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John Sullivan on British Trotskyism
As Soon As This Pub Closes
THE formation of the CPB(M-L), the largest remaining fragment of the once flourishing Maoism of the 1960s, was an early sign of the break-up of British Stalinism, as a number of activists became confused over the quarrel between Moscow and Peking, and saw in Chairman Mao the great helmsman who would steer them safely away from the currents of revisionism. Most British Maoist groups were student-based, but the CPB(M-L) had considerable support among engineering workers in London, and were temporarily able to displace their former comrades in the CPGB from the leadership of the North London District of the AEU. This toe-hold in the working-class movement provided the CPB(M-L)’s leader Reg Birch with a position on the Executive of the AEU.
The Chinese bureaucracy sensibly refused to give an exclusive franchise to any of the squabbling groups led by rival aspirants to be the British Mao, but gave them all a certain amount of encouragement by inviting fraternal delegates to its junkets and conferences. As the CPB(M-L) was never more than a few hundred strong, these duties were a heavy burden to shoulder. It was not just party occasions but Youth, Trade Union, Women’s and Peasants’ conferences which had to be covered, so leading members were obliged to spend a considerable part of their lives on these arduous tasks. The British working class has never shown proper gratitude for the heroic efforts which the party made to ensure that we were properly represented. It was not just China which had to be covered, but Albania also. The party leaders never complained, but it must have come as something of a relief when in 1974 the Chinese and Albanian leaders fell out, and the burden diminished as the CPB(M-L) chose Enver Hoxha, partly because the travelling distance was less.
The CPB(M-L) from the beginning adopted an ingenious device to avoid the danger of being torn apart by the political disagreements which were destroying their rivals. The party deliberately confined itself to making very general statements of opposition to imperialism and support for the working class. The only exception to this was support for guerrilla warfare, such as had brought Mao to power. The British labour movement’s adaptation of Mao’s tactic was to consist of localised strikes which were not to make the mistake of linking up and making generalised demands. To do so would be equivalent to the peasant masses lining up in massed formation to oppose an imperialist army, instead of taking to the hills. The strategy went down well among Reg Birch’s right-wing colleagues on the AEU executive where he was comfortably ensconced. They had always wanted to avoid fighting the employers, and as they lacked the power to stop local shop stewards leading a fight, Birch’s ideas suited them nicely.
A corollary of the refusal to raise generalised demands was that CPB(M-L) members were not to waste their time discussing politics among themselves. The branches were not allowed to communicate with each other, so the political level remained abysmally low. Isolation produced an unfortunate tendency to fantasise, so that party members were given to describe tremendous struggles in their workplaces which their fellow workers had heard nothing about. The loss of the support of their Chinese comrades was a severe blow for a group which claims that the idea for the Chinese Cultural Revolution was given to Madame Mao by Madame Birch, but worse was to follow. Enver Hoxha, their remaining patron, insisted that Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy demanded that they set up independent Red Unions, or at least rank-and-file action groups. By that time, most of the manual workers had departed and the core of the group were teachers, so it would have been impossible to erect even a plausible façade which could have kept Comrade Hoxha happy. The group was forced to relinquish the franchise and set up shop as a completely independent business.
The CPB(M-L) then, abruptly and without explanation, altered their world view and declared that the Soviet Union, previously described as an imperialist state ruled by counter-revolutionaries, was a bastion of socialism. Did this mean that they were bidding for the Moscow franchise? It was not as simple as that, and an understanding of the party’s reasoning demands a grasp of dialectical thought. Stalin had established that there could be socialism in one country. Therefore, there had to be a country for socialism to exist in and Russia’s claims were the longest established. The ‘Tankies’ in the CPGB hoped that the CPB(M-L) would dissolve its separate organisation and return to the fold to assist in the fight against the ‘Euros’, but it was already too late. Secrecy has become an obsession with the CPB(M-L), and members have taken to denying that their organisation exists, or that they know anything of its history! How can a non-existent party be dissolved? Members do not divulge either their membership or the party’s existence to colleagues at work. Their journal, The Worker, still exists, but is no longer sold openly. Sociologists of religion are familiar with this phenomenon through the study of the revolutionary sects of the seventeenth century, some of whom survived for a very long time by adopting passivity and a secretive way of life. The CPB(M-L) may be slowly disappearing from view: if you are in touch with any of its members, it is essential that you do nothing to alarm them, as it would be a loss to science if they become so secretive that they can no longer be studied.
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Last updated on 28.7.2007