Let a hundred flowers wither: the many failures of Western Maoism

Introduction

The 1960s and ’70s was the last time in Western countries that mass revolt radicalised an entire generation of youth. Student battles with police sparked a general strike in France in 1968; the US civil rights movement gave way to Malcolm X, ghetto uprisings and the Black Panthers; the 1969 Clarrie O’Shea general strike across Australia unleashed a rebellious spirit among rank-and-file workers for years to come.

The barbarity of America’s war in Vietnam, and the international movement against it, was the central focus, especially after the turning point of the 1968 Tet Offensive, when the Vietnamese people launched an heroic surprise attack on the US.

At these various high points, and many others, tens of thousands of young people in the West became revolutionaries almost overnight. For a significant number of them, this meant becoming a Maoist.

Liberals and ex-radicals look back on this period with a mix of bemusement and horror. The peace-and-love “good ’60s” gave way to the “bad ’60s” – when angry young people wanted to “smash” things such as racism, capitalism and imperialism.^[1]

This article regards the 1960s going “bad” extremely positively. Young radicals, no longer satisfied with registering moral opposition to war or racism, became much more serious and determined to put an end to the horrors of Western capitalism. In their impatient rage, their irrepressible defiance, and their sense of standing on the cusp of history, Maoism was one theory that could appeal.

In his history of the rise and fall of the US “New Communist” (Maoist) movement, former leading US Maoist Max Elbaum explains the attraction:

The Communist Party of China (CPC) put itself forward as a new centre for the world revolutionary movement and promoted itself as the shining example and prime champion of liberation movements waged by peoples of colour all over the world… Western establishment ideologues promoted a mirror image of the Chinese argument, painting China as the most dangerous advocate of revolution on the planet.^[2]

What did it mean to be a Maoist in the West? In China, the Communist Party had militarily conquered power in 1949 with a mass peasant army. It unified a long-fragmented territory under a centralised national state, defeating feudal landlords, corrupt Nationalists, and Western and Japanese imperialist plunderers.

How this experience – and later, the 1966 Cultural Revolution – could translate into conditions of advanced Western capitalism was contentious. Different Maoists had very different answers. “Western Maoism” therefore covered a wide range of overlapping, even contradictory strategies. Maoist groups could be authoritarian, conspiratorial sects or flamboyant, militant streetfighters – or both. Some advocated armed struggle from the slums and called Western workers “a parasite upon the heritage of mankind”.^[3]Others did the opposite, sending members into factories to become proletarian and get away from “petty-bourgeois” students.

The spectrum also ranged from “hard” Maoism, which closely followed the line from Beijing, to “soft” Maoism, which drew more diffuse inspiration from Third World, guerrilla and spontaneous youth rebellions. Examples of the latter include the very important workers’ parties Avanguardia Operaia and Lotta Continua that came to prominence in the Italian Hot Autumn of 1969–70.

The primary focus of this article, however, will be on “hard” Maoism in three countries: France, the United States, and Australia.

By 1970, Maoism (often called Marxism-Leninism, and sometimes Third World Marxism) was, in many Western cities, the most influential organised force in the radicalisation. The Black Panthers, who sold Mao’s Little Red Book on US street corners, toured China as distinguished guests. When the French government banned Maoist group La Gauche Prolétarienne, the world’s most famous living philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre became their newspaper’s editor and sold it on the streets of Paris.

Yet by 1980, Maoism in the West had all but evaporated. What happened?

From their formation in the early 1960s, Maoist groups posed as a radical alternative to the traditional Communist parties. Communists faced McCarthyite repression and still attracted militant unionists to their ranks. Since the 1930s, however, they had been marching into the political mainstream: supporting Allied governments in World War II, opposing strikes as undermining the war effort and rallying around the national flag. By the 1960s, Communists were tailing liberal pacifists (the US), running unions as bureaucratic machines (Australia and France) and even supporting colonialism (France).

By contrast, Maoist groups could appear bold, confrontational and activist. Maoists broke the US travel ban on Cuba, stormed the US embassy in Paris to hoist the North Vietnamese flag, and were among those university students who scandalised Australian society by fundraising for the National Liberation Front. The New Left cried: “Victory to the NLF!”; the Old Left pleaded: “Stop the Bombings: Negotiate”.

Maoists helped popularise the notion of Vietnam as an “imperialist” war. America was not making a moral mistake, but carrying out its ruling class’s capitalist interests no matter the cost to humanity. For many young radicals, this represented a more systematic understanding of why the war was happening, and what it would take to end it.

Yet Maoism arguably turned out to be the most destructive and corrosive tendency of the new Western left. Although it spoke in abstractly Marxist terms about proletarian revolution and vanguard party-building, beneath the rhetoric lay an opposite world view: one of nationalist states, militarised struggle, authoritarian dictatorships and class collaboration. In this article, we will explore many problems with Western Maoism, but the underlying one is relatively straightforward: “Communist” China was simply another Stalinist police state run by self-interested, exploiting bureaucrats.

In a few short years, Maoist organisations chewed up and spat out thousands of courageous and committed activists. Western Maoism robbed a generation of its chance to rebuild mass movements for genuine socialism: internationalist, democratic, working-class and revolutionary. Then it imploded.

This article will begin by exploring the Stalinist origins of Western Maoism. It will then identify common “themes” in its theory and practice, although it should be noted that none of these are strictly universal. Over the course of its short life, Western Maoists drew their ideas and practice eclectically from high Stalinism, the Chinese Communist Party and other Third World struggles and regimes.

Stalinist origins

Despite appearances, Maoism was not an alternative to Stalinism. It began almost everywhere as an aggressive and self-conscious revival of Stalinism.

After Joseph Stalin died in 1953, the USSR disavowed his cult of personality and reign of mass murder. In a “Secret Speech” in 1956 the new USSR leader Khrushchev admitted to what Communist parties had always insisted were nothing but Trotskyite lies.

[Stalin] used mass terror against the honest workers of the Party and of the Soviet state; against them were made lying, slanderous and absurd accusations… The confessions of guilt of many of those arrested and charged with enemy activity were gained with the help of cruel and inhuman tortures.^[4]

The speech, published in the New York Times, sent shockwaves of disaffection around the world. Almost overnight, thousands left the Communist parties. Party leaders and apparatchiks abroad sought to suppress the speech entirely; internal discussion was squashed and dissenters expelled. When Russian tanks rolled into Budapest later that year to crush an anti-Stalinist revolution, Khrushchev used the same mass terror, cruel and inhuman tortures against revolutionary workers that he had denounced. More members left in its wake.

