Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973
Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
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The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited
These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]
Reply to the Guardian
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED
2. SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY
The story of the origins of the Stalinist doctrine of "socialism in one country" is one of the usurpation of power by a bureaucratic stratum at the head of the first workers state in history. This privileged caste consolidated itself in the Soviet state apparatus which was formed as a necessary means of defending the conquests of the October Revolution in a backward peasant country, ravaged by civil war and isolated by the imperialist blockade and the triple defeat of proletarian revolution in Germany (1919, 1921 and 1923). These unfavorable conditions required a policy of "compromise" and consolidation rather than a blind "extension" of the revolution. Attraction of bourgeois experts to aid in the rebuilding of industry, guarantees to the middle peasants in order to end the famine, a policy of united front with the reformist leaders of the labor movement in the capitalist countries in order to find a road to the masses--these were the necessary tasks of the hour. To reject "compromises" on principle, as did the "Left Communists," to reject the use of bourgeois experts on principle and call for the replacement of state management of industry with trade union control, as did the "Workers' Opposition," could only lead to defeat. All the same, every compromise brings with it dangers.
Lenin was aware of these dangers from the beginning and set up the "Workers and Peasants Inspection" (Rabkrin) as early as 1919 in order to curb bureaucratic abuses. The Rabkrin, however, was headed by Stalin and became in effect his private police force.
By the time of the 11th Party Congress in 1922, Lenin was forced to observe:
"If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap."
And in his very last writing, "Better Fewer, But Better" (1923) he called for an all-out war on bureaucratism, a drastic curtailment of the Rabkrin and its amalgamation with the Control Commission, noting that the former "does not at present enjoy the slightest authority." In a postscript to his "Testament" Lenin called for Stalin's removal as General Secretary of the Party.
The Triumvirate vs. Trotsky
But simple administrative actions could not abolish a phenomenon thrown up by history itself, rather than by individual or organizational failings. The country was tired from five years of starvation and civil war, tired of waiting for a European revolution which did not come. This mood and the conservative interests of the vast bureaucracy, which overwhelmingly dominated the Communist Party itself, were reflected soon after Lenin's death by the consolidation of power in the hands of the Triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, and the practical exclusion of Trotsky from the central leadership.
A sharp crisis in the party broke out the winter of 1923-24 over the combined issues of party democracy and industrialization. The "New Economic Policy" of cooperation with the peasantry had led to the emergence of a strong kulak (rich peasant) element in the countryside which was increasingly conscious of its bourgeois interests in opposition to the Soviet government, while industry continued to grow at a "snail's pace"; at the same time Stalin was running the party as a private fiefdom through the system of appointed secretaries. Trotsky demanded a sharp turn toward centralized planning and industrialization, an offensive against the kulaks and the return of democratic norms within the Party. The Triumvirate opposed this. (A year later Bukharin, who supported Stalin's policies, made his famous speech about "building socialism at a snail's pace" and calling on peasants to "enrich yourselves"!). What is more, they moved to make sure their line would prevail at all costs: during February-March 1924 no less than 240,000 raw recruits were brought into the party in the "Lenin levy," and as soon as they were enrolled they were lined up as voting cattle to back the line of the General Secretary (Stalin). By this and various other bureaucratic maneuvers he was able to eliminate almost all oppositionists from the May 1924 Party conference, which was turned into an anti-Trotsky rally.
The second engagement in the battle was begun with the "literary controversy" over Trotsky's" Lessons of October," an introduction to his articles of 1917 in which he exposed the role played by the current party leaders during the revolution. The fact that Zinoviev and Kamenev had opposed the insurrection, resigned from their government and party posts and demanded a coalition with the Mensheviks, or that Stalin had called for support to the Provisional Government of Prince Lvov in March 1917, was not widely known among the younger generation and was extremely embarrassing to the ruling group.
They counterattacked by denying that there was ever a right wing of Bolshevism, claiming that Trotsky played an insignificant role during the insurrection and launching a campaign accusing Trotsky, the organizer of the October Revolution and the Red Army, of never having broken with his pre-1917 views of conciliation with the Mensheviks. They also charged him with being hostile to the peasantry and continuing to hold to his theory of "permanent revolution" against Lenin's formula of the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the peasantry and the proletariat." The latter charge was correct, but they had to ignore the fact that Lenin came over on all the essential aspects of permanent revolution in his "April Theses" of 1917, that he had explicitly abandoned his earlier formulation and had waged a furious struggle particularly against Kamenev on this point. For the rest, they could rely only on lies and slander.
