What can Marxist-Leninist-Maoists learn from the Anti-Revisionist “New Communist Movement” in Britain? (Part 2: The 60s-70s Wave of Revolution washes on the Shores of Britain)
See Part 1
The late 1960s and 1970s were a period of worldwide rebellion. The contradictions between the revolutionary youth worldwide and the reactionary ruling classes of both American and Soviet Imperialists had reached a breaking point, matured by the propaganda in support of the revolutionaries in the National Liberation Wars in Africa and Asia, the counter-culture which increasingly took a radical and revolutionary road, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution showing that the working class and the revolutionary youth could overthrow the reactionary bourgeois headquarters and build a new world. It seemed like the old world would die and the new one would rise any moment now.
But in places without a vanguard party or anything working towards a vanguard party, this movement flopped around aimlessly before fizzling out and dying in the 1980s. One area where this happened was here in Britain. But why?
Revolutionary Rebellion
During this crisis in Capitalism that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, the radical youth and workers rose up in Solidarity with the oppressed of the world, but for Britain specifically, mostly the countries of Indochina (especially Vietnam and Kampuchea (“Cambodia”)), Ireland, Malaya (“Malaysia”), and Cuba (while anti-imperialist solidarity with Cuba against the United States was correct, British students and workers at the beginning until Cuba’s complete transformation into a Soviet neo-colony thought Cuba was really becoming socialist), but also other countries.
These revolutionary students would mostly avoid the dead old revisionist “Communist Party” of Great Britain, and would go to two trends. The “Pro-Chinese” trend (pro-Chinese rather than “Maoist” as many of these groups would become Dengist and revisionist when Deng took over) and Trotskyite trend. We will not worry about the Trotskyites unless they specifically relate to an incident.
The main faction that would emerge at the beginning of mass revolution was the revisionist “Communist Party” of Britain “(Marxist-Leninist)” (“CP”B“(ML)”). This faction would be lead by a Reg Birch, an engineer and trade unionist (Amalgamated Engineering Union/AEU) who rose to the Executive Committee of the “CP”GB, as he was one of the few Trade Unionists to support the invasion of Hungary by the revisionist Soviet Union, as he himself said in an interview (according to Peter Paterson’s “How Much More of This, Old Boy — ?: Scenes from a Reporter’s Life”).
This faction would go through a similar development pattern of “Progressive Labour” Party, USA, first siding with Albania, then denouncing them, and then briefly supporting the Brezhnevite Soviet Union, then splitting with Mikhail Gorbachev.
These clowns would also take an economist position tying themselves completely to the trade unionist movement, tailing them off the edge of a cliff.
The Birchites would then develop a National Chauvinist reactionary right line which denounced working with the oppressed migrant proletarians and tailing British hyper-reactionary fascist Nigel Farage and the former “Grassroots Out” campaign he was a prominent leader of.
COMMUNIST FEDERATION OF BRITAIN+COMMUNIST UNITY ASSOCIATION →REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST LEAGUE OF BRITAIN
The Revolutionary Communist League of Britain was a strange beast. It had very progressive tendencies and did correct actions especially when it was CFB(ML) and CUA, but became mainly rightist and the revisionist after uniting and forming the RCLB. It was the organisation that birthed one of the two revolutionary cores within Britain, the Stockport Communist Group, after it’s founding.
The Communist Federation of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) and Communist Unity Association were loose unions of several of the small Communist groups (think the K-Gruppen in West Germany and the Marxilais-Leniniläiset Ryhmät in Finland) of differing theoretical and practical qualities (e.g. Stockport, under the future (for a brief period time) Secretary of the RCLB) which was very advanced comparatively to the others) but generally followed a somewhat similar political line, that being total support for Irish National Liberation, fighting deportation, suppoting Anti-Fascist Action (UK), the Miners’ Strike, and a professed support for “Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought” (though it was not truly followed by all the CFB(ML) groups and members), and opposition to the US and Soviet Imperialists, engaging in solidarity work with the people and liberation movements of Palestine, the Philippines, Cambodia and Southern Africa.
It would produce theoretical works of uneven quality, varying from very good (such as their critique of the British Road to “Socialism”) to bad (a faction of the movement’s defence of electoralism). This would be a testament to the loose and disunited state of both organisations.
