it undermines the theoretical basis of MTW. If the first world is primarily a counter-revolutionary context where the proletariat, due to net-exploitation, does not exist, then how can anyone develop a proletarian revolutionary theory? Such a theory can only emerge in a proletarian context; it cannot be imposed by would-be revolutionaries who remain within a petty-bourgeois con- text––and yet first world third worldists, who are responsible for devel- oping this theory, live within a social context that according to their own theory is bourgeoisified. So did they glean their theory from third world revolutions? Well, aside from the way in which they understand the Chinese Revolution (specifically through a Lin Biao hermeneutic), it appears as if third worldists are opposed to the theoretical line espoused by those third world Maoist organizations who have attempted to launch revolutions. MTW groups even go so far as to deride, as noted in the previous section, third world revolutionaries for not understand- ing the problem of “first worldism”––as if a revolutionary organization engaged in an oppressed third world nation cannot understand first world chauvinism as well as the first world third worldist whose entire ability to conceptualize the problem of “first worldism” is premised on their privileged existence at the centres of capitalism. None of this is to say that theories that originate from first world contexts cannot be useful for third world revolutionaries, or that a rev- olutionary movement must only draw upon the ideology it sponta- neously develops in the course of its particular struggle. To make such an argument, after all, would be to reject Marxism due to its European origins. The theory of third worldism, however, since it is precisely con- cerned with autonomy of the third world and the problem of first world chauvinism cannot help but experience its exportation as a contradic- tion because it is an ideology that is precisely about the revolutionary status of third world revolution in the face of first world chauvinism, the latter being the “primary contradiction” of world revolution. Another possible way to escape the contradiction of first worldist 89Chapter 5 - Oe Dogmato-Eclecticism of “Maoist Oird Worldism” third worldism is to argue that Marx and Engels, in their historical context, were able to develop a proletarian ideology despite originating from petty-bourgeois and bourgeois social positions. But such an argu- ment fails to appreciate the emergence of Marxism and, in this failure, treats class as an unchangeable essence. There is a significant difference between the philosophy of the young petty-bourgeois Marx and the Marx who embedded himself in proletarian struggles: the former only produced, at best, a radical liberalism typified by the Economic and Phil- osophic Manuscripts; the latter, though on a continuum with the former, is the Marx who would eventually produce Capital and who wrote, along with Engels, the Manifesto in the context of a proletarian organi- zation. We know that Marx not only went to the masses in order to eke out the broad brushstrokes of proletarian science, but that he also sank to the level of the proletariat by the time he wrote Capital––so much so that he had to continually pawn his winter coat and rely on monies received from Engels’ bourgeois family. So where is the moment that the first world third worldists have embedded themselves in those pro- letarian masses that, according to their theory, exist only at the global peripheries? It is clear that the third worldist academic intellectuals of yesterday and today (the Emmanuels and the Wallersteins) have not embarked on such proletarianization; I think it is also safe to assume that MIM, LLCO, and RAIM have also not pursued this process of declassing––they cannot, without leaving the comfort of the first world, and it is clear that the most significant third world Marxist revolutions are disinterested in their insights. The upshot of MTW’s core formal contradiction is terribly chau- vinist: first world third worldists will perform the mental labour of theory, third world revolutionaries will perform the manual labour of actually making revolution according to this theory. The former group, after all, cannot make revolution since they are not in the third world, they can only provide the guidelines and prepare for world-building revolutionary activities of the global proletariat. The latter group, being the authentic proletariat, is historically destined to kick-off the global revolution but only if they accept the perspective of the first world 90Critique of Maoist Reason third worldists––after all, if they reject the theory that “first worldism” (as conceptualized by MTWs) is the primary contradiction, they are doomed to revisionism. To be fair, there are third worldist organizations that have attempted to theorize creative ways in which to approach revolutionary praxis despite the fact that they operate within a first world context where there cannot be, according to the theory of net exploitation, a viable proletarian class. The Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Network, for example, uses the metaphor of a 21st Century John Brown51 so as to argue that “behind enemy lines… [we] consider our circumstances and focus on areas where we can effectively contribute to revolutionary struggle.”52 Elsewhere, RAIM speaks of preparing certain elements of the petty-bourgeois first world masses for their future dissolution into the ranks of the proletarian by organizing them around “wedge issues”, such as patriarchy and national oppression, with the aim of “a revolu- tionary class alliance for proletarian revolution.”53 Here the praxis is one of “class suicide”, an attempt to sabotage imperialism from behind enemy lines, but with the goal of some united front between these 21st Century John Browns and the international proletariat of the third world. Such a strategic line is rather vague, however, and relies heavily on the revolutionary heavy lifting being done by other. In fact, the only viable revolutionary practice for third world- ism is the practice embarked on by Denmark’s Manifest-Kommunis- tisk Arbejdsgruppe (M-KA) that split from the aforementioned KAK in 1978. Eventually known as “the Blekingegade Group”, cadre of the M-KA went underground to carry out armed expropriations so as to provide material support for third world revolutionary movements.54 51 John Brown was a white settler abolitionist in the US who, during the height of slavery, betrayed the slaveocracy and, in coordination with Harriet Tubman, sought to bring about a revolutionary overthrow of slavery. He was executed for treason in 1859. 52 Program of the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Network (anti-imperialism. org/2009/11/26/program-of-the-revolutionary-anti-imperialist-movement/). 53 How Would Marx Organize First Worlders for Revolution? (anti-imperialism. org/2013/04/02/how-would-marx-organize-first-worlders-for-revolution/). 54 Earlier, when this faction was still with the KAK, they embarked on some soft 91Chapter 5 - Oe Dogmato-Eclecticism of “Maoist Oird Worldism” Reasoning that there was no proletariat in the first world and the only authentic proleta