It is true that Trotsky wrongly called for conciliation with the Mensheviks until 1914, but he was convinced by the betrayals of the reformist Social Democrats in World War I that a split was inevitable and necessary. Lenin himself remarked that, "Trotsky long ago said that unification is impossible. Trotsky understood this and from that time on there has been no better Bolshevik" ("Minutes of the Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik Party," 1 [14] November 1917). Stalin, on the other hand, called for unification with the Mensheviks as late as April 1917 when the issue was sharply posed and Tseretelli (the Menshevik leader) was soon to enter the bourgeois Provisional Government!
"Order of the day: Tseretelli's proposal for unification.
"Stalin: We ought to go. It is necessary to define our proposals as to the terms of unification. Unification is possible along the lines of Zimmerwald-Kienthal [antiwar conferences in World War I]."
--"Draft Protocol of the March 1917 All-Russian Conference of Party Workers"
As for Kamenev-Zinoviev, the other two members of the Triumvirate and supposed defenders of Leninism against Trotsky, they called for conciliation during and after the insurrection itself (call for a joint government with the Mensheviks) and opposed the uprising! No right wing in the Bolshevik party? Lenin called them "strikebreakers of the revolution" and called for their expulsion if they did not return to their posts.
"Forgetting" such important episodes of the revolutionary struggle also requires the deliberate rewriting of history. Thus when the minutes of the Petrograd Committee of the Bolsheviks in 1917 were being published the editors simply cut out the meeting in which Lenin commented that "there has been no better Bolshevik" than Trotsky! However, one of the printers managed to pass a galley proof to Trotsky and it has been preserved for posterity. Concerning Trotsky's role in the October Revolution things were a bit stickier since John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World showed in great detail Trotsky's role as the organizer of the insurrection. So when the campaign against "Trotskyism" began Stalin summarily announced that Reed had distorted the facts, a discovery which had escaped everyone's eyes for the previous seven years. Lenin's "Testament" was also suppressed (though Khrushchev later admitted its validity).
Stalin Discovers "Socialism in One Country"
Even a steady diet of lies, distortions and slander could go only so far in securing the power of the new ruling clique. Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev were particularly vulnerable because in the theoretical arsenal of post-1917 Bolshevism, in the resolutions of the Communist International or the program of the Russian Communist Party, there was nothing which would "justify" the Triumvirate's increasingly conservative appetites. They needed a new theory which would be a clear alternative to Trotsky's permanent revolution. This was found in the doctrine of "socialism in one country."
In the current Guardian series on Trotskyism Carl Davidson defends this Stalinist theory with the claim that it is good Bolshevik coin:
"On the other hand, Trotsky stood in opposition to the Bolsheviks in claiming that the proletariat was bound to come into 'hostile collision' with the broad masses of peasants during socialist construction and that 'without direct state support from the European proletariat, the working class of Russia cannot maintain itself in power and transform its temporary rule into a durable socialist dictatorship."
--Guardian, 11 April 1973
This is a myth manufactured out of whole cloth. Until December of 1924 nobody in the Bolshevik party, not even Stalin, claimed that it was possible to build socialism in one country, without direct state aid from a victorious proletarian revolution in Europe.
"Socialism in one country" is a complete perversion of Marxism in the service of a parasitic bureaucratic clique which desires above all to escape from the logic of history and to build a comfortable nest isolated from the class struggle. In Engels' first draft of the Communist Manifesto this "theory" is clearly rejected. He wrote:
"Question Nineteen: Can such a revolution take place in one country alone?
"Answer: No. Large-scale industry, by creating a world market, has so linked up the peoples of the earth, and especially the civilized peoples of the earth, that each of them is dependent on what happens in other lands....The communist revolution will, therefore, not be a national revolution alone; it will take place in all civilized countries, or at least in Great Britain, the United States, France and Germany, atone and the same time."
--F. Engels, "The Principles of Communism," 1847
In a certain sense, this statement was too categorical; history has shown that it is possible for the revolution to be victorious, for the dictatorship of the proletariat to be established, in a single state. But the fundamental proposition continues to hold, that socialism cannot be constructed in a single nation.
Lenin recognized this and, as early as 1906, wrote:
"The Russian revolution has enough forces of its own to conquer. But it has not enough forces to retain the fruits of its victory...for in a country with an enormous development of small-scale industry, the small-scale commodity producers, among them the peasants, will inevitably turn against the proletarian when he goes from freedom toward socialism....In order to prevent a restoration, the Russian revolution has need, not of a Russian reserve; it has need of help from the outside. Is there such a reserve in the world? There is: the socialist proletariat in the West."