The CFB(ML) and the CUA would unify, but upon the acting Chairman of the CFB(ML) attempting to squash the line struggle, the Stockport Communist Group would break from the revisionism of the emerged “RCL”B. This grouping, despite only facing a quantitative positive change but in fact suffering a qualitative negative change, would feel itself good enough to act like a party-building organisation.
The group would go through another split with a pro-Juche, anti-”Revolutionary Communist” Group (another revisionist group the RCLB had collaborated with in Ireland solidarity actions) line within the organisation’s “Mosquito Press” emerging, and splitting off, forming a 3 person anti-League group. These would form the “Communist Organisation” of Scotland and England (forming an alliance with the Scottish “Communist” Republican Party who would split off an Englishman from the “CO”SE to form the “CO”E which would then disappear. The COSE would eventually “transform” into the single member “Communist Organisation” of Britain (which is not to be confused with the split from the B&I“CO”, the “Communist Organisation” of Britain and Ireland, an anti-Irish Nationalist, De Leonist party who Paul Cockshott was a member off) after a disagreement between the two members.
The RCLB would limp it’s way through the Eighties suffering demoralisation and defections, facing splits, suicidal expulsions of leading members, first full support then muted and cowardly petty-bourgeois and pacifist criticism of China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, a surprisingly successful series of publications called “Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement”, closing their “New Era Books” bookshop (an organisational hub) in 1993, before being reduced to little over 30 people by 1996, and then dying quietly in 1998.
The CFB(ML)-CUA was an eclectic confederation of different groups that had no unity between each other and were unable to gather around a coherent political line, leading to massive factional conflict, suppression of two line struggle, withering and dying
Some Personalities
Abhiyamanu ‘Manu’ Manchanda
Manu Manchanda was a British South Asian, the partner of Claudia Jones, a Black Carribbean theorist of the Communist parties of the United States and United Kingdom, who would be later be buried next to Karl Marx. Both would have doubts about the revisionist programme of the “British Road to Socialism”, Soviet social-imperialism and the easiness of joining the Party (Manchanda would tell Diane Langford that Claudia would complain that “All you have to do is fill in a form on the back of the Daily Worker (Morning Star) and you could become a member”, according to her political memoir “The Manchanda Connection”), though Claudia Jones would die one year before Manu Manchanda decisively split from the revisionist “CP”GB.
Manu Manchada would accuse the USSR (correctly) of being revisionist, complacent in the murder of progressive bourgeois democratic revolutionary President Patrice Lumumba of the Congo by CIA-trained and funded criminals. He would be expelled from the party and form the REVOLUTIONARY MARXIST-LENINIST LEAGUE, which would become the first actual group working towards a serious revolutionary Marxist-Leninist revolutionary worker’s vanguard.
Manu Manchanda would oppose the Trotskyite takeover of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and once the Russell Foundation (which while not Trotskyite in of itself, had been taken over by Trotskyites) refused to recognise the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam as the sole representative of the people of South Vietnam (which he had predicted would happen, leading to him booking a second venue in anticipation), the Vietnamese representatives and most of the other representatives would leave with Manu and form the more militant Britain-Vietnam Solidarity Front.
Manchanda would also (thankfully) defend homosexuality and allow gay people into the RMLL. This may not sound like much but compared to other Marxist-Leninist/New Communist/’pro-Chinese’ groups like the RCP and the ‘CP(ML)’ (USA).
Manchanda would lead revolutionaries to fight in solidarity with the revolutionaries of Vietnam, Laos and Kampuchea during protests against the American Imperialist war in Indochina. During the protests of 1968, the police would demand, on the 17th March, the 80,000 protesters in Trafalgar Square marching towards the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, redirect their protest to Hyde Park.
A faction of the protesters, under the leadership of the Trotskyite revisionist Tariq Ali, would obey the police, calling it a “death trap” and citing the fact they would be repeating themselves as they had already protested there before. Manchanda called Ali a ‘playboy who was going to take his supporters on a guided tour of London’. Another faction around revisionist Trotskyite actress Vanessa Redgrave would call to enter the Square but not target the embassy.
