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The Rise & Fall of Maoism

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The Rise & Fall of Maoism The Rise & Fall of Maoism: the English Experience This article commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of a meeting in a London pub in 1963. It is an enlarged and hopefully improved version of material originally posted on at the premier site for anti-revisionist documentation from the 1960s onwards: the online collaborative Encyclopaedia of Anti- Revisionism Online [EROL]. 02 Dissent Blooms 08 The Lucas Arms Meeting 13 Forum: Travelling down a cul de sac 23 Friends of China 26 Second Wave 34 Party Loyalty, Expulsion & New Beginnings 35 Schools Action Union 37 Young Communist League 40 Solidarity with Vietnam 42 One, Two, Three LSE 45 The Internationalists 50 Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation 52 A Flowering of initials 53 RMML 58 INLSF to CWLB (ML) 62 For & Against Chairman Birch 73 The Third Element 74 Claudia Jones 76 Association of Indian Communists 1 Dissent blooms 1935, 1943, 1947, 1951, 1963 - Where to begin? Well, individual members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) expressed disquiet at the strategy laid out in The British Road to Socialism when it was first unveiled in 1951. In contrast to earlier programmes of the CPGB, The British Road proposed that socialism could be achieved by the labour movement working initially within Britain’s existing democratic structures. George Thompson1 may be the only member of the CPGB’s Executive Committee to vote against adoption of The British Road, because “the dictatorship of the proletariat was missing,”2 but he remained a member of the editorial board of the CPGB’s theoretical journal, Marxism Today. There may have been expressions of doubt from former Education Organiser of the Communist Party, Douglas Garman but he remained a party member until his death in 1969.3 On the other hand, the writer Edward Upward and his wife Hilda resigned from the CPGB in 1948, in protest of its “reformist” direction. Edward later wrote about the inner- party struggle leading to their resignations in his novel, The Rotten Elements (1969). Others, like folk singer Ewan MacColl simply allowed his Party membership to lapse out of disagreement with the new strategic line, only to re-emerge in 1966 as a supporter of the anti-revisionist, pro-China journal, The Marxist. Arthur H. Evans, a rank and file CPGB member, was one of the few who waged a systematic campaign against what he perceived to be revisionism in the basic line of the Party in the post-war years, writing a series of letters to the CPGB leadership in the period 1947-1953. One party member dates her shared unease, reservations and concerns with her husband Peter from the mid-fifties: Muriel Seltman recalls: “Imperialism was the first of several issues to which we paid attention in Party policy. It was the issue which woke us up and caused us to start using our critical faculties. From about 1955 onwards we began to look critically at Party policy on peace, the relation of the CPGB to the Labour Party, the role of the Trades Unions, and finally, the policy known as the “peaceful transition to Socialism… by 1957 we were fully embarked on an internal criticism of what we saw as the opportunism of the leadership and the incorrect policies which must, we thought, be responsible for the failure of the Party to gain the confidence of the masses of the people.”4 1 Born in Dulwich, London in 1903, George Thompson, Cambridge graduate, joined the Communist Party in 1936 when a professor of Greek at Birmingham University. An Executive Committee member, he also served on the Party’s Cultural Committee. 2 Morning Star 9th January 1989 3 Professor George Thompson dedicates From Marx to Mao TseTung: a study in revolutionary dialectics to Douglas Garman stating, “he created a network of Party schools, attended by industrial workers from all parts of the country and tutored by himself and others whom he trained in his superb method of teaching through controlled discussion. He gave up this work in 1950 owing to disagreements with the Party leadership over the revisionist line of the British Road to Socialism, which he opposed from the beginning. In that struggle he was defeated.” 4 Seltman (2010) What’s Left? What’s Right? : A Political Journey via North Korea and the Chinese and the Cultural Revolution. Pittsburgh: Dorrance Publishing p48. Muriel met her future husband, Peter Seltman while studying at Trinity College, Dublin 1946, returning in 1951 to England, both joining the Communist Party. Peter Seltman died November 18th 1986. 