On a day when we are honoring the 65th anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in this entry and the comment below take on added meaning. In the old days, 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 now but the import of what he had to impart to me about the defense of revolutionary gains has stuck with me until this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article from the pen of Leon Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution and the later gains of that third revolution however currently attenuated.
This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had escaped 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 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 him from the start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth, 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 it left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism.
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 that position 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, say that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day. In the meantime study the issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution.
***************
Markin comment:
On a day when we are honoring
the 63rd anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in
this entry and the comment below take on added meaning. In the old days, 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 now but the import of what he had to
impart to me about the defense of revolutionary gains has stuck with me until
this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article from the pen
of Leon Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution and the later gains of
that third revolution however currently attenuated.
This old comrade, by the
circumstances of his life, had escaped 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 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 him from the
start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet
opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth, 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 it left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if
they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism.
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 that position 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, say that China is no
longer a workers state. But today is not that day. In the meantime study the
issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the
Chinese Revolution.
***************
Leon Trotsky
Problems of the Chinese Revolution
The Canton Insurrection
July 1928
Alma Ata
1) Stages of the Chinese Revolution
The first stage of the Guomindang was the period of domination by the national bourgeoisie, under the apologetic banner of the “bloc of four classes”. The second period, after the Chiang Kai-shek coup d’état, was an experiment in parallel and “independent” domination by Chinese Kerenskyism. While the Russian Populists, together with the Mensheviks, openly gave their short-lived “dictatorship” the form of dual power, the Chinese “revolutionary democracy” did not reach even that stage. And inasmuch as history in general does not work to order, there is nothing left for us but to understand that there is not and that there will not be any other “democratic” dictatorship than the one exercised by the Guomindang since 1925. This remains true regardless of whether the semi-unification of China accomplished by the Guomindang is maintained in the coming period or whether the country is again dismembered. But precisely when the class dialectics of the revolution, having spent all its other resources, put on the order of the day the dictatorship of the proletariat, with the numberless millions of oppressed and downtrodden of town and country on its side, the ECCI advanced the slogan of the democratic dictatorship (that is, bourgeois democracy) of the workers and peasants. The reply to this formula was the Canton insurrection which, lifted the curtain over a new stage, or, more correctly, over with all its prematurity, with all the adventurism of its leaders, the coming, the third Chinese revolution. This must be emphasized.
Trying to insure themselves against the sins of the past, the leaders criminally forced the trend of events at the end of last year and brought about the Canton miscarriage. However, even a miscarriage can teach us a good deal concerning the organism of the mother and the process of birth. The tremendous theoretical and even decisive significance of the Canton events for the fundamental problems of the Chinese revolution is due precisely to the fact that we have here what happens so rarely in history and in politics: a laboratory experiment on a gigantic scale. We paid for it dearly, but that makes it all the more imperative for us to digest the lessons.One of the fighting slogans of the Canton insurrection, as Pravda (no.31) relates, was the watchword: “Down with the Guomindang!” The Guomindang banners and signs were torn and trampled upon. But it was already after the “betrayal” of Chiang Kai-shek and that of Wang Jingwei (not a betrayal of his class, but of our illusions) that the ECCI pompously declared: “We will not give up the Guomindang banner.” The workers of Canton prohibited the Guomindang, proclaiming all its tendencies illegal. This means that to solve the basic national tasks, not only the big bourgeoisie but also the small bourgeoisie failed to advance a political power, a party, a faction, in conjunction with which the proletarian party might be able to solve the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution. The key to the position lies in the fact that the problem of winning the movement of the poor peasants already fell entirely on the shoulders of the proletariat, and the Communist Party directly; the approach to a real solution of the bourgeois-democratic tasks of the revolution necessitated the concentration of all the power in the hands of the proletariat.
As to the short-lived Canton Soviet government, Pravda reports:
“In the interests of the workers, the decrees of the Canton Soviet proclaimed workers’ control of production through factory Committees, the nationalization of big industry, transportation and the banks.”
Then, measures are mentioned such as the “confiscation of all dwellings of the big bourgeoisie for the benefit of the labourers ...”
Thus, it was the Canton workers who were in power and what is more, the government was actually in the hands of the Communist Party. The program of the new government included not only the confiscation of the feudal lands, in so far as such exist in Guangdong at all, and workers’ control of production, but also the nationalization of big industry, the banks and transportation and even the confiscation of the dwellings of the bourgeoisie and all their property for the benefit of the workers. The question arises: If these are the methods of a bourgeois revolution what will the proletarian revolution in China look like?Notwithstanding the fact that the instructions of the ECCI said nothing about the proletarian dictatorship and socialist measures; notwithstanding the fact that Canton, when compared with Shanghai, Hankow and other industrial centres of the country, has more of a petty-bourgeois character, the revolutionary upheaval effected against the Guomindang led automatically to the proletarian dictatorship which, at its very first steps, found itself compelled by the entire situation to take more radical measures than those with which the October revolution began. And this fact, in spite of its paradoxical appearance, is quite a normal outcome of the social relations of China as well as of the whole development of the revolution.
Large- and middle-scale landownership (as it exists in China) is most closely intertwined with urban, including foreign capitalism. There is no landowning caste in China in opposition to the bourgeoisie. The most widespread, generally-hated exploiter in the village is the usurious wealthy peasant, the agent of urban banking capital. The agrarian revolution has therefore just as much of an anti-bourgeois as it has of an anti-feudal character in China. The first stage of our October revolution, in which the wealthy peasant marched hand in hand with the middle and poor peasant, and frequently at their head, against the landlord, will not, or will hardly at all, take place in China. The agrarian revolution there will be from the very beginning, and also later on, an uprising not only against the few landlords and bureaucrats, but also against the wealthy peasants and usurers. Whereas in Russia the poor peasant committees acted only in the second stage of the October revolution, towards the middle of 1918, in China they will appear on the scene, in one form or another, as soon as the agrarian movement revives. The breaking-up of the rich peasants will be the first and not the second step in the Chinese October.
The agrarian revolution, however, does not constitute the only basis of the present historical struggle in China. The most radical agrarian revolution, the general division of land (the Communist Party will naturally support it to the very end), will not by itself be a way out of the economic blind alley. It is now essential for China to have national unity and economic sovereignty, that is, customs autonomy, or more correctly, a monopoly of foreign trade; this means: emancipation from world imperialism, for which China remains the most important source not only of enrichment but also of existence, constituting a safety valve against internal explosions of capitalism, today in Europe and tomorrow in America.
This is what determines in advance the gigantic scope and monstrous sharpness of the struggle through which the masses of China must pass, the more so now, when the depth of the stream of the struggle has already been measured and felt by all or its participants.
The enormous role of foreign capitalism in Chinese industry, its habit of relying directly on its own “national” bayonets in order to defend its rapacity, makes the program of workers’ control in China even less realizable than it was in Russia. The direct expropriation of the foreign capitalist enterprises, and later also the Chinese capitalist enterprises, will most likely be made imperative by the struggle, on the very morrow of the victorious insurrection.
The same objective social and historical causes which determined the “October” outcome of the Russian Revolution rise before us in China in a still more accentuated form. The bourgeois and the proletarian poles of the Chinese nation are opposed to each other even more intransigently, if this is possible, than they were in Russia, inasmuch as, on the one hand, the Chinese bourgeoisie is directly bound up with foreign imperialism and its military machine and, on the other hand, the Chinese proletariat has from the very beginning established relations with the Comintern and the Soviet Union. Numerically, the Chinese peasantry constitutes an even more overwhelming mass than the Russian peasants; but, crushed in the vice of world contradictions upon the solution of which in one way or another its fate depends, the Chinese peasantry is even less capable than the Russian of playing a leading role. This is now no longer a theoretical forecast; it is a fact tested through and through and from all sides.
These fundamental and incontrovertible social and political prerequisites of the third Chinese revolution show not only that the formula of a democratic dictatorship has hopelessly outlived its usefulness, but also that the third Chinese revolution, in spite of the extreme backwardness of China or more correctly, because of this great backwardness, as compared with Russia, will not have a “democratic” period, be it even for six months, as was the case in the October revolution (November 1917 to July 1918); it will be compelled from the very beginning to effect the most decisive shake-up and abolition of bourgeois property in town and country.
True, this prospect does not harmonize with the pedantic and schematic conception concerning the relationships between economics and politics. But the responsibility for this harmony which disturbs the newly adopted prejudices to which the October revolution already dealt a serious blow, does not devolve upon “Trotskyism” but upon the law of uneven development. In the given case, it is exactly in place.
It would be pedantry to contend that the Chinese Communist Party, had it pursued a Bolshevik policy in the revolution of 1925-27, would certainly have come to power. But it is pitiful philistinism to contend that this possibility was entirely out of the question. The mass movement of workers and peasants was absolutely sufficient for it, as was also the collapse of the ruling classes. The national bourgeoisie sent its Chiang Kai-sheks and Wang Jingweis to Moscow; through its Hu Hanmins it knocked on the door of the Comintern, precisely because it felt itself hopelessly weak in the face of the revolutionary masses; it realized its weakness and sought to insure itself in advance. Neither the workers nor the peasants would have followed the national bourgeoisie if we ourselves had not drawn them behind it with a lasso. Had the Comintern pursued a more or less correct policy, the outcome of the struggle of the Communist Party for the masses would have been determined in advance: the Chinese proletariat would have supported the Communists, while the peasants’ war would have supported the revolutionary proletariat.
If, at the beginning of the northern campaign, we had begun to organize soviets in the “liberated” districts (and the masses were instinctively fighting for that) we would have rallied to our side the agrarian uprisings, we would have built our own army; we would have undermined the opposing armies and – notwithstanding the youthfulness of the Communist Party of China – it would have been able, with a judicious Comintern guidance, to mature in these years of stress and to come to power, if not in the whole of China at once, then at least in a considerable part of it. And above all, we would have had a party.
But precisely in the sphere of leadership something absolutely monstrous occurred, a veritable historical catastrophe: the authority of the Soviet Union, of the Bolshevik Party and of the Comintern went entirely to the support, first of Chiang Kai-shek, against an independent policy of the Communist Party, and then to the support of Wang Jingwei, as the leader of the agrarian revolution. After having trampled underfoot the very basis of Lenin’s policy and paralysed the young Chinese Communist Party, the ECCI determined in advance the victory of Chinese Kerenskyism over Bolshevism, of the Chinese Milyukovs over the Kerenskys, and of Japanese and British imperialism over the Chinese Milyukovs.
In this and in this alone lies the meaning of what happened in China in the course of 1925-27.
Democratic Dictatorship or Dictatorship of the Proletariat?
How did the last Plenum of the ECCI evaluate the experiences acquired in the Chinese revolution, including the experiences of the Canton insurrection? What prospect did it outline for the future? The resolution of the February (1928) Plenum, the key to the corresponding parts of the draft program of the Sixth Congress, says concerning the Chinese revolution:
“It is wrong to characterize it as a ‘permanent’ revolution [the position of the representative of ECCI]. The tendency to skip [?] over the bourgeois-democratic phase of the revolution with a simultaneous [?] appraisal of the revolution as a ‘permanent revolution’ is a mistake similar to that which Trotsky made in 1905 [?].”
The ideological life of the Comintern since Lenin’s departure from its leadership, that is, since 1923, has consisted primarily of a struggle against so-called “Trotskyism” and particularly against the “permanent revolution”. How then could it happen that on the fundamental question of the Chinese revolution, not only the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, but even the official representative of the Comintern, that is, the leader who was especially instructed for the job, should have fallen into the same “error” for which hundreds of people are now exiled to Siberia and put in prison? The struggle around the Chinese problem has raged for about two and a half years. When the Opposition declared that the old Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (Chen Duxiu), under the influence of wrong instructions from the Comintern, conducted an opportunist policy, this was declared to be a “slander”. The leadership of the Communist Party or China was declared flawless. The well-known Tang Pingshan clamoured, with the general approval of the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI, that
“... as soon as the first manifestations of Trotskyism made their appearance, the Communist Party of China and the Young Communist League immediately adopted a unanimous resolution against Trotskyism.” <[1]
However, notwithstanding all these “achievements”, when events unfolded their tragic logic, which led to the first, and later on to the second, even more terrific débâcle of the revolution, the leaders of the Communist Party of China, from having been a model, were re-christened in twenty-four hours as Mensheviks, and turned out. At the same time, it was declared that the new leaders fully represented the line of the Comintern. But as soon as another serious phase came, the new Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was accused of having passed over (as we have always seen, not in words, but in deeds), to the position of the so-called “permanent revolution”. This was the path chosen also by the representative of the Comintern. This striking and unbelievable fact can be explained only by the glaring “scissors” between the instructions of the ECCI and the real dynamics of the revolution.
We will not dwell here upon the myth of the “permanent revolution” of 1905 which was put forward in 1924 in order to sow confusion and bewilderment. We will confine ourselves to an analysis of how this myth broke down on the question of the Chinese revolution.The first paragraph of the February resolution, from which we have taken the above passage, motivates its negative attitude towards the so-called “permanent revolution” as follows:
“The present period of the Chinese revolution is a period of the bourgeois-democratic revolution which has not been completed either from the economic viewpoint (the agrarian revolution and the abolition of feudal relations) or from the viewpoint of the national struggle against imperialism (the unification of China and the establishment of national independence), or from the viewpoint of the class nature of the government (the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry).”
This motivation is an unbroken chain of blunders and contradictions.
The ECCI taught that the Chinese revolution must guarantee China an opportunity to develop along the path of socialism. This object could be attained only if the revolution did not stop merely at the solution of the bourgeois-democratic tasks, but by growing over from one stage into another, that is, by constantly (or permanently) developing, led China towards socialist development. This is precisely what Marx understood by the term “permanent revolution”. How then can one speak of a non-capitalist path of development of China on the one hand, and on the other, deny the permanent character of the revolution in general?But – objects the resolution of the ECCI – the revolution has not been completed, either from the viewpoint of the agrarian revolution or from the viewpoint of the national struggle against imperialism. Hence the conclusion about the bourgeois-democratic nature of the “present period of the Chinese revolution”. In reality, the “present period” is a period of counter-revolution. The ECCI apparently wants to say that the new rise of the Chinese revolution, or more correctly, the third Chinese revolution, will have a bourgeois-democratic character, in view of the fact that the second Chinese revolution of 1925-27 solved neither the agrarian problem nor the national problem. However, even with this correction, the argumentation rests upon a complete failure to understand the experiences and lessons of the Chinese as well as of the Russian Revolution.
