Maoism in the Developed World

Meanwhile, ten of the 12 branches of the CPNZ announced support of the party’s leadership against Wilcox. For his part, Wilcox joined with three other members to set up a Preparatory Committee for the Formation of a CPNZ (M-L). In a further meeting, they decided to postpone the establishment of such a new party until they had gained wider support. Wilcox claimed that “leadership of the CPNZ is now in the hands of an ‘Albanian Gang of Three’—R. C. Wolf, H. Crook and R. Nunes—who form the National Secretariat located in Auckland.”[616]

Thereafter, the leadership of the CPNZ firmly allied themselves with the Albanians. Their statement of position was greeted with approval by the Albanian party journal Zeri y Populit, as well as by some other pro-Albanian parties.[617]

In January 1979, the CPNZ had a national conference, its first since 1966. Present were 34 delegates, who gave “a resounding rebuff to the local followers of the new revisionist leaders of the Chinese party and all other revisionists and opportunists who have tried to disrupt and divert the CPNZ from its Marxist-Leninist line and make it collaborate with the class enemies of the New Zealand working people—the imperialists or social imperialists who all collude and contend for world control and plunder.”[618]

However, the CPNZ leadership at first found it hard to swallow the repudiation of Mao by the Albanian leadership after its split with Mao’s successors. H. Roth noted that the CPNZ “was thrown into confusion when Enver Hoxha’s books downgrading Mao reached New Zealand. In August 1979 a CPNZ delegation led by H. Nunes went to Albania to discuss ideological differences. After its return, the Political Committee adopted a pro-Mao resolution, and articles in the party’s theoretical journal … reflected this independent stand. In February, however, a Central Committee meeting returned to the anti-Mao line, which avers that Mao was not a Marxist-Leninist and the communist victory in China in 1949 was not a socialist but merely a bourgeois democratic revolution.”

Roth went on to note that “The CPNZ now maintains that Mao Zedong Thought is ‘a dangerous form of revisionism that is most harmful to the working class because it replaces the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism with a hodge-podge of idealism and pseudo-Marxism.’ The Chinese Communist Party, it is now revealed, never treated the CPNZ ‘in the manner of a fraternal Party with correct internationalist attitudes and action.’” The CPNZ leadership claimed that Albania was “the only socialist country remaining.”[619]

This endorsement of Hoxha’s attack on Mao engendered considerable conflict within the CPNZ. This was shown in a polemic between that party and the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States, a group adhering to Maoism and to the so-called Gang of Four eliminated from power in China soon after the death of Mao Tse-tung.

The Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) had issued a statement about the CPNZ, denouncing what they called a “coup d’etat within the Party carried out by the President of the Party and others in the high leadership.” In reply to this charge, the Political Committee of the CPNZ wrote the CC of the RCP that what had occurred was that a group of “scabs and divisionists recently left our party.” It claimed that “The position of the Party always has been that the APL is a fraternal Marxist-Leninist party and that Albania is a socialist country. It was the enemy faction of the Party … who wishes to force a full and complete change in the position of the party.”[620]

In 1987, Barry Gustafson summed up the situation of the New Zealand Communist Party by that time. He wrote: “The factional infighting and splits that accompanied each realignment reduced the CPNZ to an aging handful of members who exert no discernible influence even on the extreme left of New Zealand politics. The party still admires Stalin. It raises, by donations, about $6,000 annually and publishes from its Auckland headquarters a small weekly newspaper, People’s Voice. The introduction to the CPNZ’s constitution, adopted by the Twenty-third National Conference in 1984, claims that ‘"the CPNZ has maintained a clear and unequivocal stand in opposition to the … Khrushchevite revisionists … and Chinese revisionism.’ The party sees itself as a revolutionary vanguard that rejects as impossible the peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism by gradual parliamentary means.”[621]

Regrouping of the Pro-Chinese Forces

The New Zealand groups that continued to support the post-Maoist Chinese leadership were badly divided. They apparently consisted in large part of those elements which had been thrown out of the CPNZ during the 1969-1979 period, culminating in the ouster of Wilcox himself in the 1979-1980.