Belgium was the first Western European country to develop a significant anti-revisionist communist party, and to closely align itself with China and its polemics against “modern revisionism”.
In 1963, Jacques Grippa, a prominent leader in the pro-Soviet Communist Party of Belgium, was expelled from the Party for his anti-revisionism. Grippa had been active in the Party since the 1930’s, was a hero of the World War II Belgian resistence movement, and had headed its Brussels Federal Committee. In 1964, Grippa and a significant number of his supporters founded an alternative Communist Party of Belgium (PCB) and began publishing a weekly magazine, La Voix du Peuple (The Voice of the People).
With Chinese support, both ideological and financial, Grippa helped organize pro-Chinese anti-revisionist groups in other European countries. With the outbreak of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, however, the PCB underwent a split as supporters of the Cultural revolution clashed with Grippa and his supporters. Many left the PCB to form several new Maoist parties – the Walloon Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) and the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist of Belgium. In 1968, Grippa came out openly in support of Liu Shao-chi, the former Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, deposed during the Cultural Revolution. Thereafter, Grippa’s PCB ceased to play a significant role in the Belgian anti-revisionist movement.
“On a Speech by Sidney Rittenberg” by Hammer & Steel [U.S.A.]
On the Question of Liu Shao-chi by the Progressive Worker [Canada]
“Theory” and Practice of the Modern Revisionists by Jacques Grippa
Obituary: Ludo Martens (1946-2011) by Harpal Brar