The revolution of February 1917 in Russia left unsolved all the internal and international problems which led to the revolution – feudalism in the villages, the old bureaucracy, the war and the economic ruin. Based upon this, not only the SRs and the Mensheviks, but also a considerable section of the leaders of our own party, tried to show Lenin that the “present period of the revolution is a period of the bourgeois-democratic revolution”. On this essential point, the resolution of the ECCI merely copies the objections made to Lenin in 1917 by the opportunists, against the struggle for the proletarian dictatorship.
Furthermore, the bourgeois-democratic revolution proves to be uncompleted not only from the economic and national standpoints, but also from the “viewpoint of the class nature of the government (the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry)”. This can only mean one thing: the Chinese proletariat has been forbidden to fight for power so long as there is no “real” democratic government at the helm in China. Unfortunately, it is not pointed out where this is to come from.
The confusion is further increased by the fact that the slogan of soviets was rejected for China in the course of two years on the sole ground that soviets can be organized only during the transition towards the proletarian revolution (Stalin’s “theory”). But when the soviet revolution broke out in Canton and its participants arrived at the conclusion that this is the transition to the proletarian revolution, they were accused of “Trotskyism”. Can a party be trained in such a way and can it be helped in this manner to solve the greatest tasks?
To save a hopeless situation, the resolution of the ECCI (breaking with the entire trend of its thought), hastily advances its last argument – from imperialism. We find that the tendency to skip over the bourgeois-democratic phase:
“... is all [!] the more harmful because such a formulation of the question excludes [?] the greatest national peculiarity of the Chinese revolution, which is a semicolonial revolution.”
The only meaning that these senseless words can have is that the imperialist yoke will be overthrown by some sort of dictatorship other than the proletarian. But this means that the “greatest national peculiarity” has been dragged in at the last moment only in order to present in bright colours the Chinese national-bourgeois or the Chinese petty-bourgeois “democracy”. They can have no other meaning. But we have sufficiently examined this only “meaning” in our chapter concerning the “nature of the colonial bourgeoisie”. There is no need to return to this subject.
China is still confronted with an enormous, terrific, bloody and prolonged struggle for such elementary aims as the liquidation of the most “Asiatic” forms of slavery, the national emancipation and unification of the country. But it is precisely from here, as the march of events has shown, that further petty-bourgeois leadership or even half leadership in the revolution is impossible. The unification and emancipation of China is now an international task. It is no less international than the existence of the USSR. This task can be solved only by means of a desperate struggle of the suppressed, hungry and downtrodden masses under the direct leadership of the proletarian vanguard, a struggle not only against world imperialism, but also against its economic and political agency in China – the bourgeoisie, including also the “national” and democratic bourgeois flunkeys. And that is the road, leading towards the proletarian dictatorship.Beginning with April 1917, Lenin explained to his opponents who accused him of having adopted the position of the “permanent revolution”, that the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry was partly realized in the epoch of dual government. He explained later that it was further realized during the first period of soviet power, from November 1917 until July 1918, when the peasants, together with the workers, effected the agrarian revolution, while the working class had not yet proceeded with the confiscation of the factories and plants, but experimented with workers’ control. As to the “class nature of the government”, the SR-Menshevik “dictatorship” gave all that it could give – the dual-government miscarriage. As to the agrarian revolution, it gave birth to a healthy and strong child; only, the proletarian dictatorship acted as the midwife. In other words, that which the theoretical formula of “the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” sought to unite was disunited in the course of the actual class struggle.
The empty shell of the half government was provisionally entrusted to Kerensky and Tsereteli; the real kernel of the agrarian-democratic revolution fell to the lot of the victorious working class. This is the dialectical dissociation of the democratic dictatorship which the leaders of the ECCI failed to understand. They have landed in a political blind alley, mechanically condemning any “skipping over the bourgeois-democratic stage” and endeavouring to guide the historical process by means of circular letters. If we are to understand by the bourgeois-democratic stage the completion of the agrarian revolution by means of a “democratic dictatorship”, then it was none other than the October revolution which boldly “skipped over” the bourgeois-democratic stage. Should it not be condemned for having done so?
Why is it that what was historically inevitable and the highest expression of Bolshevism in Russia, proves to be “Trotskyism” in China? Apparently in accordance with the same logic which proclaims that the theory of the Martynovs, branded for twenty years by Bolshevism in Russia, was suitable for China.
But can such a comparison be made with Russia at all? The slogan of a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry – we reply – was built up by the leaders of the ECCI exclusively and entirely by the method of analogy, but of a formal and literal analogy and not a material and historical analogy. An analogy between China and Russia is absolutely admissible if one finds the proper key to it; this analogy was used excellently by Lenin, and not after the fact but beforehand, as if he had foreseen the future blunders of the epigones. Lenin had hundreds of times to defend the October proletarian revolution which dared to capture power, notwithstanding the fact that the bourgeois-democratic problems had not yet been solved. Precisely because of that, precisely for that purpose, replied Lenin.
On January 16, 1923, Lenin wrote in answer to the pedants who, in their arguments against the capture of power, referred to the economic immaturity of Russia for socialism which was “incontestable” for Lenin [2]:
“For instance, it does not even occur to them that Russia – standing as she does on the borderline between the civilized countries and the countries which this war had for the first time definitely brought into the orbit of civilization, that is, all the Oriental, non-European countries – might therefore and was indeed bound to reveal certain peculiar features which, while of course in keeping with the general line of world development, distinguish her revolution from all previous revolutions in West-European countries, and which introduce certain partial innovations in passing to the Oriental countries.” [3]
The “peculiar feature” which brings Russia closer to the Eastern countries was seen by Lenin in the fact that the young proletariat, at the very dawn of the movement, had to take hold of the broom so as to sweep from its road to socialism all feudal barbarism and every other kind of rubbish.
Consequently, if we are to proceed from Lenin’s analogy between China and Russia, we must say: from the standpoint of the “political nature of the power”, all that could have been obtained through the democratic dictatorship was tried out in China: first in Sun Yat Sen’s Canton, then on the road from Canton to Shanghai which was crowned by the Shanghai coup d’état, and finally in Wuhan, where the Left Guomindang appeared in its chemically pure aspect, that is, according to the instructions of the ECCI, as an organizer of the agrarian revolution, but in reality as its hangman. The social content of the bourgeois-democratic revolution will have to be completed by the first period of the coming dictatorship of the Chinese proletariat and the rural poor. To advance at present the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, when the role not only of the Chinese bourgeoisie but also of “democracy” has already been tested through and through, when it has become absolutely certain that “democracy” will, in the coming struggles, play its role of hangman even more than in the past, simply means to create the means of covering up the new forms of Guomindangism and to set a trap for the proletariat.For the sake of completeness, let us recall here what Lenin said briefly about those Bolsheviks who continued to counterpose to the Socialist-Revolutionary/Menshevik experience, the slogan of a “genuine” democratic dictatorship:
“Whoever speaks only of a ‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ is behind the times, and has passed over to the side of the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle. He should be relegated to the archives of pre-revolutionary ‘Bolshevik’ relics (we might call them the archives of the ‘old’ Bolsheviks).” [4]
These words have a timely ring even today.
Of course, it is by no means a question of calling the Communist Party of China immediately to revolt to capture power. The tempo depends entirely upon the circumstances. The consequences of a defeat cannot be eliminated simply by revising one’s tactics. The revolution is now subsiding. The verbiage, half concealed by the resolution of the ECCI, about an imminent revolutionary resurgence, because numberless people are being executed in China and a terrific commercial and industrial crisis is raging in the country, is criminal light-mindedness and nothing else. After three overwhelming defeats, an economic crisis does not rouse, but on the contrary depresses the proletariat, which, as it is, has already been bled white; the executions only destroy the politically weakened Party. We are in a period of ebb-tide in China and consequently in a period of theoretical deepening, of the critical self-education of the Party, of the creation and strengthening of firm points of support in all the spheres of the labour movement, of the organization of rural nuclei of the leadership and unification of partial, at first defensive and later offensive, battles of the workers and rural poor.How will a new mass movement begin? What circumstances will give the proletarian vanguard, at the head of the multitudinous millions, the necessary revolutionary impulse? This cannot be foretold. Whether internal processes alone will be sufficient or whether an impulse from without will come to the fore the future will show.
There are enough reasons to assume that the crushing of the Chinese revolution, conditioned directly by the false leadership, will permit the Chinese and foreign bourgeoisie to overcome, in some measure, the terrific economic crisis which exists in the country at the present time; naturally, this will be accomplished upon the backs of the workers and peasants. This phase of “stabilization” will again group together the workers, give them cohesion, imbue them with a class confidence in themselves so as later on to set them up against the enemy more sharply, but upon a higher historical plane. It is only with a new rising wave of the proletarian movement that one will be able to speak seriously about the prospect of an agrarian revolution.
It is not excluded that the first period of the coming third revolution may repeat, in a greatly abridged and modified form, the stages which have already been gone through, for example, by presenting some new parody of the “common national front”. But this first period will probably suffice to permit the Communist Party to put before the popular masses its “April theses”, that is, its program and tactics for the capture of power. But what does the draft of the program of the Comintern say on this subject?
“The transition to the proletarian dictatorship is possible here [in China] only after a series of preparatory stages [?], only as a result of a whole period of the growing over [?] of the bourgeois-democratic revolution into the socialist revolution.”
In other words, all the “stages” that have already been gone through are not taken into account. What has been left behind, the draft program still sees ahead. This is exactly what is meant by dragging behind the tail. It leaves gates wide open for new experiments in the spirit of the Guomindang course. Thus, the concealment of the old blunders inevitably prepares the road for new errors.
If we enter the new rise, which will develop at an incomparably more rapid rate than the last one, with the outlived plan of “democratic dictatorship”, there can be no doubt that the third revolution will be lost just as the second one was.Adventurism as a Product of Opportunism
The second paragraph of the same resolution of the February Plenum of the ECCI says:
“The first wave of the broad revolutionary movement of the workers and peasants which, in the main, proceeded under the slogans and to a considerable extent under the leadership of the Communist Party, is over. It ended in a number of centres of the revolutionary movement with heavy defeats for the workers and peasants, with the physical extermination of the Communists and of the revolutionary cadres of the labour and peasant movement in general.” [Our emphasis.]
When the “wave” was surging high, the ECCI said that the movement was entirely under the blue banner and leadership of the Guomindang which even took the place of soviets. It is precisely on that ground that the Communist Party was subordinated to the Guomindang. But that is exactly why the revolutionary movement ended with “heavy defeats”. Now, when these defeats have been recognized, an attempt is being made to delete the Guomindang from the past as if it had never existed, as if the ECCI had not proclaimed the blue banner its own.
Formerly we were told that there were no defeats either in Shanghai or in Wuhan, there were merely transitions of the revolution “into a higher phase”. That is what we were taught. Now the sum total of these transitions is suddenly declared to be “heavy defeats for the workers and peasants”. However, in order to mask to some extent this unprecedented political bankruptcy of perspective and judgement, the concluding paragraph of the resolution says:
The ECCI makes it the duty of all sections of the Comintern to fight against the Social-Democratic and Trotskyist slander to the effect that the Chinese revolution has been liquidated [?].
In the first paragraph of the resolution we were told that “Trotskyism” consisted of estimating the Chinese revolution as permanent, that is, a revolution which is now growing over from the bourgeois to the socialist phase. From the last paragraph, we learn that according to the “Trotskyists”, “the Chinese revolution has been liquidated”. How can a liquidated revolution be a permanent revolution? This is Bukharin all the way through. Only complete and reckless irresponsibility permits of such contradictions which undermine all revolutionary thought at its roots.
If we are to understand by the “liquidation” of the revolution the fact that the offensive of the workers and the peasants has been set back and drowned in blood, that the masses are in a state of retreat, that before another onslaught there must be, apart from many other things, a molecular process at work among the masses which requires a certain period of time the duration of which cannot be determined beforehand; if “liquidation” is to be understood in this way, it does not in any way differ from the “heavy defeats” which the ECCI has at last been compelled to recognize.Or are we to understand the term liquidation literally, as the actual elimination of the Chinese revolution, that is, of the very possibility and inevitability of its revival at a new stage? One can speak of such a perspective seriously only in two cases: if China were doomed to dismemberment and complete ruin – an assumption for which there is not the slightest reason; or else, if the Chinese bourgeoisie were to prove capable of solving the basic problems of Chinese life in its own non-revolutionary way. Is it not this last variant which the theoreticians of the “bloc of four classes”, who forced the Communist Party under the yoke of the bourgeoisie, seek to ascribe to us now?
History repeats itself. The blind who could not grasp the extent of the defeat of 1923, accused us for a year and a half of looking at the German revolution as “liquidators”. Yet even this lesson, which cost the International so dearly, did them no good. At the present time, picking up their old formulas, they simply apply them no longer to Germany, but to China. It is true that the need of finding “liquidators” is far more acute than it was four years ago; for at the present time, it is too obvious that if anybody did “liquidate” the second Chinese revolution, it was the authors of the course towards the Guomindang.
The strength of Marxism lies in its ability to foretell. In this sense, the Opposition can point to a complete confirmation of its prognoses by experience: first, concerning the Guomindang as a whole, then concerning the “Left” Guomindang and the Wuhan government, and finally, concerning the “deposit” made on the third revolution, that is, on the Canton insurrection. What other confirmation could there be of a correct theoretical standpoint?
The very same opportunist line which, by the policy of capitulation to the bourgeoisie, already brought the revolution, at its first two phases, the heaviest defeats, “grew over” in the third phase, into a policy of adventurous attacks upon the bourgeoisie, and made the defeat final.
If the leadership had not been in such a hurry yesterday to skip over the defeats which it had brought about, it would have begun by explaining to the Communist Party of China that victory is not gained at one blow, that on the road to insurrection there is still a period of intense, constant and fierce struggles for political influence on the workers and peasants.
On September 17, 1927, we said to the Presidium of the ECCI:
“Today’s papers report that the revolutionary army has taken Swatow. The armies of Ho Lung and Ye Ting have now been marching for a few weeks. Pravda calls these armies revolutionary armies. But the question I ask is: what prospects does the movement of the revolutionary army which captured Swatow open up before the Chinese revolution? What are the slogans of the movement? What is its program? What should be its organizational forms? What has become of the slogan of soviets, which Pravda suddenly put forward (for a day) in July?”
