In Honor Of The 65th Anniversary Year Of The Chinese Revolution of
1949- From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-Problems Of
The Chinese Revolution (1927) – Comrade Lui’s Problem
Click on link below to read on-line all of Leon Trotsky's book, Problems Of The Chinese Revolution
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/pcr/index.htm
Markin
comment (repost from 2012 just change the year date as noted in the title
above):
On a day when we are honoring the 63rd anniversary of the Chinese
revolution of 1949 the articles by Leon Trotsky concerning the fate of the
second Chinese revolution in the 1920s posted in this entry and the comment
below take on added meaning. In the old days, in the early 1970s to put a time
frame on the period I am talking about, in the days when I had broken from many
of my previously held left social-democratic political views and had begun to
embrace Marxism with a distinct tilt toward Trotskyism, I ran into an old
revolutionary in Boston who had been deeply involved (although I did not learn
the extend of that involvement until later) in the pre-World War II socialist
struggles in Eastern Europe. The details of that involvement will not detain us
here long now although I should point out that he, Ludwig, to use his old time
party name which he insisted that I call him for memory’s sake (I never did get
his real first name although after he died somebody mentioned the name Peter),
had started his political career right around World War I in Poland at the time
of great revolutionary ferment in Europe
after the rise of the Bolshevik Revolution in the wake of the slaughter in
World War I. He was just a kid, had been drafted into something that sounded like
the National Guard here, the Polish Home Guard. Did his time when the Armistice
finally descended on Europe and then having had a belly-full of the old ways
(his words) searched around like a lot of young alienated people then and
gravitated toward Marxism.
In those days before they were murdered by the reaction in Germany
where they had been exiled (abetted by the old time German Social-Democratic
leadership) in the aftermath of the Spartacist uprising that Polish party was
run by Rosa Luxemburg and her paramour (okay, okay political co-thinker) Leo
Jogiches. There was an old saying in the Communist movement of the 1920s and
1930s (before Stalin in the late 1930s virtually liquated the whole operation
to placate his temporary partner, Hitler, in his/their designs on Poland) that
the German party might have been the biggest (after the Soviet Union’s) in the
Communist International but the Polish party was the best. So Ludwig came to
his credentials with an impressive pedigree. Naturally he was a stalwart
Communist rank and filer under the Pilsudski dictatorship from the mid-1920s
forward, was torn apart politically by the failure of the German Communist
Party to stop Hitler in his tracks when there was still time to do so in the
early 1930s, and drifted (after flirting with the exiled Bukarinites, the
rights in the Russian party and CI) toward the small but energetic Trotskyist
group in the mid-1930s when to do meant to be hounded like a dog by both the
Stalinist and Hitler-ite police apparatuses.
So when you ran into a guy like Ludwig, whether you agreed with
his politics or not, you knew you were in the presence of a real revolutionary
and not some armchair dilettante. (Many times I did not agree with him,
especially all that stuff about the Trotskyist version of the theory of Permanent
Revolution, having adamantly defended what the Vietnamese Stalinists had done
there in their national revolution. Yeah, I learned but it took a while and it
took the disaster in Chile and a couple of other places to wise up to “what was
what” in 20th century revolutions).
So you (me), young and wet behind the ears with very slim
revolutionary credentials if rather more élan, you (me) listened and thought
through many of his comments. The one that I think is germane today and which
continues to drive me some forty years later was the importance of the defense
of revolutionary gains no matter how small has stuck with me until this day.
And, moreover, is germane to the subject of these articles from the pen of Leon
Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution (in his case that of the second
revolution in the mid-1920s) and the later gains of that third revolution
(1949) however currently attenuated.
This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had barely
escaped ahead of Hitler’s police that pre-war scene in fascist-wracked Europe
and found himself toward the end of the 1930s in New York working with the
Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the period when that organization was
going through intense turmoil over the question of defense of the Soviet Union.
In the history of American (and international) Trotskyism this is the famous
Max Shachtman-James Burnham led opposition that declared, under one capitalist
reversion theory or another, that the previously defendable Soviet Union had
changed dramatically enough in the course of a few months to be no longer worth
defending by revolutionaries.
