***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through World War II-Peggy Lee Backed By The Benny Goodman Band- From Deep In The American Songbook-Rodgers And Hart’s Where Or When …

...and memories of that girl (or guy) who got away, or who was married to another, or who had another girlfriend (or boyfriend, or today mix and match, and then too come to think of it), or one of a thousand other reasons for parting, some good, some bad but in misty future time regret, sheer regret for that maybe first love and why things hadn’t worked out. Or maybe thinking, thinking too hard for the times, looking out over some Eastern or Western harbor about that guy coming back, coming back in one piece to take up their dream. And he in some muddied trench, some dank cave, some frozen beach-head thinking whether she will be waiting, waiting alone, for him. Thus this song to get one by on that cold, lonely remembrance night.

**********

Over the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale, Union Maid, Which Side Are You On, Viva La Quince Brigada, Universal Soldier, and such entitled Songs To While The Class Struggle By. This series which could include some protest songs as well is centered on roots music as it has come down through the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain amusing here. Listen up-Peter Paul Markin

Additional Markin comment for this series:

Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it meant to our parents or not, what sacred place it held in their youthful hearts, this is the music that went wafting through the house of many of those of us who constitute the Generation of ‘68. Those of us who came of age, personal, political and social age in the age of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot, and who were driven by some makeshift dream, who in the words of brother Bobby quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson were“seeking a new world.” Those who took up the call to action and slogged through that decade whether it was in civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture before the hammer came down. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note drifted out into the ebbing tide. But enough of that about us this is about forbears and their struggles, and the music that they dreamed by on cold winter nights or hot summer days.

This is emphatically the music of the generation that survived the dust bowl, empty bowl, no sugar bowl street urchin hard times of the 1930s Great Depression, the time of the madness, the time of the night-takers, the time of the long knives. Survived god knows how by taking the nearest freight, some smoke and dreams freight, Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, B&O, Illinois Central, Penn Central, Empire State, Boston and Maine, or one of a million trunk lines to go out and search for, well, search for…Search for something that was not triple decker bodies piled high cold-water flat with a common commode and brown stained sink, rooming house, hell, call it what it was flop house stinking of perspiration and low-shelf whiskeys and wines, or tumbled down shack, window pane-less, tarpaper siding, roof tiles falling, and get out on the open road and search for the great promised American night that had been tattered by world events, and greed.

Survived the Hoovervilles, the great cardboard, tin can roof, slap-dash jerry-built camp explosions along rivers, down in ravines and under railroad trestles when the banks, yeah, the banks, the usual suspects, robbed people of their shacks, their cottages, their farm houses, robbed them as an old-time balladeer said at the time not with a gun but with a fountain pen, but still robbed them. Survived the soap kitchens hungers, the endless waiting in line for scrapes, dreaming of some by-gone steak or dish of ice cream, and always that hunger, not the stomach hunger although that was ever present, but the hunger that hurts a man, hurts his pride when he has to stick his hand out, stick it out and not know why. Out of work, or with little work waiting for that day, that full head of steam day in places like Flint, Frisco town, Akron, Chicago, hell, even in boondock Minneapolis when the score gets evened, evened a little, but until then shifting the scroungings of the trash piles of the urban glut, the rural fallow fields, and that gnarring hungry that cried out in the night-want, want that is all.

Survived too the look, the look of those, the what did FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the young, or forgetful) call them, oh yeah, the economic royalists, today’s 1%, who in their fortified towers tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be the fittest. That crowd fought tooth and nail against the little guy trying to break bread, trying to get out from under that cardboard, tar paper, windowless soup kitchen world along with a hell of a lot of comrades, yes, comrades, kindred in the struggle to put survival of the fittest on the back-burner of human history, to take collective action to put things right, hell, made the bosses cry bloody murder when they shut down their factories, shut them down cold until some puny penny justice was eked out.

