What can Marxist-Leninist-Maoists learn from the Anti-Revisionist “New Communist Movement” in Britain? (Part 3: Nottingham and Stockport, Revolutionary Internationalist Contingents and Communist Unions and Communist Maoists, and the World People’s Resistance Movement)
INTROUDCTION
The Nottingham and Stockport Communist Groups would weather the storms, and survive the disillusionment and liquidationist storm that would weather other Communist/“Communist” groups during the late 70s and early 80s, and form a position of unity between themselves under the programme of the new pre-party formation, the masterful document of the movement “BREAK THE CHAINS! MANIFESTO OF THE REVOLUTIONARY INTERNATIONALIST CONTINGENT IN BRITAIN”.
They would also from unity with the exiled Comrades of Union of Iranian Communists (Sarbedaran), exiled Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionaries from Iran and Rojhilata Kurdistanê and some non-Iranian/Kurdish student supporters of them, based in London. These Comrades were veterans, who had struggled to liberate Iran during the Revolution (even if it was betrayed the Khomeinists), some of them even having even fought in actual armed struggle during the Iranian Revolution and 1982 Amol uprising. While the group could have been stronger before forming the RIC pre-party formation, the groundwork for a successful revolutionary movement was laid.
But all that begs the question…why didn’t the revolutionaries of Britain manage to develop a revolutionary party? Why didn’t the RIC or the WPRM manage to develop into a reconstituted Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Communist Party of Britain? That question will be answered in this article.
Some Background on the Nottingham and Stockport Communist Groups, and the Union of Iranian Communists (Sarbedaran)
Nottingham, Stockport and Iranian exiles in London
For my non-British readers (the majority of you), I will give you a quick rundown on where Nottingham and Stockport are, their class character now and before, before going into the history of the Communist Groups.
Nottingham is a city in Nottinghamshire, East Midlands, England, made famous from the old stories of Robin Hood and his Merry Men who live in forests outside it and were enemies of it’s Sheriff, and is one of two “sufficiency-level cities” in the Midlands, along with it’s larger and more well known cousin Birmingham.
Nottingham was, and still is, mainly dominated in class make up by proletarians, but at this time was an industrial city with a strong industrial working class and bourgeoise controlled trade union movement. It was also near many coal mining pits (Nottinghamshire was historically a major producer of coal), which mean that it would be at the forefront of the struggles against Thatcher’s murderous policies of deindustrialisation and closure of the pits.
Nottingham also had and has quite a large population of people who were not white (1971–5.1%, 1981–8%, 2023–42%, mainly South Asian but also Black, other Asians and Arab), which placed it on the forefront of these people’s (as well as “white” non-British people under oppression including Poles, Romanians and sections of Britain’s section of the Irish diaspora) struggles for an end to English chauvinism.
Stockport is located in the Greater Manchester, North West England, and had a similar class and sub-sectional make up to Nottingham (except perhaps less coal mining industrial and more manufactural industrial proletarians). Manchester was a lot whiter than Nottingham, and still is though to a lesser extent, however Stockport and the rest of Manchester had a large population of non-white people, especially compared to almost everywhere else in the country excluding London, Leicster and a few other places. These two were both very affected by the “neo-liberal” reforms of Margaret Thatcher and John Major (and their continuation under “New Labour”), and were hotbeds of the working people’s failed resistance to them. They will likely be in future, hotbeds of revolutionary struggle as well.
UNION OF IRANIAN COMMUNISTS (SARBEDARAN)
In London, the majority of members of the Revolutionary Internationalist Contingent in Britain were members of the exiled “Union of Iranian Communists (Sarbedaran)”, Sarbedaran meaning “those who are ready to be hung” (and similar to the name of a series of dynasties around the Caspian who would support Timur in the conquest of Iran), a group that was formed from the merger of the Organisation of Communist Revolutionaries (Marxist-Leninist) (Iran) and the Pooya Group (whose members sometimes went to Palestine for training in guerrilla warfare, according to Persian Wikipedia).