What struck Ludwig from the start about this dispute was the
cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the
wet-behind-the-ears youth of that day (so we of the generation of ’68 had
forbears whether we acknowledged them or not), on the question of that defense
and consequently about the role that workers states, healthy, deformed or
degenerated, as we use the terms of art in our movement, as part of the greater
revolutionary strategy. Needless to say most of those who abandoned defense of
the Soviet Union when there was even a smidgeon of a reason to defend that
state then (and when the issue came to life as a political reality shortly
thereafter when Hitler marched his troops east) left politics and peddled their
wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly
embraced the virtues of world imperialism. (The confessional literature of
American ex-Stalinists, Trotskyists, and even-left Social Democrats from the
1950s especially is replete with “errand child gone wrong but now wiser”
language most of it barely readable for any useful political purpose, or
polemic).
That said, the current question of defense of the Chinese
Revolution hinges on those same premises that animated that old Socialist
Workers Party dispute. And strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely) on the
question of whether China is now irrevocably on the capitalist road, or is
capitalist already (despite some very un-capitalistic economic developments
over the past few years), I find that many of those who oppose the position
that China is today still hanging by a thread as a workers’ state (deformed in
our language, deformed from its inception since the Chinese working-class
decimated and cowered by the reaction in the second revolution in the 1920s
played no significant independent role in the third revolution) have that same
cavalier attitude the old comrade warned me against back when I was first
starting out. There may come a time when we, as we had to with the Soviet Union
and other workers states of East Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, say
that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day.
In the meantime study the issue, read the posted articles, and
more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution as tenaciously as
in his time old Ludwig defended the gains of the Soviet Union in the interests
of the world’s working classes and oppressed.
*******
Comrade Liu’s Problem
(Nobody in the Chinese Communist Party, the party that he was
finally to come to see represented his political perspectives ever knew him as
anybody other than Comrade Lui and so we will stick with that name, although
later investigation found that he was the first son of a rich Shang-hai
merchant family whose name was Ki Zhou but Comrade Lui will do for our purposes
here.)
(I will use the old time Chinese language usages here in the
interest of some kind of historical accuracy although everybody by now should
be aware that for the past several decades there have been almost universal
spelling and phonetic changes when Chinese turns to English.)
In the fall of 1918, the year Comrade Liu entered Peking
University held many portents for the brash young man who refused to discuss
his family origins other than that he had come like virtually every young
student in the post- revolutionary period (the first revolution of 1911-12
which dispose of the dynasty like some much dirty linen and with about as much
effort as throwing such material in the laundry) from some wealth and that he
was seriously attracted to the anarchists and bookish intellectuals who held
sway there in the wake of World War I.
Like many of the young of most modern generations who came up in some measure of privilege, came up
in Comrade Lui’s case in the stifling atmosphere of old China the breath of
fresh air provided by the university was both exhilarating and filled with many
doubts about the old ways, about the way that he grew up. And so like more than
a few young first generation intellectuals he gravitated to those ideas which
were farthest away from his home life, from his strident worker bee youth
studying to make university life. That over he breathed in the new ideas, and
no ideas hit newly liberated students harder than the ideas of anarchism, at
least as understood by those so liberated.
Comrade Liu like many others was first influenced by that old
Russian dog, Prince Kropotkin, and his eclectic communal ideas, his idea of
oneness of the whole universe which had a certain Zen-like attraction to those
born into the stratified old Chinese ways (including, as has been noted, the
tremendous efforts to make sure the first son succeeded at the expense of
younger brothers. Daughters did not even enter the picture), and his basically
moralistic way to transform society. That held many attentions for a while but
if anything universal came out the First World War it was that the younger generations were looking to
break-out of the old ways and so they were looking for more activist ways to
change society. Comrade Liu with others formed a semi-secret group of
like-minded individuals bent on action to make a new anarchist-derived world.
They called themselves the Black Flag Front. That is the state of affairs as
the May Fourth Movement hit all Chinese students, from anarchists to extreme
nationalists, like a storm.
