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This story has certainly been doing the rounds in Britain, and, because I was one of the first to speculate that the Workers Institute of Marxism-Leninism-MaoZedong Thought was involved and rashly put this on Facebook, I have been thrust into the position of being an expert on the ways and means of bizarre left-wing organisations, being contacted and subsequently quoted (not always accurately) by several British newspapers and the Malaysian Star < http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2013/11/28/Maoist-group-moved-from-activism-to-paranoiadriven-cult-mentality-say-British-leftists.aspx >, and having an interview on the BBC World Service to boot. Last week, therefore, was a little strange. The origins of this little group are covered in the NYT piece that Lou P forwarded. My experience of them, as was the experience of many left-wingers in South London in the late 1970s, was that they provided the comic relief. I, as a supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Tendency (later Party), would be selling our papers in Brixton market, as would members and supporters of various other groups. The WI people would turn up, their headquarters was a shop in Acre Lane, just down the road (it sported a big picture of Mao on the corner), and they would offer their leaflets to all and sundry. I don't have any of them now (I foolishly gave them to someone years ago), but examples of their work can be found here < http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.hightide/index.htm#wimlmzt >. The group, led by 'Comrade Bala', originally from Singapore, was considered by everyone else to be politically insane; it held that Britain was a 'fascist' state, it confidently expected the British working class would soon be freed by the Chinese People's Liberation Army, and after a while it assured us -- and I remember reading this at the time with astonishment -- that the Chinese Communist Party had established in a clandestine manner the dictatorship of the proletariat in Britain. The group, about two dozen strong, seemed to be composed mainly of foreign students, I only saw a few young men and women from South or Eastern Asian backgrounds, although the news reports show that they did recruit some people of European and Afro-Caribbean backgrounds. Their disruptive behaviour led to their being barred from most people's meetings. They had a habit of making things worse for themselves by courting arrest and then denouncing the local magistrate as an 'agent of the fascist state' when he fined them a fiver for obstruction or some other minor charge. The group was raided by the police. This is a very rare occurrence in Britain, and was rather odd as the WI was a politically irrelevant organisation. I suspect that, having had several members arrested and noting that most of them were from abroad, it was noted that some of them had dubious immigration status (probably overstaying their visa-time), so, as the authorities do when finding undocumented workers, it looks around for others in that position; hence the raid. Several WI members were deported. This, I suspect, led Comrade Bala, who already considered Britain to be a 'fascist' state, to think that we were in a similar situation to Germany in 1933, and they went into clandestinity. He was always a suspicious person, suspecting the motives and integrity of anyone who disagreed with him; the WI's parent group was very hot on 'security' and intolerant of dissent, and the WI took it further in line with his personal traits. By the early 1980s, they were not to be seen, they had just disappeared, and over the intervening three decades one would occasionally be asked or one might ask someone: 'Whatever happened to the Workers Institute?' We now know that they did have a clandestine life, so successful that nobody ever knew of their continued existence. Of the three women who were found 'in slavery', I feel that the two older ones went voluntarily with Comrade Bala into hiding, following the party's line. The youngest woman, now aged 30, would have been born to one of the party members already in hiding, and it seems to me that she was educated at home as she is fully literate. It is entirely possible that, having lived for three decades in hiding, the women concerned came to the conclusion that Comrade Bala's idea of the world did not exactly coincide with reality. Even a shopping trip to Brixton that was closely chaperoned by Comrade Bala's wife would show them that Britain, whatever its faults, was not Hitler's Germany. The youngest woman would have had all the joys of growing up in an austere Maoist household, and probably would have liked to have been playing with other kids, doing what teenagers do, etc, and jibbed against the house rules. My take on the 'slavery' business is that we do not have a case of kidnapping and imprisonment, as in the recent case of the three girls pulled off the street in a US city and kept locked away and sexually abused. Whether Comrade Bala physically prevented his comrades from entering into contact with the outside world other than through carefully-chaperoned shopping trips, I don't know, and nobody will know until a full investigation takes place, and even then one can only speculate on what truly happened, taking into account the personal dynamics within the group, the long-term impact of self-imposed isolation upon one's consciousness, and so on. Comrade Bala seems to have had quite some charisma, and people can be influenced by charismatic people to do more and go further than they would normally do or go, but one has to be amenable in the first place to the ideas of the charismatic figure to act in such ways. Some of the coverage of this affair is consciously aimed at discrediting the left, making out as if we are all as barking mad as the WI, or at least halfway there. In my interviews I have been careful to emphasise the overtly weird behaviour of the group, and indeed, despite some odd traits and at times unacceptable behaviour within other left groups, the WI was way out on a limb as far as its ideas and behaviour went. Another recent attempt to tar the left by association was the scandal of the 'Crystal Methodist', the former head of the Cooperative Bank, Labour Party activist and prominent Methodist vicar Paul Flowers (a name rather too close to mine for comfort!) who was exposed in the right-wing press as an avid consumer of hard drugs, including crystal meth and ketamine (horse tranquilliser), and other behaviour unbecoming in their eyes for a man in his position, with the implication that he typifies the mainstream Labour Party, or at least its close friends. Paul F ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
