Maoism in the Developed World

In 1973, Jacques Jurquet, in the name of the PCMLF, called for abstention in that year’s election, and denounced other far-Left groups that participated in the electoral contest, particularly the Trotskyists’ Communist League. However, Milorad Popav reported that “Most of the PCMLF’s activity … was of international orientation. … The PCMLF’s alignment with Chinese policy was total. The party’s Politburo interpreted President Pompidou’s visit to China as ‘a great contribution to the Chinese people in the world struggle against the double Soviet-American Hegemony.’”[158]

By 1977, the PCMLF had modified its antielectoral attitude. Although denouncing the Union of the Left (PCF and Socialists) as one of the “two political solutions of the bourgeoisie,” it announced that in forthcoming elections it was running five candidates for parliament in the Paris region.[159]

In 1979, plans were announced for the merger of the PCMLF and another Maoist group, Parti Communiste Revolutionnaire-Marxiste-Leniniste. This followed a joint campaign of the two organizations in the 1978 parliamentary elections. The merger was to come by steps. First, their two newspapers were to be merged and then a unification congress would result in a new party.[160]

However, these plans were frustrated by a new factional fight within the PCMLF late in 1979. According to the Paris newspaper Le Monde, this dissidence arose as a result of the legalization of the party in August 1978, after nearly a decade of more or less clandestine operations. “This clandestinity had the result that the members of the PCML (fifteen hundred last Spring) were only recently aware of how close to non-existence, numerically and politically, their organization was. The PCML, still led by M. Jacques Jurquet, former member of the PCF, owed its survival to dues and subscriptions from the militants, and the support of China, which had taken a thousand subscriptions to L’Humanite Rouge, the newspaper of the organization (this figure has fallen recently to one hundred one).”

The dissidence of 1970 centered on Brittany, where the principal party leaders resigned, and a subsequent regional conference resulted in a split in the organization there. The splitters attacked the leadership of Jurquet and denounced his “dogmatism, authoritarianism and sectarianism.” The Breton conference of the organization—split between those who abandoned the party and those who wanted to continue the fight against Jurquet within its ranks, agreed “almost unanimously” to use the regional funds that were supposed to go to the national organization “to form a fund for nine former paid party officials who had resigned or been dismissed by the central organization and were without re sources.”[161]

The PCML remained loyal to China through all of the changes in leadership and policy of the Chinese party during the 1970s. In December 1976, Jacques Jurquet, as leader of a PCMLF delegation to China noted that “the great victory of the Chinese people” [an apparent reference to the fall of the Gang of Four] “guarantees that, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party headed by Chairman Hua, China remains and will always remain Red.”[162]

In 1979, at the time of the hostilities between China and Vietnam, Jacques Jurquet wrote an article in Le Monde that he concluded by saying, “Marxist-Leninists try to judge on the basis of real facts. … In that sense, the blow to stop the Vietnamese-Soviet expansionist moves is an outstanding contribution to the resistance of the peoples of the world to the hegemonic efforts of the leaders of the USSR. The military action of China can only push off the specter of world war and reinforce the preservation of peace.”[163]

However, in 1980, Nicholas Tandler and Jean Louis Panne noted the formation of a new Maoist party, the Parti Communiste Ouvrier de France, which “is pro-Albanian and was formed after a split in the PCML in the Strasbourg region.”[164] The party organ was La Forge.

At about the same time there was some indication of a group loyal to the Mao Tse-tung of the Great Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four. An entity called Pour Internationale Proletarienne signed a “Joint Communique” of thirteen parties and groups from twelve different countries calling for establishment of an international organization of that tendency.[165] However, when such an organization took form as the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), its publication gave no indication that its ranks included a French affiliate.[166]

The Marxist-Leninist Center Of France