What can Marxist-Leninist-Maoists learn from the Anti-Revisionist “New Communist Movement” in Britain? (Part 1: Introduction and early days)
Britain, like America, Canada, India, Ethiopia and so many more places, had a vibrant Communist movement in the 1960s, 1970s and the early 1980s. Many young activists radicalised by the Vietnam War, the failure of the Labour Party, the fascist policies of the Tories, the Irish National Liberation struggle and opposition to Imperialism and Reaction, put on the correct path by the stand of People’s China and Albania towards Soviet revisionism and social imperialism, and revisionism in general, flooded into the streets of Britain, fighting and leading militant struggles.
However, unlike in the USA (BARU/RCP, USA) or Canada (En Lutte! and the Worker’s Communist Party of Canada) British Communists did not form a pre-party organisation till the 1980s, and we did not ever reconstitute the Communist Party of Britain. Our ‘pre-party’/pre-party organisations (it took longer for this to happen with the NCG-SCG/RIC in Britain/WPRM but it happened) either disappeared or became revisionists (or in the case of the so called ‘Worker’s Institute of Marxism-Leninist Mao Zedong Thought’ became an actual religious cult). But why did this happen? Why couldn’t we British Communists build a reconstituted party?
The principal reason for this was revisionism within the movement. As Chairman Gonzalo said “Revisionism acts in concert with the with the reactionary State”, and revisionism within the movement led to the British movement being unable to form a Marxist-Leninist (or after 1982 and Chairman Gonzalo and the PCP’s synthesis, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) party to lead the British working class.
However, we must analyse this question far deeper than just that, and to do so we must look at the history of the movement.
ROOTS OF REVISIONISM
The roots of revisionism in the Communist Party of Great Britain run deep. However, the reasons that the party was taken over by revisionism are not particularly unique to, say, that of the Communist Party of France or the Communist Party of Greece.
While the party was a Communist Party until the full takeover with the announcement of the revisionist British Road to ‘Socialism’ (Social Fascism), many within the party leadership saw itself not as the vanguard of the Communist movement within Britain, but as the party of sympathisers of the Soviet Union in Britain. This led them to appear right when the Soviet Union was revolution, but once the Soviet Union became revisionist with the denouncement of Stalin, expulsion of the Molotov-Kaganovich-Voroshilov group from the party, the dismantling of Socialism and the engagement in Imperialism, the party openly revealed themselves to be totally and completely revisionist.
This was unmasked by the so called “British Road to Socialism”, where they would deny the need to abolish Parliament, a reactionary weapon of the ruling class, saying that the idea of establishing ‘‘Soviet Power’’ (Socialism through revolution) in Britain and abolishing Parliament was a ‘slanderous misrepresentation of our policy’ (!). The ‘Communist’ Party really demonstrates that they are Communists, who are famous for…not wanting to establish working class power and loving bourgeoise institutions?! When Lenin in The State and Revolution said “It was Marx who taught that the proletariat cannot simply conquer state power in the sense that the old state apparatus passes into new hands. As we have seen Marx meant that the working class must smash, break, shatter the whole state machine” he must have just meant the Kadets! They claimed that “Experience has shown that in present conditions the advance to Socialism can be made just as well by a different road” or, in plain English, that Socialism could be voted in through the bourgeoise parliament, an institution engineered to prevent revolution in Britain.
Why does our ‘great’ General Secretary of the ‘Revolutionary Vanguard’ believe this? Because…“People’s Democracy, without establishing Soviet Power, as in the People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe” happened. Sorry to burst your bubble Mr. Pollitt, but how do you think the People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe were established? Through the ARMED STRUGGLE of the Soviet Red Army and the local worker-peasant resistance forces against the fascist occupiers! Did Stalin vote Hitler out of Berlin?! No the Red Army drove his forces from Stalingrad into the soil! The partisans FOUGHT and WON to establish People’s Democracies!