It was not until early 1917 that Lenin wrote of the possibility of the realization of the dictatorship of the proletariat first in backward Russia, but in no way did this imply an isolated penurious "socialist" society. For the Bolsheviks the dictatorship of the proletariat meant a bridge to revolution in the West. The conditions for the socialist revolution (creating the dictatorship of the proletariat) and for socialism (the abolition of classes) are not identical. That the dictatorship of the proletariat came first to Russia by no means implied that it would be the first to arrive at socialism.
This distinction was so clear that Stalin himself, in early 1924, wrote:
"But the overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of the power of the proletariat in one country does not yet mean that the complete victory of socialism has been ensured. The principal task of socialism--the organization of socialist production--has still to be fulfilled. Can this task be fulfilled, can the final victory of socialism be achieved in one country, without the joint efforts of the proletarians in several advanced countries? No, it cannot. To overthrow the bourgeoisie the efforts of one country are sufficient; this is proved by the history of our revolution. For the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of a peasant country like Russia, are insufficient; for that the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are required."
--J. V. Stalin, "Foundations of Leninism," May 1924
In subsequent editions this was replaced by the opposite thesis, namely that "we have all that is necessary for building a complete socialist society".,
It could not be more clear that the Bolshevik perspective was one of proletarian internationalism, completely and unalterably opposed to the doctrine of socialism in one country. The Stalinists search through volumes of Lenin's writings to pick out isolated quotations which will "prove" that Lenin, too, believed in the doctrine of socialism in one country. But if that were true, even ignoring the many times Lenin denied this, why did Stalin write in May 1924 the exact opposite? If "socialism in one country" were orthodox Bolshevism why didn't anyone discover this until late 1924?
The Stalinists' favorite "proof," quoted by Davidson, is from Lenin's 1915 article "On the Slogan for a United States of Europe":
"As a separate slogan, however, the slogan of a United States of the World would hardly be a correct one, first, because it merges with socialism; second, because it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others.
"Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organizing their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world--the capitalist world--attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and in the case of need using even armed force against the exploiting classes and their states."
Taken in the context of all his other writings from this period, it is absolutely clear that Lenin is referring here not to a "socialist society" but to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Moreover, he was obviously referring to Europe, since in 1915 Lenin did not even admit the possibility of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia before a socialist revolution in the West!
The other main Stalinist "proof" is a quote from Lenin's 1923 article "On Cooperation":
"Indeed, the power of the state over all large-scale means of production, political power in the hands of the proletariat, the alliance of this proletariat with the many millions of small and very small peasants, the assured proletarian leadership of the peasantry, etc.--is this not all that is necessary to build a complete socialist society...?"
This article is limited to the political and legal prerequisites for socialism. Elsewhere ("Our Revolution," 1923) Lenin referred to the statement that "the development of the productive forces of Russia has not attained the level that makes socialism possible" as "incontrovertible," while polemicizing against the Mensheviks who concluded from this that a revolution was worthless.
The Productive Forces
During the 1930's, in a setting of high inflation, a reign of terror inside the Communist Party and a civil war with the peasants caused by Stalin's program of forced collectivization, the "complete victory of socialism" was announced. A resolution of the seventh congress of the Communist International (1935) declared that with the nationalization of industry, collectivization and liquidation of the kulaks as a class, "the final and irrevocable triumph of socialism and the all-sided reinforcement of the state of the proletarian dictatorship is achieved in the Soviet Union." In 1936 the program of the Communist Youth declared: "The whole national economy of the country has become socialist." A speaker favoring the new program argued:
"The old program contains a deeply mistaken anti-Leninist assertion to the effect that Russia can arrive at socialism only through a world proletarian revolution.' This point of the program is basically wrong. It reflects Trotskyist views."
The old program, written in 1921 by Bukharin, was approved by the Politburo with the participation of Lenin!
In his article, Davidson tries to maintain a pretense of orthodoxy by stating that "Marxist-Leninists, of course, have never held that the final victory of socialism--the classless society--is possible in one country." By his own admission then, the Russian Communist Party of the 1930's, under Stalin, was not Marxist-Leninist!
Davidson also accuses Trotsky of holding a "right opportunist 'theory of productive forces'" as the basis for opposition to the slogan of socialism in one country. But this "theory of productive forces" is the very basis of Marxist materialist analysis of history! It was Marx himself who wrote:
"this development of productive forces...is absolutely necessary as a practical premise [for socialism]: firstly for the reason that without it only want is made general, and with want the struggle for necessities and all the old crap would necessarily be reproduced; and, secondly, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established....Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable, powers...;and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples 'all at once' or simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them."