Survived but took time out too, time out if young perhaps, to stretch those legs, to sway those hips to a new sound coming out of the mist, coming out of New York, always New York then, Chicago, Detroit, and Kansas City, the Missouri K.C. okay. The sound of swing replacing the dour Brother, Can You Spare a Dime, no banishing it, casting it out with soup lines, second-hand clothes (passed down from out the door brothers and sisters), and from hunger looks, because after all it did not mean a thing, could not possibly place you anywhere else but squareville (my term, not their), if you did not have that swing. To be as one with jitter-buggery if there was (is) such a word. And swing a fade echo of the cool age be-bop that was a-borning, making everybody reach for that high white note floating out of Minton’s, Big Bill’s Jimmie’s, hell, even Olde Saco’s Starlight Ballroom before it breezed out in the ocean air night, crashed into the tepid sea. Yeah.

Survived, as if there was no time to breathe in new fresh airs, to slog through the time of the gun in World War II, a time when the night-takers, those who craved the revenge night of the long knives took giant steps in Europe and Asia trying to make that same little guy, Brit, Frenchie, Chinaman, Filipino, God’s American, and half the races and nationalities on this good green earth cry uncle and buckle under, take it, take their stuff without a squawk. And so after Pearl, after that other shoe dropped on a candid world Johnnie, Jimmie, Paulie, Benny too, all the guys from the old neighborhood, the guys who hung around Doc’s hands in their pockets, guys from the wheat fields fresh from some Saturday night dance, all shy and with calloused and, guys from the coal slags, down in hill country, full of home liquor, blackened fingernails and Saturday night front porch fiddlings wound up carrying an M-I on the shoulder in Europe or the Pacific. Susie, Laura, Betty, and dark-haired Rebecca too waiting at home hoping to high heaven that some wayward gun had not carried off sweetheart Johnnie, Jimmy, Paulie, or young Benny. Jesus not young Benny.

Survived the endless lines of boys heading off East and West, some who could hardly wait to get to the recruiting office others, well, other hanging back, hanging back just a little to think things over, and still others head over heels they were exempt, 4-F, bad feet, you see. All, all except that last crew who got to sit a home with Susie, Laura, Betty and even odd-ball Rebecca waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the ships to sail or planes to fly, hanging in some corner drugstore, Doc’s, Rexall, name your drugstore name, sitting two by two at the soda fountain playing that newly installed jukebox until the nickels ran out. Listened to funny banana songs, rum and coca cola songs, siting under the apple tree songs to get a minute’s reprieve from thoughts of the journey ahead.

Listened too to dreamy, sentimental songs, songs about faraway places, about keeping lamp- lights burning, about making a better world out of the fire and brimstone sacrifice before them, about Johnnie, Jimmie and the gang actually returning, returning whole, and putting a big dent in their dreams, hell, about maybe the damn wars would be over sooner rather than later. Listened and as old Doc, or some woe-begotten soda jerk, some high school kid, told them to leave he was closing up, they made for the beach, if near a beach, the pond, the back forty, the hills, or whatever passed for a lovers’ lane in their locale and with the echo of those songs as background, well, what do you think they did, why do you think they call us baby-boomers.

It wafted through the large console radio centered in the living room of my house via local station WDJA in North Adamsville as my mother used it as background on her appointed household rounds. It drove me crazy then as mush stuff at a time when I was craving the big break-out rock and roll sounds I kept hearing every time I went and played the jukebox at Doc’s Drugstore over on Walker Street down near the beach. Funny thing though while I am still a child of rock and roll (blues too) this so-called mushy stuff sounds pretty good to these ears now long after my parents and those who performed this music have passed on. Go figure. 