Comrade Liu and his comrades in the Black Flag
Front while then not in the leadership of the student movement having just
started to finish their first year’s studies participated fully when that big
day came. This was the action they were looking for, the chance to create that
more equalitarian society they were discussing in their rooms. Here is a little
of what the movement itself was attempting to do which forms the background for
most of what Comrade did until that time in the mid-1920s when he moved away
from the Black Flag Front and began to toy a little with Communism.
On the morning of May 4, 1919, student
representatives from thirteen different local universities met in Beijing and
drafted five resolutions:
1. to oppose the granting of
Shandong to the Japanese under former German concessions.
2. to draw awareness of
China's precarious position to the masses in China.
3. to recommend a large-scale
gathering in Beijing.
4. to promote the creation of
a Beijing student union.
5. to hold a demonstration
that afternoon in protest to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
On the afternoon of May 4 over 3,000 students
of Peking
University and other
schools marched from many points to gather in front of Tiananmen. They shouted such slogans as "Struggle for the sovereignty
externally, get rid of the national traitors at home", "Do away with
the 'Twenty-One
Demands'", and
"Don't sign the Versailles Treaty". They voiced their anger at the Allied
betrayal of China, denounced the government's spineless inability to protect
Chinese interests, and called for a boycott of
Japanese products.
Demonstrators insisted on the resignation of three Chinese officials they
accused of being collaborators with the Japanese. After burning the residence
of one of these officials and beating his servants, student protesters were
arrested, jailed, and severely beaten.[4]
The next day, students in Beijing as a whole
went on strike and in the larger cities across China, students, patriotic
merchants, and workers joined protests. The demonstrators skillfully appealed
to the newspapers and sent representatives to carry the word across the
country. From early June, workers and businessmen in Shanghai also went on
strike as the center of the movement shifted from Beijing to Shanghai.
Chancellors from thirteen universities arranged for the release of student
prisoners, and Peking University's Cai Yuanpei resigned in protest. Newspapers,
magazines, citizen societies, and chambers of commerce offered support for the
students. Merchants threatened to withhold tax payments if China's government
remained obstinate.[5] In Shanghai, a general strike of merchants and workers nearly devastated
the entire Chinese economy.[4] Under intense public pressure, the Beiyang government released the
arrested students and dismissed Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang and Lu Zongyu. Chinese representatives in Paris refused to sign on the peace treaty: the
May Fourth Movement won an initial victory which was primarily symbolic: Japan
for the moment retained control of the Shandong Peninsula and the islands in
the Pacific. Even the partial success of the movement exhibited the ability of
China's social classes across the country to successfully collaborate given
proper motivation and leadership.
Certainly the efforts here by the students
and the actions of the members of Black Flag did not point directly to a new
society but the thrill of political activity, mixing with other groups and
programs and also recruiting a small number of the most militant students
(especially from those arrested and jailed by the government) gave rise to
great expectations of things to come. It was during this period that Comrade
Liu decided to devote his life to the struggle, a decision that he held to
until the end of his life.
One of the great mistakes students have made
once they have led a movement, a radical or revolutionary movement in the
struggle for power is that they fail to see the ebbs and flows of all social
movements thinking that there is only one direction once the masses are in
motion. The Chinese students and the now Comrade Liu-led Black Flag in particular
composed mainly of students (although recruitment had brought a smattering of
professionals and young workers from the textile mills in Shanghai just of the
farms) fell prey to just that phenomenon. (They will not be alone in that
failure as the French students in May 1968 and American students throughout the
1960s attest to.) So some formerly very militant young anarchists ready to man
the barricades in a flash dropped away from the Front, got professional careers
going , started families and the million and one other things people do when
there is an ebb tide. This is the period when Comrade Liu, determined as ever,
came to the fore, came to be recognized as the leader (although being
anarchists they shied away from any official designation). And this is the
period when Comrade Lui learned about the necessity of patience waiting for
another opportunity to present itself that everybody knew was coming just as
one could see the signs in Russia well before 1917 bring the masses into the
struggle, to build those communes and local collectives that would create the
new society.
