London slavery couple were Maoists!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers'_Institute_of_Marxism%E2%80%93Leninism%E2%80%93Mao_Zedong_Thought

The Workers' Institute of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought (known as the Workers' Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought until 1979) was a small Maoist political party based in Brixton, London. It was formed by an ex-member of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) in 1974 and circulated regular political statements in its publication, the South London Workers' Bulletin, aiming to build a "red base" in Brixton, and to encourage the People's Liberation Army to liberate the area. It claimed to be affiliated to the Communist Party of China.

The party came to broader attention when the diarist in The Times began reprinting some of the group's material, as amusing asides.[1] This exposure may have led to the party being an influence on the fictional Tooting Popular Front in the television programme Citizen Smith.

The group did not achieve continued success, and moved underground following a police raid of their headquarters in around 1980. In 1982 Steve Rayner wrote a study of the organisation, and critiqued its presentism. In 2013, leaders of the group were arrested for allegedly being involved in slavery and domestic abuse.[2]

Allegedly.

this one: http://marxists.org/history/erol/uk.hightide/index.htm#wimlmzt ... probably their leading figures

The Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought (substituting Mao Zedong Thought after 1979) was created in 1974 when Aravindan Balakrishnan (popularly known as Bala), formerly a member of the National Executive Committee and Central Committee of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), led a break-away from that organization. The new organisation was characterized by the ultra-left posturing and Mao worship formerly evident in the CPE (ML) or, as Bala described them: the “Communist” Party of Elizabeth (Most-Loyal).

Drawing upon the Chinese experience of base areas, the Institute argued in favour of revolutionaries being based in working class communities, “the weakest link for the fascist state system” where political mobilisation involved whole families free from the “fascist rules and regulations and job security” involved in workplaces or educational institutions. Here revolutionary cadre could integrate and learn from the “sterling qualities of the labouring people while raising the intellectual level of the workers. Taking a working class job in the community is vital for this.”

Starting from this premise, the Workers’ Institute opened the Mao Tsetung Memorial Centre at 140 Acre Lane, Brixton, a poor and oppressed working-class area in South London in October 1976, running evening lectures, study groups and film showings. The Centre operated as a commune with 13 members living on the premises, half in paid work, six doing full-time revolutionary work, with a strong emphasis on women taking a leading role (apart from leading the Party Committee headed by Bala).

A distinctive feature of the Institute’s “Cultural Revolution” politics was that it regarded itself as a component of the Communist Party of China, arguing that:

“The Communist Party of China and Chairman Mao are on the verge of launching the final offensive, this year [1975] to dismantle the old world of colonialism, imperialism and hegemonism and build the new world of socialism. The establishment of the international dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary for this, led by the Communist Party of China and Chairman Mao and with the People’s Liberation Army of China as its main pillar. Only thus can mankind march forward to communism.”

An Institute assertion that caused much amusement and embarrassment among other leftists was that the INTERNATIONAL DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT had indeed been established covertly in 1977 “by Our Party”, the Communist Party of China.

The Worker’s Institute came to broader public attention when the diarist in The London Times began reprinting some of the group’s material, as amusing asides. “Though the hired scribes of the bourgeoisie vainly try to “level” us by describing the Workers’ Institute as the ’most lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe in Britain’, their masters are well aware of the danger of the rapid growth and development of the Workers’ Institute in the past four years to their class interests.”

The political activities at the Mao Memorial Centre was subject to police monitoring and a number of members were subject to deportation orders. Their refusal to recognise the authority of the courts led to further harassment and imprisonment. The closure of the Mao Memorial Centre followed a police raid on March 22, 1978. For a short period thereafter, meetings were held at the University College London Union, but by 1981 little was heard from the Workers’ Institute. If asked, the reply was that they had gone underground.

shows some similarities to this cult: http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v04n3-4/Cadre_or_Cult_1.html the National Labor Federation (NATLFED)/Communist Party USA (Provisional) led by "Gino Perente"

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/london-slaves-case-arrested-couple-ran-communist-sect-in-the-1970s-8962452.html

The couple arrested in the south London "slave" case were leaders of a close-knit Maoist group in the 1970s, police have revealed.

Aravindan "Comrade Bala" Balakrishnan, 73, and his wife Chanda, 67, ran a well-known collective called the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought.

According to the Evening Standard, they have been linked to 13 properties across the capital.

