The General’s Son and the Splitting Factory: Why British Maoists Loved Fencing More Than Revolution

 

The General’s Son and the Splitting Factory: Why British Maoists Loved Fencing More Than Revolution

There is a touching, profoundly naive belief that revolutionary fringe groups are held together by a shared, iron-willed dedication to overturning the global state. We love to imagine passionate radicals locking arms against the capitalist machine, too focused on the grand struggle to sweat the small stuff. Then, reality pulls back the subterranean London meeting-room curtain to reveal a much funnier and darker truth: given three Marxists and a printing press, you don't get a workers' uprising; you get three competing splinter factions and a fierce debate over who is pure enough to empty the trash.

Consider the magnificent absurdity of the British Maoist movement in the 1960s and 1970s. When the Sino-Soviet split sent shockwaves through the West, the cracks started at the top. Michael McCreery—quite literally the son of a distinguished British Army general—decided that regular pro-Soviet communists were far too soft, marched out of the party, and founded the Committee to Defeat Revisionism, for Communist Unity. Armed with pamphlets shipped straight from Beijing and Tirana, McCreery’s crew spent less time fighting British capitalism and more time drafting furious essays about why everyone else was a sellout. By 1968, heavyweights like union boss Reg Birch joined the fray, getting booted from the mainstream party, flying to Beijing to shake hands with Mao, and setting up his own franchise, the CPB (ML).

Yet, the moment British Maoism actually acquired a pulse, its internal software immediately glitched on ideological purity. Because Maoism prized absolute doctrinal correctness, any minor disagreement over international line-to-take or trade union strategy was treated as treason. By the mid-1970s, this microscopic fracturing had spawned roughly twenty competing micro-factions, each convinced they were the sole vanguard of the proletariat, while the actual British working class walked past their pamphlet tables without glancing twice.

Human history is fundamentally a museum of ideological sects that treat schisms like a competitive sport. Deep in our evolutionary wiring, we possess an aggressive tribal urge to police the boundaries of our own ingroup; when a group’s mission becomes too abstract, its members start hunting for heresy the way dogs hunt for fleas. We are masters of self-deception, wrapping our petty craving for microscopic authority in the grand, sweeping language of historical necessity.

The supreme irony of radical sectarianism is that you can travel halfway across the world to meet Mao Zedong, but you still won't be able to agree with the guy sharing your basement on how to split the electricity bill. Civilization isn't preserved by splinter groups with mimeograph machines; it survives because humanity manages to keep turning the wheels of commerce while the true believers argue themselves into irrelevance. The next time you watch a political movement fracture over a comma, remember the British Maoists of the seventies: in the grand theater of human nature, a good factional divorce is always easier than actually changing the world.

Politics, History, Communism, Britain, China, Ideology, Evolution, Cynicism, Government, Philosophy, Society, Sectarianism

將軍之子的分裂工廠：為什麼英國毛派份子寧可內鬥，也不肯去革命？

人類社會總有一種無可救藥的天真，以為激進的邊緣政治團體是靠着鐵打的革命意志黏在一起的。我們總愛幻想滿腔熱血的同志們手挽手對抗資本主義巨獸，專注於偉大的階級鬥爭而無暇他顧。直到現實冷酷地拉開倫敦地下室的布幕，露出那讓人笑不出來的底牌：只要塞給三個馬克思主義者和一台油印機，你絕對等不到甚麼工人起義，只會迎來三個互相指責對方是「修正主義叛徒」的微型教派。

看看上世紀六七十年代英國毛派那場荒誕絕倫的分裂大戲就知道了。當年中蘇決裂的消息傳到英國，第一個跳出來鬧分裂的竟然根正苗紅——米高·麥克里瑞（Michael McCreery），堂堂英國陸軍高級將領的兒子，嫌主流共產黨太溫和，帶頭退黨搞出了一個長得像咒語一樣長的組織「擊敗修正主義、爭取共產主義團結委員會」。這幫人靠着北京和地拉那寄來的紅寶書，天天忙着寫文章罵自己人。到了1968年，工會大老列格·比奇（Reg Birch）也因親中而被老共產黨開除，乾脆自己飛去北京面見毛澤東，成立了根正苗紅的英國共產黨（馬列）。

然而，這群英國毛派一旦有了起色，內置的「分裂基因」就立刻全面發作。由於毛主義極度講究意識形態的純潔性，任何一條路線微不足道的爭論都能被上升到路線鬥爭的高度。到了七十年代中期，這個本就稀疏的圈子硬生生裂成了大約二十個互相看不順眼的微型派系。每一派都堅信自己才是世界革命的唯一正統，而英國廣大的勞工階級則連看都懶得看他們一眼。

人類歷史本質上就是一部「激進教派把分裂當成日常娛樂」的黑色喜劇。我們的基因裏深深刻着強烈的族群純潔性審查本能；當一個組織的目標變得無比崇高卻又遙不可及時，成員們內置的防衛程式就會自動啟動，開始在自己人身上挑刺抓鬼。我們這群擅長自我安慰的動物，總愛把爭奪小圈子領導權的權力慾望，包裝成對歷史真理的無畏捍衛。

我們這個時代最深刻的諷刺，莫過於你可以千里迢迢飛去北京跟最高領袖握手，卻依然搞不定跟你合租地下室的同志今天晚上誰來倒垃圾。文明往往不是毀於缺乏偉大的理想，而是死這種「連自己人都容不下」的宗教式分裂症。下次當你又看到某個政治團體因為意見不合而原地分裂成好幾塊時不妨笑一笑：在大歷史的大戲裏，關起門來搞內鬥永遠比真正去改變世界要來得輕而易舉。

政治, 歷史, 共產主義, 英國, 中國, 意識形態, 進化, 諷刺, 政府, 哲學, 社會, 宗派主義