A group of 200 hundred Sarbedaran would go the Caspian Town of Amol in 1981, where they would clash with IR Iranian regime forces sporadically, hiding the jungles and forest. They would spend 1981 also building up support amongst the peasantry, however this support would be far too little, far too early.
In 1982, their guerrilla Army, led by Siamak Ziam, would drive out the Basij and seize the town of Amol. However, they lacked mass support and this led to them being attacked and killed (in the case of Siamak Ziam and a lot of Sarbedaran fighters), or captured and imprisoned for life, or fled and returned to exile.
The Sarbedaran group would learn from and produce a good summation and self-criticism from this experience. They would be active in organising of revolutionaries both amongst the countries they fled from.
However, they would eventually, after becoming the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) abandon Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in favour of Bob Avakian’s revisionist New Synthesis. Some members would leave the party (I remember reading about an Iranian Comrade who never officially joined but helped with the development of Red Guards Los Angeles in one of their documents). But that is not relevant right now.
They and their affiliated student activists would form the London organisation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Contingent.
THE HISTORY OF THE COMMUNIST GROUPS
The Stockport Communist Group would be ejected from the “Revolutionary Communist League” of Britain. They would take a…more correct line than the group they were expelled from. According to Neil Redfern, a member of the SCG, they “published a monthly paper, The Stockport Communist, which we sold outside two factories” and held “public meetings”, “a film show of October” and a street meeting in “the centre of Stockport the day after Bobby Sands died”.
However, they would have, as they admitted later, have a rightist line to party politics, “denial of the need for a clear cut plan of how to build the party.” They would speak about how “our empiricist preoccupation with the specific was a particular form of that general ideological error — metaphysics. Our organisation has from the beginning attached great importance to the fact that it is the correctness or incorrectness of the ideological and political line which decides everything.”
These mistakes would be helped to be realised by the Comrades of the Nottingham Communist Group under the leadership of a “Henry Powell”. While the NCG may have had a small actual membership (some people have claimed “Powell” was the only member, though I have seen so sources behind this claim), they were active in organising the revolutionaries of Nottingham and building the party to create revolution.
They would stand with the faction which upheld the fighters for the revolutionary line of the Communist Party of China led by Zhang Chunqiao and Jiang Qing, Mao’s Wife (unforunatley mislabelling Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao in their pamphelt) when they were put on trial by the counter-revolutionary anti-socialist Hua-Deng-Ye Group. They would produce a decent summation of why China is no loner socialist later as well.
They would produce the excellent theoretical journal “Red Star” which, while not fully online, has many excellent articles that I would highly recommend you read and study.
Revolutionary Unity and Heights achieved before Great Crisis
The Revolutionary Internationalist Contingent in Britain (RIC) was formed after the unification around the Nottingham, Stockport and Sarbedaran-affiliated Comrades. This was a great moment in the history of the people’s struggle in Britian, as a pre-party formation that held a correct line had been forged from the class struggle and was put in a position to build the revolutionary three weapons in Britain.
According to Redfern’s memoir, they would establish a MARXIST-LENINIST PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (MLPC), which was the first attempt to organise a pre-party formation from these groups. According to Redfern (in a moment of self-criticism), “the MLPC published The Unholy Alliance: the United Front against Fascism and War. This document (written by me (Shobhiku’s Note: Redfern)) made many correct criticisms of Comintern policy, but effectively treated the post-1935 Comintern as a counter-revolutionary organisation, rather than as one making serious opportunist errors. Unsurprisingly, it was roundly criticised at the conference which founded the RIM. Accusations of Trotskyism were made.”
“Henry Powell” would begin to make mistakes, because of an idealist tendency he held, rejecting the need to unify with the RIM, and leading a rightist tendency within the MLPC, which was eventually rejected and defeated. and “Powell” would abandon this tendency. However, this would highlight the beginning of the transformation of “Powell”’s transformation from an overall positive and revolutionary force within the Movement into an overall negative and counter-revolutionary force within the Movement.