Without first organizing the Communist Party against the Guomindang in its entirety, without agitation among the masses for soviets and a soviet government, without an independent mobilization of the masses under the slogan of the agrarian revolution and national emancipation, without the creation, extension and strengthening of the local soviets of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies, the uprising of Ho Lung and Ye Ting, even leaving aside their opportunist policy, could not fail to be an isolated adventure, a pseudo-Communist Makhno feat; it could not but clash against its own isolation, and it has clashed.
The Canton insurrection was a broader and deeper rehearsal of Ho Lung’s and Ye Ting’s adventure, only with infinitely more tragic consequences.The February resolution of the ECCI combats certain putschistic tendencies in the Communist Party of China, that is, the tendencies towards armed skirmishes. It does not say, however, that these tendencies are a reaction to the entire opportunist policy of 1925-27, and an unavoidable consequence of the purely military orders, handed down from above, to “change step” without appraising all that had been done, without an open revaluation of the basis of the tactics, without a clear prospect. Ho Lung’s march and the Canton insurrection were (and under such circumstances, had to be) outbursts of putschism.
A real antidote to putschism, as well as to opportunism, cannot be had without a clear understanding of the truth that, from now on, it devolves entirely upon the Communist Party of China to guide the armed insurrection of the workers and the poor peasants, to capture power and to institute a revolutionary dictatorship. If it thoroughly assimilates an understanding of this, it will be little inclined to improvise military attacks on towns, or armed insurrections in traps, or to chase humbly after the enemy’s banner.
The resolution of the ECCI condemns itself to sterility by the fact alone that while arguing most abstractly concerning the inadmissibility of skipping over stages and the harmfulness of putschism, it ignores entirely the class content of the Canton insurrection and the short-lived soviet régime which it brought into existence. We Oppositionists hold that this insurrection was an adventure of the leadership in an effort to “save its prestige”. But it is clear to us that even an adventure develops according to certain definite laws which are determined by the structure of the social environment. That is why we seek to discover in the Canton insurrection the features of the coming stage of the Chinese revolution. These features correspond fully with our theoretical analysis of the Canton uprising. But how much more imperative is it for the ECCI, which holds that the Canton rising was a correct and proper link in the chain of struggle, to give a clear class characterization of the Canton insurrection. Yet, there is not a word about this in the resolution of the ECCI, although the Plenum met immediately after the Canton events. Is this not the most convincing proof that the present leadership of the Comintern, stubbornly pursuing a false policy, is compelled to play on alleged errors of 1905 and other years, without daring to approach the Canton insurrection of 1927, the significance of which completely upsets the schema of the revolution in the East which is outlined in the draft program?
Soviets and Revolution
In the February resolution of the ECCI, the representative of the Comintern, “comrade N. and others”, are made responsible for the “absence of an elected soviet in Canton as an organ of insurrection” (emphasis in the original). In this charge we have, in reality, an astounding admission.
The report in Pravda, written on the basis of first-hand documents (no.31), stated that there was a soviet government established in Canton. But it said nothing about the fact that the Canton Soviet was not an elected organ, that is, that it was not a soviet – for how can there be a soviet which has not been elected? We learn this for the first time from the resolution. Let us reflect for a moment on the significance of this fact. The ECCI tells us now that a soviet is necessary for an armed insurrection, but not before. But when the insurrection is decided upon, it appears that there is no soviet! To set up an elected soviet is not at all an easy matter: it is necessary that the masses should know from experience what a soviet is, that they should understand its form, that they should have accustomed themselves in the past to the election of soviets. Of this, there was not a sign in China, as the slogan of soviets was declared to be a Trotskyist slogan precisely in the period when it should have become the nerve centre of the entire movement. When, however, a date was fixed in all haste for an insurrection so as to skip over their own defeats, they simultaneously had to appoint a soviet. If we were not to expose the roots of this error to the very bottom, the slogan of soviets itself might be turned into a noose for strangling the revolution.Lenin explained to the Mensheviks in his time that the basic historical task of the soviets is to organize, or to help to organize, the capture of power, so that on the morrow after the victory, it may become the machinery of that power. The epigones – not disciples, but epigones – draw from this the conclusion that soviets may be organized only when the twelfth hour of the insurrection has struck. On the basis of Lenin’s broad generalization they write, post factum, a short prescription which does not serve the interests of the revolution but acts to their detriment.
Before the Bolshevik soviets captured power in October 1917, the SR and Menshevik soviets had existed for nine months. Twelve years prior to that, the first revolutionary soviets existed in Petersburg and in Moscow and in many other towns. Before the soviet of 1905 embraced the factories and plants of the capital, there was a printers’ soviet in Moscow during the strike, and a few months prior to that, in 1905, a mass strike in Ivanovo-Voznesensk set up a leading committee which already presented all the principal features of a soviet of workers’ deputies. Between the first attempt at setting up a soviet of deputies and the gigantic experiment of setting up a soviet government, more than twelve years rolled by. Of course, such a period is not absolutely essential for all countries, China included. But to think that the Chinese workers are capable of organizing soviets on the basis of a short prescription which is substituted for Lenin’s broad generalization, means the replacement of the dialectics of revolutionary action by a pedant’s impotent and importunate decree. Soviets must be set up not on the eve of uprisings, with the slogan of the immediate capture of power – for if the matter has reached the point of the capture of power, if the masses are prepared for an armed insurrection without soviets, it means that there have been other organizational forms and methods which made possible the performance of the preparatory work to ensure the success of the uprising: the question of soviets then becomes of secondary importance and is reduced to a question of organizational technique, or still lower, to a question of name. The task of the soviets is not merely to issue the call for the insurrection or to carry out that insurrection, but to lead the masses toward the insurrection through the necessary stages. At first, the soviet does not rally the masses to the slogan of an armed insurrection, but to partial slogans; it is only later, step by step, that they are brought towards the insurrection without scattering them on the road and without allowing the vanguard to become isolated from the class as a whole. The soviet appears most frequently and primarily in connection with strikes which have before them the prospect of revolutionary development, but are, at the given moment, limited to economic demands. The masses must feel and understand, while in action, that the soviet is their organization, that it marshals their forces for the struggle, for resistance, for self-defence, and for the offensive. They can feel and understand this not through a one-day action and in general not through one act, but through the experience of several weeks, months and perhaps years, with intermissions or without. That is why only a bureaucratic leadership of epigones can restrain the rising and mutinous masses from the creation of soviets, under conditions when the country is passing through a period of revolutionary upheavals, and when the working class and the poor peasants see before them the prospect of capturing power, even if only in one of the later phases, and even if that prospect can be envisaged in the given phase only by a small minority. That was always our conception of the soviets. We valued the soviet as that broad and elastic organizational form which is grasped by the masses who have just awakened, in the very first phase of their revolutionary action, and which is capable of uniting the working class in its entirety, regardless of how large a section of it has, in the given phase, already matured to the point of understanding the task of capturing power.
Is any further documentary evidence necessary? Here, for instance, is what Lenin wrote about the soviets in the epoch of the first revolution:
“The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party [that was then the name of the Party] has never refused, at moments of greater or lesser revolutionary unrest, to utilize certain non-party organizations, such as soviets of workers’ deputies, in order to strengthen the influence of the Social Democrats over the working class and to consolidate the Social-Democratic labour movement.” (Our emphasis) [5]
One could cite such historical quotations without number. But the question appears to be clear enough without that.
In contradiction to this, the epigones have converted the soviets into a parade uniform which the Party puts on the proletariat on the eve of the capture of power. But that is just when we find that soviets cannot be improvised in twenty-four hours, by order, with the direct object of an armed insurrection. Such experiments must inevitably assume a fictitious character and the absence of the conditions necessary for the capture of power be marked by the external ceremonial of the soviet system. That is what happened in Canton, where the soviet was simply appointed to pay respects to the ritual. That is where the epigones’ formulation of the question leads to.In the polemics on the Chinese events, the Opposition was accused of the following alleged crying contradiction: whereas at the beginning of 1926 the Opposition came forward with the slogan of soviets for China, its representatives spoke against the slogan of soviets for Germany in the autumn of 1923. On no other point, perhaps, has the scholastic spirit in political thought been expressed so strikingly as on this. Yes, we demanded for China, at the right time, the creation of soviets as independent organizations of workers and peasants, when the wave ran high. The chief significance of the soviets was to be that of setting up the workers and peasants against the bourgeoisie of the Guomindang and its left-wing agency. The slogan of soviets in China meant, in the first place, the break-up of the suicidal, shameful “bloc of the four classes” and the withdrawal of the Communist Party from the Guomindang. The centre of gravity consequently lay not in a sterile organizational form, but in a class political line.
In the autumn of 1923 in Germany, on the contrary, it was a question of organizational form only. As a result of the extreme passivity, the backwardness, and the tardiness of the leadership of the Comintern and of the Communist Party of Germany, the favourable moment for a call for the organization of soviets was missed; under pressure from below, the factory Committees occupied in the labour movement of Germany, by the autumn of 1923, the place which, provided the Communist Party had followed a correct and daring policy, would no doubt have been occupied much more successfully by soviets.
The acuteness of the situation had in the meantime reached its highest degree. To lose further time would mean definitely to miss a revolutionary situation. The uprising was finally put on the agenda with very little time left. To advance the slogan of soviets under such conditions would have been the greatest doctrinaire stupidity conceivable. The soviet is not a talisman which has within itself the power of saving everything. In a situation such as had then developed, the creation of soviets in a hurry would only have duplicated the factory committees. It would have become necessary to deprive the latter of their revolutionary functions and to pass these over to the newly created soviets which enjoyed no authority as yet. And at what time? Under conditions when each day counted. This would have meant to substitute for revolutionary action a most injurious game of playing with trifles in the field of organization.
That the soviet organizational form can be of gigantic importance is irrefutable, provided, however, that it reflects a correct political line at the proper time. It can, on the other hand, be of no less negative importance if it is converted into a fiction, a talisman, an empty shell. German soviets, created at the very last moment in the autumn of 1923, would have added nothing politically, they would only have caused organizational confusion. What happened in Canton was even worse. The soviet which was created in a hurry, only so as to observe the ritual, was merely a camouflage for an adventurist putsch. That is why we found out, after it was all over, that the Canton Soviet was just one of those old Chinese dragons – it was simply drawn on paper. The policy of marionettes and paper dragons is not our policy. We were against improvising soviets by telegraph in Germany in September 1923. We were for the creation of soviets in China in 1926. We were against carnival soviets in Canton in December 1927. There are no contradictions there. On the contrary, we see in it a deep integral understanding of the dynamics of the revolutionary movement and of its organizational forms.
The question of the role and the significance of the soviets, which has been distorted, confused and obscured by the theory and practice of recent years, has not been illuminated in the least in the draft program.
Notes
1. Stenographic report, p.205.
2. On Revolution, Vol.18, Part 2, p.119.
3. ibid., p.118.
4. Letters on Tactics, Vol.XIV, Part 1, p.29.
5. Draft Resolutions for the 5th Congress of the RSDLP, Vol.13, p.215.
Leon Trotsky
Problems of the Chinese Revolution
The Chinese Question
After the Sixth Congress
October 4, 1928
Alma Ata
The lessons and the problems in the strategy and tactics of the Chinese revolution constitute at the present time the greatest teaching for the international proletariat. The experience gained in 1917 has been altered, disfigured and falsified to the point of unrecognizability by the epigones brought to power on the waves of defeats of the world’s working class. Henceforth, one is compelled to extract the 1917 revolution from beneath mountains of impurities under which it has been buried. The revolution has verified the policy of Bolshevism by resorting to the method of reductio ad absurdum. The strategy of the Communist International in China was a gigantic game of “losers win”. The young generation of revolutionists must be taught the alphabet of Bolshevism by using the Chinese antithesis contrasted to the experience gained in October. China itself has a world importance. But what happens in this country decides not only its own fate, but the destiny of the Communist International in the full sense of the world. Not only has the Sixth Congress not drawn up the correct balance or introduced clarity, but on the contrary, it has consecrated the errors committed and has supplemented them by a new confusion which can create for the Chinese Communist Party a hopeless situation for a whole series of years. The bureaucratic thunderbolts of excommunication will manifestly fail to reduce us to silence when the fate of the international revolution is at stake. It is just those who excommunicate us who are the ones directly responsible for the defeats suffered; that is why they dread the shedding of light.
* * *
In the past five years, no party has suffered so cruelly from the opportunist leadership of the Communist International as the Chinese CP. We have had in China a perfect example (and that is just the reason why it led to a catastrophe) of the application of the Menshevik policy to a revolutionary epoch. What is more, Menshevism had a monopoly at its disposal, for it was protected against Bolshevik criticism by the authority of the Communist International and by the material apparatus of the soviet power. This combination of circumstances is unique in its kind. As a result, one of the greatest revolutions, according to its possibilities, was completely confiscated by the Chinese bourgeoisie; it served to strengthen the latter, something which, from all the data in our possession, the bourgeoisie had no reason to count on. The mistakes of opportunism have not yet been repaired. The whole course of the Congress discussion, the reports of Bukharin and Kuusinen, the speeches of the Chinese Communists – all these indicate that the line of conduct followed by the leadership in Chinese politics not only was false but remains false to this day. Passing over from the opportunism openly practised in the form of collaboration (1924-27), it made an abrupt zig-zag at the end of 1927 by resorting to adventures. After the Canton insurrection, it rejected putschism and passed into the third phase, the most sterile one, seeking to combine the old opportunistic premises with a purely formal, ineffectual radicalism, which at a certain period bore in Russia, the names of “ultimatism” and “Otzovism”, and which constitutes the worst variety of ultra-leftism.
