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
Belgium’s Party of Labor Founded
The Liquidationist Tendency within the Marxist-Leninist Movement
Concerning Marxist-Leninist Unity by the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Belgium
To Be a Marxist and a Revolutionary in the World of 1988
On certain aspects of the struggle against revisionism: For the unity of all communists, in defence of proletarian internationalism by Ludo Martens
Belgian Party on war and revolution by The Call
Belgium communists celebrate by The Call
May Day in Europe: two special reports by The Call