*******

Songwriters: HART, LORENZ/RODGERS, RICHARD

When you're awake, the things you think
Come from the dream you dream
Thought has wings, and lots of things
Are seldom what they seem

Sometimes you think youve lived before
All that you live to day
Things you do come back to you
As though they knew the way

Oh the tricks your mind can play

It seems we stood and talked like this, before
We looked at each other in the same way then
But I can't remember where or when

The clothes you're wearing are the close, you wore
The smile you are smiling you were smiling then
But I can't remember where or when

Some things that happened for the first time
Seem to be happening again

And so it seems that we have met before
And that we laughed before, also loved before
But who knows where or when

 

She Stoops To Conquer- With The 1950s Film Some Like It Hot In Mind –Take Three     

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

He did not think that he could keep on living a lie.  He, John Samson to give him a name, although the particulars of his condition could apply to many more than one would think, maybe not numberless but let’s leave it at more than one would think, think out in the closeted, red scare, cold war early 1960s night when to be different in any of about twelve different ways drew the night-takers to one’s door, drew the night of the long knives in your direction. No John did not think he could keep on letting the whole wide world think he was just a reclusive oddball, a quirky nut- case.

Especially when old time friends, high school guys who thought they knew him a little, thought he was just one of the guys hanging around Doc’s Drugstore over on Walker Street in growing up hometown North Adamsville talking about slipping it, you know IT to some passing pretty, or double-dating down at Adamsville Beach with some girl classmate breathing all over him asked why he wasn’t like them, carrying a married ball and chain and kids on the way. Jesus the hell he went through back then just to get through the night without screaming. Or later guys at work, guys at the warehouse over in Southie, tried to date him up with women, usually but not always their sisters, or their sisters’ friends and he begged off with some very lame excuses, headaches, stuff like that just like a woman, yes, just like a woman he thought with a chuckle. But what was person like him to do in the year 1961 with the whole world arrayed against him, and his kind. His kind being a, uh, cross-dresser, a transvestite, hell, call him the way they described his kind, a flaming drag queen. His instinct, his survival instinct said keep your head down, keep to your secret world, keep the wolves of society away, and mainly keep his parents in the dark for as long as possible. And so he did, although who knows at what psychic cost.

That secret world of his was caught up in midnight dates with guys who liked to swing with drag queens, liked the idea of being with a “woman” without the hassle of being with a woman, without the forms dictated by a straight society.Guys who   got their kicks that way, guys who were willing to at least keep him company, play to his girlish vanity, in anonymous locations, usually far, very far, from his North Adamsville digs. Or later when he felt able to do so without blushing putting on silly little come-on-boys titter shows for strangers down in closed door social clubs in the South End of Boston, occasional wild side trysts in New York City, mainly the Village, and in summer, sweet summer down in Provincetown with all its delights.

No, he could not keep going on that way. His parents were becoming increasingly suspicious, suspicious enough to inquire incessantly every time they could about why he didn’t settle down with some nice girl. They were suspicious that he has no girlfriends, none, not even for public show to keep people at least guessing. They would be crushed to know that he had no interest in girls if he was truthful with them, was uncomfortable around them and always as far back as he could remember felt that way, and thus had no freaking desire to be interested in girls unlike two of his brothers who were raising broods to terrorize an unknowing world. What he was interested in was cross-dressing, wearing female attire and to be, frankly, admired as a girl, as a woman, to be a femme as he liked to call himself in his lonely minutes. So no girls as his parents called them, good or evil, crossed his path, and were moreover to be treated as competition, or to be asked for beauty tips, stuff like that.

His parents with whom he had lived at home off and on the previous several years after he had graduated from high school in 1957, usually after some unsuccessful affair went sour, or he got kicked out of some rented digs for being, well, odd, or some no-nonsense landlord’s idea of being odd, were beginning to speak to neighbors and relatives that Johnnie was “different” from their three other sons. Especially those two blooming brood-growing sons. Although the youngest, not yet married, a college kid, Albert, and maybe a little more worldly-wise that his parents and other brothers having broken out of the cloistered small town mainly Irish Catholic enclave unlike them, seemed to sense what John was all about, although he never said anything about it to him, never even later when he came out of the closet, and became famous.     