No Chinese Communist can any longer take a single step forward now without first having estimated at its right value the opportunist leadership which led to destruction in the three stages (Shanghai, Wuhan, Canton) and without having completely understood the immense break produced by these defeats in the social and political, the internal and international position of China.The Congress discussion showed what gross and perilous illusions still subsist in the conceptions of Chinese Communist leaders. While defending the Canton insurrection, one of the Chinese delegates referred triumphantly to the fact that after the defeat suffered in this city, the membership of the Party did not decrease but grew. Even here, thousands of miles from the theatre of the revolutionary events, it seems incredible that such monstrous information could have been presented to a world Congress without immediately encountering an indignant refutation. However, thanks to observations made on another point by a speaker, we learn, that while the CPC has gained (for how long?) tens of thousands of new members among the peasants, it has on the other hand lost the majority of its workers. It is this menacing process, characterizing without the possibility of error a certain phase of decline of the Party, that the Chinese Communists describe at the Congress as a sign of growth and progress. While the revolution is beaten in the cities and in the most important centres of the workers’ and the peasants’ movement, there will always be, especially in a country as vast as China, fresh regions, fresh just because they are backward, containing not yet exhausted revolutionary forces. On the distant periphery, the beginnings of the revolutionary wave will yet swell for a long time. Without having direct data on the situation in the Chinese-Muslim regions of the south-west, it is difficult to speak with precision of the probability of a revolutionary ferment being produced there in the approaching period. But the whole past of China renders such an eventuality possible. It is quite evident that this movement would only be a belated echo of the battles of Shanghai, Hankow and Canton. After the decisive defeat suffered by the revolution in the cities, the Party, for a certain time, can still draw tens of thousands of new members from the awakening peasantry. This fact is important as a precursory sign of the great possibilities in the future. But in the period under consideration it is only one form of the dissolution and the liquidation of the CPC, for, by losing its proletarian nucleus, it ceases to be in conformity with its historical destiny.
An epoch of revolutionary decline is by its very essence pregnant with dangers for a revolutionary party. In 1852, Engels said that such a party, having let a revolutionary situation escape it, or having suffered a decisive defeat in it, inevitably disappears from the scene for a certain period of history. The counter-revolutionary epoch strikes a revolutionary party all the more cruelly if the crushing of the revolution is caused, not by an unfavourable relationship of forces, but by the patent and indisputable blunders of the leadership, as was exactly the case in China. Add to all this the brief existence of the Chinese party, the absence in it of firmly tempered cadres and solid traditions; add to it, finally, the alterations made so light-heartedly in the leadership which, there as everywhere else, was converted into the responsible manager expiating the mistakes of the Communist International. Taken together, all this creates veritably fatal conditions for the CPC during the counter-revolutionary epoch, the duration of which cannot be determined in advance.
It is only by clearly and courageously posing the fundamental questions of today and yesterday that one can avert for the CPC the fate which Engels spoke of, in other words, liquidation, from the political point of view, for a certain period.
We have examined – the class dynamics of the Chinese revolution in a special chapter of the criticism to which we submitted the fundamental theses of the draft program of the Communist International. Today, we see no need of adding anything to this chapter, or, for that matter, of introducing any modifications into it. We arrived there at the conclusion that the subsequent development of the Chinese revolution can only take place in the form of the struggle of the Chinese proletariat, drawing hundreds of millions of poor peasants to the conquest of power. The solution of fundamental bourgeois-democratic problems in China depends entirely on the dictatorship of the proletariat. To oppose to this the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry is to devote oneself to a reactionary attempt which seeks to drag the revolution back to stages already traversed by the coalition in the Guomindang. This general political diagnosis, containing the strategical line of conduct for the coming period of the Chinese revolution, or more exactly, of the third Chinese revolution of the future, in no way annuls the question of the tactical problems of today and tomorrow.
1) The Permanent Revolution and the Canton Insurrection
In November 1927, the plenum of the Central Committee of the Chinese party decided that:
The objective circumstances existing at the present time in China are such that the duration of a directly revolutionary situation will be measured not by weeks or by months, but by long years. The Chinese revolution has a lasting character, but on the other hand, it has no stops. By its character, it constitutes what Marx called a permanent revolution.
Is this right? Intelligently understood, it is right. But it must be understood according to Marx and not according to Lominadze. Bukharin, who showed up the latter precisely for having employed this formula, was no closer to Marx than the author of it. In capitalist society, every real revolution, above all if it takes place in a large country, and more particularly now, in the imperialist epoch, tends to transform itself into a permanent revolution; in other words, not to come to a halt at any of the stages it reaches, not to confine itself up to the complete transformation of society, up to the final abolition of class distinctions, consequently, up to the complete and final suppression of the very possibility of new revolutions. That is just what the Marxian conception of the proletarian revolution consists of, being distinguished by that from the bourgeois revolution, limited by its national scope as much as by its specific objectives. The Chinese revolution contains within itself tendencies to become permanent in so far as it contains the possibility of the conquest of power by the proletariat. To speak of the permanent revolution without this and outside of it, is like trying to fill the cask of the Danaïds. Only the proletariat, after having seized the state power and having transformed it into an instrument of struggle against all the forms of oppression and exploitation, in the interior of the country as well as beyond its frontiers, gains therewith the possibility of assuring a continuous character to the revolution, in other words, of leading it to the construction of a complete socialist society. A necessary condition for this is to carry out consistently a policy which prepares the proletariat in good time for the conquest of power. Now, Lominadze has made of the possibility of a permanent development of the revolution (on the condition that the Communist policy be correct) a scholastic formula guaranteeing at one blow and for all time a revolutionary situation “for many years”. The permanent character of the revolution thus becomes a law placing itself above history, independent of the policy of the leadership and of the material development of revolutionary events. As always in such cases, Lominadze and company resolved to announce their metaphysical formula regarding the permanent character of the revolution only after the political leadership of Stalin, Bukharin, Chen Duxiu and Tang Pingshan had thoroughly sabotaged the revolutionary struggle.
After having assured the continuity of the revolution for many years, the plenum of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, freed from any further doubts, deduces from this formula conditions favourable to the insurrection.
“ Not only is the strength of the revolutionary movement of the toiling masses of China not yet exhausted, but it is precisely only now that it is beginning to manifest itself in a new advance of the revolutionary struggle. All this obliges the plenum of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party to recognize that a directly revolutionary situation exists today (November 1927) throughout China.”
The Canton insurrection was deduced from a similar evaluation of the situation with perfect inevitability. Had a revolutionary situation really existed, the mere fact of the defeat of Canton would have been a special episode, and in any case, would not have transformed the uprising of this city into an adventure. Even in face of unfavourable conditions for the insurrection of Canton itself or its environs, the leadership would have had as its duty to do all that was necessary to realize the revolt most rapidly in order thus to disperse and weaken the forces of the enemy and to facilitate the triumph of the uprising in the other parts of the country.
However, not after “many years” but after a few months, it had to be acknowledged that the political situation had declined abruptly, and that before the Canton insurrection. The campaign of Ho Lung and Ye Ting were already developing in an atmosphere of revolutionary decline, the workers were separating themselves from the revolution, the centrifugal tendencies were gaining in strength. This is in no way contradictory to the existence of peasant movements in various provinces. That is how it always is.Let the Chinese Communist ask themselves now: Would they have dared to decide upon fixing the Canton insurrection for December had they understood that for the given period the fundamental forces of the revolution were exhausted and that the great decline had commenced? It is clear that if they had understood in good time this radical break in the situation, they would in no case have put on the order of the day the appeal for the armed uprising in Canton. The only way of explaining the policy of the leadership, in fixing and carrying out this revolt, is that it did not understand the meaning and the consequences of the defeats in Shanghai and Hupeh. There can be no other interpretation of it. But the lack of understanding can all the less excuse the leadership of the Communist International since the Opposition had warned in good time against the new situation and the new dangers. It found itself accused for this, by idiots and calumniators, of having the spirit of liquidators.
The resolution of the Sixth Congress confirms the fact that an inadequate resistance to “putschistic moods” produced the fruitless uprisings in Hunan, in Hupeh, etc. What is to be understood by “putschistic moods”? The Chinese Communists, in conformity with the directions of Stalin and Bukharin, judged that the situation in China was directly revolutionary and that the partial revolts had every chance of being extended successfully to the point of becoming a general insurrection. In this way, the launching of these surprise attacks resulted from an erroneous estimation of the circumstances in which China found itself towards the second half of 1927, as a result of the defeats suffered.
In Moscow, they could prattle about the “directly revolutionary situation”, accuse the Oppositionists of being liquidators, while providing for themselves beforehand against the future (especially after Canton) by making reservations on the subject of “putschism”. But on the theatre of events, in China itself, every honest revolutionist was duty bound to do everything he could in his corner to hasten the uprising, since the Communist International had declared that the general situation was propitious for an insurrection on a national scale. It is on this question that the régime of duplicity reveals its deliberately criminal character.
At the same time the resolution of the Congress says:
“The Congress deems it entirely inexact to attempt to consider the Canton insurrection as a putsch. It was a heroic rearguard [?] battle of the Chinese proletariat, fought in the course of the period which has just passed in the Chinese revolution; in spite of the crude mistakes committed by the leadership, this uprising will remain the standard of the new soviet phase of the revolution.”
Here confusion reaches its zenith. The heroism of the Cantonese proletariat is brought in evidence as a screen to cover up the faulty leadership, not of Canton (which the resolution casts off completely) but of Moscow, which only yesterday spoke not of a “rearguard battle” but of the overthrow of the government of the Guomindang.
Why is the appeal to insurrection denounced as putschism after the experience of Canton? Because, thanks to this experience, the inopportuneness of the uprising was confirmed. The leadership of the Communist International had need of a new object lesson in order to discover what already appeared quite clear without it. But are not these supplementary lessons for backward people, given in life, too costly to the proletariat?Lominadze, one of the infant prodigies of revolutionary strategy, swore at the Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that the Canton insurrection was necessary, right and salutary, precisely because it inaugurated an era of the direct struggle of the workers and peasants for the conquest of power. He met with agreement. At the Sixth Congress, Lominadze recognized that the insurrection did not inaugurate an era of triumph but concluded one of defeat. Nevertheless, just as before, the uprising is considered necessary, right and salutary. Its name has simply been changed: from a clash between the vanguard of the forces at hand, they made a “rearguard battle”. Everything else remains as in the past. The attempt to escape the criticism of the Opposition by hiding behind the heroism of the Cantonese workers has as much weight as, let us say for example, the attempt of General Rennenkampf to take shelter behind the heroism of the Russian soldiers whom he drowned by his strategy in the Masurian swamps. The proletarians of Canton are guilty, without having committed mistakes, simply of an excess of confidence in their leadership. Their leadership was guilty of having had a blind confidence in the leadership of the Communist International which combined political blindness with the spirit of adventurism.
It is radically false to compare the Canton insurrection of 1927 with that of Moscow in 1905. During the whole of 1905, the Russian proletariat rose from one plane to the other, wresting concessions from the enemy, sowing disintegration in its ranks, concentrating around its vanguard ever greater popular masses. The October 1905 strike was an immense victory, having a world historical importance. The Russian proletariat had its own party, which was not subordinated to any bourgeois or petty-bourgeois discipline. The self-esteem, the intransigence, the spirit of offensive of the Party, rose from stage to stage. The Russian proletariat had created soviets in dozens of cities, not on the eve of the revolt but during the process of a strike struggle of the masses. Through these soviets, the Party established contact with the vast masses; it registered their revolutionary spirit; it mobilized them. The tsarist government, seeing that each day brought a change in the relationship of forces favourable to the revolution, passed over to the counter-offensive and thus prevented the revolutionary leadership from being able to gain the time needed for continuing to mobilize its forces. Under these conditions, the leadership could and should have staked everything so as to be able to test by deeds the state of mind of the last decisive factor: the army. This was the meaning of the insurrection of December 1905.
In China, events developed in a directly opposite way. The Stalinist policy of the Chinese Communist Party consisted of a series of capitulations before the bourgeoisie, accustoming the workers to support patiently the yoke of the Guomindang. In March 1926 the Party capitulated before Chiang Kai-shek; it consolidated his position while weakening its own; it discredited the banner of Marxism; it converted itself into an auxiliary instrument of the bourgeois leadership. The Party extinguished the agrarian movement and the workers’ strikes by putting into practice the directions of the Executive Committee of the Communist International on the bloc of four classes. It renounced the organization of soviets so as not to disturb the situation at the rear of the Chinese generals. It thus delivered to Chiang Kai-shek the workers of Shanghai, bound hand to foot. After the crushing of Shanghai, the Party, in conformity with the directions of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, placed all its hopes in the Left Guomindang, the so-called “centre of the agrarian revolution”. The Communists entered the Wuhan government, which repressed the strike struggle and the peasants’ uprisings. They thus prepared a new and still crueller devastation of the revolutionary masses. After all this, an instruction entirely permeated with the spirit of adventurism was issued, ordering an immediate orientation towards the insurrection. It is from this that was first born the adventure of Ho Lung and Ye Ting, and the even more painful one of the Canton coup d’état.
No, all this does not resemble the insurrection of December 1905 at all.
If an opportunist calls the events of Canton an adventure it is because it was an insurrection. If a Bolshevik employs the same designation for these facts, it is because it was an inopportune insurrection. It is not for nothing that a German proverb says that when two men say the same thing it does not mean the same thing. The officials à la Thälmann can continue, on the subject of the Chinese revolt, to recount to the German Communists the “apostasy” of the Opposition. We will know how to teach the German Communists to turn their backs on the Thälmanns. In actuality, the question of evaluating the Canton insurrection is the question of the teachings drawn from the Third Congress, in other words, of a lesson where the life of the German proletariat was at stake.
In March 1921 the Communist Party of Germany sought to engage in an insurrection by basing itself upon an active minority of the proletariat in the face of the passive spirit of the majority, which was tired, distrustful, expectant, as a result of all the preceding defeats. Those who directed this attempt at the time also sought to take shelter behind the heroism of which the workers gave proof in the March battles. However, the Third Congress did not congratulate them for this attempt when it condemned the spirit of adventurism of the leadership. What was our judgement in those days of the March events?
“Their essence,” we wrote, “is summed up in the fact that the young Communist Party, alarmed by a manifest decline in the workers’ movement, made a desperate attempt to profit by the intervention of one of the most active detachments of the proletariat in order to ‘electrify’ the working class and, if possible, to bring matters to a decisive battle.” [1]
Thälmann has not understood a thing of all this.
From July 1923 on, we demanded, to the great astonishment of Clara Zetkin, Warski and other old, very venerable but incorrigible Social Democrats, that the date of the insurrection in Germany be fixed. Then, at the beginning of 1924, when Zetkin declared that at that moment she envisaged the eventuality of an uprising with much “more optimism” than during the preceding year, we could only shrug our shoulders.
