Maoism

MAOISM. For a few brief years during the 1970s, advocates of the type of Marxism-Leninism promoted by the Chinese Communist Party constituted the largest and most dynamic trend on the US socialist left. This self-described “New Communist Movement” (the term “Maoism” was then frowned upon) was overwhelmingly a creation of young people radicalized in the tumultuous 1960s. At its height, US Maoism could claim a core of roughly 10,000 activists devoted to its mission of constructing a new, “genuinely revolutionary” vanguard party to supplant the Communist Party USA and other allegedly reformist groups of the Old or New Left.

US partisans of “Mao Tse Tung Thought” failed to unite into a single Maoist party. But the largest radical newspaper of the time, the 20,000-plus circulation Guardian, declared itself a proponent of New Communist goals from 1971 and remained so until the end of the decade. The various Maoist cadre organizations, ranging in size from a few dozen to more than 1,000 members, produced dozens of other newspapers, journals, books, and pamphlets that reached thousands beyond the Maoist ranks. The New Communist Movement also constituted the most racially diverse sector of the US left, with the highest proportion (twenty-five to thirty percent or more) of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos and Asian Americans in its leadership and membership ranks. For a time, several thousand New Communist activists successfully rooted themselves in industrial jobs and working-class communities, and some played central roles in local and even occasional nationwide struggles. Support for major strikes, such as the May 1972-February 1974 walkout in Texas and New Mexico by 4,000 mainly Chicana women at Farah Co. (then the largest US manufacturer of men’s and boy's pants) owed much to their work, as did mass mobilizations against the initial high court decisions rolling back affirmative action, i.e., Bakke vs. University. of California, 1977-78. By that time, the NCM had largely fallen back upon itself.

The large-scale radicalization of the late 1960s powered the rise of US Maoism and other trends on the self-avowed revolutionary left. The pivotal year, 1968, brought the Vietnamese Tet offensive, the French May and the Czech August, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, and subsequent rebellions in black communities across the United States. Thousands of young people decided that social revolution in the United States had become both necessary and possible, perhaps just around the historical corner. A small but militant minority of them set out to discover or create an ideology, strategy and organization that could bring about that revolution. The large majority of new left activists walked away, looking for other means of social change.

The aspiring revolutionaries embraced the outlook of the Chinese Communist Party at the height of its international prestige. Maoism offered a systemic analysis linking interventionist war and domestic injustice to the economic imperatives of monopoly capitalism. It presented itself as the prime example and main champion of the Third World national liberation movements that were “shaking the empire.” China’s “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, ” or more accurately, the claims made for it, seemed to offer a more militant and democratic version of socialism than that of the Soviet Union.

Maoism also stressed the pivotal role of the working class at just the moment when a round of militancy was stirring sectors of US workers, and when activists leaving the campuses were chafing at the limits of student and youth politics. Strike levels role sharply: more hours were spent on strike in 1971 than in any year since 1946. The powerful in-plant resistance of African American auto workers in Detroit centered on the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and this development appeared to prove the Maoist thesis that the most explosive social fuel for revolution lay at the intersection of class exploitation and racial oppression. The militancy of young, mostly white workers in the nationally publicized Lordstown, Ohio, strike raised the possibility of radicalism also spreading to a sector that had been shunned by most of the New Left.

Maoism’s advocacy of a disciplined, secretive party meanwhile spoke to the frustrations many felt with the chaotic functioning of most New Left formations, as well as to the growing concerns they had about building organizations capable of resisting infiltration and repression. Maoism defended extra-legal tactics, armed self-defense and preparation for military struggle in a way that appealed to those who had directly experienced the massive state violence of the late 1960s. This risk-taking view contrasted sharply with the far more cautious perspectives of Old Left groups, whether Communist, Trotskyist or socialist. Finally, during its formative period, Maoism did not appear to be an ideology particularly distinct from or in competition with other currents of revolutionary thought, especially the views of the Vietnamese and Cuban Communist Parties and the liberation movements in southern Africa and the Middle East. Thus, US Maoism took shape only partly as an orthodox expression of Chinese doctrine. Other variants of a Third World-oriented Marxism likewise gave major emphasis to the struggles of peoples in what is now termed the Global South and communities of color inside "the belly of the beast,” and these were also part of the mix.