The early years of the 1920s were not a good
time to be an anarchist (or for that matter a dissident communist) once the
Nationalist reaction under Chiang-kai-shek and the various warlords who
effectively ruled vast swaths of China after the central government
half-heartedly granted some of the demands of the initially student-led May
Fourth Movement and sucked all the political air out any dissenting politics.
Those were also the years that the fledgling Chinese Communist Party, under
orders from the Communist International then led by the deceased Lenin’s old
right-hand man, Zinoviev (and with the emerging leader Joseph Stalin’s
blessing) to work within the Chiang operation, the Kuomintang (hereafter KMT).
So the political space for some kind of radical commune short of taking power
seemed less than fruitful since Comrade Lui, who had gone to school with some
of the leading Nationalist cadre who emerged after 1919 and especially with the
death of Sun-Yat-sen in leading positions in the national government refused to
support that government despite various entreaties by his former schoolmates (always
taking into consideration that the national government in many places was
non-existent at various times and for many reasons including vast corruption at
the center.
At that time the semi-secret Black Flag under
a political program worked out by Comrade Liu and his closest associates. As
the decade progressed toward the decisive struggles around the second
revolution from 1925 on those associates tended to increasingly be first
generation departed from the villages turned to factory workers. A few with
some education and the few students left who had gone to study in Paris looked to
the various strands of syndicalism that made
more sense to them that the old time Kropotkin moral commune. And as the
ideas of factory-centered communes took hold of the organization a collective decision
(urged on by Comrade Liu and his friend, Lu Chen, was made in late 1923 to move
the main Black Flag operation out of Peking to Shanghai where the foreign
settlements and their Chinese lackeys were building upon the factories created
by the needs at home while the war in Europe had been going on where the imperialists
were busy eating up their resources on the bloody battlefield and said the hell
with the colonials and other lesser markets.
Shanghai with its vast factories and
up-from-hunger working class treated like their coolie forbears before them by
foreign nationals and home-grown capitalists alike was a prime recruiting
ground for the Black Flag with its newfound syndicalist orientation (the
Communist Party was also gaining recruits and supporters as well among that
same population). Shanghai was also the place where Comrade Lui learned his
trade as a revolutionary cadre leader in integrating the raw recruits into the
organization. It was his idea to set up reading circles where literary was
taught and the classics of anarchism explained in simple terms. It was also his
idea to set up some underground operations since he could read the signs that
the big struggle ahead would require such an operation just like in Russia
before 1917.This was also the time when Comrade Lui would start to mix it up politically
with his arch political opponents, the Communists, who were gaining strength in
the factories and it appeared in the government as well. (They, Comrade Lui and
his associates, would laugh among themselves that the level of influence that
the Communist Party had on Sun Yat-sen and after his death Chiang was directly
proportional to the arms and other aid coming into KMT headquarters. Later when
those guns were turned around the matter was no longer laughable and required a
different appreciation of the situation).
On a personal note this period is also where
Comrade Lui met his future wife, Li San, Li San who would stick by him through
the rest of his life. They had met at a reading circle after Li had heard
rumors about the Black Flag having moved its main operation to Shanghai. As
noted previously this reading circle was the main way to organize young
recruits under the increasingly hard conditions of the Nationalist government. The
circle that Li would eventually join however was not a workers’ circle since she
was a daughter of a Shanghai merchant family although not known to Comrade Liu
previously and had been educated in Paris. The decision was made in order to
not intimidate the raw young workers and to give them space to be heard and
work toward leadership to keep the worker circles separate from the young
professionals and academics until the training period was over. Li had been somewhat
“liberated” for the times (she wore Western clothing, spoke English and French
well, lived a half-Bohemian existence with a few other such women and men in a
large house just outside the settlement area) and so she was intrigued by what
the reading circle provided after she had dismissed out of hand the Communists (feeling
as she confided to Comrade Lui that having come from a merchant family that the
Communists would do like that had done to such families in Russia in the
aftermath of the revolution. Her family, or what was left of it, fled to Taiwan
in 1949.)
