Then, early in 1958, the Chinese launched the so-called Great Leap Forward. This was a clear break with the Soviet model of Marxist-Leninist economy and society which they had until then followed. It sought to reorganize the economy on the basis of “communes,” which they pictured as a “higher” form of society than that prevalent in the USSR and other “socialist” states. Khrushchev was reported to have regarded the Great Leap Forward as both ridiculous and disastrous.
There also developed basic differences of opinion concerning relations between the Marxist-Leninist-controlled countries of the world and the West. The Chinese rejected the so-called peaceful coexistence policy expounded by Khrushchev and dismissed his emphasis on the dangers of a nuclear war, advocating instead confrontation with the United States and the rest of the West.
Until 1960, these disagreements took place behind closed doors, so to speak. But in July of that year the Soviet government suddenly announced that it was canceling its economic aid program to China and was withdrawing all of the several thousand technicians who had been helping the Chinese economic development programs.
Thereafter, the conflict between the Chinese and Soviet parties (and governments) became increasingly open. An attempt to find common ground at a meeting of more than eighty Communist parties from around the world, held in Moscow in 1960, utterly failed. The Central Committees of the Communist parties of the Soviet Union and China began exchanging bitter public letters with one another. In the beginning, the Soviet party engaged in violent attacks on the Albanian party, the only party in power that supported the Chinese, and the Chinese attacked with equal vehemence the Yugoslav party toward which Khrushchev had made overtures, seeking to patch up the split that Stalin had provoked several years earlier. However, each side soon began openly disputing the positions taken by the other.
Finally, in 1963 the Chinese party decided to take the controversy to the world Communist movement in general. They welcomed the support of the handful of parties that had aligned themselves with the Chinese in the dispute, and undertook to encourage splits in the parties whose allegiance still lay with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The present volume deals with that Chinese effort to split the world Communist movement, insofar as the parties in the developed countries—United States and Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand—are concerned. Although the most substantial parties to side with China were in the developing world—in the countries contiguous to China, in Latin America, and in some parts of Western Asia—Maoism was by no means confined to them. As we shall see, one of the first Maoist parties to be established was in the United States. For reasons of its own, the traditional New Zealand party joined the Maoist ranks from the beginning (the only former member party of the Comintern to do so), and there were schismatic Maoist parties established in virtually all of the West European countries. The Japanese party wavered in its allegiance for some time, and a three-way division finally occurred there.
Chinese support for schismatic Maoist Communist parties continued as long as Mao Tse-tung was alive. However, Mao was not only the leader of the Chinese Party, but also controlled the
Chinese government, and over time his evolving policies in the latter role had an unsettling effect on the Maoist parties outside of China. This was particularly the case with his development in the early 1970s of a rapprochement with the United States.
For a short while after Mao’s death, the Chinese party, under the leadership of Hua Kuo-feng, continued the policy of encouraging International Maoism. However, Hua’s showdown with the so-called Gang of Four (Mme. Mao and three colleagues), which brought about their imprisonment, caused further problems for the Maoist parties outside of China. Some of them split between groups still loyal to the Chinese party leadership and those who supported the Gang of Four.
A further complication was presented by the Albanian party. It had remained loyal to Mao so long as he lived, but was unwilling to support his successors. Before long, it even began, in retrospect, to be highly critical of Mao Tse-tung himself, thus promoting even more dissidence within the ranks of the Maoist parties.
The Albanians began their attacks on Mao by taking issue with the so-called Three Worlds Theory, contained in a document issued by the Chinese leadership soon after Mao’s death and attributed to him. According to it, the world was divided into three segments: the “first world,” consisting of the two “super-powers,” that is, the United States and the Soviet Union; the “second world,” consisting of the Western European nations and Japan; and the “third world,” made up of the developing countries, the leader of which was China.
From their repudiation of the Three Worlds Theory, the Albanian leadership extended their attacks on Mao to the whole body of his theory and practice. Some hitherto Maoist parties in other countries aligned themselves with the Albanians.
There thus came to be three identifiable tendencies among the parties making up International Maoism: those still loyal to the new ruling Chinese group, those supporting the Albanians, and those proclaiming themselves the “true Maoists,” who continued to preach the doctrine of the Mao of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” and declared their support for the Gang of Four.
However, with the ascent of Teng Hsiao-ping to power after 1978, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party lost virtually all interest in International Maoism. Teng and his colleagues turned their attention principally to the economic development of their country, took large strides towards establishing a market economy, and had little further interest in the International Communist Movement, Maoist or otherwise.
Although by the 1990s International Maoism had not ceased to exist, it had come to be confined to a small group of small organizations, principally in Asia and South America, the most notable of which was the so-called Sendero Luminoso Communist Party of Peru. Among the developed countries, many of the Maoist parties had disappeared and others were much weakened.
A few of the surviving parties of the more “orthodox” variety had for the first time established what amounted to a Maoist International, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM). The formation of the RIM tended to highlight one of the peculiarities of International Maoism; until then, no attempt to form a Maoist version of the Communist International had ever been made by Mao himself or by the Chinese party at any time. All relations between the Chinese party and those elsewhere which were Maoist were on a party by party basis, rather than taking the form of establishment of an international organization.
In sum, it can be said that International Maoism constituted, so long as Mao lived, the most consequential schismatic movement within International Communism since it came into existence in 1919, with the establishment of the Communist International. Although International Trotskyism has had a much longer existence, dating from 1929, and still is in existence at the end of the twentieth century, it has never had as many parties associated with it, nor has it had parties of the importance of some of those that rallied to the banner of Mao Tse-tung. International Maoism was the only schismatic tendency in the history of the Communist movement to have had the support of a major country. Its fate rested largely on whether or not that power, China, continued to maintain that support.[1]
Part Ⅰ: United States and Canada
Maoism in the United States and Canada
Maoism appeared in both the United States and Canada in the early 1960s, in the former case even before the Chinese Communists overtly sought to recruit counterparts in other countries. In both cases, the earliest Maoist groups were breakaways from the pro-Soviet Communist parties. Subsequently, recruits to Maoism came in large part from elements of the New Left of the 1960s.
1
For a more extensive treatment of the origins and evolution of International Maoism, see Robert J. Alexander: International Maoism in the Developing World.