But the movement fell rapidly backward upon itself. Just as soon as Maoist ideas gained influence, one set of Maoist organizations isolated themselves badly. The Progressive Labor Party (PL) had been formed in 1962 by a break-away faction of the CPUSA, sympathizing with the Chinese when the Sino-Soviet dispute burst open in 1960-61. PL (publishers of Challenge newspaper and PL magazine) sent its cadre into SDS in February 1966, where they played a prominent and destructive role. Launching one of the two main factions in SDS’s June, 1969 split, they precipitated the organizational collapse of the largest new left movement. Ironically, PL was itself by that time moving away from mainstream Maoist positions. Attacking the Vietnamese communists for “selling out” (i.e., negotiating with the US) and the Black Panther Party for "anti-working class nationalism,” that is, black nationalism, PL alienated the vast bulk of young radicals. Rather than joining PL, which retreated into its own idiosyncratic brand of Marxism, the Maoist majority moved to create new organizations.

This process took shape within a broad left milieu sympathetic to China and "Chairman Mao." The Black Panther Party, for example, never a specifically Maoist group, encouraged its members to sell Mao’s “Little Red Book.” The prestigious independent socialist magazine Monthly Review also portrayed Maoism in a very favorable light. Within this supportive climate, a layer of activists determined to construct a US Maoist party began to coalesce into study circles and study-action collectives. Between 1968 and 1972, dozens of these circles were formed by (overwhelmingly white) activists coming out of SDS, especially from the Revolutionary Youth Movement II faction that had opposed both PL and the' Weatherman group. Similar groups were forged by activists who had spearheaded the Puerto Rican, Chicano, Asian American and African American youth movements. A small number of older ex-members of the CPUSA, or of PL, took part in the process. In a few cities, Detroit the most important, a turn toward Maoism on the part of newly radicalized young workers, especially Black workers, seemed to have great promise. Informal links also developed between many of these circles and individuals. The Guardian took on the role of a movement-wide forum for news, communication, and debate. Gradually, nationwide democratic-centralist groups (“pre-party formations”) began to emerge.

A consensus grew up on the political "lines of demarcation" defining the New Communist Movement. Most shared the advocacy of violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat; rejection of the Soviet and U.S. Communist Parties for alleged “revisionism,” the error of discarding the revolutionary principles of Marxism-Leninism; and the defense of Stalin, including the belief that after Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin in 1956, the Soviet Union had moved toward restoration of capitalism and hence become an anti-revolutionary force. Domestically, the Maoist current saw the key to the US revolution as forging an alliance between the “multinational working class” and the “oppressed nationalities.” Maoism held that the struggles of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans had an independent, cross-class revolutionary dynamic, elements in the national struggles for self-determination. The “spontaneous movements” of workers and oppressed nationalities, presumed to be growing rapidly in size and militancy, prompted the crucial need for a disciplined Bolshevik-style vanguard with the correct political line to provide adequate leadership. Hence the logic: “Party Building Is Our Central Task."

These views set Maoists against major currents emerging at the time. With few exceptions, Maoist groups viewed the rapidly growing women’s liberation movement skeptically at best, and regarded homosexuality and the emerging lesbian/gay rights movement as reactionary. The New Communists also saw themselves in bitter competition with all other trends on the socialist left and, while sometimes proclaiming the need for united fronts, usually adopted a combative posture toward progressive reformers in the mass movements. They chose, in other words, the road of sectarianism.

The Revolutionary Union (RU) and the October League (OL), both mainly out of the SDS split, had the bulk of members and following. A smaller entity, the Communist League, formed when some former SDSers joined with a core of activists who had left the CPUSA after defending Stalin in 1956-1958, and recruited few. The RU, founded as the Bay Area Revolutionary Union in 1968, grew into a nationwide organization in 1970-1971 and declared itself the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in September, 1975. The RU published Revolution newspaper (later the Revolutionary Worker) and at its height included upwards of a thousand members. The OL, formed in 1972 through the merger of local collectives in Atlanta and Los Angeles, grew to an equal size, about one-third activists of color, a greater percentage than RU and more typical of the "multinational" New Communist organizations that did not focus on a specific oppressed minority. OL published The Call newspaper and proclaimed itself the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) in June 1977. The Communist League, unusual in that it had stronger roots in pre-1956 Stalinism than in post-1968 Maoism, made its biggest impact when it recruited a large number of activists from Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers in 1971. Somewhat smaller than RU and OL, CL declared itself the Communist Labor Party of North America in September 1974, as it published the People’s Tribune.