After a formal old time courtship (to appease
her family, his he had lost track of when he went underground although the
family name was still on placard of the rice company doing business at the
family’s old location according to a source that he sent to find out about the
matter. And so this is what the personal
and political situation of Comrade Liu looked like when the great Shanghai
uprising blew the final bit of old China away (although that process would take
another twenty plus years).
The second revolution began in in 1925 and so
we should take note of what that meant for Comrade Liu and his Black Flag
comrades because although the revolutionary possibilities would find their
greatest expression in Shanghai before the KMT machine guns started blazing
away the initial impetus came from Canton:
“The Revolution Begins-the event that really sparked off the
enormous movement of the working class was the shooting down of a demonstration
of students and workers by British and French machine gunners on June 23, 1925.
This provocation triggered off an explosion that had been gathering in the
previous period. The workers of Canton and Hong Kong came out in a huge strike
which lasted for about 16 months, and a paralyzed imperialism throughout the
whole of China. This movement – a strike and the boycott of French goods, and
of British goods in particular – was so complete that 100,000 Chinese workers
moved from Hong Kong to Canton, where the workers were the real power. They
cleared out the opium dens, closed down gambling joints, and improvised an
embryonic soviet in Canton. (As things were fluid in the first days of the
uprising the few Black Flag adherents in Canton were advised to enter the
soviet and spread the anarchist word while doing the practical work noted just
above. The won over many textile workers including an important trade union cadre
who would later in Shanghai lead important textile mill strikes.)
The anarchist movement had never been strong in China seeminly
too esoteric for a tradition-bound society bound together at the family, kinship
and village level (nor, for that matter the ideas of the post-World War I
Social Democracy either as that tendency acted as accomplices of their national
colonial enterprises). So unique opportunities really existed for the Communist
Party. The independent movement of the working class began to change the
relationship of forces in China in favor of the working class. But, the
Communist Party deliberately subordinated themselves to the Kuomintang (KMT) and
to Chiang Kai-shek. The counterrevolution over time gained ground using the
gangsters of Canton and Hong Kong as well as shock troops to crush the labor
movement. At this stage the slogan of the Communist Party in China, and of the
Communist International under the direction of Stalin and Bukharin was ‘full
support to the revolutionary Kuomintang’. The KMT was accepted as a sympathetic
section of the Communist International in 1926.
The Shanghai working class was also looking expectantly
towards the movement in Canton. Tragically, that did not happen, because the
Chinese Communist Party subordinated itself to the Kuomintang while Chiang
Kai-shek gathered the reins of power in his hands. After 1923, the Russian
revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, opposed the entry of the Communist Party
into the Kuomintang. He stood for the complete independence of the Communist
Party from the Kuomintang. While tactically working on anti-imperialist actions
that came up. This position would become important later when Comrade Liu was
analyzing what had gone wrong in the second revolution. Trotsky was not opposed
to a limited bloc on specific anti-imperialist action. But, Trotsky argued, the
Communist Party should not have subordinated itself politically to the KMT and
losing its anchor among the working class militants who were following its
directives.
One of the most important developments in the Chinese
revolution was undoubtedly the heroic movement of the proletariat in Shanghai
in 1927. Chiang’s Northern Expedition reached the gates of that city by January
or February. When the first detachments of the Kuomintang were 25 miles from
Shanghai, the trade unions there, particularly the General Labor Union, called
for the workers to come out in a general strike. (Black Flag trade union
militants, especially in the Delwar Textile Mills, were central to bring out
the workers in the whole industry.)
On February 19 approximately 350,000 workers answered the
call for a general strike. Then, however, the detachments of the northern
warlords went out into the city, joined by the imperialists from the foreign
concessions of Shanghai, and shot down demonstrating workers. A worker found
reading a leaflet was immediately beheaded and his head put on a stake and
paraded through the city in order to terrorize the Shanghai working class. A
reign of terror ensued in the following week. Yet the Kuomintang armies refused
to go into the city. Instead they waited for the Chinese capitalists to crush
the workers. There was a pause, then on March 21 at least 500 workers were
executed.