“An elementary truth of Marxism says that the tactics of the socialist proletariat cannot be the same in face of a revolutionary situation as when this situation does not exist.” [2]
Today, everybody acknowledges this ABC verbally, but how far they still are from applying it in reality!
It is not a question of knowing what the Communists must do when the masses are rebelling of their own accord. That is a special question. When the masses arise, the Communists must be with them, organizing and instructing them. But the question is posed differently: What did the leadership do and what should it have done during the weeks and months that immediately preceded the Canton insurrection? The leadership was duty bound to explain to the revolutionary workers that as a consequence of defeats, due to an erroneous policy, the relationship of forces had veered entirely in favour of the bourgeoisie. The great masses of workers who had fought tremendous battles, dispersed by the encounters, abandoned the field of battle. It is absurd to believe that one can march towards a peasant insurrection when the proletarian masses are departing. They must be grouped together again, fight defensive battles, avoiding a general battle, which obviously does not hold out any hope. If in spite of such a work of clarification and education, contrary to it, the masses of Canton had rebelled (which is very unlikely) the Communists would have had to put themselves at their head. But it is just the reverse that happened. The uprising had been commanded in advance, deliberately and with premeditation, based upon a false appreciation of the whole atmosphere. One of the detachments of the proletariat was drawn into a struggle which obviously held out no hope, and made easier for the enemy the annihilation of the vanguard of the working class. Not to say this openly, is to deceive the Chinese workers and to prepare new defeats. The Sixth Congress did not say it.Does all this signify that the Canton insurrection was only an adventure, allowing of but one conclusion, that is, that the leadership was entirely incompetent? No, that is not the sense of our criticism. The Canton insurrection showed that even after enormous defeats, with the manifest decline of the revolution, even in non-industrialized Canton, with its petty-bourgeois traditions of Sun-Yat-Sen-ism, the proletariat was able to rise in revolt, to fight valiantly and to conquer power. We have here a fact of enormous importance. It shows anew now considerable is the weight of the proletariat in its own right, how great is the political role which it can eventually play, even if the working class is relatively weak in numbers, in a historically backward country, where the majority of the population is composed of peasants and scattered petty-bourgeois. This fact, once more after 1905 and 1917, completely demolishes the philistines à la Kuusinen, Martynov and consorts, who teach us that one cannot dream of speaking of the dictatorship of the proletariat in “agrarian” China. Yet the Martynovs and the Kuusinens are at the present time the daily inspirers of the Communist International.
The Canton insurrection showed at the same time that at the decisive moment the proletariat was unable to find, even in the petty-bourgeois capital of Sun-Yat-Sen-ism, a single political ally having a distinct form, not even among the debris of the Guomindang, of the left or the ultra-left. This means that the vital task of establishing the alliance between the workers and the poor peasants in China devolves exclusively and directly upon the Communist Party. The accomplishment of this task is one of the conditions for the triumph of the coming third Chinese revolution. And the victory of the latter will restore the power to the vanguard of the proletariat, supported by the union of the workers and the poor peasants.
* * *
If “apostasy” must be spoken of, the traitors to the heroes and the victims of the Canton insurrection are those who seek to rid themselves of the teachings of this uprising in order to conceal the crimes of the leadership. The lesson to draw is the following:
- The Canton insurrection showed that only the proletarian vanguard in China is capable of carrying out the uprising and of capturing power. The revolt showed, after the experience of collaboration between the Communist Party and the Guomindang, the complete lack of vitality and the reactionary character of the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, opposed to the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat drawing the poor peasants behind it.
- The Canton insurrection, conceived and executed contrary to the course of development of the revolution, accelerates and deepens the decline of the latter, facilitating the annihilation of the proletarian forces by the bourgeois counter-revolution. This stamps the inter-revolutionary period with a painful, chronic and lasting character. The greatest problem now is the renascence of the Communist Party as the organization of the vanguard of the proletariat.
These two conclusions are equally important. It is only by considering them simultaneously that the situation can be judged and the perspectives fixed. The Sixth Congress did neither the one nor the other. By taking as its point of departure the resolutions of the Ninth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (February 1928) which assured us that the Chinese revolution “is continuing”, the Congress slipped up in its flight to the point of declaring that this revolution has now entered into a preparatory phase. But this flight will not help anything. We must speak clearly and sincerely, recognize firmly, openly, brutally the breach that has taken place, adapt the tactics to it and at the same time follow a line of conduct which leads the vanguard of the proletariat through the insurrection to its preponderant role in the soviet China of the future.
2) The Inter-Revolutionary Period and the Tasks
That Present Themselves in the Course of it
Bolshevik policy is characterized not only by its revolutionary scope, but also by its political realism. These two aspects of Bolshevism are inseparable. The greatest task is to know how to recognize in time a revolutionary situation and to exploit it to the end. But it is no less important to understand when this situation is exhausted and is converted, from the political point of view, into its antithesis. Nothing is more fruitless and worthless than to show one’s fist after the battle. That, however, is just where Bukharin’s speciality lies. First, he proved that the Guomindang and the soviets are the same thing, and that the Communists can conquer power through the Guomindang, avoiding the fray. And when this same Guomindang, with the aid of Bukharin, crushed the workers, he began to show his fist. In so far as he did nothing but amend or “complete” Lenin, his caricatured aspect did not exceed certain modest limits. In so far as he pretends to give leadership himself, profiting by the total lack of knowledge in international questions on the part of Stalin, Rykov and Molotov, little Bukharin swells up until he becomes a gigantic caricature of Bolshevism. His strategy reduces itself to finishing off and mutilating, in the epoch of decline, that which escaped alive in the abortive and besmirched revolutionary period.
It must be distinctly understood that there is not, at the present time, a revolutionary situation in China. It is rather a counter-revolutionary situation that has been substituted there, transforming itself into an inter-revolutionary period of indefinite duration. Turn with contempt from those who would tell you that this is pessimism and lack of faith. To shut one’s eyes to facts is the most infamous form of lack of faith.There remains in China a revolutionary situation in all its profundity, in so far as all the internal and international contradictions of the country can find their solution only on the road of the revolution. But from this point of view, there is not a single country in the world where there does not exist a revolutionary situation which must inevitably manifest itself openly with the exception of the USSR, where, in spite of five years of opportunist back-sliding, the soviet form of the proletarian dictatorship still opens up the possibility of a renascence of the October revolution by means of reformist methods.
In certain countries, the eventuality of the transformation of the potential revolution into an active revolution is closer; in others it is further off. It is all the more difficult to divine in advance what will be the rotation followed, since it is determined not only by the acuteness of the international contradictions, but also by the intersection of world factors. One may very reasonably assume that the revolution will be accomplished in Europe before taking place in North America. But the predictions which announce that the revolution will break out in Asia first and then in Europe already have a more conditional character. It is possible, even probable, but it is not at all inevitable. New difficulties and complications, like the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, or else the accentuation of the commercial and industrial crisis, under the pressure of the United States, can in the nearest future confront the European states with a directly revolutionary situation, as was the case in Germany in 1923, in England in 1926 and in Austria in 1927.
The fact that only yesterday China was passing through a stirring revolutionary phase does not bring closer the revolution for today and tomorrow, but on the contrary, makes it more distant. In the course of the period which followed the revolution of 1905, it produced great revolutionary disturbances and coups d’état in the countries of the East (Persia, Turkey, China). But in Russia itself, the revolution revived only twelve years later, in connection with the imperialist war. Naturally, these intervals are not obligatory for China. The general speed of the evolution of world contradictions has now been accelerated. That is all that can be said. But one must take into account and bear in mind that in China itself the revolution is at the present time laid over into an indefinite future. And moreover: the consequences of the defeat of the revolution have not yet been completely exhausted. In Russia the wave of fall and decline went through the years 1907-08, 1909 and partly 1910, when, thanks in large measure to the revival of industry, the working class began to come to life. A no less abrupt descent confronts the Chinese Communist Party. The latter must know how to cling to every ledge, to hold tenaciously to every point of support so as not to tumble down and be smashed.
The Chinese proletariat, beginning with its vanguard, must assimilate the enormous experiences of the defeats and, by acting with new methods, recognize the new environment; it must redress its shattered ranks; it must renew its mass organizations; it must establish with greater clarity and distinctness than before what its attitude must be towards the problems which are arising before the country: national unity and liberation, revolutionary agrarian transformation.
On the other hand, the Chinese bourgeoisie must squander the capital accumulated by its victories. The contradictions which exist within itself, as well as between it and the outside world, must once more lay themselves bare and become sharpened. A new regrouping of forces must have its repercussions in the peasantry, reviving its activity. It is precisely all this that will signify that there is a renascence of the revolutionary situation on a higher historical basis.
“... Those who have had to live, said Lenin on February 23, 1918, through the long years of revolutionary battles at the time of the ascension of the revolution and at the time when it sank into the abyss, when the revolutionary appeals to the masses found no echo among them, know that in spite of everything the revolution always rose anew” [3]
The pace that the Chinese revolution will follow in “rising anew”, will depend not only upon objective conditions but also upon the policy of the Communist International.
The resolution of the Congress wheels diplomatically around these essential questions, planting reservations to the right and the left which will permit it to save itself, that is, like the lawyers, it creates motives in advance which will permit it to squash the case or appeal it.
It is true that this resolution recognizes that “the slogan of mass uprising becomes a propaganda slogan and it is only to the extent ... that a new rise of the revolution matures that it will again become immediately applicable in practice”. Let us point out in passing that as late as February of this year such an attitude was called Trotskyism. No doubt it must be understood that this term signifies the ability to take into account facts and their consequences more rapidly than is done by the leadership of the Communist International.
But the resolution of the Congress does not go beyond this transformation of the armed insurrection into a propaganda slogan. The reports say nothing more on this point. What is to be expected in the very next period? What must be prepared for? What line must be followed in the work to be effected? No perspective is established. To understand how much needs to be learned over again from the very bottom in this question, let us again cast a glance upon yesterday, upon the very same resolution of the Chinese Central Committee, which furnishes the most striking manifestation of “revolutionary” light-mindedness doubled by opportunism. [4]
The Plenum of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, directed by the infant prodigies of left centrism, decided in November 1927, on the eve of the insurrection at Canton:
“In evaluating the general political situation created in China after the counter-revolutionary coup d’état in Hunan, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, already in its theses of August, formulated the affirmation that stabilization of the bourgeois military reaction in China was entirely impossible on the basis of the present social, economic and political relationships.”
In this remarkable thesis, dealing with stabilization, the same operation was carried through as was done with the revolutionary situation. These two conceptions have been transformed into certain substances, irremediably opposed to each other. If the revolutionary situation is assured for “many years” in the face of no matter what circumstances, it is clear that stabilization, no matter what happens, is “absolutely impossible”. The one supplements the other in a system of metaphysical principles. Bukharin and his friendly enemy, Lominadze, do not understand in such a case that the revolutionary situation, as well as its opposite, stabilization, are not only the premises of the class struggle but also constitute its living content. Outside of this struggle, neither the one nor the other exists.
We once wrote that stabilization is an “object” of the class struggle and not an arena established for it in advance. The proletariat wants to develop and utilize a situation of crisis, the bourgeois wants to put an end to it and to overcome it by its stabilization. Stabilization is the “object” of the struggle of these fundamental class forces. Bukharin first sneered at this definition; then he introduced it textually, as contraband, into his printed report to one of the plenums of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. But in acknowledging our formula, directed especially against his scholasticism, Bukharin failed absolutely to understand the meaning of our definition. As to the capricious leaps that Lominadze executes towards the left, their radius is very restricted, for the valiant infant prodigy does not dare break Bukharin’s thread. Naturally, absolute stabilization is absolutely opposed to an absolute revolutionary situation. The conversion of these absolutes into each other is “absolutely impossible”. But if one descends from these ridiculous theoretical summits, it turns out that before the complete and final triumph of socialism, the relatively revolutionary situation will very likely be converted more than once into relative stabilization (and vice versa). All other conditions remaining equal, the danger of the conversion of a revolutionary situation into bourgeois stabilization is all the greater the less capable is the proletarian leadership of exploiting the situation.The leadership of the Chiang Kai-shek clique was superior to that of Chen Duxiu and of Tang Pingshan. But it is not this leadership that decided: foreign imperialism guided Chiang Kai-shek by threats, by promises, by its direct assistance. The Communist International directed Chen Duxiu. Two leaderships of world dimensions crossed swords here. That of the Communist International, through all the stages of the struggle, appeared as absolutely forthless, and it thus facilitated to the highest degree the task of the imperialist leadership. In such conditions, the transformation of the revolutionary situation into bourgeois stabilization is not only not “impossible”, but is absolutely inevitable. Even more: it is accomplished, and within certain limits it is completed.
Bukharin has announced a new period of “organic” stabilization for Europe. He gave assurances that one need not expect, in the course of the coming years in Europe, any renewal of the Vienna events or in general any revolutionary conclusions. Why? One does not know. The struggle for the conquest of power is entirely thrust aside by the struggle to be conducted against war. On the other hand, stabilization in China is denied, just as the Fifth Congress denied it in Germany after the defeat of the revolution of 1923. Everything passes and everything changes, except the mistakes of the leadership of the Communist International.
The defeat of the workers and the peasants in China corresponds inevitably to a political consolidation of the Chinese ruling classes; and that is precisely the point of departure for economic stabilization. A certain establishment of order in domestic circulation and in foreign commercial relations, following upon the pacification or the abatement of the civil war regions, automatically brings with it a restoration of economic activity. The vital needs of the completely devastated and exhausted country must make a path for themselves to some degree or other. Commerce and industry must begin to re-establish themselves. The number of employed workers must increase.
It would be blindness to close one’s eyes to the existence of certain political premises for the subsequent development of the productive forces of the country which, of course, take on the forms of capitalist servitude. The political premises alone do not suffice. There is still needed an economic impulsion without which the disorganization could be overcome only with relative slowness. This external shock may be furnished by the influx of foreign capital. America has already cut across the field, outstripping Japan and Europe, by consenting, for the sake of form, to conclude an “equal treaty”. The domestic depression, in the face of the available resources, makes more than likely an extensive economic intervention in China by the United States, before which the Guomindang will evidently hold the door wide “open”. One cannot doubt the fact that the European countries, especially Germany, fighting against the rapidly aggravated crisis, will seek to debouch upon the Chinese market.