While the revolutionaries under Manchanda would refuse to surrender and capitulate to the enemy, and defiantly march to Grosvenor Square, where the nest of the American Imperialists in the UK, the Embassy, and actively protest outside the Embassy. This lead to a Battle, where revolutionaries and progressives would fight with police in defence of the revolutionaries in Indochina.
Manchanda would be a revolutionary, both in action and in personal life. For example, when Manchanda had a child with his partner Dianne Langford (long after Claudia’s death, named after Claudia (nicknamed ChuChu)), Manchanda would attack the traditional bourgeois family by taking on more responsibility for childcare than his wife, and raise his child to be a revolutionary and a person who served the people.
However, Manchanda would be living proof of the universal law that everything, even people, have primary aspects and secondary aspects, and that the secondary can and, under the correct circumstances, will transform into the primary contradiction (read Mao’s On Contradiction). While during the late 60s and early 70s, his primary aspect was his revolutionary aspect, he also had the secondary aspect of rightist tendencies. Subjectively, that was a tendency towards being closer to a ‘pro-Chinese’ position and not a Maoist position (‘pro-Chinese’ in that they would tow the Beijing Line no matter if it was revolutionary or revisionist), and a tendency towards Third-Worldism.
These arose from his objective petty-bourgeois class background and the lack of self-criticism and rectification of this error (which is also shown in his early correct tendency towards defiant and rebellious protest no matter the cost which had aspects of the early signs of adventurism, but were not fully or even mostly adventuristic, which would later be replaced by a tendency towards Third-Worldism and a lack of faith in the British working class).
The conditions that would lead to these making him become revisionist during the revisionist takeover and dismantling of socialism under Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping. It would also make it easy for him to adopt Third-Worldism. This led to the transformation of the secondary aspect of rightist tendencies transforming into primary aspect of revisionism during the late 70s and 80s.
This would also occur within the Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League, which would transform from a revolutionary and Marxist-Leninist into being revisionist and counter-revolutionary along the same path of Manu Manchanda. This was because the RMLL, especially after the adoption of Third-Worldism, transformed from a League to build into a Clique around Manchanda. The leadership of the party was either Manchanda’s family (Manchanda, Langford) or friends. It also always did have a problem with correctly implementing the mass line, but this especially intesnified after the adoption of the Third-Worldist line, led to isolation from the masses, and even from the rank-and-file of the RMLL.
Perhaps if Manchanda had practiced a more intense and constant practice of self-criticism, and applied Maoism to British conditions properly, he would not have fallen into revisionism. Perhaps if the RMLL had practiced the mass line
HARPAL BRAR
Harpal Brar, like Manu Manchanda, was an Indian in Britain. He joined the RMLL and would become friends with Manchanda, but after disagreements with him, split to form his Association of Communist Workers.
Harpal Brar’s Association of Communist Workers would ‘support’ the Women’s Liberation movement (Manchanda would also, and would be a much more positive force towards the movement), however, they were in truth against them. This is shown by an incident that occurred October 1971 at the Second National Women’s Liberation Conference in Skegness, where Harpal Brar jumped on stage and wrestled the microphone out of the hand of a Women’s Liberation speaker he disagreed with according to a document made from later released/leaked Special Branch/MI5 documents (Spying on the RMLL and Friends) (almost all of these groups, like the ‘pro-Chinese’ groups in America, Canada, USSR, etc., were infiltrated by agents and informants of counter-revolutionary state intelligence agencies). (And yet according to his “CP”GB-“ML” he’s the actual fighter for women and trans people are the enemy!)
While animosity to the women’s movement in the western “new left” and all round bad analysis of the question of women’s oppression under Capitalism and Revisionist “Socialist” ( capitalist countries claiming Socialism e.g. the Khruschevite USSR, the Ulbrichite-Honeckerite East Germany, Gomulkaite Poland etc.) countries (while the women’s movement had bourgeois and petty bourgeois trends (liberal and radical feminisms) it also had proletarian trends which were not analysed to create a theory working towards the liberation of working women under Capitalist oppression) was a universal problem, this is the most striking incident I’ve seen from any moment in that period noting the male chauvinism in the movement.