The Shanghai working class rose again on March 21, 1927,
when about 800,000 workers came out onto the streets. They improvised an army
of 5,000 workers. Armed with a few pistols, mostly with bare hands, they
marched against the barracks and against the troops of the northern warlords
and smashed them. The First Division of the Kuomintang – seasoned troops
largely influenced by the Communist Party – decided that they would delay no
longer and marched into Shanghai in defiance of Chiang Kai-shek’s orders. The
leader of the First Division was a general who looked towards the Communist
Party. The whole of Shanghai was in the hands of the working class within two
or three days. Secretly, on the outskirts of Shanghai, Chiang Kai-shek met with
gangsters and representatives of the imperialist powers. Together they
discussed a program of repression to crush the workers’ movement in the city.
Despite the
experience of Canton 12 months before, the Communist Party again reinforced the
illusions of the Shanghai workers in the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek, with
calls of ‘Long live the heroic general! Long live the Kuomintang army!’ Had the
Communist Party based itself on an independent movement of the working class, it
could have taken power. The police had been smashed, and the policing of
Shanghai was under workers’ control. The trade unions in effect controlled
Shanghai and the working class was in the majority, yet the trade unions and
Communist Party formed a coalition with the capitalist party – the Kuomintang.
Of the 19 representatives in the government, the Communist Party had only 5.
The blow was struck on April 12, 1927. The Kuomintang
troops used all the dirty tricks of the capitalists. When they attacked one
workers’ headquarters in Shanghai, these Green gangsters dressed up in workers’
blue denim overalls. Kuomintang troops came along to ‘mediate’. Once inside the
headquarters, the troops lined up the workers against the wall and shot them, including
Comrades Wong and Chan two well-known leaders in the Delwar Textile Mills. The
workers were politically disarmed because they had been told that the
Kuomintang troops were on their side.
In the days preceding the coup of April 12, the General
Labor Union had actually warned that a coup was being prepared and that a
general strike should be organized. Never once was the fountainhead of the
counterrevolution – Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang leaders – mentioned by
the Communist Party or the workers’ leaders of Shanghai.
The Shanghai working class was crushed in blood. An
estimated 35,000 workers, many of them Communist Party members, were killed in
Shanghai alone between April 12 and the end of 1927.
The defeat of the Shanghai working class in 1927 meant the
crushing of the Chinese working class for a whole historical era, but it was
not the end of the matter. There were the beginnings of movements in Hunan and
Hupei, the other two important provinces of China where the peasantry, and the
working class, had begun to move into action.
Naturally the Black Flag was in the thick of things in a
small way in Canton where they had some supporters and the influence of the
Communists was not as strong as in Shanghai. When things were tense there
Comrade Ming and Chou (their organizational names since nobody knew them as
anything else) before they were executed and dumped into a mass grave by the
government troops when the reaction triggered by the demands of British and
French concessionaries went to work did excellent and well-regarded work. They were even were well thought of by the
rank and file Communists in the days before the hard lines between Communists,
Left-Communists (Trotskyists), and the various anarchists’ collectives set in. Comrades
Ming and Chou were central figures in the commune set up at the Trafalgar
Textile Works and they were fingered by company spies, Chinese company spies
paid for by as it turned out Chinese capitalists doing lackey work for the
foreign nationals, for their leadership roles.
Before the end they had been able to set up working committees
to oversee materials, transport, repair, and the commissary that effectively ran
the factory and provided goods to the local population at good prices, (Whether
they would be able to sustain that work as an individual enterprise over the
long haul was problematic and in any case that situation never developed
although we know from Spain, particularly Catatonia, that such workers’
collectives were able to survive for almost a year so outside the long term
question of state power and who has it the prospects were far from impossible.)
The situation in Canton by the end where armed resistance, general strikes were
met by the overweening desire of the foreigners to impose the greatest butchery
on the workers (and their peasant supporters who were beginning to awaken once
the news from their former farm boys came through talking about the classic
peasant question- “land to the tiller”) had worked their courses things began
to be questioned within the Black Flag about its role in the revolution. That huge defeat in Canton and the aftermath made
the Black Flag comrades think things through a bit more critically as Shanghai
became the center of the struggle in 1927.