Given the vast area of China and its multitudinous population, even feeble success in the field of road construction, even a simple growth in transportation security, accompanied by a certain regulation of the exchange, must automatically produce a considerable increase of commercial circulation and by the same sign an enlivening of industry. At the present time, the most important capitalist countries, among them and far from occupying last place, the United States, preoccupied with an outlet for their automobiles, are interested in the establishment of all kinds of roads.
In order to stabilize the Chinese exchange and to mark out the roads, a large loan from abroad is required. The possibility of concluding it is discussed and recognized as quite real in the influential Anglo-Saxon financial press. They speak of an international banking consortium to amortize the old debts of China and to grant it new credits. The well-informed press is already calling the future affair “the most important in world history”.
It is impossible to predict to what extent these grandiose projects will be put into effect without being better acquainted with all the documents, which relate in part to operations that take place behind the scenes. But there can be no doubt about the fact that for the near future the course of events will follow this direction. Right now, the press is bringing dozens of news items indicating that the extremely relative pacification of China and its still more relative unification have already given an impetus in the most diversified fields of economic life. A good harvest in almost the whole of China is acting in the same sense. The diagrams of domestic circulation, of imports and exports, show patent signs of progress.
Manifestly, one should not repeat the mistake committed yesterday, only the other way around. One should not attribute to semicolonial capitalist stabilization I do not know what rigid, unchangeable – in a word, metaphysical – traits. It will be a very lame stabilization, exposed to all the winds of world politics as well as to the still un-eliminated internal dangers. Nevertheless, this very relative bourgeois stabilization is radically distinguished from a revolutionary situation. To be sure, the fundamental material relations of the classes have remained the same. But the political relationships of their forces for the period in view have been rudely altered. This is expressed also by the fact that the Communist Party has been almost completely driven back to its starting point. It will have to regain its political influence by proceeding almost from the beginning.
What has been gained is experience. But this gain will be positive instead of negative on the single condition that the experience is judiciously assimilated. In the meantime, the bourgeoisie is acting with greater assurance, with greater cohesion. It has gone over to the offensive. It is setting itself great tasks for the morrow. The proletariat is falling back; it is far from always offering resistance to blows. The peasantry, deprived of any kind of centralized leadership, boils over here and there without having any real chances of success. Now, world capital is coming to the aid of the Chinese bourgeoisie with the clear intention of bowing down still lower to the ground, through the intermediary of the latter, the Chinese toiling masses. There is the mechanism of the process of stabilization. The day after tomorrow, when Bukharin runs his head into the facts, he will proclaim that heretofore the stabilization might have been considered as “incidental”, but it is now clear that it is “organic”.
The process of economic recovery will, in turn, correspond to the mobilization of new tens and hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers, to the tightening up of their ranks, to the increase of their specific gravity in the social life of the country and by that an increase in their revolutionary self-confidence. It is superfluous to explain that the re-animation of Chinese commerce and industry will soon give point to the problem of imperialism. However, were the Communist Party of China, influenced by the scholasticism of Bukharin and Lominadze, to turn its back to the process really taking place in the country, it would lose an economic point of support for the recovery of the workers’ movement.
At the beginning, the augmentation of the specific gravity and the class self-confidence of the proletariat will make itself felt in a rebirth of the strike struggle, in the consolidation of the trade unions. It is needless to say that serious possibilities are thus opened up before the Chinese Communist Party. Nobody knows how long it will have to remain in a clandestine existence. In any case, it is necessary to reinforce and to perfect the illegal organizations in the course of the coming period. But this task cannot be accomplished outside of the life and the struggle of the masses. The illegal apparatus will have all the greater possibilities to develop itself if the legal and semi-legal organizations of the working class surround it closely and the more profoundly it will penetrate into them. The Chinese Communist Party must not have doctrinaire blinkers over its eyes, and it must keep its hands on the pulse of the economic life of the country. It must put itself at the head of strikes at the proper time, charge itself with the resurrection of the trade unions and the struggle for the eight-hour day. It is only under these conditions that its participation in the political life of the country can obtain a serious foundation.
* * *
“There cannot even be any question,” said one of the Chinese delegates at the Congress, “of a consolidation of the power of the Guomindang.” [5] This is false. There most assuredly can be a “question” of a certain consolidation, even fairly considerable, of the power of the Guomindang for a certain period of time, even for a fairly important period.
The Chinese bourgeoisie, with an ease which it never expected, has won decisive victories, for the period in view, against the workers and the peasants. The re-awakening of its class consciousness which followed made itself clearly felt at the economic conference which met at the end of June in Shanghai and which represented, so to speak, the economic pre-parliament of the Chinese bourgeoisie. It showed that it wanted to reap the fruits of its triumph. Across this road stand the militarists and the imperialists with whose aid it vanquished the masses. The bourgeoisie wants customs autonomy, that stumbling block to economic independence, to the completest possible unification of China; the abolition of internal customs which disorganize the market; suppression of the arbitrariness of the military authorities who confiscate the rolling stock of the railroads and encroach upon private property; finally, the reduction of armaments, which today constitute a too heavy burden upon the economy of the country. It is to this, also, that belongs the creation of a unified currency and the establishment of order in administration. The bourgeoisie has formulated all its demands in its economic pre-parliament. From the formal point of view, the Guomindang has taken note of it, but being entirely divided among the regional military cliques, it constitutes at the present time an obstacle to the realization of these measures.The foreign imperialists represent an even stronger one. The bourgeoisie considers, and not without cause, that it will exploit the contradictions between the imperialists with all the greater success, and that it will obtain an all the more favourable compromise with them, should it be successful in compelling the military cliques of the Guomindang to submit to the centralized apparatus of the bourgeois state. It is in this sense that the aspirations of the most “progressive” elements of the bourgeoisie and of the democratic petty bourgeoisie are now being directed. It is out of this that is born the idea of the National Assembly to crown the victories won, a means of bridling the militarists, the authorized state representative of the Chinese bourgeoisie for doing business with foreign capital. The economic animation which is already visible cannot but give courage to the bourgeoisie, obliging it to regard with particular hostility anything that impairs the regularity of the circulation of merchandise and disorganizes the national market. The first stage of economic stabilization will certainly increase the chances of success of Chinese parliamentarism and will consequently require that the Chinese Communist Party give evidence, in this question too, of timely political initiative.
For the Chinese bourgeoisie, having vanquished the workers and the peasants, it can only be a question of an arch-censored assembly, perhaps by simply giving formal representation to the commercial and industrial associations on the basis of which the economic conference of Shanghai was convoked. The petty-bourgeois democracy, which will inevitably begin to stir, seeing that the revolution declines, will formulate more “democratic” slogans. In this manner, it will seek to establish contact with the higher strata of the popular masses of town and country.
The “constitutional” development of China, at least in its next stage, is intimately bound up with the internal evolution of the Guomindang, in whose hands the state power is at present concentrated in every respect. The last plenum of the Guomindang, in August, decided, so far as can be understood, to convene for the first of January 1929 the Party congress which was adjourned for so long a time owing to the centre’s fear of losing power (as we see, the peculiarity of “China” is not very peculiar). The agenda of the congress includes the problem of the Chinese constitution. It is true that certain internal or external events may cause the collapse not only of the January congress of the Guomindang but also of the whole constitutional era of stabilization of the Chinese bourgeoisie. This eventuality always remains a possibility. But unless new factors intervene, the question of the state régime in China, the constitutional problems, will occupy the centre of public attention in the next period.
What attitude will the Communist Party take? What will it set up against the Guomindang’s draft of a constitution? Can the Communist Party say that since it is preparing, as soon as a new rise takes place, to create soviets in the future, it makes no difference to it up to then whether there exists or does not exist in China a National Assembly, that it matters little if it is censored or embraces the whole people? Such an attitude would be superficial, empty and passive.
The Communist Party can and should formulate the slogan of a Constituent Assembly with full powers, elected by universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage. In the process of agitation for this slogan, it will obviously be necessary to explain to the masses that it is doubtful if such an assembly will be convened, and even if it were, it would be powerless so long as the material power remains in the hands of the Guomindang generals. From this flows the possibility of broaching in a new manner the slogan of the arming of the workers and the peasants. The revival of political activity, connected with that of economy, will once more bring the agrarian problem to the foreground. But for a certain period it may find itself posed on the parliamentary field, that is, on the field of the attempts by the bourgeoisie and primarily by the petty-bourgeois democracy to “solve” it by legislative means. Obviously, the Communist Party cannot adapt itself to bourgeois legality, that is, capitulate before bourgeois property. It can and should have its own finished and rounded-out project for the solution of the agrarian problem on the basis of the confiscation of landed property exceeding a certain area, varying in accordance with the different provinces. The Communist project of the agrarian law must be in essence the formula of the future agrarian revolution. But the Communist Party can and should introduce its own formula into the struggle for the National Assembly and into the Assembly itself, should this ever be convened.
The slogan of the National (or Constituent) Assembly is thus intimately linked up with those of the eight-hour day, the confiscation of the land and the complete national independence of China. It is precisely in these slogans that the democratic stage of the development of the Chinese revolution will express itself. In the field of international policy, the Communist Party will demand an alliance with the USSR. By judiciously combining these slogans, by advancing each of them at the proper time, the Communist Party will be able to tear itself out of its clandestine existence, make a bloc with the masses, win their confidence, and thus speed the coming of the period of the creation of soviets and of the direct struggle for power.
Well-defined historical tasks are deduced from the democratic stage of the revolution. But by itself the democratic character of these tasks does not at all determine as yet what classes, and in which combination, will solve these problems. At bottom, all the great bourgeois revolutions solved problems of the same type, but they did it through a different class mechanism. By fighting for democratic tasks in China in the inter-revolutionary period, the Communist Party will re-assemble its forces, will check up on itself, upon its slogans and its methods of action. If it should succeed, in this connection, in passing over a period of parliamentarism (which is possible, even probable, but far from inevitable), this will permit the proletarian vanguard to scrutinize its enemies and adversaries by examining them through the prism of parliament. In the course of the pre-parliamentary and parliamentary period, this vanguard will have to conduct an intransigent struggle to win influence over the peasants, to guide the peasantry directly from the political point of view. Even if the National Assembly should be realized in an arch-democratic manner, the fundamental problems would nevertheless have to be solved by force. Through the parliamentary period, the Chinese Communist Party would arrive at a direct and immediate struggle for power, but by possessing a maturer historical basis, that is, surer premises for victory.
We have said that the existence of the parliamentary stage was probable, but not inevitable. A new disintegration of the country, as well as external causes, may prevent its realization; at all events, in the first case, a movement in favour of parliaments for various regions might come forward. But all this does not remove the importance of the struggle for a democratically convoked National Assembly which would by itself be an entering wedge between the groupings of the possessing classes and would broaden the framework of the proletariat’s spirit of activity.
We know in advance that all the “leaders” who preached the bloc of the four classes, the arbitration commissions instead of strikes, who gave telegraphic orders that the agrarian movement should not be extended, who counselled that the bourgeoisie should not be terrorized, who prohibited the creation of soviets, who subordinated the Communist Party to the Guomindang, who acclaimed Wang Jingwei as the leader of the agrarian revolution – that all these opportunists, guilty of the defeat of the revolution, will now attempt to outbid the left wing and to charge our way of putting the question with containing “constitutional illusions” and a “Social-Democratic deviation”. We deem it necessary to warn the Communists and the advanced Chinese workers in time against the hollow, false radicalism of yesterday’s favourites of Chiang Kai-shek. One cannot rid oneself of a historical process by faked quotations, by confusion, by mile-long resolutions, in general, by every sort of apparatus and literary trick, which seeks to escape facts and classes. Events will come and furnish the test. Those for whom the tests of the past are not enough have only to wait for the future. Only, let them not forget that this verification nevertheless is effected on the bones of the proletarian vanguard.
3) The Soviets and the Constituent Assembly
We hope that it is not necessary to raise here the general question of formal, that is, of bourgeois democracy. Our attitude towards it has nothing in common with the sterile anarchist negation. The slogan and the norms of democracy, from the formal point of view, are deduced in a different way for the various countries of a well-defined stage in the evolution of bourgeois society. The democratic slogans contain for a certain period not only illusions, not only deception, but also an animating historical force.
“So long as the struggle of the working class for full power is not on the order of the day, it is our duty to utilize every form of bourgeois democracy.” [6]
From the political point of view, the question of formal democracy is for us not only that of the attitude to be observed towards the petty-bourgeois masses, but also towards the worker masses, to the extent that the latter have not yet acquired a revolutionary class consciousness. Under the conditions of progress of the revolution, during the offensive of the proletariat, the eruption of the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie in political life was manifested in China by agrarian revolts, by conflicts with the governmental troops, by strikes of all kinds, by the extermination of lower administrators. At the present moment, all the movements of this type are obviously diminishing. The triumphant soldiery of the Guomindang dominates society. Every day of stabilization will lead more and more to collisions between this militarism and the bureaucracy on the one hand, and on the other, not only the advanced workers but also the petty-bourgeois masses who predominate in the population of the country and towns, and even, within certain limits, the big bourgeoisie. Before these collisions develop to the point of becoming an open revolutionary struggle, they will pass, from all the available facts, through a “constitutional” stage. The conflicts between the bourgeoisie and its own military cliques will inevitably draw in the upper layer of the petty-bourgeois masses, through the medium of a “third party” or by other means. From the standpoint of economics and of culture, the former are extraordinarily feeble. Their political strength lies in their numbers. Therefore, the slogans of formal democracy win over, or are capable of winning over, not only the petty-bourgeois masses but also the broad working masses, precisely because they reveal to them the possibility, which is essentially illusory, of opposing their will to that of the generals, the country squires and the capitalists. The proletarian vanguard educates the masses by using this experience, and leads them forward.The experience of Russia shows that during the progress of the revolution, the proletariat organized in soviets can, by a correct policy, directed towards the conquest of power, draw behind it the peasantry, fling it against the front of formal democracy embodied in the Constituent Assembly, and switch it on the rails of soviet democracy. In any case, these results were not attained by simply opposing the soviets to the Constituent Assembly, but by drawing the masses towards the soviets while maintaining the slogans of formal democracy up to the very moment of the conquest of power and even after it.
