Summary
The Maoist schism in the International Communist Movement arose from the almost inevitable struggle for leadership of that movement that arose between the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party and Mao Tse-tung and other leaders of the Chinese party after the death of Stalin. The Chinese, with certain reason, felt that Mao, the leader of the successful Communist Revolution in the world’s most populous country, and an important theoretician of Marxism-Leninism, was the senior figure in International Communism after the death of Stalin, but the Soviet leadership was not willing to make such a concession.
By the late 1950s, conflict over a variety of issues had arisen between the Soviet leadership and Mao and his associates. By 1963 that schism had reached the point where the Chinese leadership was encouraging other Communist parties to look to Mao as the leading spokesman for International Communism, and where they were not willing to do so, it was stimulating splits in parties still loyal to Moscow. The present volume is a study of these parties and these splits in the “developing” countries.
The Chinese leadership, torn between their roles as leaders of an international revolutionary movement and as rulers of a major country, engaged in several changes in policy that undermined International Maoism. The first was the rapprochement with the United States in the early 1970s, which brought the first schisms within International Maoism. Much more significant was the change in policy and orientation that followed the death in 1976 of Mao Tse-tung.
At that point, Mao’s successors decided for all practical purposes to forego their position as international revolutionaries in favor of policies designed to concentrate on the problem of developing the Chinese economy and the emergence of China as a Great Power. Those policies involved—in direct contradiction of Marxism-Leninism—submitting a major part of the Chinese economy to the dictates of the market, and welcoming foreign investment to participate in that process.
These policies brought the virtual demise of International Maoism. They first provoked a split with Enver Hoxha and the Albanian Party of Labor, the only ruling Communist Party that had sided with Mao against the Soviet leadership. They also provided conflicts between those Maoist parties that continued to support the post-Mao leadership in China and those that did not. They likewise led the Chinese to abandon support of those parties in neighboring countries that had long been following the path of “popular war” advocated by Mao Tse-tung, in favor of developing more or less good relations with the governments against which those parties were revolting. By the mid-1990s those revolts had largely disappeared.
By the 1990s, the only visible remains of International Maoism were those parties grouped in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), the only effort that had been made to create a Maoist version of the Communist International. The RIM consisted, for the most part, of small parties of opponents of the post-Mao Chinese leadership, advocates of orthodox Maoism as originally pronounced by Mao himself and espoused by the socalled Gang of Four, who had emerged as leaders during the Great Cultural Revolution and who had been sentenced to long jail terms by Mao’s successors. Without the support of a major government such as the Comintern had enjoyed, it seemed unlikely that the RIM would become a significant factor in world politics in the foreseeable future.
International Maoism in the Developing World
The present volume recounts the history of International Maoism in what is often called the “developing world,” or the “Third World,” that is, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. That is the part of the globe in which Mao Tse-tung and his colleagues thought his theory and practice had greatest relevance. Frequently, the Chinese Communist Party pictured itself as the natural leader of this “proletarian” part of the world in its struggle against imperialism and Soviet “social imperialism.”
This book includes a short look at the Albanian Party of Labor, both because of the fact that, although geographically located in Europe, Albania is, for all practical purposes, a Third World country, and because of the significance of that party in mobilizing (and then splitting) International Maoism, particularly in the developing world. Clearly, dissident Maoist parties could not develop in countries dominated by Communist parties aligned with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; but in Albania’s case, the party leadership as a whole decided, so long as Mao Tse-tung was alive, to join the Maoist camp, perhaps in part because of natural association of that leadership with the Third World that Mao and his associates sought to lead.
In a study of International Maoism, the “developing” countries are particularly important for several reasons. In the first place, they are the only nations in which some Maoist parties became major players in their countries’ national politics. Second, they were the only nations in which the Maoist “popular war” theory was put into practice by Maoist parties. In the third place, for a considerable period of time the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government gave extensive material and political support to those Maoist parties, support that went far beyond the propaganda backing and (sometimes) limited financial aid going to Maoist groups in other parts of the world.
It was also in the “developing world” that the conflicting roles of the Chinese Communist Party as ruler of one of the world’s most important countries and as head of an international revolutionary movement became most evident. For almost three decades after coming to power, the Chinese Communist Party and the government it controlled gave very extensive help to Maoist parties in the developing world, particularly in South and East Asia.
However, even while Mao Tse-tung was still alive, the Chinese policy and behavior in Africa were determined more by Chinese national interests than by “proletarian internationalism.” There, the Chinese were concerned principally with trying to block the spread of Soviet influence, with the result that Chinese attitudes and support were determined by the willingness of parties and governments to oppose the Soviet Union, rather than by their adherence to Marxism-Leninism, let alone Maoism. In following this “line,” the Chinese were sometimes even willing to work with the supposedly hated “imperialists” of the United States. As we shall see, this led to some otherwise surprising Chinese backing of parties and regimes that were avowedly anticommunist.
Following the death of Mao Tse-tung, when his followers decided to concentrate their efforts on the development of the Chinese national economy and on enhancing the status of China as a world power, they lost virtually all interest in furthering the development of a world revolutionary movement owing its inspiration to the doctrines of Mao Tse-tung. As a result, Chinese aid to “popular wars” in South and East Asia was at first curtailed, and then ceased entirely, and virtually all of those movements collapsed as a consequence. Also, there is absolutely no evidence that the Chinese supported the only Maoist “popular war” in Latin America, started in 1980 by the Sendero Luminoso Communist Party in Peru.
Finally, the developing countries are of significance in the history of International Maoism because they provided most of the parties and groups that made the only attempt to establish a Maoist Communist International in the 1980s and 1990s, after the Chinese had lost all interest in the subject. Although the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States (and the party of the same name in Chile) took the lead in this project, and when the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement was finally organized, it also included groups from Italy and Great Britain (with its headquarters in the latter country), most of its affiliates were in Latin America and Asia. The party that the RIM pictured as the contemporary model to follow was the Sendero Luminoso Communist Party of Peru. The only other Maoist party that sought to launch a Maoist “popular war” in the 1990s was the RIM affiliate in Nepal.