[We will hereafter use not this male name John, or Johnnie, bestowed, no what do they call it now, assigned at birth to him by his family and convention in the year of our lord 1939, the year of his birth, but his secret world name, Jackie, and use feminine pronouns to avoid any further confusion on the point of identification of one Jackie Samson.]

They, her parents, Delores and Paul to give them names, would say that Jackie had always been sort of a loner, sort of liked to look at the world differently from the other boys. Always had her nose in a book, unlike the sports-driven other boys. Those books and her secret hide-away public library visits from such things as sports and school dances and made up “dates”  unless absolutely unavoidable were what saved her lots of harassment on that score although she was not particularly interested in academics and had been a middling student, at best. Little did Delores and Paul know as well how different Jackie was from her siblings. How early on Jackie was fascinated by her girl cousins’ things, frilly girl things, when they came to visit or she went there and, naturally, her mother’s things, rummaging through her bureaus when she was home alone,  and abhorred sports, dirty boy talk, and male swagger in general.

That fascination with women’s things, especially frilly things hit home to her at first when she had, alone and secretly in downtown Boston, seen Some Like It Hot, and almost had an orgasm when she saw Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis dressed in drag even though they were just using it as a ruse, using it to avoid some unpleasant bad guys who were hunting for them back in bootleg Chicago gangster days. (She would see that film several more times at that time, as well as later, and have that same reaction).  Moreover little did they know what she herself had begun to realize that she liked, really liked, to dress like a girl (woman) hard as that was for her to understand at first. She would always be confused by those feelings because while she loved to dress up she didn’t necessarily feel like a girl (later woman) like some of her friends, her secret friends, who were almost praying they could be women and were always talking about some kind of expensive and experimental operation to do just that being performed over in Europe some place. One friend, Lucy Love, was actually saving money to go to Europe and have the operation.   

She had Georgette (birth name, name assigned at birth, okay, George Sampas) to thank for helping her break down her confusion about her feelings. Jackie had previously thought she was just weird, weird even by South End, Village, Provincetown conventions, when she wanted to assert her girl-ness without dreams of being transformed like some fairy- tale princess into a woman. Most of the homosexuals she knew turned her down when they found out her inclinations, couldn’t understand why she was not attracted to them like other men in a manly man to man way. That misunderstanding had exploded in a previous relationship when Clip (she preferred not to use his real name since he has a very big public position as head of an international company so Chip) flipped out when Jackie started to see a straight man occasionally who was willing to treat her like a woman, treat her like the real woman she felt inside even though no science, no medical advances could help align her body with her soul. Once she met one such straight guy, Clint, she knew that her affair with Chip, who never really accepted her girl-ness except when it came to sex, would soon be over although she really could have used a friend and a place to stay so she wouldn’t have to move back home and face that whole “different” song and dance. But see Clint had been dependent on his wife’s money, serious trust money and not to be sneered at according to Clint, and that wife would have flipped out and divorced him if she ever found out about his relationship with Jackie. Would take the kids, the house, the dough and all. So while Jackie clung to him (and he to her) she would, in the end, have to make her own way in the world elsewhere.                             

That is where Georgette came in and kind of saved her, kind of made her more comfortable with her feelings. They had met at Sally’s down in the Village (Sally, the owner, of course being not some girl Sally but the stage first name of the owner, ex-drag queen Judy Garland impersonator, Salvatore Domino) where Georgette sat at a table one night by herself in high fashion- pompadour blonde wig, fluttering black eyelashes, ruby red lips, and a gorgeous dress from one of the better New York fashion houses. She was in short in full drag regalia as befitted a queen of the night. Jackie, still too shy to go all out in drag even in such friendly environs, went up to her and remarked on her splendid attire. Georgette, maybe with a few too many drinks in her at that point in the evening, kind of snickered at that sentiment and asked what the hell Jackie thought she was doing looking like some housewife from Jersey in high tone Sally’s (Jersey where Georgette was from so she knew).