The Secret Speech marked a turning point in the consolidation of a new Stalinist orthodoxy. Concerned with stabilising its imperialist bloc in Eastern Europe, the USSR had begun arguing for “peaceful coexistence” with the West since the early 1950s, advocating for its Western satellite parties to openly pursue a gradualist, parliamentary road to socialism. Parties should allow more internal debate and engage in friendlier cooperation with right-wing social democrats such as the Australian Labor Party.

This provoked a sharp disagreement from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Fearing any thaw in US-Soviet relations would leave China out in the cold, CCP chairman Mao Zedong began criticising Khrushchev in increasingly bitter terms. This culminated in 1961 in an open breach, the Sino-Soviet split.

The CCP’s polemics with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) looked like a dogmatic adherence to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. In a 1964 pamphlet, Mao Zedong harshly criticised Khrushchev as a “phoney communist” for calling the dictatorship of the proletariat no longer necessary in the USSR. Mao demolishes Khrushchev’s substitute concept, the “state of the whole people”, with quotations from Marx and Lenin. The pamphlet even cites reports of conditions in many Soviet enterprises. The corruption and self-enrichment of USSR bureaucrats in their despotic control over workers suggested that capitalism had been, or was being, restored. “The factories which have fallen into the clutches of such degenerates are socialist enterprises only in name, that in fact they have become capitalist enterprises by which these persons enrich themselves.”^[5]

The USSR and its satellite parties had become “revisionist”, a favoured term of Maoism. The concept connoted a type of corruption of the ruling bureaucrats, who out of laziness, decadence or self-interest had turned their backs on world revolution. The CCP did not mince words:

Khrushchev has been colluding with U.S. imperialism…opposing the revolutionary struggles of the oppressed peoples and nations, practising great-power chauvinism and national egoism… In completely negating Stalin, he has in fact negated Marxism-Leninism which was upheld by Stalin and opened the floodgates for the revisionist deluge…^[6]

These polemics against “revisionism”, however, were not about upholding a principled Marxism against the USSR. Instead, they were a self-serving smokescreen for the cynical conflict of interests between one state-capitalist regime and another. Firstly, there was the geopolitical competition typical between any nation states in world capitalism. Chinese and USSR spheres of influence overlapped in the Korean peninsula, Mongolia and Central Asia, where the much stronger USSR could obviously gain at China’s expense. Secondly, the USSR’s “peaceful coexistence” with the West included cancelling its former assistance with China’s nuclear weapons program.

For China, a poor and encircled state-capitalist dictatorship, nuclear weapons were the fastest way to achieve geopolitical clout and national “defence”. The CCP’s hyped-up rhetoric of imminent world war and revolution, as well as a cavalier attitude to the consequences of nuclear Armageddon,^[7] were above all a justification to have the bomb. As the Chinese government complained quite openly in 1963: “If the Soviet leaders really practised proletarian internationalism, they would have no reason whatever for obstructing China from manufacturing nuclear weapons”.^[8]

Embattled and isolated, the CCP also had less to lose in its exaggerated calls for radical struggle and revolution across the world. In so doing, it hoped it might attract the allegiance of Communist parties in oppressed nations, and gain support among disaffected members in the West.

The Sino-Soviet split did indeed divide the Communist membership in countries such as Australia – but very unevenly.

The vast majority of the Communist Party of Australia rank and file [were] anxious to find a way out of isolation after years of the Cold War… The extreme leftism of the Chinese rhetoric had no appeal to [those] who had spent the past decade learning to be restrained, moderate and above all devoted to a pacifist struggle against war.^[9]

For some party apparatchiks, however, Mao was holding the line. They clung hard to Stalin-worship, monolithic leadership and hyper-denunciation. All they had ever known was how to obey, and command, absolute authority. China promised dogmatic purity and a new motherland. That is why early pro-China factions generally called themselves “Marxist-Leninists”, after the state religion of the USSR expounded by Stalin, rather than “Maoists”.

To genuine socialists, Stalin had long since butchered the revolution. Ample proof was provided in the form of gulags, purges, secret police, forced collectivisation, famine, ceaseless intensification of work, bureaucratic privilege, personality cults and the obliteration of democracy. As Leon Trotsky noted in 1937, “between Bolshevism and Stalinism [is drawn] not simply a bloody line but a whole river of blood”.^[10]

However, for the early Maoists, these atrocities were socialism’s bread and butter.

The Communist Party of Australia’s (CPA’s) Ted Hill was a textbook case. A trade union lawyer, Hill served the party loyally for decades, both before and after Stalin’s death. “To me words are not adequate to describe fully the grand picture of the new way of life in the Soviet Union”, Hill wrote after attending the 1959 congress of the CPSU.^[11] As Victorian state secretary, he had cracked down on dissent after the Secret Speech and according to fellow party leader John Sendy had his own factional spies.^[12]

Hill could not countenance the partial loosening of internal party life that would take place in the ensuing years. After losing by 10 to 1 in the 1964 Victorian state conference election, he split to form the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), or CPA-ML. With him went a group of party functionaries and some popular trade union officials, including Victorian Tramways Union leader Clarrie O’Shea. For the next few years, the CPA-ML operated in absolute secrecy under the unquestioned authority of Ted Hill, who spent his time regurgitating reams of Stalinist dogma, making trips to see Mao, and contemplating a move to the Victorian mountains to train for guerrilla warfare.

The Stalinist origins of Maoism were similar in most Western countries. A failed election bid to the Communist Party of the USA’s national committee saw long-term party organiser Milt Rosen establish a pro-China faction, arguing to go underground for the coming world war. Its expulsion in 1961 led to the founding of Progressive Labor (PL).^[13]

Much the same split occurred in the adult French Communist Party (PCF) to form the PCFml. This was, however, overshadowed by a pro-China youth faction that formed in its student federation. These were avid disciples of the Stalinist philosopher Louis Althusser. After allying with their “revisionist” enemies in the PCF to drive out Trotskyist youth, they themselves were expelled and formed the Union of Communist Youth Marxist-Leninist, or UJCml, in 1966.^[14]Its talented student leader Robert Linhart was toured through China by the Communist Party to witness the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”.

The numbers that broke away in these splits were initially tiny, numbering from a few dozen to a few hundred. However, they were flattered with official recognition from the CCP, the largest such party on the globe. China’s predictions of imminent war, revolution and victory – not to mention its financial patronage – helped these tight, hierarchical, secretive organisations to persevere. Extreme grandiosity justified every form of thuggery against rival forces, and harsh internal suppression of debate. These practices already had long standing in the Stalinist movement from which they came.

Having established the Stalinist origins of Marxist-Leninist/Maoist splits, let us explore several recurring themes in their world view and practice.