The British Road to Social Fascism ‘forgets’ Class Struggle, ‘forgets’ the Struggle against the Labourite social fascism AS A WHOLE and not just against “the dominant Labour Party leaders”. “Right-wing Labour” is not the only enemy of the working class. It was, and still is, only the crudest expression of the GENERAL POLICY AND CLASS CHARECTER OF LABOUR, which our ‘Communists’ also seem to have forgotten about. Hell, not just about Labour or Parliament, our great ‘revolutionaries’, our amazing ‘Communist’ leaders don’t mention the class character of…anything really! Not the State, not the Tories, not Labour (well, they have some vague gesturing to the “big landlords, bankers and monopolists”, which is probably supposed to mean the bourgeoisie, but this party programme doesn’t really elaborate that much so how could one really know right.
The 1977 version of the BR‘S’, which I have chosen to ignore due to the CPGB completley revisionist stand at that time, is even worse, claiming that Socialism will be brought about by…“further decisive change to the left, in the Labour Party, its national executive committee and parliamentary party, in the strength and size of the Communist Party, and in the relationship of the Communist Party and the Labour Party”, or cloaked entryism into Labour.
THE PICTURE PREVIOUSLY USED HAS BEEN REMOVED AS IT WAS MISTAKEN TO BE OF A EGP GUERILLA, WHEN IT WAS ACTUALLY OF A COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY RONDERO HOISTING A CAPTURED PCP FLAG AS A WAR TROPHY
This ‘revolutionary’ programme also says that our ‘Communists’ are people who “fight for lasting peace as the vital need of the British people” and that a “socialist foreign policy can only be a policy of peace”. We recognise that Communism is NOT peace. As Mao Zedong said “Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.” Communism is the revolutionary imposition of the needs of the working class, an exercising of an “all round dictatorship over the bourgeoise” as Zhang Chunqiao said. A socialist foreign policy is one that it is at war with capitalism (even if not actively in ground wars, actively developing revolutionary movements within other countries), working to help develop revolution in other countries as much as we can do while safely developing socialism internally. Communism is CLASS WAR.
(Of course, we should also not fall into the Trotskyite revisionist idea that Communists should constantly be in a complete offensive against Capitalism, even if the material conditions dictate that the Communist movement has to enter a defensive period. We, however, cannot become fighters for ‘peace’. Communists can only enter a period of strategic defense, but it is impossible to enter a period of peace with Capitalism. We should continue to fight the Class War, even if we are forced to go on the defensive due to our material conditions.)
Importantly, there was no mention of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, instead insisting on a transition to socialism through the existing Labour Movement and Britain’s ‘democratic’ structures and institutions. This party programme of the ‘proletarian vanguard’ had forgotten something which Lenin recognised meant that “Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat” in the second chapter of State and Revolution. This shows the anti-Marxist nature of the programme. All Marxists should oppose revisionism like this.
Comrade Stalin himself criticized this programme. While Stalin held to a wrong view also held by Marx that socialism could possibly be voted through in some countries, as well as not recognising the functional unity of the Labour and Co-Operative parties, Stalin rightly saw the lack of criticism of the Labour Party, and while he took the wrong view that the Programme was overall good, which it was not, due to misunderstanding the British situation and context, he saw that it was definitely was faulty.
Only George Thompson voted against programme, understanding “the dictatorship of the proletariat was missing”. While he wouldn’t leave the party yet, the revolution in China would lead him to let his membership lapse. Edward and Hilda Upland resigned from the CPGB in 1948, in protest of its “reformist” direction, later writing about the inner-party struggle leading to their resignations in the novel, The Rotten Elements (1969). Some in the rank-and-file like Hamilton Neil Goold-Verschoyle and Arthur H. Evans launched campaigns to uproot revisionism, which failed. Other opponents, like Ewan MacColl simply allowed his Party membership to lapse.
BREAK WITH REVISIONISM
In 1956, Khrushchev lies about, slanders and denounces Stalin and, by extension, Marxism-Leninism. Pollitt liked Stalin personally, even if Pollitt took an anti-Marxist-Leninist stand ideologically, and coupled with his declining health, lead him to step down from leadership. He was succeeded by John Gollan, a revisionist who told the Communist Party of China “How can Khrushchev claim to have introduced peaceful transitions? I advanced it long before he did!” (Mao Zedong, Selected Works, Vol. V, page 495).