The Revolutionary Internationalist Contingent would then be formed after the unification of the three groups. The Revolutionary Internationalist Contingent would also get some support from members of the PCP exiled in London, around the Sol Rojo Committee (not to be confused with Sol Rojo Mexico or PCE (Sol Rojo) or the solrojo.org, the former website of the MPP before it’s capture by Jose’s counter-revolutionary faction) in London. However, these forces would eventually become some of the earliest supporters of the Right Opportunist Line in Peru, with one of their articles in their “El Diario Internacional” publication being criticised by the RCP (both for presenting themselves as the actual PCP, being an Internet-reliant group and, strangely enough, for holding positions the RCP would later hold about Chairman Gonzalo’s supposed ‘capitulation’).
However, the Revolutionary Internationalist Contingent would engage very weakly in mass struggle, founding a flop group called the “Campaign against State Oppression” which brought little steam to the RIC and only tired out revolutionaries in a useless campaign that brought nothing. This was mostly due to the negative influence of “Henry Powell”, whose influence isolated them from the masses. They would however, engage in some good solidarity work with the Great Peruvian World Historic Revolutionary People’s War and with the Irish National Liberation Struggle.
A split emerged between “Powell” and the Pat Derrington-Neil Redfern-Sarbedaran group, where the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement would support the D-R-S group against “Powell”, however, attempting the RIM asked that the split be “friendly” in order to potentially reunify the groups. This is nonsensical and means nothing, but the group that came out of the split, the Revolutionary Communist Union, did “respect” it, as best they could have.
Eventually, the Derrington-Refern group would liquidate the RCU after adopting the revisionist line of M.N. Roy that the West would only have revolution after the East had one. However, the Iranians would continue as the “Supporters of RIM in Britain” and later “Revolutionary Communist Maoists”, who would continue/produce two good journals, “CONQUER THE WORLD” and “RED REBEL”.
They would engage quietly and build up a movement in London of Maoist activists and revolutionaries who were ready to rebuild the pre-party formation, and declare solidarity with revolutionaries all across the world, including the Great Leader of the Peruvian Revolution CHAIRMAN GONZALO, and this group would be the core of the future World People’s Resistance Movement.
THE LAST STRIDES-THE WORLD PEOPLE’S RESISTANCE MOVEMENT AND THE CO-ORDINATING COMMITTEE OF REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNISTS OF BRITAIN
The World People’s Resistance Movement would be the last segment of the Maoist Movement to continue as a real movement. They would engage in the protests of the anti-globalisation and surge of class consciousness after the 2008 Financial Crisis. They would engage in support work for the Nepali revolution, even travelling to document it.
They would attack the revisionist ”new synthesis” but defend Prachandaite neo-revisionism in those defences. Apparently, the WPRM had a website but it is no longer up. The World People’s Resistance Movement seems to have both given up party building and may not exist anymore.
Meanwhile, three groups, the ‘Democracy and Class Struggle’ group around the Internet Magazine of the same name, the ‘George Jackson Socialist League’ around several Black activists, and the ‘Revolutionary Praxis’ group around our old friend “Harry Powell”, who wrote a depressing and pessemistic article listing valid criticisms of the Maoist movement but offering no solutions, would join together with the help of Comrades from Tjen Folket-Communist League of Noway, into the CCRCB.
The CCRCB would flail around vaugely for a few years before disappearing. “Harry Powell” himself would die sometime in the 2010s. The period of the organisations that emerged from the anti-revisionist movement of the past had came to an end.
What can we learn from this?
The movement flailed around, as there was no great leadership or any active construction of the party through class struggle. Especially at the end of the last century, the group produced excellent theoretical analysis of situations but their practice was subpar. Afterwards, the WPRM’s theory was subpar but their practice was good. And still no movement, no creative application of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (principally Maoism) to the British Conditions.
However, we revolutionaries are rebuilding the movement within the country and this time we will win.
DARE TO STRUGGLE, DARE TO WIN!
RECONSTITUTE THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF BRITAIN UNDER MARXISM-LENINISM-MAOISM!
LONG LIVE MARXISM-LENINISM-MAOISM!
LONG LIVE PEOPLE’S WAR!
LONG LIVE THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST LEAGUE!
CREATIVELY APPLY MARXISM-LENINISM-MAOISM TO THE BRITISH CONDITIONS!