Workerism

Most early Maoists were “workerist”. They stereotyped workers, whom they sought to flatter, as socially conservative, and romanticised the image of working-class life. Hard labour was purifying, and workers were considered free from the bourgeois rot that infected all other individuals.

In France, thousands of UJCml students took Mao’s advice to “come down from the horse to observe the flower” by going to the toughest factories.^[15] From 1967, student members were taken off the campuses, which were simmering with political radicalism, and sent to investigate or work in factories and on farms, which were not. This strategy was known as établissement.^[16]

The students, who often had middle-class backgrounds, were anxious to purge themselves of it. Intra-group competition played a part here too. The older French Maoists of the PCFml, who although much smaller enjoyed official Beijing endorsement, touted themselves as the true proletarian group and relentlessly baited the student group as petty-bourgeois intellectuals.^[17]

Beneath the anti-elitist pretentions of the Maoist dictum to “serve the people” lay a very elitist assumption. As with Stalin, Mao and their single-party dictatorships, Marxist-Leninists were the self-appointed vanguard on a messianic mission. One participant described the feeling for many of the students undergoing établissement:

I wanted to put my head on the stock of the anvils, to disappear and be reborn, in another manner, in worker brutality… We venerated the people… We were strange shepherds who dreamed of being swallowed by our flock.^[18]

Instead of building workers’ self-confidence, the UJCml sought to win their passive support. The long-term strategy was to take leadership of the trade union confederation away from the PCF. There was little reflection on the class nature of the trade union bureaucracy; the problem stemmed only from the “revisionist” thinking that had infected its PCF leadership.

Établissement was a disaster by every metric. The students were muscled out by the Communist-controlled union machine, and worn out by the pace of work. In his own account, L’établi (The Assembly Line), Maoist leader Robert Linhart describes his self-imposed exhaustion:

The first day in a factory terrifies everyone, many people will speak to me about it later, often with anguish. What mind, what body can accept this form of slavery, this destructive rhythm of the assembly line, without some show of resistance? It’s against nature. The aggressive wear and tear of the assembly line is experienced violently by everyone, city workers and peasants, intellectual and manual workers, immigrants and Frenchman.^[19]

Furthermore, workers were not the adoring chorus that so many had anticipated. The result was that hundreds of student activists quickly gave up on politics entirely.

Students were absolutely correct to see the working class as the agent of revolutionary change. But their energies would have been better served building pro-worker politics in the universities. Workerism, however, usually came with extreme hostility to any other social layer. So when students set up barricades and fought the police in the Latin Quarter of Paris, Linhart called it a “social-democratic plot, orchestrated by Trotskyists to usurp the working class’s legitimate leadership of the struggle for the benefit of the petit bourgeoisie”.^[20]

This “social-democratic plot” was the famous May ’68. It soon sparked the largest general strike in history. Events completely bypassed the Maoists’ factory implantation. Instead, workers were radicalised by their visits to the Sorbonne university in May and June, where they intersected with many Trotskyist students. As one old militant at Renault recounted:

Every evening I took five or six workers – quite often members of the Communist Party – in my car to the Sorbonne. When they returned to work the next day they were completely changed people… Many young workers rediscovered there in the Sorbonne the historic idea of the revolutionary traditions of the working class, and started to talk the language of revolution… In the student demonstrations we were free to throw paving stones at the police. At the official trade union demonstration the main slogan was “Beware of provocateurs”.^[21]

The PCF and the unions infamously sabotaged the general strike, actions which both Maoists and Trotskyists rightly denounced. However, the PCF’s betrayal was a repeat of its 1936 “Popular Front” government and their 1944 support for de Gaulle. These two policies had been laid down by the Maoists’ hero Joseph Stalin.

Abstention from the central events of May 1968 provoked an internal crisis in the UJCml. They had built a reputation for street-fighting in the Vietnam War movement. Yet during the most significant Western upheaval since World War II, they completely failed the test. “In the demos of the first week of May much was expected of us from a military point of view. But we obviously brought nothing to it”, Maoist leader Benny Lévy later admitted.^[22]Convinced the problem lay in their incorrect reading of Marxist-Leninist dogma, most activists withdrew from all practical activity to study the holy texts. “It was a massive retreat. The UJCml was put to rest permanently.”^[23]

Social conservatism

The Maoists’ workerism made them hardcore cultural conservatives in the midst of a blossoming counterculture. Members of Progressive Labor in the US, for example, had to be clean-shaven and neatly dressed, and were encouraged to marry. Marijuana use was strictly forbidden, since it was “pushed by the U.S. ruling class…to divert young people from struggling against them”.^[24]When they got work in factories to “serve the people”, their jeans-wearing, long-haired, dope-smoking workmates thought they might be cops.

Stalin and Mao extolled “proletarian family values” because these ensured stable, self-reproducing units of exploitable labourers. All deviation was punished harshly. The Western Maoists transferred this line with gusto onto a generation of freewheeling youth. They generally dismissed women’s liberation as “middle-class” and were, without exception, psychotically homophobic. By 1975, the largest US Maoist group was still proclaiming that “bourgeois society breeds and promotes homosexuality to degrade and enslave the masses of people, and it will be abolished”.^[25]

Sectarianism

The most hardline Maoists inherited from Stalinism the idea of a highly centralised, undemocratic party. They were extremely hostile to all others and could scarcely cope with being around them. Their dogmatic, brittle and authoritarian political culture suffocated debates. They pitted themselves against mass movements developing beyond their control, or producing new, more popular leaders. Even after launching worthwhile campaigns, they would beat an erratic, destructive retreat.

The experience of Progressive Labor in the US illustrates this perfectly. Through its strident pro-Black Power campaigning and a charismatic leader Bill Epton, the party enjoyed connections with Malcolm X’s Organisation of Afro-American Unity. Their newspaper’s front page became the unofficial poster of the 1964 Harlem riots. Epton, targeted as a riot ringleader, was the first person convicted of criminal anarchy since 1919.^[26]

The next few years of rising Black struggle exposed PL to real-world, democratic impulses and inputs. PL’s authoritarian leader Milt Rosen preferred to keep the group in what he called “glorious isolation”. Epton’s rising popularity had to be checked, and new West Coast chapters brought into line under the New York leadership. So when, in 1968, students of colour at San Francisco State launched the longest student strike in US history, demanding a Black studies department and more minority faculty, Rosen cracked down on the local PL chapter, which had initially supported the strike.