A large number of other groups, none numerous in themselves, formed in this period, some destined to become more prominent during Maoism’s brief “second wave,” after the Chinese began orienting themselves toward the West in 1973.These groups included I Wor Kuen, formed as a nationwide organization by a 1971 merger of New York and San Francisco collectives of Chinese American youth; the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, formed by the section of the Young Lords Party, which turned to Maoism in 1971-1972; the Black Workers Congress (BWC), an outgrowth of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which for a time after its 1971 founding congress existed as a loose national “mass/cadre” hybrid and, after a series of internal battles, consolidated as a small Maoist group in 1972-1973; the August Twenty-Ninth Movement, which grew out of a section of the Chicano movement in the Southwest and held its “Unity Congress” in 1974; the Revolutionary Communist League, whose roots lay first in the Committee for a Unified Newark and then the Congress of Afrikan Peoples, which played a significant role in several of the key expressions of the early 1970s Black Liberation Movement such as the National Black Assembly and the African Liberation Support Committee; the Workers Viewpoint Organization, initiated by ex-PL members as the Asian Study Group in 1973 and becoming the Communist Workers Party in 1979; the Marxist-Leninist-led Union of Democratic Filipinos, which anchored U.S. solidarity work with the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines; and the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists, which later became the pro-Albania Marxist-Leninist Party. The Chicago-based Sojourner Truth Organization and the loose “Midwest Federation” of collectives that it led also functioned within the New Communist milieu, although its unorthodox brand of Marxism owed more to influences from the Italian extra-parliamentary left, and the writings of C.L.R. James among others, than specifically to Maoism.

The height of optimism about uniting Maoism’s different strands into a single party came in 1973. That spring, spokespeople for almost all the major Maoist groups participated in a series of forums sponsored by the Guardian. The biggest, entitled “What Road to Building a New Communist Party?” drew 1,200 to a New York City auditorium, the tape and transcript heard and read by thousands more across the country.

The optimism soon melted away. The 1974 recession led to a decline rather than rise in worker militancy. The mass movements from the 1960s in which Maoism had first found a base, mainly the student, antiwar and Black Liberation Movements, ebbed away. Meanwhile, the currents on the rise, the women’s, lesbian/gay and anti-nuclear movements, responded understandably to sectarian Maoist views. Rival trends within the left, most especially the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the New American Movement, gave Maoism serious competition. The 1976 launching of a popular weekly tabloid, In These Times, confirmed the anti-Maoist majority view on the Left. Entrenched problems of sectarianism, doctrinaire orthodoxy and anti-democratic practices naturally, meanwhile began to sap members’ morale and repel potential supporters.

Simultaneously, the changing policies of the Chinese CP began to put US Maoists into a serious bind. In 1974, the Chinese leadership unveiled its “Theory of the Three Worlds” as a justification for alliances with reactionary governments in the Third World, conservative European politicians and even the US military against the Soviet Union, which the Chinese began to describe as the more dangerous of the “two superpowers.” Maoism’s initial attraction to 1960s activists faded as the Chinese had begun calling for a stronger NATO, attacking Cuba as a Soviet puppet, and distancing itself from the most vibrant national liberation movements in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

Until the end of the Vietnam War in Spring, 1975, the consequences of China’s new posture remained somewhat muted. Matters came to a head just a year later when conflict broke out in Angola, following the successful conclusion of that country’s long battle against Portuguese colonial rule. China sided with South African and the CIA-backed mercenary armies against the triumphant Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola, because the MPLA was backed by Cuba and the USSR. Faced with a choice between following Beijing or sticking to their ardent anti-imperialist roots, American Maoist groups faltered badly. Most of the largest organizations backed China, while the Guardian, the CLP, dozens of smaller circles, and most of Maoism’s periphery supported the MPLA.

Meanwhile, Chinese internal politics exploded. Mao died and the winners in Beijing’s subsequent power struggle arrested his closest allies (the “Gang of Four”). The new leadership quickly reversed the policies of the Cultural Revolution and embarked upon even greater cooperation with the U.S. Shortly thereafter, China’s closest ally, Albania, denounced Maoism. China’s protégés in southeast Asia, the Khmer Rouge, were exposed as genocidal killers and overthrown in 1979 by a Cambodian faction backed by the Vietnamese. China then launched an unsuccessful invasion of Vietnam.

