Maoism in the Developed World

West German Maoism suffered considerably from the zigzags of Chinese party and government policy. We have noted that the KPD-ML, the oldest of the groups, ended up joining the Albanian camp. The KBW, on the other hand, was split wide open by the purge of the Gang of Four and consequently went into sharp decline. The decision of the KPD in 1980 to go out of existence may well also have been related to the difficulty of keeping up with the changes in Chinese policy, as well as, perhaps, to the lack of further interest on the part of the Chinese in patronizing further Maoist parties in other countries.

Maoism in Great Britain

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) largely dominated the Far Left in British politics during the six decades following its establishment in 1920. Although a Trotskyite dissidence appeared in the 1930s and persisted thereafter, it never succeeded—except during World War II—in offering a serious challenge to the CPGB.[227]

The Communist Party of Great Britain reached the apogee of its influence immediately following World War II. In the 1945 general elections, it seated two members of parliament instead of a single m.p., which had been its representation during most of the interwar and World War II years. Its influence was also considerable in the trade union movement.

In 1950 the CPGB lost its House of Commons seats and was never able to regain them. It was the scene of considerable internal controversy and struggle, particularly after Nikita Krushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU early in 1956 and the Soviet invasion of Hungary later that year, and after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the CPGB became one of the most clearly “Eurocommunist parties in Europe. This orientation led to a significant defection in 1985, when a substantial group of secondary leaders broke away to form the Communist Party of Britain, which proclaimed itself ‘Leninist’ but eschewed allegiance to Stalinism.”[228]

In the meantime, the CPGB had been affected, although only modestly, by the split in International Communism between the supporters of the Soviet and Chinese parties.

The first Maoist split in the Communist Party of Great Britain took place late in 1963, with the formation of the Committee to Defeat Revisionism, For Communist Unity. Although apparently enjoying relatively substantial financial support, this group soon split, and apparently ceased to be of any significance in far-Left British politics. Then a new Maoist group, the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), appeared in 1968, and it and several other pro-Chinese groups continued to exist through the next decade.

The Committee To Defeat Revisionism, For Communist Unity

The first British Maoist group, the Committee to Defeat Revi­sionism, For Communist Unity, was established in November 1963. An official statement of the group said that it was set up “by Communists who had come to recognize, in the course of struggle against the policies of the Communist Party of Great Britain, that to transform this Party from within… was an impossibility. This committee is now organizing a public campaign to expose revisionism, and win the militant industrial workers and intellectuals to understand that a genuine Communist Party must be established before advance can be made against monopoly-capital in Britain. We shall, before long, achieve this goal.”[229]

The Committee appeared at its inception to have relatively considerable financial resources. In the months following its establishment, it began to issue a periodical, Vanguard, edited by Arthur Evans,[230] and also put out about half a dozen pamphlets, setting forth its position on various issues.

The Committee to Defeat Revisionism centered much of its fire on the leadership of the CPGB. In one of its pamphlets, Michael McCreexy said that “comrades who recognized and protested at the open appearance of Social Democratic theory and practice in the C.P.G.B., were unable to check the degeneration of the Party into a radical appendage of the Social-Democratic Labour Party. By 1951 a new and outright revisionist programme, the British Road to Socialism, had been adopted. In this peaceful, legal tran­sition to socialism was declared a real possibility in imperialist Britain, and an imperialist attitude openly adopted towards the peoples of the British Empire. Both the socialist revolution and proletarian internationalism were kicked out of the window.”[231]