Article here on the sort of brainwashing techniques used in another Maoist group (but which some Trotsky groups are not immune from either).

Steven.

Thanks guys. Entdinglichung I would have said that they sounded delightfully barmy, but of course this domestic slavery case means that there is a much darker side to it all…

I've a vague recollection of their not being regarded very fondly by groups whose meetings they intervened at. Their texts did use to provide a good deal of (unconscious) entertainment - the ones posted at marxists.org are good examples. I used to have a copy of an open letter to the Chinese leadership circulated by one side (i.e one person) of a split inside the group which was truly beyond satire.

Looking at their writings now they seem to exhibit all the indicators of a classic millenarian sect based on an apparently literal belief in the immanence of global revolution.

"The socialist new thing in the imperialist heartlands, the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, will indeed flourish with the victory of world people’s revolution and the establishment of the INTERNATIONAL DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT! "

('On Building a Revolutionary Stable Base Area' 1977)

It's a little sobering to contemplate in the same text :

7. The comrades leading our squads are all women comrades. This has great strategic significance because the NEW WORLD can only get built with NEW WOMEN and new women have to be trained in actual struggles within and outside the organisation where male comrades must consciously defeat manifestations of male supremacy and women comrades must consciously defeat inferiority complex or the “queen bee” complex. Adhere to Chairman Mao’s teaching: “Whatever men comrades can accomplish women comrades can too.”

and relate it to this household which appears to be the degenerated vestige of the original commune.

some good points in Tariq Ali's Graun article

What always struck me even then as slightly odd was that, regardless of the political complexion of a sect, the behavioural patterns of its leaders were not so different. Even those most critical of Stalinist style and methods tended to reproduce the model of a one-party state within their own ranks, with dissent limited to certain periods and an embryonic bureaucracy in charge of a tiny organisation. It was in western Europe, not under Latin American or Asian military dictatorships, that clandestinity and iron discipline were felt to be necessary.

Don't think so much of Tariq Ali's piece myself.

Maoism was always weak in Britain, confined largely to students from Asia, Africa and Latin America.

That ethnic profile scarcely applied to the largest Maoist group, the Birchite CPB (M-L), nor to Michael McCreery's Committee to Defeat Revisionism for Communist Unity. My recollections of the CPE (M-L), which the Workers Institute were expelled from, was of seeing them demonstrating at cultural events (this was the group Cornelius Cardew and friends belonged to). My memory is of them being overwhelmingly white and middle class, but it's entirely conceivable that what I saw wasn't representative.

Even those most critical of Stalinist style and methods tended to reproduce the model of a one-party state within their own ranks, with dissent limited to certain periods and an embryonic bureaucracy in charge of a tiny organisation.

Don't think this begins to get to grips with things. Small as UK Maoist and Hoxhaist groups were, they still replicated the divisions seen in Maoism elsewhere, between 'Old Left' varieties (based on anti-Kruschevism and ultra-Stalinism) and 'New Left' varieties. The 'Old Left' Maoists tended to have internal regimes based on that of the CPGB. Some of the 'new left' varieties - the Workers Institute being a prime example to judge from the account in Steve Rayners phd thesis - took their example from the image of the Cultural Revolution, and operated internal regimes that exemplified radical forms of the "tyranny of structurelessness", within which unity was maintained by political skill and the constant reshaping of an obligatory consensus, rather than through an exercise of formal authority within clearly defined bureaucratic structures.

I think A. Belden Field's account of Maoism in France is very useful about these divisions although they expressed themselves differently and on a much smaller scale in the UK.

3 women held hostage for 30 years. Why look for explanations in their ideology? Looks tasteless, prurient and trainspottery all at once.
It's peoples' lives FFS.

hellfrozeover wrote

3 women held hostage for 30 years. Why look for explanations in their ideology? Looks tasteless, prurient and trainspottery all at once.
It's peoples' lives FFS.

This. As appalling and shocking as it is, and whatever fucked up strain of ideology it came out of, the media are all over them, naming them, finding pictures, old neighbours, speculating about this, that and the other. Until they decide to talk for themselves, and they might not ever want to, it seems to me to be that the kind thing to do would be to leave them alone. I know that no-one is actually doing that here but I can imagine at the very least going from being held captive for 30 years to being the subject of massive amounts of what doesn't add up to much more than gossip must be utterly overwhelming, to say the least.

3 women held hostage for 30 years. Why look for explanations in their ideology? Looks tasteless, prurient and trainspottery all at once.
It's peoples' lives FFS.

