As was the case in many other countries, the followers of “Mao Tse-tung Thought” in the United States and Canada lacked unity among themselves. Various competing groups appeared in both countries!—in Canada, in large degree because they originated in different parts of the country, in the United States because they emerged from New Left groups of different racial and ethnic origins. There were few attempts to establish unity among the competing Maoist sects.
With the alterations of Chinese Communist Party and government policy beginning in the early 1970s, new sources of schism arose among the Maoist groups in the United States and Canada. The Progressive Labor Party abandoned Maoism as early as 1972 because of the rapprochement of the Mao regime with the United States. Subsequently, groups in both countries took differing positions on the changing policies and personnel in China following the death of Mao Tse-tung. Some supported the successors of Mao, others backed the Gang of Four. Finally, there were groups in both nations that ended up allying themselves with the Albanians.
In neither country did any Maoist party present a really formidable challenge to the pro-Soviet Communist Party, or for that matter, to the principal Trotskyist groups. They predominantly appealed to radicalized youths, particularly on college campuses. The efforts of a few of them to establish a base in the labor movement proved largely fruitless.
During the 1960s, the Progressive Labor Party of the United States may be said to have had the “Chinese franchise,” and by the late 1970s the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) enjoyed the same endorsement from the People’s Republic for a short while. It is not clear that any Canadian group established any close connection with the Chinese Party and government.
The Progressive Labor Party
The Progressive Labor Party was the first significant Maoist party in the United States. Unlike most of its successors, it originated in a split in the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), and it held the “Chinese franchise” throughout most of the 1960s and until it broke with Mao and the Chinese Party over the Nixon-Mao rapprochement of 1971—1972. It was, perhaps, the first national Maoist group to break with the Chinese.
Establishment Of The Progressive Labor Party
In 1961, two secondary leaders of the Communist Party in New York state, Milt Rosen and Mort Scheer, took the lead in organizing a “left wing” within it. Both men had sought membership in the CP National Committee in 1959, but had not been chosen.[2] Rosen was originally from Buffalo, but by 1961 was a state organizer, working out of New York City.[3]
By 1961, Rosen and Scheer were urging transfer of the Communist Party national headquarters from New York to Chicago, and were suggesting that it might be necessary for the party to go “underground,” in view of government attacks on it. In October of that year, Ben Davis was sent from New York City to Buffalo to try to get Scheer to change his position. This mission failed, and by the end of 1961 both Rosen and Scheer had been expelled from the Communist Party.[4]
In January 1962, Rosen, Scheer and a number of their supporters met and established what they called the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM). They announced that the PLM was being organized “in response to unemployment, racism and the threat of war.”[5]
The CPUSA “theoretical” journal Political Affairs published a statement about the expulsion of Rosen, Scheer and their colleagues. It said that “attention, however, must be called to the fact that a small number of these neo liquidators have now passed over into open disruption and renegacy. In Buffalo, six of these members, after suffering defeat have resigned from the party. … Connected with these deserters is another handful of disrupters in New York headed by Milt Rosen, who have also renounced the party.”[6]
The PLM held its first convention on July 1, 1962, with 50 delegates attending from 11 states. That meeting elected a National Coordinating Committee, with Rosen as chairman of the organization, and Scheer as vice chairman. It also decided to launch a newspaper, Challenge, a theoretical journal, Marxist-Leninist Quarterly, and a magazine, Progressive Labor.[7]
Most of those who emerged as leaders of the PLM and were to continue for some years to head the organization, came out of the Communist Party. These included Bill Epton, who soon joined Mort Scheer as Vice Chairman and was head of the Harlem branch; Fred Jerome, son of V. J. Jerome, long-time editor of the CPUSA periodical Political Affairs; Jake Rosen (no relation to Milt Rosen), who had led the American delegation to the 1957 Moscow World Youth Festival and had also visited Cuba and China; and Walter Linder, who after getting an M.A. in history, had gone to work in a factory, in accordance with the CPUSA’s “industrial concentration” drive in the 1950s. The only exception to previous CPU SA membership was Levi Laub, who led a delegation of young people to visit Cuba in 1963, in defiance of the State Department’s ban on travel there.[8]
In May 1964, the National Coordinating Committee of the PLM issued a nine-point Statement of Principles. This document proclaimed, among other things, that “America’s working people will be guaranteed security, democracy, equality and peace only when our country is run on an entirely different basis than it is now; only when a socialist system replaces the current imperialist capitalist one. … To win control of the government, so as to be able to build a socialist society, United States workers may be forced to defend themselves. … American workers need an organization that is centralized in form so as to be effective, and democratic in content so as to properly reflect the needs of the people. … A political party based on these principles should be formed as soon as possible.”[9]
From its inception, the PLM sided with China in the developing Sino-Soviet dispute. A long statement by the PLM National Coordinating Committee entitled “Washington’s ‘Grand Design’ for World Domination,” apparently adopted late in 1963 or early 1964, claimed that the United States “while probing for and taking advantage of every opportunity to infiltrate and subvert China, as has been done in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Democracies, has recognized that the Marxist ideology and practice in that socialist country, as opposed to Khrushchev’s capitulation and the spurious ‘relaxation’ it has brought about in U.S.—USSR relations, is a genuinely revolutionary ideology which inspires, informs, rallies and supports the revolutionary forces throughout the world.”[10]
According to Phillip Abbott Luce (an early recruit to the PLM leadership who soon left the group and drifted far to the Right), in the Spring of 1964 the PLM leadership decided that “Every member of Progressive Labor must belong to a club and attend its weekly meetings, he must be a part of a weekly study group, he must sell the newspaper two hours a week, he must engage in ‘grass roots work among the masses’ … he must buy all the Party literature, pay dues, and contribute to a sustaining fund as well.”[11]
Aside from such routine party work, members of the PLM carried out several more publicity-worthy projects. Two activities of the PLM that gained most public attention during the nearly two and a half years before it was converted into the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) were the organization of two tour groups to Cuba in defiance of U.S. government dictate, and participation in the Harlem riot of the summer of 1964.
2
Phillip Abbott Luce, The New Left Today: America’s Trojan Horse, The Capitol Hill Press, Washington, DC, 1971, page 70.
3
Harry Williams, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win, Bom to Lose: Maoism in the U.S. (manuscript), 1986, page 2.
6
Cited in Robert J. Alexander: “Schisms and Unifications in the American Old Left,” Labor History, Fall 1973, page 549.
9
Marxist-Leninist Quarterly, theoretical organ of Progressive Labor Movement, Brooklyn, New York, volume II, number 2, pages 2—3.