Jackie blushed and was flustered thinking, feeling anyway that she looked pretty good, brown wig, skirt and blouse, and sensible make-up, an outfit that Clint would have been  happy to take her out in. Georgette sensing she had been a little unkind mentioned some tips, better eye-liner, a little more lipstick to give a fuller look to the lips and, no question, get rid of that 1930s hair-do wig that was her real complaint. They talked a while and Georgette softened up and could be quite charming (although later Jackie found she could be just as unkind sober as drunk). That night Georgette took charge of Jackie’s look, for good or evil. And that started their friendship, their life together.                

After a couple of weeks Jackie was comfortable enough to wear fashionable dresses and accessories out in the streets, the hard bitten early 1960s New York streets (although for a long time not alone but always in Georgette’s company). At that point Jackie moved in with Georgette in her garret in deep Soho, then mostly abandoned warehouses but with cheap, very cheap rent.    That done though she, they, had hit a wall. Neither were working, Jackie finding it impossible to dress up at night and then work in some ill-begotten warehouse over on Seventh Avenue by day and Georgette was struggling to make a “career,” a vague sense that she could become like Sally, a high-shelf impersonator. She was then working on some Peggy Lee material and practicing her mannerisms.  

But, truth, they had no dough, no prospects of dough and a landlord who was not happy, and made his unhappiness well known, to have two drag queens a couple of months behind in their rent, cheap or not, mooching off of him. That is when Georgette put together the idea of a drag sister singing act rather than a solo career.  As it turned she had a great silky smoky female voice reminding one and all of late 1940s sulky Billie Holiday on bluesy numbers and Peggy Lee when she fronted for Benny Goodman on the sentimental stuff. Jackie was not bad on harmony as long as she did not try to hit the high range notes. After a few weeks they decided that they would go to Sally’s Monday audition night where the “girls” could get on stage and show their stuff in front of an audience, a mixed audience of drag queens and straight, a typical Village crowd, that Sally’s always drew on any given night. A tough slow Monday night after a drunken weekend Monday night audience though. Georgette decided they should go with Blues In The Night to play to the crowd. Georgette was in high-gear that night, had her come hither moves down pat, Jackie a little more wooden in her moves and a tad off in the voice department nevertheless held her own. The crowd loved it, and better, Sally saw something in them something worth giving them Thursday nights for a trial period. They thereafter became the talk of queer New York.        

And so for several years in all the drag haunts of New York City, P-town, Frisco town and some foreign ports they had a following and kept the wolves from their door. Eventually they each got a segment of the show Georgette doing torchy stuff, you know Billie, Peggy, a wicked Dinah Washington, a foxy Eartha and Jackie honed a presentable Judy Garland (which made Sally cry when she first performed it solo at Sally’s). Then they would do a final set together and done. But like all fashion, or all beauty for that matter, things fade. Middle age did nothing for them, weight problems, too much booze, too many cigarettes, too much dope when dope was cool and one was not cool if one did not get dope high, too many parties, hell, maybe too many lovers.The list they compiled to take stock one night could go and go. Moreover those guys who were crazy for Billie, Peggy or Judy were being replaced by an audience that was clueless about those legendary singers and who wanted Barbra Streisand, Christ, Barbra, or Bette Midler. Or after Stonewall and Harvey Milk wanted to get up there themselves. Welcome to the new age.

So as Georgette and Jackie got older they were in less demand, playing smaller venues in out of the way places, small gay social clubs who hired them for a night’s entertainment. One night somebody in the crowd called on “the blimps to retire and get facelifts while you are at it.” That was a kind of watershed. They eventually abandoned the act and opened a small bar in Frisco, a friendly town for their kind, any different kind. And it is still there, Jackette’s, including their own Monday night auction program for new talent, in that golden town although now under new management.          