A new line was cynically imposed. The official PL position now called Black nationalism “objectively reactionary” and “counter-revolutionary”. Since universities were capitalist brainwashing, more Black professors would merely be “changing the colour of the brain-washer’s face”, the party argued in a January 1969 issue of Challenger. When they presented their newspaper to student strikers, with its front page headline, “Don’t support Black Studies!”, any support for PL was instantly detonated. Dissenters inside PL were expelled in the aftermath.^[27]

PL acted exactly the same way towards the anti-Vietnam War student marches they helped to initiate in 1964. From 1967, they abandoned the May 2 Movement on the basis that US imperialism was a “paper tiger” about to collapse anyway, and the North Vietnam government was “revisionist”.^[28] In reality, the movement had outgrown their petty control.

PL’s next and most ambitious sectarian project was an aggressive takeover bid of the radical activist body Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). By 1969, SDS had 100,000 members nationwide, and was leading campus direct actions and mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Many SDS members were increasingly open to revolutionary politics. PL’s goal was to “capture” SDS, have it adopt the PL program by hook or by crook, kick out whoever disagreed, and rule over whatever remained.^[29]

The other student leaders of SDS were alarmed by the entrance of PL. Dogged, disciplined and drilled, PL members deployed endless denunciation and even physical violence against rival student activists. By contrast, most SDS veterans had fuzzy politics and only a few years’ organising under their belts. Anxious to hold ground against PL, the SDS leadership began serving back the same hyped-up, denunciatory style. The ham-fisted dogma of Marxism-Leninism became the weapon of choice for all sides. In the heat of a faction fight, the SDS leaders became, in the words of one Bill Ayers, who would soon form the terrorist Weatherman group, “the silliest, least intellectual group of Marxists ever”.^[30]

The SDS leadership exploited the most unpopular point of Progressive Labor’s politics among radical students: its extreme hostility to Black nationalism. PL’s magazine had described a 1969 Black Panther conference as a “circus of clowns and crackpots…true opportunists, racists and anti-communists…a sorry bag of accumulated scum”.^[31] The leaders of the Black Panthers were invited to the 1969 SDS national conference to drive PL out of the organisation.

The extremely bitter and hostile fight split SDS down the middle between the two factions. On one side were the workerist-Stalinists of Progressive Labor, the “first wave” Maoists. On the other were the Black Power-Student Power alliance of “second wave” Maoists. Within months, SDS was completely defunct.

Maoism had destroyed the largest, most radical student organisation in US history on the eve of a campus explosion. A few months later in 1970, four million students walked off campuses to protest Nixon’s bombing campaign in Cambodia and the killing of four students at Kent State. The year after, public opinion polls showed three million people thought a revolution was necessary in the US. At this moment, an activist leadership, steeled by the struggles of the 1960s, was indispensable – but completely missing in action. “A nationwide student organisation…could have vastly strengthened radical initiatives during various 1969–72 upsurges.”^[32]

PL retreated into oblivion, selling its newspaper outside factory gates in rapidly diminishing quantities. The baton passed to the new, anti-PL student Maoists, who splintered into dozens of groups determined to build the one and only “vanguard party” on the immortal truths of Mao Zedong Thought. One quarter of the largest group immediately split off to train for guerrilla warfare in the San Francisco Bay Area. Most groups abandoned the campuses in favour of “base-building” – this time in poor, Black and immigrant neighbourhoods. The Weather Underground became outright terrorists, blowing up government buildings and inviting government repression of the left.

More on sectarianism: Australia

As the 1960s progressed, some early Maoist groups began relaxing aspects of their workerism. In Australia, for example, the CPA-ML could see promising prospects on Australian campuses. They recruited the talented Albert Langer, a student leader in the Monash University Labor Club. Although the number of hardline Maoists never exceeded a dozen, they became the politically leading force in the club. With this leadership growing over campus politics, they would eventually establish the Worker-Student Alliance (WSA).

First initiated in January 1970 on the Monash and La Trobe university campuses, there were 14 WSA branches across Melbourne by November 1971, and 25 by February 1972. An estimated 1,000 to 2,000 high school and university students, workers and teachers were involved with WSAs at this high point.^[33]

WSAs engaged in a variety of anti-war activism and local working-class community struggles. Connections to wharfies and construction labourers were facilitated by the CPA-ML, whose leaders controlled both the WSAs and a few blue-collar unions. This enabled some successful local campaigns such as preventing the eviction of public housing residents, and student-worker marches such as the Battle of Waterdale Road which defied police crackdowns.

Yet within a year or two, the WSAs were falling apart. The Maoists’ sectarianism was catching up to them. They engaged in increasingly hyped up denunciation of their left-wing rivals, which ranged from decrying the “rubbish” and “filth” of campaigning around women’s and gay liberation, to violent bashings of opponents, especially Trotskyists. One Trotskyist at LaTrobe was pushed through a plate-glass window by campus Maoists and required 50 stitches.^[34] As we shall see later, other components of Australian Maoist politics, namely their nationalism, would drive away whoever remained.

Through their control of several important trade unions, the Maoists used the same bureaucratic thuggery against workers. The leader of the Victorian branch of the Builders Labourers’ Federation, the CPA-ML member Norm Gallagher, worked with construction bosses to smash up the NSW branch, which had been the most democratic, rank-and-file, radical and socially progressive union in Australian history.

The Cultural Revolution and idealism

A major component of both “hard” and “soft” Maoist appeal to students was the 1966 “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in China. In reality a bureaucratic faction fight gone mad, it was sold as a radical youth revolt against tradition and authority. The Great Helmsman Mao Zedong was taking on those party bureaucrats threatening to restore capitalism in China with their “revisionist” thinking, and calling on students to rise up with him.

The entire conception of this “revolution”, let alone its bloody reality, was a further degeneration from Marxism. If China was a classless communist society, why the outbreak of so much struggle and conflict? The Stalinist thinker Louis Althusser, a key influence on French Maoists, provided an answer. For Althusser, the Cultural Revolution proved that “class struggle can unfold in its purest form in the ideological sphere”.^[35]The classes of “class struggle” no longer had to exist in any real, material sense. Instead, “social classes are defined…depending on the side they take in political and ideological struggles”. In other words: proletarians are those who think good, the bourgeoisie are those who think bad, and the Party, its great leader and its intellectuals, decide which is which.

Compare this idealism with the materialist principles laid out by Marx and Engels as early as 1845 in The Holy Family:

It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organisation of bourgeois society today.^[36]

Maoism was a regression to pre-Marx idealism. Proletarian was a state of mind, not an objective class position. Peasant armies, bands of guerrillas, tiny student groups or exploitative police dictatorships could all be proletarian – so long as they said so. The Stalinist and Maoist conception of the party was “almost a metaphysical entity into which the working class has been transubstantiated”.^[37]If such a party ruled society, then by definition that society was socialist, or on the way there.