--K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, 1847
Davidson ridicules these basic Marxist propositions (ascribing them instead to Khrushchev and Liu Shao-chi!), claiming:
"Most socialist construction that has taken place in the world has been in relatively backward countries. But to call it 'socialism,' in Trotsky's view, would only 'hopelessly discredit the idea of socialist society in the eyes of the toiling masses.'"
This view, according to Davidson, is "patently ridiculous."
Just how "socialist" was the Soviet Union in the 1930's? While Russia had made great strides in industrialization, definitively proving the superiority of socialist organization of production even with the terrible restrictions imposed by Stalin's bureaucratic rule, it was still far behind the advanced capitalist countries. The most basic necessities--decent housing, adequate food and clothing--were still unavailable to the masses of the population. Inflation was rampant and a black market continued to exist. Meanwhile the bureaucracy used its power to secure its own well-being, which concretely meant high salaries, special shops, automobiles, country houses and many other privileges. Lenin had said that the dying away of the state would begin on the very day of the seizure of power. The proletarian state, which was still an organ of class rule, would cease to be a separate power above society but the instrument of the vast majority, carrying out their will and basing itself on their active participation. In the Soviet Union of 1935 the state had not begun to wither away, but had grown instead into a gigantic apparatus of suppression and compulsion.
This, Brother Davidson, is socialism? Even after Stalin's political counterrevolution the Soviet Union was still a great advance over the conditions of czarism and capitalism. It remained a workers state, in the sense of preserving socialist property forms, though badly degenerated. But the classless society (announced by Stalin's 1936 Constitution of the USSR) it was not.
Betrayal of the 1926 British General Strike
The most damning proof of the counterrevolutionary meaning of the doctrine of "socialism in one country" was in the field of Stalin's foreign policy and his systematic downplaying, and finally abolition (1943), of the Communist International in favor of blocs with the bourgeoisies of the various countries where revolution threatened. An immediate and graphic illustration of the real content of Stalinist "internationalism" was provided by the 1926 British general strike.
In 1925 British coal operators sought to terminate the 1924 contract and replace it with anew agreement which would reduce miners to a below-subsistence standard of living. After an official inquiry into the industry the government returned a report which would have placed the main burden of modernizing the coal industry on the miners. Their answer was a strike beginning on 3 May 1926. The next day the whole country was in the throes of a general strike. Councils of action were set up in the workers' districts to keep up morale and control the issuing of permits for emergency work or special transport. This was not simply an industrial dispute but a direct attack on the bosses' state.
The General Council of the Trades Union Congress, which had been entrusted with the conduct of the strike, called it off after nine days and at the height of its effectiveness, frightened by its revolutionary implications. Men going back to work found themselves blacklisted or accepted back only on terms including reduction in wages, loss of seniority or leaving the unions. On 13 May a second general strike occurred over the victimizations, but after conciliatory speeches from the TUC leaders--and having no alternative leadership--the men again returned to work. The miners stayed out until a series of separate agreements made between 23 and 29 December, but they were forced by the treachery of the trade-union tops to fight alone. The owners won on all counts: the national contract was lost and miners had to work longer hours for lower wages.
During the temporary retreat of the class struggle in Europe during 1924-25 Stalin decided to try and make peace with the reformist trade-union leaders, possibly abandoning the Red International of Labor Unions. The keystone to this policy was the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee, a bloc between the Soviet trade unions and the General Council of the British TUC, formed in May 1925. After the General Council betrayed the 1926 general strike, Trotsky demanded an immediate rupture with these strikebreakers. Stalin and Bukharin refused. (Zinoviev had at this point joined the Opposition, though he was to capitulate to Stalin two years later.) In 1926 the General Council supported British imperialism's repression of the Chinese revolution. Trotsky again demanded the denunciation of the Anglo-Russian Committee. Again Stalin refused.
When it finally succumbed in 1927 it was the British leaders who dumped the Committee. Its principal aim had supposedly been to oppose British intervention in Russia. As a logical extension of the doctrine of socialism in one country, this mythical aid from the labor fakers was sufficient grounds for sacrificing the 1926 general strike.
