The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following materiaclass="underline"
Material reprinted from the Yearbook on International Communist Affairs (issues from 1966 to 1988}, edited by Richard F. Staar, with the permission of the publisher, Hoover Institution Press. Copyright © 1966—1988 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Material from Justus M. van der Kroef, “Australia’s Maoists,” Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, Leicester University Press, Leicester, England, 1970. Used by permission.
Excerpts from letters to author from Mads Bruun Pedersen and Eric S. Einhorn. Used by permission.
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The author and publisher will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions.
Preface
This is the second volume of my study of International Maoism. It deals basically with Maoism in the “developed” countries. However, in the case of the European nations it varies a bit from this pattern, including all those nations which during the Cold War period were not controlled by Communist parties. It thus deals with such nations as Greece, Cyprus, and Portugal, which are not exactly “developed” in the economic sense. Nevertheless, historically and politically they have more in common with other European countries than they do with those of the so-called Third World, particularly during the period in which International Maoism has existed.
One “technical” comment is in order. This 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 themselves used that spelling, and it appeared in most of the published sources we use. However, where sources we quote use the new transliteration into English, we faithfully reprint that.
I have used two principal sources of information in working on this study. One is the Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, which the Hoover Institution published over a period of more than two decades. The other consists of documents of the Sozialistische Einheitpartei Deutschland (SED), the Communist Party of the former German Democratic Republic, which were originally not for general distribution but became available after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I owe debts of gratitude in connection with each of these sources. On the one hand, I must thank the Hoover Institution for permitting me to quote more or less extensively from its volumes. On the other, I am obliged to Dr. Norbert Matloch for making available to me the East German Communist publications, and to Professor Max Guyel of the Rutgers Psychology Department and to a graduate student in that department, Michael Diefenbach, for helping me decipher the German in which the SED documents are written.
Professor Justus van der Kroef of the University of Bridgeport has been kind enough to make available to me a valuable article he wrote on the Maoists of Australia. Similarly, Professor Eric S. Einhorn of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst provided important leads concerning Scandinavian Maoists, and Mads Bruun Pedersen, a Danish historian of the Marxist movements in Scandinavia, was kind enough to provide me his own observations and several important documents of the Danish Maoists.
As he has done with several of my recent books, Eldon Parker has done a magnificent job of converting the original manuscript into camera-ready copy, for which he has my thanks. Also, as has been the case on several earlier occasions, I am obliged to Dr. James Sabin of the Greenwood Publishing Group for his interest in having this volume see the light of day. And I must thank Nina Sheldon for copyediting and Nicole Cournoyer for otherwise seeing this volume through to publication.
Finally, as always, I owe much to my wife Joan for putting up with me while I worked away on this volume, often when, clearly, she might have preferred that I be doing other things.
Introduction
International Maoism had its origins in the split that developed in the 1950s, after the death of Stalin, between the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties (and regimes). The schism was perhaps as near to being inevitable as anything in human affairs.
Given the nature of Marxist-Leninist ideology, particularly as it developed after the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, there could be only one center from which the “correct” interpretation of that ideology came. So long as the Soviet Union remained the only country governed by a Marxist-Leninist (Communist) party, it remained the place of origin of such an interpretation, and so long as he lived, Joseph Stalin continued to be the person whose interpretation was definitive.
Even the emergence of Communist regimes in most of the East European states immediately after World War II did not significantly change the situation. None of the parties in those countries controlled a nation of sufficient importance to form the basis for a major split in the International Communist Movement. This was borne out by the fact that the one schism that did take place in those years, that is, that of the Yugoslav party, did not give rise to any significant challenge to Stalin’s leadership of International Communism.
However, the advent of the Chinese Communist Party to power in 1948—1949 drastically changed this situation. China was a nation containing one quarter of the human race, and although the country remained poor and underdeveloped, it had the economic and military potential to become one of the world’s major powers. Sooner or later, it was all but inevitable that differences of opinion between the Chinese and Soviet parties would give rise to a challenge on the part of the Chinese leadership to the priority of the Soviet party leadership within the world Communist movement.
So long as Stalin lived, no such split took shape. Over many years, he had been accepted by the leaders of all the Communist (Stalinist) parties as the source of Marxist-Leninist wisdom and policy. Furthermore, although there are indications that Stalin did not particularly want the Chinese Communists to come to power, he was wise enough to extend them considerable economic and other aid once they had won the Chinese civil war.
However, the situation fundamentally changed with Stalin’s death. Thereafter, the Chinese Communists did not feel that his successors spoke with the authority they had recognized in Stalin. They had good reason to believe that their own principal leader, Mao Tse-tung, was the senior and most authoritative leader in the world Communist community. He had led his party to victory in a struggle spreading over more than two decades, and he was a “theorist” of consequence, traditionally a requirement for a major leader in International Communism. In addition, he governed the world’s most populous country.
Therefore, as disagreements emerged between Mao and his associates on the one hand and Nikita Krushchev and other post-Stalin leaders of the Soviet party and government on the other, the Chinese felt under no compulsion to accept the ideas and interpretations of events of the Soviet leaders as being inevitably correct.
Disagreements arose over a number of issues. One of the first was Krushchev’s famous “secret” speech to the twentieth Congress of the Soviet party early in 1956, in which he excoriated Stalin. The Chinese leadership felt that that speech was a major mistake, and undermined the Communist movement throughout the world. Shortly afterwards, the Chinese were very critical of the Soviet leaders’ handling of the uprising in Hungary against the Communist regime there, and the near revolt against the one in Poland.