2 The Seltmans, active in Finsbury Park branch, were to develop that critical enquiry, later published as a pamphlet called Revisionism and Imperialism, into political opposition in the anti-revisionist movement. In 1957 Arthur Clegg “formally left the Party, not because he had any differences over major questions of policy regarding British politics but over China itself and regarded himself a Communist to the very end of his life.” 5 He had joined the Communist Party as a student at the LSE in the 1930s and was active in the Friends of the Chinese People. He became its full-time national organizer when it merged with the China Campaign Committee in 1937.6 In 1941, he was appointed editor of World News and Views. In 1947, he moved to the Daily Worker, first as Far Eastern advisor, then diplomatic correspondent and finally foreign editor. He remained on the fringes, supportive to the pro-China activities, supporting public meetings and campaigns that concerned international issues, but was not visibly identified with the party-building activities of dissident communists. Other dissidents described the 1951 programme as “revisionist,” but opposition to the strategy never coalesced into organizational form before the 1960s. Thus, the initial, post- World War II anti-revisionist opposition within the Communist Party was muted and individual in character. For British communists, Khrushchev’s theories of peaceful coexistence and the parliamentary road to socialism had been enshrined in party policies since the early 1950s. For those who were uneasy with such teachings there was nowhere else to go. One participant explained: two subjective factors tended to deter the rank and file from taking a firm stand against what was going on. Firstly, there were social pressures. Cost of a member’s social contact tended to be with other members ...It helped develop a sense of continuity and comradeship. But it also encourages conformity to the Party and to the leadership, even when the latter were clearly in error. The second subjective factor was every Member’s knowledge that the leadership had the endorsement of the Soviet Communist Party. Thus, it was felt that to go against the Party in Britain, was to go against the whole of the international communist movement.7 If the British Road was okay with Stalin, what weight could be given to our concerns? John Gollan (1911 - 1977), a leader of the CPGB at this time was reported to have later told the Communist Party of China: “How can Khrushchev claim to have introduced peaceful transitions? I advanced it long before he did!”8 Given the entrenched viewpoints, the Sino-Soviet Polemic was less a dialogue and more a stand up fight for the "soul" of the International Communist Movement. The Albanian and Chinese Parties were most forthright in their defence of their position but it was generally present by political opponents as some form of knee-jerk Stalinist reaction to the policies advanced by the Soviet leader Khrushchev. "Both dogmatism and revisionism run counter to Marxism “observed Mao Zedong. "Marxism must necessarily advance; it must develop along with practice and cannot remain still. It would become lifeless if it were stagnant and stereotyped. However, the 5 http://www.grahamstevenson.me.uk/ 6 Clegg (1989) Aid China 1937–1949: A Memoir of a Forgotten Campaign. Beijing: New World Press 7 Lee (1990) "Revisionism in Britain: the Decline of the British Communist Party". RCL Briefing, Revisionism: the politics of the CPGB Past & Present 8 Mao Zedong (1977) Selected Works Vol. V Beijing, Foreign Language Press: 495 3 basic principles of Marxism must never be violated otherwise mistakes will be made. It is dogmatism to approach Marxism from a metaphysical point of view and to regard it as something rigid. It is revisionism to negate the basic principles of Marxism and to negate its universal truth. Revisionism is one form of bourgeois ideology. The revisionists deny the difference between socialism and capitalism, between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. What they advocate is in fact not the socialist line but the capitalist line. In the present circumstances, revisionism is the more pernicious than dogmatism. It is an important task for us to unfold criticism of revisionism on the ideological front now." 9 Speaking in 1957, against the background of a growing split in the communist world, Mao Zedong advanced a position that sought to rescue Marxism from the theoretical dilution and weakening of militancy. Mao, amongst many others, condemned a political approach "to transform the capitalist state into a state representative of the interest of the working people" as against the canon of Marxist-Leninist teachings on the nature of the state. 10 Some compromise had been reach at the 1957 and 1960 meetings of communist parties but it proved fragile: they did not resolve the theoretical and ideological issues at stake. The international debate that publically unfolded with the 1960 Chinese publication of “Long Live Leninism” provided a rallying point for anti-revisionist communists. The Chinese position asserted that the main danger within the international movement was revisionism, meaning the policies and analysis pushed by Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership.
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