I presume this is addressed to me as much as anyone else here :

As far as I was concerned this thread was about the political group not the specifics of these women's circumstances which I was a little reluctant to speculate about. I'm sorry if that leads you to conclude I was exhibiting insufficient empathy.

I entirely agree discussion of this matter should respect the women. Quite a good starting point would be to stop describing them as 'hostages' or 'captives' or 'slaves' but as what they are - victims of serious long-term domestic violence and abuse.

Why do I say that ? Because the backlash against the women has already begun - take this nauseating shit from the repellent contrarian scum at Spiked who question the media coverage in order to conclude :

Rather, what we seem to be dealing with is, quite simply, a very, very eccentric household, in which various people came together, did and believed very strange things, developed an obsession with Mao and conspiracy theories about the British ‘fascist state’, and then ended up regretting it all - well, three of women seem to have regretted it. And so they left. Voluntarily. Without a struggle.

In other words they were 'asking for it' and the 'handcuffs' weren't invisible they were non-existent.

The media circus seems to have been fuelled by the fact that after they initiated an escape from their situation by approaching a charity which deals with forced marriages the case was taken up by the Met's Human Trafficking unit. The other side of the exploitative coverage that resulted is that they at least seem to have approached a charity with the resources to help them. Although the government has expanded the definition of domestic violence to specifically include 'coercive control', actual services for victims of domestic abuse have been savaged by the same governments cuts.

I entirely agree that the ideology of the group doesn't explain how this household became what it was. But I do think if there's going to be discussion about political groups and their ideologies and practises it should attempt to be accurate. (And that applies as much to 'ours' as to 'theirs').

As for interest being 'prurient' well I can only speak for myself. I am (sadly) old enough to remember the 70s and I spent a long time working in social housing - specifically a small community with a higher than average proportion of politicos and ex-politicos of various kinds. Back in the day I saw some pretty awful anarchist and libertarian communal situations involving 'actual people ffs' being 'actually' damaged. I've experienced a fair number of situations where I had to get involved. Some of these situations were pretty disturbing and in a couple of cases I'm still troubled by the way I responded to them. None of these situations were 'explained' by the political ideology or practise of those involved, but it did underlie the formation of the households and communities in which they took place. I'm afraid there is nothing about anarchist or communist politics which automatically insulates those involved from 'comrade on comrade' abuse, manipulation or exploitation.

I don't think the situation of these women should be used as a springboard for 'lessons' to be drawn until and unless we know much more than media speculation. But I do think its reasonable to take interest from the point of view that these could have been, not abstract victims, but comrades.

agree with Lurdan, not the situation to score points, sadly every major political current on the left has its skeleton in the cupboard

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10476181/Slavery-case-Not-all-political-extremists-are-mad-and-I-should-know.html

I actually preferred this article to Tariq Ali's which felt a little lazy

Much as it's in the Torygraph and in spite of the author being a former flat-top-sporting RCPer :upnorth: that Brendan O'Neill article makes some very good points.

Some are using the south London story to air their prejudices about ideological belief, political passion and devotion to a cause. Instead of asking: “How could a seemingly odd, one-off couple manage to mistreat three women like this?” they’re saying: “This is where ideological commitment gets you.” The alleged events are being interpreted through today’s broader suspicion of strong belief and political faith.
.
At a time when everyone is encouraged to obsess over their personal identity, to nurture their self-esteem, to devote more energy to the narcissistic pursuit of therapeutic self-improvement than to any big political project, the whole of the Seventies and Eighties look increasingly odd to us. We can’t believe people lived and breathed politics. We can’t believe people sacrificed some of life’s pleasures in the pursuit of political ideals. We can’t believe those things happened because they seem so alien in this era of navel-gazing selfie-taking, in which writing a tweet is considered political activity and all big systems of meaning – whether Left-wing, Right-wing or religious – are seen as foolish, dangerous and corrupting.

yep, good stuff there, personally sad to have grown up in the 'end of ideology' period, an environment so suspicious of politics. still ingrained to some degree with the implicit message given in school that all social ills have been addressed, as if. takes effort to shake it off even now

http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/989/maoist-slaves-combating-the-fascist-state-in-brixton

The organisation became increasingly eccentric. Balakrishnan now assumed the role of Britain’s Mao. The central aim was to establish a “red base” in Brixton, chosen because it was the “worst place in the world”4 - therefore sheer desperation would force the oppressed workers into spontaneous revolutionary action. Indeed, declared Balakrishnan, “we have undertaken the unprecedented task of building the first stable base area in the imperialist heartlands” and this “new development” has “driven the British bourgeoisie up the wall”. Indeed, it has “taken the British fascist state by storm”.

