Maoism in the Developed World

Marian Leighton wrote in 1987 that a recent book on the AKP by a member of the organization had said “that constant squabbling characterized the AKP during the early 1980s. A good deal of the squabbling may have involved the role of women in the organization, because at the parry’s congress in December 1984, women captured the leadership.” Leighton cited an article in the official Communists’ paper Klassekampen to the effect that the “anti-Soviet AKP has taken the lead in making a six-hour workday the watchword from start to finish as a women’s issue within the labor movement. The AKP also has had great and decisive significance for important campaigns in the battle to save jobs.”[417]

A December 1984 press conference of the AKP “emphasized that it continues to advocate armed revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat.”[418]

There is no doubt that the Norwegian AKP was the most important of the Scandinavian Maoist parties. The Danish Trotskyist leader and historian Mads Bruun Pedersen noted that “Norway … has a special place in Scandinavian Maoist history. The Norwegian Maoist movement has always been the leader party” in Scandinavia.[419]

Similarly, Eric S. Einhorn wrote that the AKP “had more lasting strength than the Danish KAP,” and added (in 1992) that “That movement continues to survive as the … Red Electoral Alliance which is the catch-all for radical socialists to the left of the significant Socialist Left Party and which holds some local government posts.”[420]

The Swedish Communist League (Marxist-Leninst)

Maoism in Sweden emerged as one result of a long factional struggle within the Swedish Communist Party between so-called “modernizers” and orthodox pro-Soviet elements. This conflict ended in 1967 with the victory of the “modernizers.”

John Logue has described the culmination of the internal dispute among the Swedish Communists. He wrote that “With the popularity of their course confirmed, the modernizers moved to a programmatic and organizational restructuring of the party at its twenty-first congress in 1967. A new party program was adopted that incorporated some criticism of the socialist countries as well as pledging the party’s allegiance to parliamentarism. In its membership statutes, the party renounced democratic centralism; henceforth, lower-level party organs were not obligated to abide by the decisions of high-level party bodies. Membership was open to all those who supported the party’s program. Structurally, the party returned to its form prior to its bolshevization during the early 1920s. Symbolically, it changed its name as well from Sveriges Kommunistiska Parti (Sweden’s Communist Party) to Vansterpartiet Kommunisterna (VpK) (Left Party-Communists).”[421]

Logue has also noted the impact of these decisions of the Swedish Communists insofar as Maoism was concerned. He wrote that “The first Marxist-Leninist party developed in Sweden with the formation of Kommunistiska Forbundet Marxist-Leninisterna (KFML) (Communist League, Marxist-Leninists) during the immediate aftermath of the VpK’s ratification of its revisionist line at its 1967 congress. The VpK youth went over to the Marxist-Leninists en masse in 1970.”[422] The initials of the new group were KFML.

The KFML was established at a congress on June 23—25, 1967. Its Chairman was Bo Gustafasson, “a young academic.”[423] The defection of the VpK’s youth group to the KFML took place just before the 1970 elections, at which time it changed its name from the Leftist Youth Federation to the Marxist-Leninist Battle League (MLK).

One of the early activities of the KFML was to participate in the 1970 election. However, it did very poorly, receiving only 0.4 percent of the total vote.[424] But the Maoists did not thereafter concentrate much of their attention on electoral politics. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Swedish movement against the Vietnam War was largely led by Maoists.

The KFML dominated the principal organization in that field, the United National Liberation Front Groups (DFFGs), from the mid-1960s on. According to Gunnar Wall, writing in the U.S. Trotskyist periodical Intercontinental Press, this was because the Social Democrats “took a generally pro-U.S. position,” and the VpK “presented a pacifist line.” As a consequence, “The Maoists took advantage of the lack of competition to construct the movement according to their own sectarian interest. The DFFGs were built on the basis of individual membership, and admittance could be gained only by accepting a far-reaching political discipline, the primary objective of which was to eliminate any criticism of the leadership. … The Maoist conceptions of the character of the Vietnamese revolution, people’s war, the ceasefire accords, and many other things were all promoted in the name of the DFFGs.”