He would eventually gain control then split off the journal of the Indian Workers’ Movement (a Communist movement amongst Indian immigrants to ) “Lalkar” (Lalkar means Challenge in Punjabi and Lal Kar means Red Work, if your interested).
He would eventually unite with Arthur Scargill’s social-fascist “Socialist Labour” Party, but would be purged and then split off because Scargill would refuse to support the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a model for a future Britain, and defend it from imperialism. (While defending the DPRK from US Imperialism and invasion is good, the DPRK abandoned socialism after the August Incident and the purge of Yan’an line within the WPK.)
However, that is not the main problem with this. Harpal Brar united and liquidated his so-called “Communist” organisation into a social-fascist group. This shows he is a social-fascist revisionist, along with his rejection of the development of Marxism-Leninism into Marxism-Leninism-Maoism by Chairman Gonzalo of the Communist Party of Peru (PCP), his queer-phobia and upholding of revisionist countries (China, the DRPK, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba) shows his social fascism.
Harpal Brar would then form the “Communist Party” of Great Britain “(Marxist-Leninist)”, a revisionist grouping which is a stain on the movement, a transphobic, homophobic, bourgeois, right opportunist, counter-revolutionary party, with no application of the mass line and rejection of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the third and highest stage of Marxism’s development.
It would also begin to closely align with Caleb Maupin, Lyndon LaRouche, and the Schiller Institute, and in the modern day, is basically the British wing of the Schiller Institute. They also work as a wing of George Galloway’s party, the “Workers Party of Britain”, a “radical” social-democratic group.
Harpal Brar is also a landlord who owns several buildings in West London (one of the most expensive housing markets in the world) and a shawl selling company called “Madeleine Trehearne and Harpal Brar”. Our “great proletarian revolutionary”, a landlord and a capitalist!
The “CP”GB“(ML)” is a dead-end, it is a useless group of rightists incapable of leading revolution in Britain.
THE NORTH IS WHITE, AND IT IS GREAT, FROM CANADA ARISES HARDIAL BAINS, HE IS FOR THE PEOPLE’S LIGHT, HUERHUAHUEI HE IS HUMANITIES’ SAVIOUR
A little joke title.
But seriously, Hardial Bains-alligned students formed the Internationalists group in Sussex University, then became a “Communist Party” of England “(Marxist-Leninist)” without any qualitative or quantitative transformation, who first supported Mao, and did some really funny actions, both correct, such as physically attacking racist psychologist Hans Eysenck, and some VERY ADVENTURIST AND INCORRECT such as MAKING PETROL BOMBS. They got international recognition from China and Albania because Hardial Bains and Enver Hoxha were besties.
They then did some electoralism in 1973 (running in both the February and October general elections (there were two, that was a rough year)). Eventually they sided with Albania’s (then valid) criticisms of People’s China’s Three Worlds Theory, leading to split of about 10% of their membership around future Dengist actual religious cult leader Aravindan Balakrishnan (British Malayali like me…) and his Worker’s Institute of “Marxism-Leninism Mao Tsetung Thought” who I have written an independent article about, which you can read here.
The CPE(ml) would transform fully Hoxhaist with Bains’ conversion to Hoxhaist dogmato-revisionism, also renaming itself the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). But after the fall of Albania, it would go the same path as their more successful Canadian mother party, and become a weird semi-Hoxhaist semi-Anti-Deng Dengist (supportive of North Korea and Cuba but against China) group of maybe 100 or 200.
What a pathetic mess!
REVOLUTIONARY STUDENTS’ ACTIONS
The students of Britain, proletarian and petty-bourgeois, were fired by the spirit of rebellion that had been ignited all across the world. A lot of these students were led to the light of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, and these groupings emerged into several organisations.