Slipping further into lunacy, Balakrishnan prophesied that China’s People’s Liberation Army would launch a “revolutionary invasion” of Britain by 1980 - with the bridgehead being the liberated zone of Brixton, its jubilant population throwing garlands of flowers at the PLA tanks and soldiers. A ‘perspectives’ document in 1977 argued that the British population was moving in a clear “revolutionary direction”, reassuring us that the institute “successfully conducts vigorous programmes to uphold Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line amidst the mass upsurge in Britain”.5

Another report issued in the same year envisaged “political mobilisation” involving whole families free from “fascist rules and regulations”, in liberated areas. Perhaps the final descent into Maoist madness was an assertion that the international dictatorship of the proletariat had actually been “established covertly” in 1977 by “our party” - ie, the Communist Party of China. We are living under communism, but just do not know it.

Unsurprisingly, the institute came to the attention of various wags in the bourgeois press. The Times diarist in April 1977 reprinted some of the group’s material as amusing vignettes and it has even been suggested that this sudden exposure was the inspiration behind the BBC’s Citizen Smith and his Tooting Popular Front. But rival comrades on the far left had their fun as well.

The Mao Zedong Memorial Centre was often subject to police monitoring and a number of members were issued with deportation orders. Their persistent refusal to recognise the authority of the courts led to further harassment and imprisonment. Eventually the police raided the centre in March 1978, under circumstances that are still slightly mysterious, and it was closed down shortly afterwards. By 1981 the group had virtually disappeared from the political map. However, in ITV archival documentary video footage from 1997, a woman identified as Josephine Herivel is seen along with other members of the group angrily telling journalists to go away, as they were part of the “fascist state”.

In some respects, communists do not want to be too harsh on ‘comrade Bala’ - his original intentions were probably quite sincere, albeit in a totally mixed-up and hopeless way. But mad politics drives you crazy, as his sad story shows. Instead of ushering in utopia, his demented attempts to construct socialism in one borough, then one district - and finally one building - brought about the opposite result: a hellish reproduction of the same old crap.

http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2014/12/11/balakrishnan-workers-institute-of-marxism-leninism-mao-thought-charged/

Police have charged a man with false imprisonment, rape and child cruelty in a suspected slavery case in London.

Aravindan Balakrishnan, 74, has been charged with one count of cruelty to a person under 16, four counts of rape and 19 counts of indecent assault.

The suspected offences relate to three women.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/nov/12/cult-leader-sexually-assaulted-and-brainwashed-followers-court-told

A communist revolutionary who led a commune in Brixton in the 1970s imprisoned his daughter, and beat and raped two female acolytes in collectives across south London without being detected over a period of three decades, a court has heard.

The alleged victims of Aravindan Balakrishnan, a communist who set up the Workers Institute of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought in Brixton in the 1970s, included his daughter who was born in the commune and only escaped aged 30, the jury at Southwark crown court was told by the prosecution.

He is facing trial for false imprisonment and child cruelty against his daughter as well as the rapes, sexual assaults and assaults of two other female commune members, none of whom can be named.

Balakrishan, now 75, sat impassive in the dock as he heard that he faces in total four charges of rape, six charges of indecent assault, three charges of actual bodily harm, cruelty to a person under 16 and false imprisonment.

He was arrested in November 2013 when his daughter finally left the commune with the help of the Freedom Charity, alongside two other longstanding commune members, Aishah Wahab and Josie Herivel.

After a period in which he was “a charismatic man and a vivid and energetic speaker”, drawing around 100 followers with his plan to overthrow the fascist state as he saw Britain in the 1970s, his influence waned and the collective was reduced to him and just six women, the court heard.

He then mounted a campaign of “debilitating mental and physical violence”, beating, raping and sexually assaulting some of the women, all the while with his wife, Chandra, living with them too. His wife and the others “had all been so dominated and brainwashed to the extent that they believed that he was all powerful and all-seeing”, the court heard.

Rosina Cottage QC, prosecuting, told the jury: “This case concerns the
brutal and calculated manipulation by one man to subjugate women under
his control.”