Factional fights in the ruling strata of Stalinist dictatorships, and conflicts within the global “socialist” camp, were explained with the moralistic theory of revisionism. Revisionism was an eternal risk for any socialist society: at any time, its leaders’ descent into “bourgeois thinking” could snowball into the full-blown restoration of a capitalist economy – all without the attention or activity of the masses. The party leadership then, was in an eternal war for the right line of march, requiring constant ideological purification.

Purity

Maoists therefore placed an extreme emphasis on individual purity and sacrifice. Psychological transformation, not real-world mass struggle, was crucial. Criticism-self-criticism circles were designed to ideologically “remould” individuals into the great leaders of tomorrow. These encouraged an inward-looking, therapeutic politics – similar to, and cross-fertilising with, the consciousness raising circles of women’s liberation.^[38]In turn, it paved the way for more contemporary lifestylism, call-out culture and checking one’s privilege.

The grandiose, authoritarian style of these small groups often allowed strange and abusive behaviour to flourish. Where such groups did not entirely descend into cults, they skirted dangerously along the perimeter. This has been a favourite trope of liberals ever since, to tar the entire far left with the same brush. Guru charlatans such as US Maoist leader Bob Avakian were proof that revolutionary politics and the Manson family existed somewhere on the same “bad ’60s” bandwidth.

Dogma

Alongside personal purity went ideological purity. Maoists did not understand that mass movements and revolutions were expressions of deeper, objective processes. Instead, the most popular dictum of 1970s US Maoism was that “the correctness or incorrectness of the line determines everything”.^[39] This had disastrous consequences. Whenever struggles faced a setback, or groups failed to grow, an incorrect idea was entirely to blame. That meant the little vanguard party had been infiltrated by a “bourgeois headquarters” (such headquarters could be established among a dozen people). Debate became almost impossible to keep at the level of tactical difference. As struggles quickly declined through the 1970s, splits were frequent, traumatic, and strengthened cult of personality leadership styles.

The ideas that guided Maoists and “determined everything” were little more than comforting, self-assured, sterile, abstract dogma. The core text, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong or the “Little Red Book”, ranges from the facile to the objectionable. Some examples include: “Be united, alert, earnest and lively”; “Serve the people, heart and soul”; “Combat liberalism”; “China’s women are a vast reserve of labour power”; “The atom bomb looks terrible but in fact isn’t”; “Hungary in 1956 was a case of reactionaries inside a socialist country, in league with the imperialists”.^[40]

The book, however, was enormously popular on the Western left. After its translation into Swedish in 1967, over 100,000 copies were sold in a population of 8 million.^[41] But adherence to the book had more in common with religion than politics. So did the Mao caps, Mao suits and portraits of the “reddest, reddest red sun of our hearts Chairman Mao”.^[42]

Politics is tested by real-life struggle and vigorous debate. Theory is informed by studying history and political economy. The Maoists placed little importance on these. So Elbaum reflects that the Maoist left,

in contrast to nearly every other 1970s/early 1980s US left tendency, issued almost nothing in the way of original studies illuminating new features of US social and economic development or hidden chapters of US history…almost nothing that remains of value to serious left researchers and scholars.^[43]

Substitutionism

For Marxists, the proletariat is a unique social class. It alone has the power to replace the capitalists’ control of the economy with a democratic, socialist society. The working class occupies the heart of our profit-making society and can bring it to a grinding halt. Workers labour and strike as a collective, and can only take control of production on the same basis, not as individual producers or property owners. And workers do not exploit or oppress anyone else in society. A revolution that brings democratic workers’ councils to power will liberate all oppressed people.

Despite a lot of rhetoric, in practice the Maoists rejected this. Workers were not a unique class. Any layer that desired revolution could substitute for them so long as, through sheer brute force, it could establish the rule of a “Marxist-Leninist” party. Their vision of socialism, after all, included a peasant army led by intellectuals establishing a police state led by bureaucrats. This allowed immense ideological and strategic “flexibility” (and indeed “revision”) for Maoists about who to build a “base” among. It could just as well be students, farmers, or in the slums.

As we have seen, Western Maoists spoke a lot about workers. However, this was never as agents of their own struggle and emancipation. They were advanced capitalism’s equivalent of the Chinese peasantry, a standing army of support for elites to seize power on their behalf.

This explains the fact that despite their formal adherence to “orthodoxy”, and despite their dizzying array of strategies and perspectives, one concept is universally absent from Western Maoism: workers’ democratic councils. The beating heart of the Paris Commune, the Russian soviets and many other inspiring revolutions was torn out. In fact, Maoists sometimes explicitly ruled it out. In a 1969 polemic, the “anti-hierarchical” Gauche Prolétarienne dismissed French Trotskyism’s call for workers’ control of industry as reformist, arguing: “Revolutionary power…combines two essential conditions: the support of the masses and the gun”.^[44]

Voluntarism

As the 1960s and ’70s wore on, the influence of Third World struggles tended to weaken workerist tendencies and strengthen voluntarist and nationalist tendencies in Western Maoism. These were the final nails in its coffin.

The belief that sheer willpower could transform society (voluntarism) was a widespread affliction in the 1960s. Life had become one demonstration after another and a heady feeling of momentum naturally emerged.

Third World resistance – from Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to Ho Chi Minh – seemed to prove that guerrilla brilliance and personal heroism could overcome even the strongest imperialist powers in the world. So-called “objective conditions” – state power, capitalist control of production, workers’ passivity, division and alienation – could be defeated by subjective initiative alone.

Maoists were voluntarists par excellence. “A single spark can light a prairie fire”, the Little Red Book remarks. Ultra-militant confrontation would shock people into action and draw them behind Maoist leadership. Sometimes this proved effective, such as when Melbourne Maoists helped lead a riot outside the US consulate on 4 July 1969. Ruling class repression, it was argued, would then educate protesters on the true nature of the “fascist capitalist state”. This was also sometimes vindicated, as when those same Maoists occupied Monash university buildings, leading to expulsions that angered and electrified the campus’ entire student body.

However, at other times, the same actions alienated others, invited heavy repression, and left radicals isolated. Undoubtedly, if socialists are not to become passive and ineffectual, they need to take risks and act in the hope of inspiring broader resistance. Yet this must be done with real objective conditions in mind. Where actions fail or backfire, then retreat, regroupment and sober reflection are necessary. These in turn require robust internal cultures of democratic debate.