“That in the Russia of September-November 1917, the working class of the cities, the soldiers and the peasants, as a result of a number of special conditions, found themselves admirably prepared for the adoption of the soviet régime and the dissolution of the most democratic of the bourgeois parliaments – that is an undeniable and perfectly established historical fact. Yet the Bolsheviks did not boycott the Constituent Assembly; far from it, they participated in the elections not only before but even after the conquest of political power by the proletariat ...
“Even a few weeks before the victory of the soviet republic, even after this victory, the participation in a parliament of bourgeois democracy, far from injuring the revolutionary proletariat, helps it to prove to the backward masses that these parliaments deserve to be dissolved, facilitates the success of their dissolution, brings nearer the moment when it could be said that bourgeois parliamentarism had ‘had its day politically’.” [7]
When we adopted direct practical measures to disperse the Constituent Assembly, I recall that Lenin insisted particularly on having sent to Petrograd one or two regiments of Lettish light infantry, composed largely of agricultural workers. “The Petrograd garrison is almost entirely peasants; may it not hesitate in face of the Constituent?” That is how Lenin formulated his preoccupations. It was not at all a question of political “traditions”; indeed, the Russian peasantry could have no serious traditions of parliamentary democracy. The essence of the question lies in the fact that the peasant mass, aroused to historical life, is not at all inclined to place confidence in advance in a leadership coming from the cities, even if it is proletarian, especially during a non-revolutionary period; this mass seeks a simple political formula which would express directly its own political strength, that is, the predominance of numbers. The political expression of the domination of the majority is formal democracy.
Naturally, to affirm that the popular masses can and should never and under no conditions “leap” over the “constitutional” step, would be to manifest a ridiculous pedantry in the spirit of Stalin. In certain countries, the epoch of parliamentarism lasts long decades and even centuries. In Russia, it was only prolonged for the few years of the pseudo-constitutional régime and the one day of existence of the Constituent. From the historical point of view, one can perfectly well conceive of situations where even these few years and this one day would not exist.Also, if the revolutionary policy had been correct, if the Communist Party had been completely independent of the Guomindang, if the soviets had been established in 1925-27, the revolutionary development could already have led China today to the dictatorship of the proletariat by passing beyond the democratic phase. But even in that case, it is not impossible that the formula of the Constituent Assembly, not tried by the peasantry at the most critical moment, not tested, and consequently still containing illusions, could, at the first serious difference between the peasantry and the proletariat, on the very morrow of the victory, become the slogan of the peasants and the petty bourgeoisie of the cities against the proletariat. Important conflicts between the proletariat and the peasantry, even in face of favourable conditions for the alliance, are quite inevitable, as is witnessed by the experience of the October revolution. Our greatest advantage lay in the fact that the majority of the Constituent Assembly, which had grown in the struggle of the dominant parties for the continuation of the war and against the confiscation of the land by the peasants, had profoundly compromised itself, even in the eyes of the peasantry, already at the moment of the convocation of the Constituent Assembly.
* * *
How does the resolution of the Congress, adopted after a reading of Bukharin’s report, characterize the present period of the development of China and the tasks to be deduced from this period? Paragraph 54 of this resolution says:
“At the present time, the principal task of the Party, in the period between two waves of revolutionary progress, is to fight to win the masses, that is, mass work among the workers and the peasants’ the re-establishment of their organizations, the utilization of all discontentment against the landed proprietors, the bourgeoisie, the generals, the foreign imperialists ...”
There is really a classic example of double meaning in the manner of the most renowned oracles of antiquity. The present period is characterized as being “between two waves of revolutionary progress”. We know this formula. The Fifth Congress applied it to Germany. A revolutionary situation does not develop uniformly, but by successive waves of ebb and flow. This formula has been chosen with premeditation, so as to be able to interpret it as recognizing the existence of a revolutionary situation, in which there takes place simply a “calm” before the tempest. At all events, they will also be able to explain it by pretending to acknowledge a whole period between two revolutions. In both cases, they will be able to begin the new resolution with the words: “as we foresaw” or “as we predicted”.
Every historical prognosis inevitably contains a conditional element. The shorter the period over which this prognosis extends, the greater is this element. In general, it is impossible to establish a prognosis with which the leaders of the proletariat would, in the future, no longer have need of analysing the situation. A prognosis has not the significance of command but rather of an orientation. One can and one must make reservations on the point up to which it is conditional. In certain situations, one can furnish a number of variants of the future, delimiting them with reflection. One can, finally, in a turbulent atmosphere, completely abandon prognosis for the time being and confine oneself to giving the advice: Wait and see! But all this must be done clearly, openly, honestly. However, in the course of the last five years, the prognoses of the Communist International have constituted not directives but rather traps for the leaderships of the parties of the various countries. The principal aim of the “prognoses” is: to inspire veneration towards the wisdom of the leadership, and in case of defeat, to save its “prestige”, that supreme fetish of weak people. It is a method of oracular announcement and not of Marxian investigation. It presupposes the existence on the scene of action of “scapegoats”. It is a demoralizing system. The ultra-leftist mistake committed by the German leadership in 1923 flowed precisely from this same perfidious, double-meaning manner of formulating the question on the subject of the “two waves of revolutionary progress”. The resolution of the Sixth Congress can cause just as many misfortunes.We have known the wave of the period before Shanghai, and then that of Wuhan. There have been many more partial and localized waves. They all rose in the general revolutionary progress of 1925-27. But this historical ascension is exhausted. This must be understood and said clearly. Important strategic consequences are to be deduced from it.
The resolution speaks of the necessity of utilizing “all discontentment against the landed proprietors, the bourgeoisie, the generals, the foreign imperialists”. This is incontestable, but it is too indefinite. Utilize it how? If we find ourselves between two waves of continuous revolutionary progress, then every manifestation of discontentment, no matter how small its importance, can be considered as the famous (according to Zinoviev-Bukharin) “beginning of the second wave”. Then the propaganda slogan of the armed insurrection will have to be transformed immediately into a slogan of action. From this can grow a “second wave” of putschism. The Party will utilize quite differently the discontentment of the masses, if it considers it by reckoning with a correct historical perspective. But the Sixth Congress does not possess this “bagatelle”, a correct historical perspective, on any question. The Fifth Congress was a failure because of this deficiency. It is on this score that the whole Communist International can also break its neck.
After having once more condemned the putschistic tendencies for which it itself prepares the ground, the resolution of the Congress continues:
“On the other hand, certain comrades have fallen into an opportunist error: they put forward the slogan of the National Assembly.”
The resolution does not explain what the opportunism of this slogan consists of. The scalded cat fears even cold water.
Only the Chinese delegate, Strakhov, in his closing speech on the lessons of the Chinese revolution, tried to furnish an explanation. Here is what he says:
“From the experience of the Chinese revolution, we see that when the revolution in the colonies [?] draws close to the decisive moment, the question is clearly posed: Either the dictatorship of the landed proprietors and the bourgeoisie, or that of the proletariat and the peasantry.”
Naturally, when the revolution (and certainly not only in the colonies) “draws close to the decisive moment”, then every mode of action in the Guomindang style, that is to say, all collaborationism, is a crime involving fatal consequences: one can then conceive only of a dictatorship of the possessors or a dictatorship of the workers. But as we have already seen, even in such moments, in order to triumph over parliamentarism as revolutionists, one must have nothing in common with the sterile negation of it. Strakhov, however, goes even further:
“There [in the colonies], bourgeois democracy cannot exist; only the bourgeois dictatorship, operating openly, is possible It cannot have there any constitutional path.”
This is a doubly inexact extension of a correct thought. If, during “decisive moments” of the revolution, bourgeois democracy is inevitably torpedoed (and that not only in the colonies), this in no wise signifies that it is impossible during inter-revolutionary periods. But it is Strakhov and the whole Congress who do not want to recognize that the “decisive moment”, during which it was precisely the Communists who occupied themselves with the worst democratic fictions within the Guomindang, has already passed. Now, before a new “decisive moment”, a long period must be passed through, during which the old questions will have to be approached in a new manner.
To assert that in the colonies there can be no constitutional or parliamentary periods of evolution, is to renounce the utilization of methods of struggle which are essential to the highest degree, and is, above all, to make hard for oneself a correct political orientation, by driving the Party into a blind alley.To say that for China, as, moreover, for all the other states of the world, there is no way out towards a free, in other words, a socialist development, by following the parliamentary path, is one thing, is right. But to claim that in the evolution of China, or of the colonies, there can be no constitutional period or stage, that is another thing, that is wrong. There was a parliament in Egypt, which is at the present time dissolved. It may come to life again. There is a parliament in Ireland, in spite of the semi-colonial situation of that country. The same holds true for all the states of South America, not to speak of the dominions of Great Britain. There exist semblances of “parliaments” in India. They can also develop later on: in such matters, the British bourgeoisie is pretty flexible. What reason is there for asserting that after the crushing of the revolution which has just taken place, China will not pass through a parliamentary or pseudo-parliamentary phase, or that it will not go through a serious political struggle to gain this stage of evolution? Such an assertion has no foundation at all.
The same Strakhov says that it is precisely the Chinese opportunists who aspire to substitute the slogan of the National Assembly for that of soviets. This is possible, probable, even inevitable. It was proved by all the experience of the world labour movement, of the Russian movement in particular, that the opportunists are the first to cling to parliamentary methods, in general to everything which resembles parliamentarism, or even approaches it. The Mensheviks clung to activity in the Duma as against revolutionary activity. The utilization of parliamentary methods inevitably brings up all the dangers connected with parliamentarism: constitutional illusions, legalism, a penchant for compromises, etc. These dangers and maladies can only be combated by a revolutionary course in policies. But the fact that the opportunists put forward the slogan of the struggle for the National Assembly in no way constitutes an argument in favour of a formal, negative attitude on our part towards parliamentarism. After the coup d’état of June 3, 1907 in Russia, the majority of the leading elements of the Bolshevik Party favoured boycotting the mutilated and tricked Duma. This did not prevent Lenin from coming forward resolutely in favour of the utilization of even the “parliamentarism” of June 3, at the Party conference which at that time still united the two factions.
Lenin was the only Bolshevik who voted with the Mensheviks in favour of participation in the elections. Obviously, Lenin’s “participation” had nothing in common with that of the Mensheviks, as was shown by the whole subsequent march of events; it was not opposed to the revolutionary tasks, but served them for the epoch included between two revolutions. While utilizing the counter-revolutionary pseudo-parliament of June 3, our party, in spite of its great experience of the soviets of 1905, continued to conduct the struggle for the Constituent Assembly, that is, for the most democratic form of parliamentary representation. The right to renounce parliamentarism must be won by uniting the masses around the Party and by leading them to struggle openly for the conquest of power. It is naïve to think that one can simply substitute for this work the mere renunciation of the revolutionary utilization of the contradictory and oppressive methods and forms of parliamentarism. This is the crudest error of the resolution of the Congress, which makes here a flippant ultra-leftist leap.
Just see how everything is turned topsy-turvy. According to the logic of the present leadership, and in conformity with the sense of the resolutions of the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, China is not approaching its 1917, but rather its 1905. That is why the leaders conclude mentally: Down with the slogan of formal democracy! There really does not remain a single joint which the epigones have not taken care to dislocate. How can the slogan of democracy, and especially the most radical one, the democratic representation of the people, be rejected in the condition of a non-revolutionary period, if the revolution has not accomplished its most immediate tasks from the point of view of the unity of China and its purging of all its feudal and military-bureaucratic rubbish?
So far as I know, the Chinese party has not had a program of its own. The Bolshevik Party arrived at the October revolution and accomplished it while armed with its old program, in the political part of which the slogans of democracy occupied an important place. In his time, Bukharin attempted to suppress this minimum program, just as he came forward later on against transitional demands in the program of the Communist International. But this attitude of Bukharin’s remained recorded in the history of the Party only as an anecdote. As is known, it was the dictatorship of the proletariat which accomplished the democratic revolution in Russia. The present leadership of the Communist International absolutely does not want to understand this either. But our party led the proletariat to the dictatorship only because it defended with the greatest energy, doggedness and devotion all the slogans and demands of democracy, including popular representation based upon universal suffrage, responsibility of the government to the representatives of the people, etc. Only such an agitation permits the Party to preserve the proletariat from the influence of petty-bourgeois democracy, to undermine its influence among the peasantry, to prepare the alliance of the workers and the peasants, and to draw into its ranks the most resolute revolutionary elements. Was all this nothing but opportunism? Spoitie, svietik, nie stydities!
* * *
Strakhov says that we have the slogan of soviets and that only opportunists can substitute for it the slogan of the National Assembly. This argument unmasks in most exemplary manner the erroneous character of the Congress resolution. In the discussion, nobody confuted Strakhov. On the contrary, his position was approved; it was ratified in the principal tactical resolution. It is only now that one sees clearly how numerous are those in the present leadership who went through the experience of one, two, or even three revolutions, letting themselves be drawn in by the course of events and the leadership of Lenin, but without themselves reflecting upon the meaning of what was happening and without assimilating the greatest lessons of history. One is therefore obliged to repeat again certain elementary truths.
In my criticism of the program of the Communist International, I have shown how the epigones have monstrously disfigured and mutilated the thought of Lenin, which affirms that the soviets are organs of insurrection and organs of power. From it was drawn the conclusion that soviets can be created only on the “eve” of the insurrection. This grotesque idea found its most consummate expression in the same resolution, recently revealed by us, of the November Plenum of the Chinese Central Committee held last year. It says there:
“Soviets can and should be created as organs of revolutionary power only when we are in the midst of an important, incontestable progress of the revolutionary movement of the masses and when the solid victory of the uprising is assured.”
The first condition: “important progress”, is incontestable. The second condition: “guarantee of victory”, and what is more, of a “solid” one, is simply pedantic stupidity. In the rest of the text of the resolution this stupidity, however, is developed at length:
“The creation of soviets obviously cannot be approached when victory is not yet absolutely guaranteed, for it might then happen that all attention is concentrated solely upon elections to the soviets and not upon the military struggle, as a consequence of which petty-bourgeois democratism might install itself, which would weaken the revolutionary dictatorship and would create a danger for the leadership of the Party.”
