Preface
This volume and the companion one on Maoism in the Developed World are a complement to two of my earlier works, a study of the Right Communist Opposition of the 1930s (the followers of Nikolai Bukharin), and one of International Trotskyism from 1929 to 1985. Maoism is the third major schism that the International Communist Movement, originally established with the foundation of the Communist International in 1919, suffered in its history of a little over seventy years. Two other divergences within the movement in its last quarter of a century—Titoism and “Eurocommunism”—never developed into any cohesive group of parties with a more or less well-defined ideology differentiating them from the great majority of Communist parties that remained loyal to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union until the CPSU and the Soviet Union itself disappeared.
Maoism arose as a result of conflict between the world’s two largest Communist parties (and governments), those of the Soviet Union and China, which developed in the late 1950s and continued for a quarter of a century. The development of that conflict, and the emergence of a group of dissident parties loyal to Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communist Party and government, is traced in our introductory chapter. The rest of this volume analyzes the individual parties loyal to “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought” in the countries of the Developing World: Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
My original idea for a history of International Maoism was to have the whole story in a single volume. However, the publishers felt that it would make more sense to divide it into two, one dealing with the developing countries (or “Third World”), the other with the developed ones. The present work is the first of these.
This volume also differs in another way from what I had originally planned. I had first thought to end the story in 1980, on the thesis that by that time, with Deng Xiao-ping leading China, and concentrating on his country’s economic development and its emergence as a Great Power, the Chinese Communist Party had lost all interest in International Maoism, so for all practical purposes, International Maoism was finished. However, the publishers argued, logically enough, that International Maoism had continued to exist after 1980, and asked me to bring the study more up-to-date. I have done so.
Two “technical” comments are appropriate. One is that, although the lengths of chapters concerning Maoism in specific countries in general roughly reflect the significance of the movement in those nations, there are a few cases in which the availability of material helped determine how long a chapter might be.
The second “technical” issue concerns orthography. Generally, I have used the old-fashioned spelling of Chinese proper and place names, since during most of the period covered by this book the Chinese officials themselves used that spelling, and it appeared in most of the published sources we used. However, where sources we quote use the new transliteration, we faithfully reprint that. Another orthographical question involves the spelling of the name of the Soviet leader who succeeded Stalin. Usually, Englishlanguage sources spell the name “Khrushchev.” However, some Chinese sources spell it “Khrushchov,” and of course we reprint the name as the Chinese used it in their publications.
Naturally, I owe debts of gratitude for help in preparing this book. I particularly want to thank Justus van der Kroef of the University of Bridgeport, an eminent contributor to the Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, who was kind enough to send me material that he had published on Maoism in several countries. I also want to thank Professor Barry Carr for his observations on Maoism in Mexico, and Professor Lewis Taylor of the University of Liverpool for his information about Peru. Likewise, I appreciate very much the help of my friend and one-time student, Marcos Perera, for help in getting material on Paraguayan Maoism in recent years.
I am grateful to Dr. Norbert Madloch, who provided me with invaluable documents of the Sozialistische Einheit Partei (SED), the Communist Party of the former German Democratic Republic, upon which I have drawn extensively in this study. I am also obliged to Professor Max Guyil of the Rutgers Psychology Department, and to a post-graduate student in that department, Michael Diefenbach, for helping to decipher the German in which the SED documents are written.
My friend and former student Eldon Parker has been of inestimable aid in preparing camera-ready copy for this volume, as he has been in the case of several previous works of mine.
As has often been the case in the past, Dr. James Sabin of Greenwood has been very helpful with suggestions and encouragement.
Extensive quotations appear from China and Russia: The Great Game, by O. Edmund Clubb © 1971 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, and from Communist China and Latin America, 1959—1967, by Cecil Johnson © 1970 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Likewise, quotations from Peking and Latin American Communists, by Ernest Halperin © 1966, appear with permission of the Center for International Studies of Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and extensive quotations from successive volumes of Yearbook on International Communist Affairs appear here with permission of the Hoover Institution Press.
Finally, I owe my wife Joan thanks for putting up with me while I worked on this volume. Her tolerance and support are always invaluable.
Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ
The Origins and Development of International Maoism
Of course, nothing is inevitable in human affairs. However, the clash between the Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and China was about as close to being inevitable as any event in modern history.
It was certainly to be expected that the appearance of a Communist government in any other major country would result sooner or later in that country’s party and government coming into conflict with the Soviet Communist Party and regime. Such a contest was inherent in the nature of Leninism as a political movement.
The “new kind of party” proposed by Lenin at the beginning of the twentieth century, and developed in practice after the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917, had the “right” to lead the “working class, ” according to Lenin and his successors, because of its inherent nature. It was, in theory at least, made up of dedicated professional revolutionaries, who were thoroughly schooled in the teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin himself, and hence knew what History had decreed concerning the “proletarian revolution” and the transformation it would bring about in any country in which it triumphed.
This “new party” was also governed by the principles of “democratic centralism.” In theory, this meant that until decisions had been made by the party’s highest body, its congress, there could be free discussion, but that once a decision had been taken, all members of the party were required to support that decision fully, whatever their position on the issue in question had been beforehand, and the party’s top leadership had the right, and duty, to punish any party member who did not do so. Long before the Bolshevik Revolution, Leon Trotsky had argued (correctly) that in such an organization, sooner or later, “the party is replaced by the organization of the party, the organization by the Central Committee, and finally the Central Committee by the dictator.”[1]
Increasingly, after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist parties took on many of the attributes of a dogmatic religious sect. Because of their supposed immersion in Marxist-Leninist doctrine, they “knew” what History (which stood in the place of God in Communist theology) intended. However, in practice, since there might conceivably be several interpretations of the mandate of History, it was the interpretation of the highest authorities of the Communist parties that was the “correct” one and that all members of the parties, as well as the peoples over whom they ruled, had to accept as the Gospel. In practice, this came to mean that it was the person who dominated any given Communist party who determined what was “the Truth” (a concept frequently referred to—in capital letters—in the Sino-Soviet dispute), and after 1929 it was Stalin who was the fount of all wisdom for International Communism as a whole.
1
See Robert J. Alexander,