The Maoists, however, had only one gear, quickly becoming locked in cycles of confrontation-repression-confrontation. As one former CPA-ML member describes:

The CPA-ML leadership and its youth wing spurred each other on, generating an inexorably leftward momentum. Armed struggle for the overthrow of capitalism was envisaged as growing out of the steady escalation of the level of violence at street demonstrations.^[45]

In Australia, street battles and reprisals very quickly reduced the struggle to a minority of heroic individuals and mass of spectators. Each round of occupation at Monash University led to new disciplining of the Maoist students, who responded each time with smaller and less effective occupations.

The more difficult the objective circumstances, the more desperate and destructive became Maoist tactics. A deeper slump needed a more dramatic “spark” to shock it back to life. Since repression reinforced feelings of weakness in the masses, and the left’s isolation from them, Maoists were on a tactical death-spiral.

This took devastating hold in France after 1968. Reeling from their failure to connect with the May revolt, a new Maoist group emerged: La Gauche Prolétarienne (GP). Influenced by the mystique of the Cultural Revolution, GP valorised maximum, spontaneous, violent confrontation of any kind. Their flamboyant tactics brought them to infamy. In 1970, they “liberated” sacks of caviar, foie gras and champagne from a Paris luxury food store, and redistributed it to a poor French-Algerian neighbourhood. (“We’re not thieves, we’re Maoists”, their leaflet explained.^[46])

But their tactics had little to do with rebuilding a mass movement from the ground up after the defeat of 1968. GP wanted to immediately bypass the trade unions, which “we don’t hide the fact that we are resolutely opposed to”, they wrote in a 1969 document, Blow for Blow.^[47] Raising any demands was reformist.

Factory militants connected to GP smashed up machines and bashed foremen and managers. This isolated radicals from their workmates and made them targets for repression. After the GP was banned by the government in 1970, they renamed themselves the ex-GP and increased confrontation. Worker member Pierre Overney was murdered in a fight with factory security in 1972. An enormous flood of sympathy followed from workers and the entire left, as 200,000 people attended Overney’s funeral.

Yet the response of the ex-GP destroyed whatever could have been made of this moment. An ex-GP commando group kidnapped his boss, holding him hostage for two days before being forced to surrender him unconditionally. This not only destroyed the Maoists but led to extreme demoralisation on the Left. “It became virtually impossible to do political work at the Renault plant after this affair”, wrote Belden Fields.^[48]

Substituting themselves for the working class took its most extreme form in left-wing terrorism, which plagued West Germany, Italy and Greece in the 1970s. Maoists, although not only Maoists, took part in this, irreparably damaging whatever links had been established between the far left and the workers’ movement.

Third Worldism

Maoism at its core was for national struggle, not class struggle. The world was not divided between an international working class and the ruling classes of each national state. Instead, it was a fight between the “proletarian” China and allied Third World nations against the “bourgeois” United States and Western nations. People’s Liberation Army leader Lin Biao called it “the principal contradiction in the contemporary world”.^[49]

However, while national liberation struggles were progressive, they were rarely socialist. Much more typically, they were led by intellectuals and army officers, and more likely to mobilise the peasantry or poor than the working class proper. Where they succeeded, they either set up capitalist democracies, such as India or Sri Lanka, or established flat-out dictatorships over the working class, as in Egypt, Ghana and Vietnam. The latter were frequently in the name of “Arab socialism”, “pan-African socialism” or straight-up “Marxism-Leninism”. Yet, ruled by a small elite, their interests remained the same as for any national state in the global capitalist system: competitive exploitation of the labouring population, as well as safeguarding and expanding influence and control over territory and resources.

Instead, Maoists considered certain Third World nation states as acting in selfless regard for world revolution. Since they saw the world as divided between good and bad nations, rather than exploited and exploiting classes, Maoism was a nationalist ideology. World revolution was never envisaged as an international working-class chain reaction that demolished all borders. It was, at absolute best, the accumulation of “Socialism in One Countries”.

Where the Western workers’ movement was weakest, in the United States, the nationalist bent of Maoism was strongest. In particular, Mao’s China became a guiding star for many radical Black nationalists. They theorised themselves as an “internally colonised people”, a separate Third World nation within the United States. The first Black Maoist organisation in the US, the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), established in 1962, conceived of their liberation completely in terms of Third World people’s war. “What we got from Mao…was that the countryside or the peasantry of the world would move first and surround the cities of the world. We saw ourselves as the peasants surrounding the cities. Seasonally employed black men.”^[50]

These extraordinarily defiant activists had a burning hatred of the system, but lacked any coherent vision for how the economy and society might be transformed. The Fall 1964 issue of their magazine Black America described a liberation war taking about 90 days:

Chaos will be everywhere… The revolution will “strike by night and spare none”… The Black Revolution will use sabotage in the cities, knocking out the electrical power first, then transportation and guerrilla warfare in the countryside in the South. With the cities powerless, the oppressor will be helpless.^[51]

Apart from the implausibility of the oppressed Black minority alone overpowering the US state, there is no explanation for how a military uprising of itself would abolish capitalist relations of exploitation and replace them with collective, classless production.

RAM was a major ideological and organisational influence on the much more famous Black Panther Party. Both conceived of the revolution primarily in military terms. Whoever was most receptive to immediate violent action was the most radical class. For Panthers, this meant recruiting from the lumpenproletariat – gang members, petty criminals, “brothers on the block”: people “who would rather punch a pig in the mouth and rob him than punch that same pig’s time clock and work for him”.^[52]

The problems with the Black Panther revolution were tragically exposed from 1970. Their armed patrols and “serve the people” breakfast program inspired the oppressed ghettos to stand taller, yet this could not substitute for the powerful collectivity of organised workers. The Black Panther Party was quickly and savagely broken by a US government campaign of murder, repression and infiltration.

In their time the Black Panthers were, in turn, a major ideological influence on the broader, mostly white student movement. When they waded into SDS in 1969 (see above) and raked the “white, racist, counter-revolutionary” PL over the coals, hundreds of guilty white SDSers squirmed in their seats. In the crucible of Black Panther worship, liberal white guilt and anti-PL crusading, a new “flavour” of Maoism formed among radicalising students. Workerist Maoism was out, and Third World Maoism was in. It stressed the “white-skin privilege” of US workers that made them racist, pro-US imperialism and counter-revolutionary.

The moralist, elitist prejudices of many students carried over perfectly into this Maoist conversion. Western workers striking for higher wages was a selfish, dirty and irrelevant thing to the world revolution, since their “television set, car and wardrobe already belong, to a large degree, to the people of the rest of the world”.^[53] The Marxist notions that workers had shared interests across nations and racial and gender divisions, and that workers’ struggle anywhere helped struggles of the oppressed everywhere, were rejected or downplayed.