The spirit of Stalin, refracted through the prism of the infant prodigy, Lominadze, hovers over these immortal lines. However, all this is simply absurd. During the Hong Kong strike, during the Shanghai strikes, during all the subsequent violent progress of the workers and the peasants, soviets should and could have created as organs of an open revolution mass struggle which, sooner or later and not at all at one blow, would lead to the insurrection and the conquest of power. If, in the phase under consideration, the struggle did not rise to the point of insurrection, obviously the soviets too would be reduced to nothing. They cannot become “normal” institutions of the bourgeois state. But in that case, too, that is, if the soviets are liquidated before the insurrection, the working masses make an enormous acquisition, familiarizing themselves with the soviets in practice, identifying themselves with their mechanism. During the following stage of the revolution, the more successful and more extensive creation of soviets will thus be guaranteed: although, even in the phase that follows it may be that they do not lead directly, not only to victory, but even not to the insurrection.
Let us recall this very distinctly: the slogan of soviets can and must be put forward from the first stages of the revolutionary progress of the masses. But it must be a real progress. The working masses must flock to the revolution, rally under its standard. The soviets furnish an expression, from the organizational point of view, to the centripetal force of revolutionary progress. But in this way, it holds true at the same time that during the period of revolutionary ebb-tide and of the development of centrifugal tendencies in the masses, the – slogan of soviets will be doctrinaire, lifeless, or what is just as bad, it will be the slogan of adventurists. The Canton experience showed this better than anything else, in a striking and tragic manner.At the present time, the slogan of soviets in China has an importance only from the point of view of perspective, and in this sense it has a propaganda value. One would not be conforming to anything at all by opposing the soviets, the slogan of the third Chinese revolution, to the National Assembly, that is, to the slogan that flows from the débâcle of the second Chinese revolution. Abstentionism, in an inter-revolutionary period, especially after a cruel defeat, would be a suicidal policy.
One might say (for there are many sophists in the world) that the resolution of the Sixth Congress does not at all mean abstentionism: there is no National Assembly, nobody is as yet convoking it or promising to convoke it, consequently there is nothing to boycott. Such reasoning, however, would be too pitiable, purely formal, infantile, Bukharinistic. If the Guomindang were compelled to proclaim the convocation of a National Assembly, would we boycott it in the given situation? No. We would pitilessly unmask the lie and duplicity of the Guomindang’s parliamentarism, the constitutional illusions of the petty bourgeoisie: we would demand the complete extension of electoral rights; at the same time we would throw ourselves into the political arena to oppose, in the struggle for the parliament, in the course of the elections and in the parliament itself, the workers and the poor peasants to the possessing class and their parties. Nobody would presume to foretell how great would be the results thus obtained for the present party, debilitated and reduced to a clandestine existence. If the policy were correct, the advantages could be very considerable. But in this case, is it not clear that the Party can and must not only participate in the elections if the Guomindang promulgates them, but also demand that they be held by mobilizing the masses around this slogan?
From the political point of view the question is already posed, every new day will confirm it. In our criticism of the program, we spoke of the probability of a certain economic stabilization in China. The newspapers have since then brought dozens of indications of the economic revival that is beginning (see the Bulletin of the Chinese University). Now it is no longer a supposition, but a fact, even though it is only in its very first phase. But it is just in the course of the first phase that the tendencies must be perceived, otherwise it will not be a revolutionary policy that is pursued, but a dragging at the tail of events.
The same holds true for the political struggle around the questions of the constitution. This is now no longer a theoretical forecast, that is, a simple possibility, but something more concrete. It is not for nothing that the Chinese delegate frequently recurs to the theme of the National Assembly; it is not by chance that the Congress thought it necessary to adopt a special (and a particularly false) resolution on the subject of this question. It is not the Opposition which has posed this question, but rather the evolution of Chinese political life. Here too one must know how to perceive a tendency at the very outset. The more audaciously and resolutely the Communist Party comes forward with the slogan of the democratic Constituent Assembly, the less place it will leave all sorts of intermediary parties, the more solid will be its own success.
If the Chinese proletariat is obliged to live a few more years (even if it were only another year) under the régime of the Guomindang, could the Chinese Communist Party abandon the struggle for the extension of legal possibilities of all sorts, for the freedom of press, of assembly, of organization, of strike, etc.? Were it to abandon this struggle, it would transform itself into a lifeless sect. But that is a struggle on the democratic plane. Soviet power signifies the monopoly of the press, of assembly, etc., in the hands of the proletariat. Perhaps the Chinese Communist Party will put forward these slogans precisely at this time? In the situation under consideration, it would be a mixture of childishness and madness. The Communist Party is fighting at present not for power, but to maintain, to consolidate and to develop its contact with the masses for the sake of the struggle for power in the future. The struggle to win the masses is inevitably bound up with the struggle conducted against the violence which the Guomindang bureaucracy practices towards the mass organizations, their meetings, their press, etc. During the period that is to follow immediately, will the Communist Party fight for freedom of the press or will it leave this to be done by a “third party”? Will the Communist Party confine itself to presenting democratic, isolated, partial demands (freedom of the press, of assembly, etc.), which would amount to liberal reformism, or will it put forward the most consistent slogans of democracy? In the political sphere, this signifies popular representation based upon universal suffrage.
* * *
One might ask if the Democratic Constituent Assembly is “realizable” after a defeated revolution in a semi-colonial China encircled by the imperialists. This question can only be answered by conjectures. But the simple criterion of the possibility of realizing some demand, in the face of conditions existing in bourgeois society or in a given state of this society, is not decisive for us. It is very probable, for example, that the monarchical power and the House of Lords will not be swept away before the establishment of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevertheless, the British Communist Party must formulate among its partial demands this one as well.
It is not by devoting oneself to empirical conjectures as to the possibility of realizing some transitional demand or not, that the question relating to it is settled. It is its social and historical character that decides: is it progressive from the point of view of the subsequent development of society? Does it correspond to the historical interests of the proletariat? Does it strengthen the consciousness of the latter? Does it bring it closer to its dictatorship? Thus for example, the demand for the prohibition of trusts is petty-bourgeois and reactionary and, as the experiences of America have shown, it is completely utopian. Under certain conditions, on the contrary, it is entirely progressive and correct to demand workers’ control over the trusts, even though it is more than doubtful that this will ever be realized within the framework of the bourgeois state. The fact that this demand is not satisfied so long as the bourgeoisie rules must push the workers to the revolutionary overthrow of the latter. Thus, the impossibility of realizing a slogan from the political point of view can be no less fruitful than the relative possibility of putting it into practice.Will China come for a certain period to democratic parliamentarism? What will be the degree of its democratism? What strength and what duration will it have? All this is a matter of conjecture. But it would be radically wrong to base oneself on the supposition that parliamentarism is unrealizable in China in order to conclude that we cannot hale the cliques of the Guomindang before the tribunal of the Chinese people. The idea of the representation of the entire people, as has been shown by the experience of all the bourgeois revolutions and especially those which liberated nationalities, is the most elementary, the most simple and the one most apt to embrace really vast popular strata. The more the ruling bourgeoisie resists this demand of the “entire people”, and the more the proletarian vanguard rallies around our banner, the riper the political conditions will become to win the real victory against the bourgeois state, little matter whether it be the military state of the Guomindang or the parliamentary.
It may be said: a real Constituent Assembly will not be convoked except through the soviets, that is through the insurrection. Would it not be simpler to begin with soviets and to confine oneself to them? No, it would not be simpler. It would be just like putting the cart before the horse. It is very likely that it will not be possible to convoke the Constituent Assembly except through the soviets and that in this way the Assembly might become superfluous even before its birth. This may happen, just as it may not happen. If the soviets, through whose medium a “real” Constituent Assembly might be called together, were already here, we would see if it was still necessary to proceed with its convocation. But there are no soviets at the present time. One cannot start to establish them except at the beginning of a new advance of the masses, which may take place in two or three years, in five years, or more. There are no soviet traditions at all in China. The Communist International conducted an agitation in that country against soviets and not in favour of them. In the meantime, however, constitutional questions are beginning to emerge from every cranny.
Can the Chinese revolution, in the course of its new stage, leap over formal democracy? It follows from what has been said above that, from the historical point of view, such a possibility is not excluded. But it is entirely inadmissible to approach the question guided by this possibility, which is the most distant and the least likely. It is to manifest light-mindedness in the political domain. The Congress adopts its decisions for more than one month, and even, as we know, for more than a year. How then can the Chinese Communists be left bound hand and foot, by designating as opportunism the form of political struggle which, from the next stage onwards, may acquire the greatest importance?
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It is incontestable that by entering the path of struggle for the Constituent Assembly, the Menshevik tendencies in the Chinese Communist Party may be revived and strengthened. It is no less important to fight against opportunism when the policy is directed towards parliamentarism or towards the struggle for it, than when one is confronted with a direct revolutionary offensive. But, as has already been said, it does not follow from this that the democratic slogans should be called opportunistic, but that guarantees and Bolshevik methods of struggle for these slogans must be worked out. In broad outline, these methods and guarantees are the following:
- The Party must have in mind and must explain that in comparison with its principal aim, the conquest of power with arms in hand, the democratic slogans have only an auxiliary, a provisional, an episodic character. Their fundamental importance consists of the fact that they permit us to debouch on the revolutionary road.
- In the process of the struggle for these slogans of democracy, the Party must shatter the constitutional and democratic illusions of the petty bourgeoisie and of the reformists who express their opinions, by explaining that power in the state is not obtained by the democratic forms of the vote, but by property and by the monopoly of information and armaments.
- While making full use of the differences of views existing within the petty and the big bourgeoisie on the subject of constitutional questions; while opening up every possible road towards an openly exercised field of activity; while fighting for the legal existence of the trade unions, the workers’ clubs, the labour press; while creating, whenever and wherever possible, legal political organizations of the proletariat under the direct influence of the Party; while trying as soon as possible to legalize more or less the various fields of activity of the Party; the latter must above all assure the existence of its illegal, centralized, well-built apparatus, directing all the branches of the Party’s activity, legal as well as illegal.
- The Party must develop systematic revolutionary work among the troops of the bourgeoisie.
- The leadership of the Party must implacably unmask all the opportunist hesitations seeking a reformist solution of the problems confronting the proletariat of China and must cut off all the elements who consciously pull towards the subordination of the Party to bourgeois legalism.
It is only by taking these conditions into account that the Party will preserve the necessary proportions in the various branches of its activity, will not let pass a new turn in the situation which leads towards a revolutionary advance, so that its first steps proceed along the road of the creation of soviets, of mobilizing the masses around them and of opposing them to the bourgeois state, with all its parliamentary and democratic camouflage, should this happen to be realized.
4) Once More on the Slogan of the Democratic Dictatorship
The slogan of the Constituent Assembly is just as little opposed to the formula of the democratic dictatorship as it is to that of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Theoretical analysis and the history of our three revolutions indicate that.
In Russia, the formula of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry was the algebraic expression, in other words, the most general, the broadest expression of the collaboration of the proletariat and the lower strata of the peasantry in the democratic revolution. The logic of this formula was conditioned by the fact that its fundamental magnitude had not been checked up in action. In particular, it was not possible to predict quite categorically if, in the conditions of the new epoch, the peasantry would be capable of becoming a more or less independent political power, to what extent it would be such, and what would the reciprocal political relations of the allies in the dictatorship which would result from it.The year 1905 did not bring the question to the point of a decisive verification. The year 1917 showed that when the peasantry bears on its back a party (the Socialist Revolutionaries) independent of the vanguard of the proletariat, this party proves to be in complete dependence upon the imperialist bourgeoisie. In the course of the period from 1905 to 1917, the growing imperialist transformation of the petty-bourgeois democracy as well as of international Social Democracy, made gigantic progress. It was because of this that in 1917 the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry was really realized in the dictatorship of the proletariat, drawing with it the peasant masses. By this very token, the “transformation by growth” of the revolution, passing from the democratic phase to the socialist stage, took place with the dictatorship of the proletariat already established.
In China, the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry might still have had a certain political logic, much more limited and episodic than in Russia, if it had been formulated at the right time in 1925-26, in order to test out the animating forces of the revolution, so as to be replaced, also at the right time, by the dictatorship of the proletariat, drawing behind it the poor peasants. All that is necessary has been said about this in The Criticism of the Draft Program. Here, it still remains to ask: Does not the present inter-revolutionary period, bound up with a new regrouping of class forces, allow one to discern possibilities of the rebirth of the slogan of the democratic dictatorship? To this we reply: No, it makes this possibility disappear completely.
The period of inter-revolutionary stabilization corresponds to the development of the productive forces, to the growth of the national bourgeoisie, to the growth and the increase of the cohesion of the proletariat, to the accentuation of the differentiation in the villages and to the continuation of the capitalist degeneration of democracy à la Wang Jingwei or any other petty-bourgeois democrat, with their “third party”, etc. In other words, China will pass through processes analogous in their broad outlines to those through which Russia passed under the régime of June 3. We were certain in our time that this régime would not be eternal, nor of long duration, and that it would terminate by a revolution. That is what happened (somewhat aided by the war). But the Russia which came out of the régime of Stolypin was no longer what it had been when it entered it.
The social changes which the inter-revolutionary régime will introduce in China depend especially upon the duration of this régime. But the general tendency of these modifications is henceforth indisputable: it is the sharpening of the class contradictions and the complete elimination of the petty-bourgeois democracy as an independent political power. But this signifies precisely that in the third Chinese revolution, a “democratic” coalition of the political parties would acquire a still more reactionary and more anti-proletarian content than that of the Guomindang in 1925-27. There is therefore nothing left to do but to make a coalition of classes under the direct leadership of the proletarian vanguard. That is the road of October. It involves many difficulties, but there exists no other.
Appendix: On the Policy and Régime of teh Comintern
Notes
1. L. Trotsky, Five Years of the Communist International, p.333.
2. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and th4e Renegade Kautsky, Works, Vol.XV, p.499.
3. Lenin, Report at the Meeting of the All-Russia CEC, Works, Vol.XX, part 2, p.217.
4. It goes without saying that Pravda has not published this resolution to which we have already referred above. It can only be found in the Material on the Chinese Question (no.10, 1928, issued by the Chinese Sun Yat-Sen University), and is very hard to procure. It is this same resolution that is officially charged with “Trotskyism”, although it is, in reality, nothing but Stalinist-Bukharinist opportunism upside down. – L.T.
5. Pravda, August 28, 1928.
6. Lenin, Report at the 2nd All-Russia Trade Union congress, Works, January 20, 1919, Vol.XX, Part 2, p.298.
7. Lenin, Works, Vol.XVII, 1920; The Infantile Sickness of Communism, p.149.