Nobody thought things through in Shanghai more than
Comrade Liu. He was still adamantly opposed to any support to the Kuomintang
having an almost visceral distrust of those whom he had known at school and in
the early days of the May Fourth Movement as well as his well-thought out political
opposition to working with bourgeois forces except in tactical situations where
a temporary common front was required to confront a situation, usually a
military situation. After examining what went right and wrong in Canton (based on
reports sent back by comrades and supporters there as great peril) Comrade Liu
knew great events were going to be decided in Shanghai, a final show-down among
the various contenders for power was already in the making before Chiang made
his various moves to take individual power. More importantly he that the
Communists were much stronger than the Black Flag forces, although that
situation was somewhat fluid at the rank and file level since many militant but
uneducated workers were flooding into the party. He also knew that if the Black
Flag was to have any influence on the Shanghai workers who were being organized
into trade unions, workers committees and street collectives as a very quick
pace he, they, needed to get to the still unformed Communist rank and file (the
leadership too was open to greater prospects of influence than later after
Stalin in Russia and then via the Communist International internationally
including the Chinese party hardened those left up). Moreover Comrade Liu on
the basis of the Canton commune experience was beginning to see that as
important as factory committees, as that syndicalism that had animated the work
of the Black Flag for the previous few years was that the Russian soviet idea,
particularly its role in the struggle for state power, was the only way to get
rid of the foreigners, their military operations and their damn Chinese
lackeys.
And so not without some trepidation, and not without some
fear that the Black Flag comrades would be devoured by the Communists a
decision was made to enter the Chinese Communist Party and work there for the
ideas that had made them revolutionaries. Comrade Liu in the bargain worked out
with the local Communist leadership was placed in charge of the political
commissars in the factories since he was well-known in those locations and
trusted by many of the factory workers. (By the way the local Communist
leadership, some who had known Comrade Liu since the May Fourth Movement days,
unlike later was happy to see a small experienced factory cadre come to their
organization even though they still were personally a little wary of Comrade
Liu on his adamant opposition to working in the KMT)
And once Comrade Liu entered the Communist Party there was
no better communist, just like there had been no better anarchist/syndicalist
in the independent Black Flag operation. A number of comrades would speculate
later, after the second revolution ground to a halt, and once the reaction took
its bloody revenge, that such comrades like Liu were hard to come by and that
it would take maybe a few generations to produce masses of such cadre. But back
to the moment. Comrade Liu began immediately to set up readers’ circles in the
factories (aided now in this work by Comrade Li who had developed a very
patience and winning style that made her ideal for such work especially among
woman workers and housewives who had become politicized of necessity by the
situation).
Those who know the least bit about the history of the
second Chinese revolution and its aftermath know that that revolution was
drowned in blood by the barbarous former “allies” Chiang and his KMT troops.
While we do not know all the specifics since Chiang put a veil of secrecy over
most of his bloody actions once he was victorious we do know that the mass of
rank and file communist workers in Shanghai were executed on his orders, and
know that in the first rank, since there was then no reason to eliminate the
heroic city past by the Communists, who fought Chiang were rank and file
members of the Black Flag who were especially effective against the criminal gangs
employed by Chiang to aid in his dirty work. That remnant was decimated in the
fight and Comrade Liu (and Li) who had gone underground before the Nationalists
entered Shanghai was one of the few that survived. But survive he did, survived
to take part in the discussion about what the hell went wrong, what policies
were followed that precluded victory.
No question that the number one question when the
survivors were looking for “scapegoats” was the policy of entry into the KMT,
the unending, uncritical carte blanche entry complete with Communist
International/Soviet Army guns and military expertise which was turned against
the party and its supporters by Chiang. At this point Comrade Liu, who had
personally buried himself in work to avoid having to deal with the question
while the party was under the gun, spoke up strongly although without rancor
about the false policy of depending on the good offices of the KMT to the end. Worse
to still exhibit naïve about the way the KMT used the Chinese party. To be
naïve at a personal level about Chiang and his cohorts. Initially Comrade Liu’s
analysis centered strictly on the perfidy of the KMT, the bourgeois nature of
the organization and less on what role in the wake of the Russian revolution
the bourgeoisie as represented in China by the KMT (and the warlords in the
outer regions) would play in colonial and undeveloped nations’ revolutions.