Instead, the vast majority of the American working class were seen as useless, if not an active enemy. As economic beneficiaries of the US war machine, the revolution would be in spite of them, even against them. The defeat of the American ruling class would require a war of the Third World against the US, with Black people as an internal flank and white radicals as a self-flagellating cheer squad.

After the SDS explosion had produced a new generation of Third World Maoists, the national thesis was applied to every racially oppressed group in the US. Each “internally colonised people” had its own national struggle, so each organised separately. There were Black Maoist groups, Puerto Rican Maoist groups, Latino Maoist groups, Asian Maoist groups, and white Maoist groups. They rejected the view that racially oppressed workers formed sections of a broader US working class. That led them into a range of confusing positions: the Black-led Communist League argued in 1972 for a new independent state in the US South made up of both “Black Negroes” and “White Negroes”.^[54]

The confusion reached a low point in 1974 with the Boston “busing crisis”. The plan was to bus Black children to white schools to help desegregate public education. Widespread, violent opposition from white racists galvanised Black community resistance in turn. Hoping to breathe new life into a considerably declined civil rights struggle and resist a burgeoning racist backlash, anti-racist activists mobilised en masse to Boston.

Yet more than one Maoist group, including the country’s largest Revolutionary Union (RU), stridently opposed busing. They argued it was a form of racial dilution of the Black, Latino and Asian “nations”. Others argued it was a “monopoly capitalists’ plot” to stoke up racism within the white working class. Some made both claims!

Activists with RU arrived in Boston in October 1974 with their newspaper bearing the headline: “People Must Unite to Smash Boston Busing Plan!”. From uncritically worshipping the Black Panthers, this white-majority Maoist group had come to a strange alignment with segregationists. As Elbaum recounts:

The issue was published at the same time as the most aggressive advocates of smashing the busing plan were physically attacking Boston Blacks on sight – and more than one Bostonian thought on first glance that the RU publication was a right-wing tabloid.^[55]

The RU’s bitter split in the aftermath was by now standard fare.

Australian patriotism

From the late 1960s onwards, the CPA-ML applied this nationalist thesis to equally reactionary effect in Australia. The CPA-ML argued Australia was an oppressed nation like China or Vietnam, and would first need to win independence from US imperialism before any talk of socialism. The first-phase national struggle would not be led by the working class but by a broad coalition of all “patriotic” forces, what Mao had called the “bloc of four classes”. How broad was this coalition? “We are even prepared to unite with some sections of the national bourgeoisie and internationally with other imperialists to form a united front of 90 percent of the world’s people to defeat US imperialism”, a 1971 WSA statement declared.^[56]

Alongside their violent behaviour and sectarianism, this bizarre position drove out the remaining genuine progressives activists in the Worker-Student Alliance. The Maoists could now struggle uninhibitedly “for an independent Australia”. They embarked on a “Long March” across regional Victoria, alerting farmers to the dangers of a Japanese invasion.^[57] They initiated the Blinky Bill Brigade to campaign against the Yankee imperialist Mickey Mouse, who in 1977 had been crowned King of Moomba, a Melbourne cultural festival.^[58] A member of the campaign entered the float dressed as Blinky Bill while another “dressed in a rat’s costume and also went along to agitate and take the focus away from Mickey Mouse”.^[59] The road from the 1949 Battle of Chengdu to the 1977 Battle of Moomba was a long and tortuous one.

Chinese foreign policy

One of the most decisive blows to Western Maoism came from Mao himself. After meeting with US president Richard Nixon in 1972 and securing American “friendship” against the USSR, Mao exported a new line to the international Maoist movement. Soviet “social imperialism” was now objectively the greater evil, and the United States might, in some cases, be a force for good.^[60]

Implacable opposition to US imperialism had been the Maoist selling point. Now hardline Maoist groups sided with US- and apartheid South Africa-backed groups in Angola against popular national liberation forces. From uncritical supporters of national liberation movements, Maoists became opponents of independence for Bangladesh (as West Pakistan’s military butchered millions) and for Puerto Rico (a colony of the United States). When the Portuguese revolution broke out in 1974, the most hardline Maoists sided with the NATO-aligned Socialist Party against the revolutionary left. In West Germany, some Maoist groups had gone over to supporting NATO outright, a move echoed by some US groups who called for more US bases in the Philippines.

Mao’s China was one of just three countries to keep its embassy open in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile from day one after its brutal coup against the Salvador Allende government, and the ensuing murder of thirty thousand leftist workers. Those groups most eager to maintain their official ties with Beijing (or to poach them from a rival) complied with China’s silence over Chile.

The Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, backed by the CCP, was a step too far for some. Yet the movement had trained plenty of yes-men willing to toe the line to the bitter end. After a 1977 tour of the country, Ted Hill wrote in Vanguard the following year: “The Communist Party of Kampuchea are building socialism. Their successes are inspiring… There is a great hooha about Phnom Penh being virtually without people… It is quite right that people should not eat unless they work”.^[61]

After the Khmer Rouge genocide, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, China invaded Vietnam, and the Soviet Union threatened to invade China. The entire “socialist” camp was falling apart. Some disoriented Maoists shifted their loyalties to Vietnam. Yet Vietnam was allied with the “revisionist” USSR; soon, it would join China in opening up to the free market, and later form a friendship with US imperialism.

Conclusion

Western Maoists had tied themselves up in knots, excusing the crimes and following the twisted lines of Third World ruling classes aligned with the CCP. Once the bonds broke, they flew off in every direction. Most of what was left of the US Maoists flooded into the capitalist Democratic Party to support the presidential nomination campaign of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson – a move that Elbaum lauds as a break from the sectarian, dogmatic past of the old Maoists (today, Elbaum supports voting for Kamala Harris).^[62]

A disproportionate number of French Maoists became “New Philosophy” hardline advocates of neoliberalism. After his release from prison, GP leader Alain Geismar left to form a commune, and later returned to politics as a social-democratic government minister. Australian Maoists found their way into the Greens, into academia, into sectarian irrelevance.

But most tragically, the vast majority simply dropped out of left-wing politics. They equated socialism with their time in the Maoist movement and became bitterly disillusioned. Maoism was by no means the only politics guilty of workerism, sectarianism and the like: other tendencies also played a counterproductive or outright destructive role. However, Maoism took these faults to their extremes and applied them with a cynical ruthlessness worthy of its Stalinist inheritance.