Some included the Schools Action Union (not offically Marxist-Leninist but dominated by Marxist-Leninist revolutionary students) and the Revolutionary Socialist Student’s Front. The SAU and the RSSF would lead a mass strike of schools in West London, which would spread to all London. They demanded (sorry for using Jacobin as a source, it’s the only one I could find that listed all their demands):
- Control of schools to be placed into the hands of their pupils and staff (not won)
- Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly to be guaranteed (not won)
- Corporal punishment in schools to be abolished (won)
- School uniforms to be abolished (not won)
- All schools to become comprehensive (not based on grades to enter) and co-educational (with female and male students) (half won, most schools are co-education but some schools are not, 90% are comprehensive)
- Teachers’ salaries to be increased (won later)
They were subject to constant slander and lies by the press. According to the previously cited article in Progressive Student:
The SAU were quick to point out the role played by the press. As Vanguard states, “The newspapers and TV owned and controlled by Big Business don’t dare to write anything in favour of our struggle. They lie about everything that is in the interests of the working class. They lied about our numbers out on strike, they said there were only a 1,000 when in fact there were no less than 10,000. They slandered us just like they do all militant workers (e.g. miners and railwaymen) who fight for a living wage and democratic rights; just as they ridicule and slander the youth who demonstrate in support of Vietnamese people. Although the SAU constantly states that we are not “pupil-power” and are in fact fighting for working class power, i.e. on the side of teachers, parents and workers, the gutter press don’t take any notice and makes up lies which suit their own foul purposes. They churned out vomit like “kid-lib”, “pupil power” etc., obviously trying to push it as one big joke. But we’ve got them worried. They are afraid of the direction the SAU is leading the struggle, that is against the interest of the bosses education system.”
“One rat from the South London Press broke into the home of SAU comrades and stole some confidential documents which they have been using for their foul purposes. Another paper, eager to plug malicious lies about the SAU, offer £20 to a Rutherfords brother to throw a brick through a window. Not wanting to betray our mass movement he of course told this thug reporter where to get off.”
Now this movement was not perfect. Under the leadership of the SAU, which did not have a coherent political line of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought applied to the British conditions, the Comrades of the SAU underestimated the brutality and viciousness of the British state, as well as not formulating enough political demands. They also did not realise that control of the schools by students and staff, and freedom of speech and assembly, are not truly possible under Capitalism. Sure, they may have been able to get it on paper, but not in practice, in practice assembly would be restricted and free speech would be impossible, as the Capitalist state works to defend the interests of the Bourgeois class against the Proletariat and Progressive forces.
It would also be the subject of British State infiltration and spying. The Heath Government was terrified the SAU was a factory for future Marxist-Leninist “professional revolutionaries” that were spoken of by Lenin as making up the Proletarian vanguard Party (read Lenin’s “What is to be done?” ). The Heath Government was also scared the SAU was a front for older revolutionaries and for Soviet infiltration. They found no evidence for this however (sorry about using Jacobin again but they do give correct facts here, even if they don’t correctly seek the truth), and so stuck to their original plan to deal with the movement. They isolated the movement's radicals from the masses, and let it fizzle out and die.
Why did the SAU and the revolutionary student’s movement in general fail to lead the revolutionary students of Britain towards revolution, but why did that happen? Because there was no great leadership, no party, no organisational line and because much of the movement was dominated by the petty-bourgeois students, who while progressive were unable to deal with their own petty-bourgeois class background, and ping-ponged from “ultraleft” in form and right in essence, to right in form and essence, and suffered from state infiltration, which would have been made better by having a firm party line.
They also constructed their organisation badly, not concentrically around a party or pre-party formation and an embryonic People’s Army, which could have allowed for the defence of the movement, it’s activists and actions, but Gonzalo had not developed his theory of concentric construction of the Party-Army-United Front.
Overall, we should honour the memory of their struggle, but analyse the failures and shortcomings of the organisations that fought for liberation.
Fire in the Midlands…
Around this time, two groups with what would be the closest to a revolutionary red line would emerge. These groups would be the NOTTINGHAM COMMUNIST GROUP and the STOCKPORT COMMUNIST GROUP. These two groups would go one to be the groups that would join the REVOLUTIONARY INTERNATIONALIST MOVEMENT of the PCP, TKP/ML (until it’s expulsion after the Avakianite takeover) and CPI(ML) Naxalbari, and would unite into the REVOLUTIONARY INTERNATIONALIST CONTINGENT IN BRITAIN (RIC B)-WORLD PEOPLE’S RESISTANCE MOVEMENT (WPRM), a high point in the revolutionary struggle in Britain.
See Part 3.