Stalin Orders Chinese Communists to Their Graves
Another even more horrifying example of the meaning of socialism in one country was Stalin's policy in the Chinese revolution of 1925-27. As early as 1924 the Chinese Communist Party had entered the populist bourgeois Kuomintang party of Sun Yat-sen on orders from Moscow. Trotsky objected when the matter was discussed then at the Politburo. The Chinese CP leadership under Chen Tu-hsiu likewise repeatedly objected. In October 1925 they proposed preparing to leave the Kuomintang; the plan was turned down by the Comintern Executive on Stalin's instructions. Stalin's line was that the revolution must be restricted to a bourgeois-democratic stage, under the leadership of a "bloc of four classes" including the national bourgeoisie, urban petty bourgeoisie, workers and peasants. The political expression of this bloc was the Kuomintang, to which the Chinese Communists were to subordinate themselves. They were directed to hold down the class struggle against the "anti-imperialist bourgeoisie" in the cities and seek a balance between them and the peasant movement in the countryside, above all maintaining the unity of all anti-imperialist forces.
Stalin's main interest in China at the time was not to foster revolution but to achieve a diplomatic bloc with the Kuomintang government. In early 1926 this bourgeois party was admitted to the Communist International as an associate party, and the Cl Executive Committee, the "General Staff of World Revolution," elected Sun's successor General Chiang Kai-shek an honorary member! Only a few weeks later, on 20 March, Chiang carried out his first anti-communist coup, barring CP members from all leadership posts in the Kuomintang and demanding a list of all CP members who had joined the Kuomintang. Under orders from CI representatives, the Chinese party leadership agreed! In October 1926 Stalin actually sent a telegram urging the Chinese CP to call off a peasant revolt in Kuangtung province. Trotsky commented on this:
"The official subordination of the Communist Party to the bourgeois leadership, and the official prohibition of forming soviets (Stalin and Bukharin taught that the Kuomintang 'took the place of, soviets) was a grosser and more glaring betrayal of Marxism than all the deeds of the Mensheviks in the years 1905-1917."
--L. D. Trotsky, "Permanent Revolution," 1928
This was bad enough, but after a challenge from the Left Opposition headed by Trotsky and Zinoviev, and during the crucial days of the Shanghai insurrection which began in March 1927, Stalin again and again reaffirmed the policy of capitulating to the nationalists while the latter were preparing to liquidate the communists. A March 1927 editorial in the Communist International said the main task in China was "the further development of the Kuomintang." On 5 April Trotsky warned that Chiang Kai-shek was preparing a quasi-bonapartist coup against the workers and called for the formation of workers councils to frustrate this aim. At the same time Stalin boasted at a party meeting in Moscow that "we would use the Chinese bourgeoisie and then throw it away like a squeezed lemon." Also at this time the Chinese CP leadership was appealing to Moscow, trying to impress the CI with the significance of the Shanghai events, the greatest workers' rising in Asia, and with the need to break with the Kuomintang. They were ordered to surrender Shanghai to Chiang's armies, and on 12 April the Kuomintang army carried out a massacre which cost the lives of tens of thousands of Communists and militant workers who had laid down their arms at Stalin's orders. This was "socialism in one country in practice!
But still Stalin would not abandon his policy and, declaring that the alliance with Chiang had now lapsed (!), he now ordered a bloc with the left-Kuomintang which had set up a government in Wuhan. Again Chinese Communists were ordered to hold back the peasant movement in order not to antagonize the "anti-imperialist" bourgeoisie. And again the bourgeois nationalists turned on the CP. At the end of the year Stalin moved to head off criticism of his Chinese policy from the Left Opposition by ordering an uprising in Canton by telegraph in a tactical situation where it was bound to suffer defeat, which it did despite the heroic defense of the "soviet government" by the Canton workers.
According to Davidson, "the Comintern advocated a policy put into practice independently by Mao and ignored or opposed by both Chen Tu-hsiu and Chang Kuo-tao." In actual fact Mao did not criticize the line followed by Chen in this period. At one point (fall 1924) he was expelled from the CP Central Committee for his too-close cooperation with the right-wing Kuomintang leaders!
While the Opposition's line on China had been firmly defeated in the thoroughly bureaucratized Russian Communist Party and the Comintern, it was still dangerous to Stalin to have Trotsky at freedom in the Soviet capital. In consequence he ordered the arrest of the organizer of the October Revolution and founder of the Red Army, exiling him to Alma Ata in Central Asia and deporting him from the USSR two years later. The Bolshevik party had been transformed from the leading revolutionary force in the world into a mere appendage of Stalin's bureaucracy. When Davidson and the Maoists today support the doctrine of socialism in one country, it is this history of betrayals that they are defending.
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