The radicalised youth of the 1960s had the odds stacked against them. Their task was to build something entirely new after decades of Stalinist domination over the left. Then the mid-1970s downturn in workers’ struggle and the triumph of neoliberalism condemned every left tendency to much tougher isolation than any had bargained for.

Nonetheless, if from the outset the dominant alternative to Stalinism had been genuine Marxism, then the 1960s could have been a major breakthrough for the Western working-class movement. Instead, Maoism – a rehashed Stalinism with organisational continuity from counter-revolutionary Communist Parties – got there first. “The bitter final legacy of Stalinism in Australia was the destruction of the best opportunity in thirty years to build a socialist party that could challenge the tepid reformism of the ALP”.^[63]

Despite starting from very small numbers, genuine anti-Stalinist Marxism grew in the 1960s and has survived until today. In particular, the International Socialists^[64] from the beginning opposed Washington, Moscow, Beijing, social democracy and union bureaucracy. This tendency looked to the bottom-up international class struggle to change the world, kept to the spirit of Trotskyism and not always to the letter, and critically analysed new world politics and trends. Its endurance has provided a living link between the 1960s generation and activists today. This is a modest but important legacy. Without the destructive influence of Maoism, their numbers and influence might have been much greater.

As a new generation incipiently breaks with capitalism, and a minority thereof search for radical alternatives, there is some risk of Maoism – with its “romantic” mix of guerrilla chic, Stalinist kitsch, and revolutionary phraseology – experiencing a revival. The disaster of Maoism during the last major Western upsurge must not be forgotten, and must not be repeated. Instead, activists must prepare for the future by studying our past and organising around the politics of genuine Marxism.

References

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1. For the quintessential ex-radical mea culpa, see Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987). Julia Lovell’s recent liberal pop-encyclopaedia Maoism: A Global History (2018), similarly implies that a kind of violence-loving madness descended on Western youth in the late ’60s. ↑
2. Elbaum 2002, p.46. When read critically, Elbaum’s is the most useful book written on US Maoism, or what he terms “Third World Marxism”. ↑
3. Cleaver 1969, p.8. ↑
4. Khrushchev 1956. ↑
5. Mao 1964. ↑
6. Mao 1964. ↑
7. “Launching a war using atomic and nuclear weapons, the result will only be the very speedy destruction of these monsters themselves encircled by the peoples of the world, and certainly not the so-called annihilation of mankind… On the debris of imperialism, the victorious people would create very swiftly a civilization thousands of times higher than the capitalist system and a truly beautiful future for themselves.” From the editorial “Long Live Leninism” in the CCP central committee paper Hongqi, 8 April 1960, issue 8. ↑
8. Peking Review 1953. ↑
9. O’Lincoln 1985, p.105. ↑
10. Trotsky 1937. ↑
11. Hill 1959, p.1. ↑
12. From Sendy’s 1978 memoir Comrades Come Rally, cited in O’Lincoln 1985, pp.106–7. ↑
13. Morris Jr 1970. ↑
14. Belden Fields 1988, chapter 3. ↑
15. Reid 2004. ↑
16. See UJCml 1968. ↑
17. Belden Fields 1988, pp.92–3. ↑
18. Daniel Rondeau, L’enthousiasme (1988), quoted in Reid 2004. ↑
19. Linhart 1978, p.26. Linhart rejected some of the most extreme romanticising of the working class, and his characterisations in the book are frequently touching, humane and realistic. But this did not make the strategy any more successful for the organisation he led. Linhart suffered a nervous breakdown in the aftermath of the UJCml’s colossal failure in 1968. ↑
20. Quoted in Rekret et al 2022. ↑
21. Cliff & Birchall 1968. ↑
22. Lévy 1971. ↑
23. Belden Fields 1988, p.93. ↑
24. Scheer 1975. ↑
25. Programme and Constitution of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, 1975. ↑
26. See Scheer 1975. If the history is even half accurate, PL began with quite an impressive first few years of activism, before utterly squandering it in the few years after that. ↑
27. Dann and Dillon 1977, chapter three: “Retreat from the Black Liberation Movement”. ↑
28. Dann and Dillon 1977, chapter two: “The Retreat from the Anti-War Movement 1967–68”. ↑
29. For the definitive account of this saga, see Weinberg and Gerson 1969. ↑
30. Quoted in Bailey 2003. ↑
31. Progressive Labor 1969. ↑
32. Elbaum 2002, p.73. ↑
33. Russell 1999, p.300. ↑
34. “Maoist Thug Attack in Melbourne”, Workers’ Vanguard, 75, 29 August 1975, p.11. ↑
35. Althusser 1966. ↑
36. Marx and Engels 1845, chapter four. ↑
37. Weinberg and Gerson 1969, p.8. ↑
38. For an example of the overlap in Australia, see Russell 1999 on male chauvinist self-criticism in the Maoist-led Worker-Student Alliances, pp.304–5. ↑
39. Elbaum 2002, p.238. ↑
40. Mao 1966. ↑
41. Johansson 2012, chapter 8. ↑
42. “Women xinzhong zuihong zuihongde hong taiyang Mao zhuxi”, poster from the Cultural Revolution, 1968. https://chineseposters.net/posters/e3-712 ↑
43. Elbaum 2002, p.324. ↑
44. La Gauche Prolétarienne 1969a. ↑
45. Herouvim 1984. ↑
46. Lovell 2015, p.315. ↑
47. La Gauche Prolétarienne 1969b. ↑
48. Belden Fields 1988, p.113. ↑
49. Lin Biao 1965, chapter 8. ↑
50. Muhammad Ahmad (formerly Max Stanford), RAM founder interviewed in Lovell 2019, p.305. Lovell’s book is a liberal mishmash and is not recommended reading. ↑
51. Cited in Kelley and Esch 1999, p.17. This article is highly recommended for exploring the ideological precursors to the Black Panther Party. ↑
52. Cleaver 1969, p.7. ↑
53. Ayers et al 1969, p.2. ↑
54. Elbaum 2002, p.194. ↑
55. Elbaum 2002, p.191. ↑
56. Cited in Russell 1999, p.308. ↑
57. Russell, p.306. ↑
58. Armstrong, p.105. ↑
59. Campaign poster and account at Art Workers Archive, https://www.communityartworkers.com.au/mickey_moomba.php. ↑
60. See Elbaum 2002, chapter 10. ↑
61. From the April 1978 issue of CPA-ML publication Vanguard, cited in Smith 1922. ↑
62. See, for example, Elbaum 2024, in which he argues for an “anti-MAGA front” united behind the Democratic Party to stop the fascist Trump. ↑
63. Armstrong 2001, p.107. ↑
64. The International Socialists were the precursor organisation of Socialist Alternative. ↑