After intense line struggle within the CPGB, two lines emerged within the party. A revolutionary line, the anti-revisionist line, and a counter-revolutionary line, and the revisionist line of Gollan and his gang within the Party. Gollan and his group relentlessly smashed any attempt to open two line struggle within the party and the anti-revisionist line was at a crossroads. One splits into two, of course, and the revolutionary line then split once again: into the correct left line of Michael McCreery and the counter-revolutionary right lie of the Forum for ‘Marxist-Leninist’ Struggle.
MCCREERY AND THE COMMITTEE TO DEFEAT REVISIONISM, FOR COMMUNIST UNITY
Michael McCreery, though born to a bourgeoise General in the British Army, became, after political education and experiencing the class struggle, became a fighter for Communism, a Marxist-Leninist, and had opposed the revisionist line put forward by Pollitt and Gollan, and tried to save the extant Communist Party of Great Britain from revisionist decay. However, he was unsuccessful and therefore, at The Lucas Arms pub, he, along with some other Comrades representing CPGB branches all across the country, decided to abandon the revisionist chaff and form the COMMITTEE TO DEFEAT REVISONISM, FOR COMMUNIST UNITY (CDRCU) to re-establish the Communist Party of Great Britain as a Marxist-Leninist party. He and his Comrades were expelled from the Party but their act of rebellion could have created a platform for revolution.
The CDRCU would produce some theoretical works, produce a newspaper and show solidarity to the struggles both of the British working class and to the struggles of working people internationally, especially those under British yolk, to the people of Malaya, the Congo and South Africa, and would take an active role in opposing revisionism both within the CPGB and in the ‘Communist Movement’.
However, that’s about the best that comes from the CDRCU. They would engage very little in actual class struggle. In his great work, On Practice (1937), Mao Zedong said “If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself”. The CDRCU did not change society by practicing class struggle.
The CDRCU also neglected to understand one of the great questions of the movement, the question of Irish National Liberation. While the CDRCU did vaguely gesture in support of the movement, they did not analyse the movement at all, and even though the movement was one of the foremost revolutionary national liberation struggles against British colonialism, the CDRCU did not focus on it nearly enough.
Unfortunately, the CDRCU was an organisation very much built around Michael McCreery alone. While a Great Leadership within the Party/Pre-Party Formation is good, if the party falls apart after the leader dies, it did something wrong. That’s what happened to the CDRCU, which split into several competing revisionist and revolutionary fragments (notable examples include the Worker’s Party of Scotland (Marxist-Leninist) who did a bank robbery and the Working People’s Party of England which was a newsletter cult).
Another Wrong Line
Some ‘anti-revisionists’ did not want to break from the revisionist CPGB. These coalesced around the ‘Forum for Marxist-Leninist Struggle’. The FMLS thought that they could lead campaigns against individual revisionist leaders (Gollan, Rajani Palme Dutt (who accused the CPC of being racist)) in order to save the CPGB and turn it into an anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist Party.
They wrongly fell into the idea that the official ‘party’, which had been openly taken over by revisionists since 1951, and had been controlled by them for longer, could be saved, taking an idealist view that rejected the actual situation of the CPGB (a revisionist party through and through) in favour of dreams that ‘The Party Can Be Transformed”, as they titled a 1964 document accusing McCreery of ‘left’ opportunism.
They opposed ‘the second course’, or reconstitution of the party, because if that course was adopted “the assets of the Communist Party will be left in the hands of a revisionist rump and the situation will be confused nationally and internationally by the existence of two parties, both claiming to be Marxist-Leninist. It follows that the first course is the more desirable of the two ways in which a Marxist-Leninist Party may be formed and it is this course which must be aimed for.” This is unprincipled unity.
As Communists, we should obviously unite and not split with all that can be united with but we CANNOT unite with revisionism. Revisionism is a parasite on the communist movement and it needs to be taken out from us like a parasite should be through STRUGGLE. The revisionist leadership destroyed the FMLS and crushed the ‘anti-revisionist’ group in the CPGB.