All this left Maoism in shambles. Some Maoist groups (OL, for example) proclaimed loyalty to whatever faction held power in Beijing. Others, notably the RCP, decided to hold up the banner of the ousted Gang of Four, losing 40 percent of its members to the breakaway Revolutionary Workers Headquarters, mostly to the pro-Albanian Communists, the MLP and a split-off from the BWC called the Marxist-Leninist Organizing Committee, later the Communist Party USA-ML. This unraveling process took a few years to unfold, and at its beginning, some of the weaker groups continued to believe that they could still build a party that avoided the blind loyalty to Beijing that had wrecked the initial Maoist efforts.

These new groups had become smaller and more politically diverse than those earlier in the decade. At one pole, those who had broken most sharply with China’s policies in the controversy over Angola formed a loose “anti-dogmatist and anti-revisionist trend” that included the Guardian and a network of local collectives. Anchored by the Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee, now calling itself the Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center, the Union of Democratic Filipinos and assorted other activists, grouped around the new journals Theoretical Review and Line of March. A round of internal battles in 1977-1982 produced the roughly 500-member Line of March group, which published Frontline newspaper and steadily moved close to Soviet positions in world politics. Other activists and circles of this inclination mostly joined Line of March or abandoned the party building project altogether. At the other end of the spectrum, the League of Revolutionary Struggle, formed in 1978 by a merger of I Wor Kuen and the August Twenty-Ninth Movement, joined with the Revolutionary Communist League in sticking close to the official positions of the Chinese Communist Party until the Tien An Men Square massacre in 1989.

The small and eclectic Communist Workers Party, meanwhile, briefly gained the national spotlight after five of its members and supporters were murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen at a demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina in November, 1979. Yet smaller organizations that attained a measure of influence during the late 1970s and early ‘80s included the Boston-based Proletarian Unity League, which promoted the notion of a purified Maoism free of ultra-left tactics, and the California-centered Democratic Workers Party, which advocated an unorthodox strain of communism (“world systems theory”), led by Marlene Dixon and notorious for its cult-like functioning even within a Maoism hardly known for democracy or openness.

Several of these organizations remained vibrant into the 1980s and played significant roles in the Central America solidarity movement, Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns, and the Rainbow Coalition. But by this time, they had become a disparate set of competing parties rather than any kind of identifiable trend. Most had been shattered by the profound crisis that overtook every section of world communism beginning in the mid-1980s. CWP transformed itself into the non-Leninist New Democratic Movement in 1984 and then disintegrated altogether. Line of March officially disbanded in 1989 and the League of Revolutionary Struggle a year later, while the OL/CP (ML) and most of the other groups from Maoism’s first wave had collapsed earlier in the 1980s. The small and ultra-secretive Maoist Internationalist Movement, a latecomer formed in 1983, lasted until 2008. The most sustained effort to revive Maoism in the new millennium, the Kasama Project, never got much beyond a somewhat widely read website and lasted only from 2007 to 2015.

Today, only a few organizational remnants from Maoism's 1970s zenith survive, and these are either tiny or unrecognizable as Maoist or both. The RCP and PL continue to exist as minuscule sects, isolated from the rest of the left. The small Freedom Road Socialist Organization (formed via a merger of the Proletarian Unity League and a shrunken Revolutionary Workers Headquarters) split in 1999 into a group defending a traditional version of Marxism-Leninism, keeping the name, and the Liberation Road Organization that looks toward a more broad-based refoundation of the revolutionary left. The League of Revolutionaries for a New America can trace its roots to the now-disbanded CLP but today it is neither explicitly Marxist-Leninist nor a political party. We could add to this list various individuals and circles that still self-identify as Maoist and promote the views of "Chairman Gonzalo," the one-time leader of Peru's Shining Path or of communist insurgents in India, Nepal or the Philippines. The total still does not add up to either a coherent political current or a major factor within the otherwise expanding American socialist left. They had been left behind by history.

Thousands of individuals who passed through Maoism during the last fifty years remain politically engaged, especially within the unions and within communities of color. The diverse lessons they have drawn from their Maoist experience do not add up to a coherent set of politics. The popular 1970s Maoist prediction, “The Future Is Bright, The Road Is Tortuous” has proven only half correct, and not the inspiring half that once infused US Maoism with tremendous self-confidence and revolutionary zeal.

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Kelley, Robin D.G. and Betsy Esch. "Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution," in Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen, eds. Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

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