Lawrence Parker, London
Dear comrades,
I have been following Brunhilda Olding’s series Towards a History of Partyism [part one, part two] with interest.
However, without wanting to be a smart-arse, I must correct one error: the British Open Polemic group did not go on to found the CPGB-ML. Open Polemic (OP) was a pro-Soviet group that came out of splits from the New Communist Party and Proletarian groups.
The CPGB-ML came out of the Maoist movement that founder Harpal Brar had been around since the late 1960s. Although the CPGB-ML was formally founded in 2004, the group had been around in different guises for decades.
Pro-Soviet and pro-China factions were on different trajectories in and around the old CPGB from the 1960s and often were mutually hostile, given the ideological brickbats that the two regimes hurled at one another.
It is true that OP, which functioned as a kind of ecumenical movement for fringe British communist sects in the 1990s, hosted conferences in which Brar-influenced groups such as the Stalin Society participated. Brar’s groups also contributed to the OP magazine.
However, OP, to the best of my knowledge, played no role in the founding of the CPGB-ML in 2004 and had pretty much disintegrated by the early 2000s.
Apologies for the length of this; I really must get out more…
PARTISAN! 