Always a thoughtful man Comrade Liu began to question exactly what type of
revolution China needed and what process would lead to the revolution. As a
syndicalist that question, really as always the question of state power, of
whose interests will be taken care of in the revolution, was secondary to
creating those organizations at the base of society that would somehow carry
themselves to the top and the question of state power would wither away of its
own uselessness.
The flow of the second revolution put a huge crimp in
Comrade Liu’s thinking on the matter. He knew instinctively that the rotten
Chinese bourgeoisie (and remember he came from that strata so he had some
experience at how rotten they really were) so very connected with the European
imperialists were not going to make a great social revolution for the coolies
and peasants who they lorded it over. And so he belatedly came to see that the
social revolution was now on the agenda just like in Russia in 1917 although he
was then unfamiliar with Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution and so he was
not quite sure how this would work out in China with its mass of peasantry not
quite ready to do much more than fight for the land.
Needless to say there would be recriminations over the
failed policies that derailed the promising Chinese revolution. The national
leadership, the Chen leadership, took it on the neck even though Chen had
personally argued for a political break with the KMT fairly early on but was
overruled by the agents of the Communist International who had flooded into
China along with the military aid to the KMT. Comrade Liu, too low then to be
on the CI radar, was left alone (he also had protectors in the party who
vouched for him and his work something that could be done, done for the last
time then before the lines hardened) and so he continued his low level
underground work as the leadership fights boiled over.
Of course the leadership struggle centered on what the
hell to do about insuring the survival of the party and what forces to try to
organize now that defeat stared the party in the face for who knew how long.
Without going into great detail here the argument would be between those like
Mao, who eventually had his way, wanted to move out of the clamped down cities
and depend on the volatile peasantry to drive the social revolution and those
like Comrade Liu who argued that a working-class revolution had to be based on
the workers and the workers were in the cities. Comrade Liu and those like him
would lose that argument but he would remain in Shanghai all through the
dispute and all through the various extermination campaigns that Chiang was
endlessly trying to carry out that would ultimately lead Mao and his party
remnant on the long march to Yenan.
Little is known of the work of Comrade Liu during this
period except that people remember that there were always reading circles
popping up around Shanghai associated with his name (and Li’s) and that he
secretly recruited many to the underground party. What is known, known now
through the exile literature of the time was that Comrade Liu had received
literature from the Trotsky-led Left Opposition in Russia over the debates on
the China question in the late 1920s and had formed a very secret circle in
Shanghai supporting that position although he was never bothered by the party
about it as he most certainly would have been in Russia. Probably, according to
later speculation, the main forces with Mao were too busy trying to survive
themselves to worry excessively about political deviations at the time.
What is known is how Comrade Liu ended. Once Mao had
established himself in Yenan and communications back to the cities were set up
he put out the call for those like Comrade Liu with experience in readers’
circles to go out there to educate the masses of peasants who were coming to
the party in throngs. Comrade Li was not invited. Although there is still some
uncertainty about who did the deed as Comrade Liu was travelling to the now
familiar if still difficult path to Yenan he was killed either by KMT soldiers
who had been warned that he was travelling to Yenan or that agents of the Green
Tea Gang who had had it in for Comrade Liu since the Shanghai days and his
efforts to eliminate these treacherous criminal gangs got to him. He died a
good communist. Li San would stay in Shanghai underground and do work in the
women’s section of the party, a job that would turn into a government job once
the party came to power in 1949. Her date of death in uncertain since she was
rounded up in the aftermath of the Hundred Flowers experiment and not heard
from again.
As for Comrade Liu’s problem, the problem that animated
this piece, the problem of how to overthrow the old order and what kind of more
equitable society to form in the wake of the overthrow of the capitalist class,
although he was not around to see it, and the state created probably was far
from what he had envisioned when he started on the political road with the May
Fourth Movement, he probably would have been proud that old Chiang got beaten
out in the end and that the forgotten of China would be better off than they
had ever been in history. Not a bad epitaph.