Most FMLS-ers fled the organisation and regrouped around The Marxist magazine, accused by the (revisionist) CPGB of being “disruptive little sect who have emerged to claim a virtual monopoly of Marxist understanding. Like all sectarian groups, they want the movement to go back to square one and start anew under their leadership” in statement by the London District Secretary of the (revisionist) Communist Party. The grouping around that journal flipflopped around being a tool of general tool to organise or a tool of theory alone, and really ended up doing neither. After a brief stint unilaterally declaring a “Party building” formation without actually having a qualitative leap in reaction to the formation “CP”B“(ML)”, it turned into a bad theoretical journal which survived till dying a quiet death in 2014 (!).
Other Bad Tendencies
The Action Centre of ‘Marxist-Leninist’ Unity — ‘Marxist-Leninist’ Organisation of Britain (AC’ML’U — ‘ML’OB) was a strange organisation. It was led by Mike Baker and after his expulsion Bill Bland. Baker split with the USSR but united with during the Cultural Revolution…Liu Shaoqi for some reason. They were politically followers of the tendency by created the revisionist Jacques Grippa of the ‘Communist Party’ of Belgium ‘(Marxist-Leninist)’ and also followed by the ‘Marxist-Leninist’ Centre of France which denounced the Cultural Revolution for it’s ‘chaos’ and ‘attacks on good cadre’, declaring in their foreword to the revisionist thesis of the ‘Left Neo-Revisionist Clique in China’ of the ‘CP’B’(ML)’, that there was a “counter-revolutionary coup of 1966” which, in the words of the ‘CP’B‘(ML)’ was led by a “counter-revolutionary group, representing the privileged strata of China, cunningly flattered the youth, especially the student youth, trying to make them believe that they had a vanguard political role to fulfil. Freeing the youth for a long time from study and productive work, it utilised them to attack the Communist Party and to try to intimidate the working class. Then, showing its true face, it ordered the army to launch attacks against the Party and the state organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as well as against the working people who rose to defend them; it placed under military control the industrial and mining enterprises, the secondary and higher schools, and the people’s communes. It set out to impose by force of arms a dictatorship of the reactionary classes, in particular of the old and new bourgeoisie.” What utter nonsense! Any basic Marxist-Leninist(-Maoist) analysis of the Cultural Revolution can see that it was led by people from both the intelligentsia (who are often overstated by counter-revolutionaries) but principally from, especially during the creation of the Revolutionary Committees and the complete seizure of power from the counter-revolutionary crypto-Liuist and Linist factons, the working class. Bland would later drop Liu and pick up Hoxha, and change the name of the AC‘ML’U — ‘ML’OB to the ‘Communist’ Leauge.
Another group that emerged was the “Finsbury Communist Association”, a little sectarian group of a handful of people, led by Ivor Kenna, who died back in 2021. They are a useless and small little group that spent more time attacking the dustiness of Albanian bookshops than actual party building, and denounced Stalin’s definition of a nation.
There was one last revisionist faction: the British and Irish Communist Organisation (B&ICO) who were pro-Ulster Unionism. I will not analyse them further because their is no point.
Revolutionary struggle to come…?
Claudia Jones, a black proletarian feminist and Marxist-Leninist from Trinidad and Tobago, and member of the CPUSA until her deportation in 1948. She would move to the UK and be accepted into the CPGB on arrival, where she would try to do Communist organising but be attacked by fellow party members for racist reasons.
In the UK, she would enter into a relationship with the Indian Abhiymanu ‘Manu’ Manchandra, and from their visit People’s China. Claudia and Manu would continue to drift closer to the revolutionary line of Chairman Mao. While Claudia would die soon after, Manu would become one the firmest strugglers, in this period, for Marxism-Leninism, and in 1968 would be expelled for criticising the Soviet smothering of the Vietnamese struggle and complicity in the murder of Patrice Lumumba.
These two would light the flame of popular uprising in Britain, which will be talked about in Part 2 and Part 3.
