From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Victor Serge-The Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution

 

YEAR ONE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION by Victor Serge

Book Review 

Present At The Creation 

I have read several books on subjects related to the Russian Revolution by Victor Serge and find that he is a well-informed insider on this subject although the novel rather than history writing is his stronger form of expressing his views. See his The Case of Comrade Tulayev. This book can be profitably read in conjunction with other better written left-wing interpretations of this period. Sukhanov's Notes on the Russian Revolution (for the February period), Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World come to mind.

The task Serge sets himself here is to look at the dramatic and eventually fateful events of first year of the Russian Revolution. Those included the Bolshevik seizure of power, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and the struggle by the Bolsheviks against other left-wing tendencies in defining Soviet state policy, the fight to end Russian participation in World War I culminating in the humiliating Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany and, most importantly, the beginnings of Civil War against the Whites. In short, he investigates all the issues that will ultimately undermine and cause the degeneration of what was the first successful socialist seizure of state power in history.

Serge's history is partisan history in the best sense of the word. It is rather silly at this late date to argue that historians must be detached from the subject of their investigations. All one asks is that a historian gets the facts for his or her analysis straight. And then stay out of the way. Serge passes this test. Serge worked under the assumption that the strategic theory of the Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky was valid. That premise stated that Russia as the weakest link in the international capitalist system could act as the catalyst for revolution in the West and therefore shorten its own road to socialism. The failure of that Western revolution, the subsequent hostile encirclement by the Western powers and the inevitable degeneration implicit in a revolution in an economically undeveloped country left to its own resources underlies the structure of his argument.

The Russian revolution of October 1917 was the defining event for the international labor movement during most of the 20th century. Serious militants and left -wing organizations took their stand based on their position on the so-called Russian Question. At that time the level of political class-consciousness in the international labor movement was quite high. Such consciousness does not exist today where the socialist program is seen as, at best, utopian. However, notwithstanding the demise of the Soviet state in 1991-92 and the essential elimination of the Russian Question as a factor in world politics on a day to day basis anyone who wants learn some lessons from the heroic period of the Russian Revolution will find this book an informative place to start.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.

Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.

The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff. 
******** 

Victor Serge

The Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution

(1927/28)

---

From Revolutionary History, Vol. 5 No. 3.
Transcribed by Alun Watson.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

---

Introduction from Revolutionary History

Victor Serge
Bolshevism and Asia
(January 1927)

Victor Serge
First Letter: The Class Struggle
in the Chinese Revolution
(April 1927)

Victor Serge
Second Letter: The Communist Task
(June/July 1927)

Victor Serge
Third Letter: The Strength of the
Agrarian Revolution – The Red Spears
(August 1927)

Victor Serge
Fourth Letter: The Outcome of an Experience
of Class Collaboration
(August 1927)

Victor Serge
Fifth Letter
(September/October 1927)

Paul Sizoff
Canton, December 1927
(Start of 1928)

---

Introduction from Revolutionary History

One of Serge’s responsibilities as a supporter of the Left Opposition was to sit on the sub-committee it set up to frame a policy on the Chinese Revolution (Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 216). Since their prime source of information was the Comintern press itself, they were not always very accurately informed (or at times even informed at all, such as when they were not even told of the opposition of the Chinese Communist Party to its subordination to the Guomindang), and it is surprising how clear their analysis of the situation turned out to be.

Although this account has been reprinted as a full-length book in French (Savelli, 1977), Italian (Samonà e Savelli, 1971) and German (Verlag Neue Kritik, 1975), and the fifth and last items in Documents sur le mouvement révolutionnaire en Chine (part 2, Cahiers du CERMTRI, no. 55, December 1989), this is its first appearance in English. Apart from the last piece on Canton, which appeared over the pseudonym of ‘Paul Sizoff’ in La Lutte de Classes (no. 1, February-March 1928; cf. Memoirs, p. 239), they originally came out over Serge’s name in Clarté magazine, the first, Le Bolchevisme dans l’Asie, as a separate article (new series, no. 7, 15 March 1927), and the rest as five letters in a collection entitled La Lutte des classes dans la révolution chinoise (Clarté, nos. 9, 11, 12, 13 and 14, May-October 1927). The editors of Clarté since it resumed publication in June 1926 were sympathetic to the ideas of the Left Opposition, for amongst them were the future French Trotskyist leaders Pierre Naville and Gérard Rosenthal, who had been introduced to Trotsky by Serge at the tenth anniversary celebrations of the Russian Revolution. The magazine changed its name to La Lutte de Classes in the spring of 1928. The publication of these articles may have been the final cause of Serge’s arrest, though as he points out, this would have happened in the long run anyway (Memoirs, pp238-40).
As the ‘select bibliography’ appended to the 1984 Writers and Readers edition of Serge’s Memoirs reminds us, the text we print below was planned to appear some years ago. The original project to translate and annotate Serge’s writings on China was begun by Greg Benton, but pressure of work and the uncertain state of left-wing publishing at the time obliged him to relinquish his task when he had drafted out three of the chapters. Al Richardson had independently worked on two other chapters when Dr Benton was kind enough to hand over the texts of all the French originals and his own preliminary translations. The whole was then finished off and annotated by Al Richardson and checked against the original French by Harry Ratner, Ian Birchall and Greg Benton, who also helped with the footnotes, which as a result are far richer in our version than the simple reproduction of Serge’s own notes appearing in the modern French, German and Italian reprints. Except in the very few cases where Chinese names are so familiar in their previous Wade-Giles forms that changing them would only have added to the confusion of the reader, all proper names have been given in the modern Pinyin mode of transliteration (a brief table showing the differences can be found in Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 2, Spring 1990, p. 1). Again to avoid confusion, all quotations from the Marxist classics or from Stalin and Mao have been reproduced in the wording of the familiar Russian or Chinese-produced English versions.
Whilst the main thrust of Serge’s analysis has held up remarkably well over the years, not all of his opinions on these events have received confirmation from the further development of our knowledge. For example, his favourable verdict on Mao Zedong (repeated in his Memoirs, p. 220), whom he discusses as if this Chinese Socialist Revolutionary had Bolshevik politics, has not been endorsed by the development of the state Mao set up. Trotsky’s own views on these events can be followed in Leon Trotsky on China (New York 1976), and some of the opinions of the other Russian leaders can be consulted in the appendices to the New Park edition of Problems of the Chinese Revolution (London 1969) or in Pierre Broué’s La Question chinoise dans l’Internationale communiste (Paris 1965). For the overall historical background, the first edition of Harold Isaacs’ The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (London 1938) is still required reading, and Workers News has performed an invaluable service by reprinting Max Shachtman’s original preface to the Problems of the Chinese Revolution in its supplement for May-June 1992 (no. 38). Subscribers to Revolutionary History should also refer to the collection we brought together in Volume 2, no. 4 (Spring 1990). For first-hand reminiscences, Wang Fanxi’s Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary should be consulted in its second edition (New York 1991), whilst Peng Shuzhi’s L’Envol du communisme en chine as yet only exists in a French version edited by Claude Cadart and Cheng Yinxiang (Paris 1983). Greg Benton’s history of the Chinese Trotskyists is promised to appear later this year.

Top of the page