Cottage said his daughter was born to another collective member, Sian Davies.

“[The daughter] had no independent life,” the prosecutor told the jury. “She was bullied, beaten and separated from the world. She never went to school, played with a friend, saw a doctor or a dentist. She barely left the house. She was hidden from the outside world, and it kept from her, except as a tool with which to terrify her into subjugation.”

The court heard that Balakrishnan’s alleged rape and sexual assault victims “were cowed into submission” and “stayed in the collective too frightened to leave and hating to stay”.

Cottage said: “They were forced into sexual acts over which they had no choice and were deliberately degrading and humiliating. He seemed to exult in his power over them.”

“In order to bend them to his will he used mental and physical dominance and violence, sexual degradation, and in relation to one, his daughter, he controlled every sphere of her life to the extent that she was unable either emotionally or physically to leave his influence until she was 30 years old and ill with diabetes,” she said.

The trial continues.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/nov/13/commune-leaders-daughter-rejected-life-of-abuse-court-told

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jan/29/maoist-cult-leader-jailed-for-23-years-as-slave-daughter-goes-public

http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1092/devotion-to-dogma/

The court heard how the leader of the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought - such as it was - operated a “dehumanising and degrading” domestic regime, terrifying his small coterie of female followers (or subjects) into thinking he could read their minds and had “god-like” powers. These powers involved mastery of ‘Jackie’ (Jehovah, Allah, Christ, Krishna, Immortal Easwaran), and an “electronic satellite warfare machine” built by the Communist Party of China/People’s Liberation Army, which could strike them dead if they ever stepped out of line. Balakrishnan also claimed that it was a challenge to his leadership that had resulted in the 1986 space shuttle disaster.

All this is perhaps not quite so surprising when we discover that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein were - in the words of Morgan-Davies - his “his gods and his heroes” that he wished to “emulate”: therefore you “couldn’t criticise them”. Indeed, according to her, her father was using the sect or collective as a “pilot unit” to learn how to control people before taking over the world - presumably appointing himself as global revolutionary dictator. But so great were his delusions, revealed Morgan-Davies, that at times he worried that Mao and the others might act as a “rival to him” - when instead they should be “secondary to him”, as he wanted to be “bigger than all of them”. We are also informed that he wished three million had died in the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Balakrishnan raped two women on the basis that he was “purifying them” of the “bourgeois culture” in the outside world, the jurors were told. He began sexually abusing his first victim when his wife, Chandra, was in a diabetic-induced coma. She met him at a demonstration when she was 23, saying he “had the air of an important man with authority” and quickly became entranced by him. The other victim was a Malaysian nurse who initially found Workers’ Institute meetings “welcoming and friendly”, but was repeatedly sexually assaulted over a 10-year period.

During the trial, Morgan-Davies detailed how she was regularly beaten and prohibited from going to school or making friends - she never played with another child and if visitors came to the house she was hidden away. Nor did she ever see a doctor or dentist. Balakrishnan told her that the front door had to be locked at all times to keep out the “fascist agents” planted amongst the neighbours and people living around them. Morgan-Davies was so lonely that she would talk to the taps in the bathroom, and tried to make friends with the rats and mice that scuttled into the kitchen. She felt like a “caged bird with clipped wings” and is still “terrified” of “saying the wrong thing”, having spent her entire life feeling “small, stupid and inadequate”.

Originally she was told she was a “waif”, but later found out that she was actually the daughter of a Balakrishnanite, Sian Davies (aka ‘comrade Sian’). The latter died under unknown circumstances in 1997, falling from a window on Christmas Eve. Morgan-Davies recalls hearing screaming and shouting on that night, seeing Sian Davies lying in a pool of blood below the bathroom window and pleading with Balakrishnan to kill her (an open verdict was declared). Sian Davies was not allowed to hug or breastfeed her daughter because she was “collective property”.

Morgan-Davies said she was forced to record everything she did in minute detail in her diaries, including exactly what she ate and her visits to the lavatory. She noted a daily percentage of how much her “lord and master” loved or hated her - ie, “Comrade Bala loves me 40%” or “hates me 60%” - and “Comrade Bala says I am 89% super-idiot”. She became “number one criminal” for making up words, which only Balakrishnan had the right to do, because he was the “natural centre of all things”. Another diary entry recounts how “Comrade Bala” took her into the garden and told members of his collective to “beat her” if she cuddled them.