The mention of new management part is not accidental. About fifteen years ago Georgette passed away and Jackie ran the place herself for a while. Then she too passed away a few years later, about ten years ago. The way I came across this story though, not a story usually on my radar, was that my old time high school friend, Peter Paul Markin (although we always called him just Markin, forget that stupid three name upper-crust Peter Paul stuff for a working poor kid), grew up across the street in North Adamsville from the Samsons. Although Markin was several years younger than Jackie he had heard stuff about a Jackie Samson, the famous drag queen, who had grown up and lived right across the street for him when he lived in California. Jackie’s parents had passed on by then, embarrassed and hurt that the son that they had tried to raise as a good Catholic boy had turned out, turned out the only word they would use to describe her, “different.” The three brother continued to raise their broods, or two of them did anyway, cursing their faggot brother and disowning her. Albert, for his own reasons, lived, lives with a women companion and they decided not to have children. He never did talk about the “difference” with Jackie just kind of accepted it with a sense of resignation, and maybe sorrow for his parents.

Markin investigated the story, filled in some of the details some time later. He was interested in Jackie’s career, how she felt, what it was like back in the day when queerness was beyond the pale, especially in their old neighborhood. Funny how times have changed I remember, and Markin does too, when our mothers, maybe Mrs. Samson too, would warn us away from The Shipwreck a bar located on a cove on the outskirts of my hometown, Hullsville, across from the Paradise Amusement Park because drag queens performed there like it was some kind of disease. I also remember times, and Markin does too, when a rite of passage for straight boys in our towns was to go to P-town and gay-bait the faggots, queers and dykes. Jesus.

One time a few years before Jackie died while Markin was on a trip to San Francisco after he moved back East he went into Jackette’s, introduced himself, and told Jackie that he was curious for the real story of Jackie’s life not the crude stuff that had gone around the neighborhood and how she survived it all that he later related to me.  They chatted for a couple of hours that day and on several other occasions. That first day though Jackie had invited Markin over to her apartment. That night they watched a DVD of Some Like It Hot on Jackie’s television, a favorite film of Markin’s as well, had a few drinks, and Jackie put on her old regalia and sang Cry Me A River for him. What do you think of that my friends.         

 

 

Frequently Asked Questions Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. Attorney David Coombs addresses FAQs Chelsea's lawyer David Coombs Earlier this week, Private Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning's lawyer David Coombs answered some questions on his blog about Chelsea and her condition in prison. These questions have been frequently posed to Mr. Coombs by both public and press. 1) Is Chelsea still going through the indoctrination process? No. Chelsea has successfully completed her indoctrination process at the United States Disciplinary Barracks (USDB). After completing her indoctrination, the facility placed Chelsea in general population. Being held in general populations means that Chelsea does not have any special limitations or restrictions. She is able to participate in all vocational and educational opportunities at the USDB and is able to receive visitors and correspondence. All mail received at the USDB will be inspected upon receipt. Any mail that is considered detrimental to security, good order, discipline, or the correctional mission of the USDB will be rejected. 2) Can I write to Chelsea? Yes, you may write to Chelsea by addressing your letter to the following address: Bradley E. Manning 89289 1300 N. Warehouse Road Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027-2304 Read more... Alice Walker writes letter of support for Chelsea: Urges Convening Authority to grant clemency Alice Walker has written a letter in support of Chelsea Manning's clemency application. As commander of the Military District of Washington, Major General Jeffrey S. Buchanan has the power to reduce Chelsea Manning’s 35-year prison sentence to time served. Hundreds have already written letters to Maj. Gen. Buchanan, explaining why Manning deserves clemency. This week we received a letter from Pulitzer Prize-winner Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple. She praises Manning's humanism. Peter Van Buren, State Department whistle-blower, has published his letter of support as well. Read here for more information on how to lend your support for Chelsea Manning with a letter to Maj. Gen. Buchanan. Click here to read Alice Walker's letter. Had enough of governments spying on citizens while keeping their own actions hidden from view? Take your support for Private Manning to a "Stop Watching Us" rally near you. How we crowd-sourced transcripts of the entire Manning court martial By Rainey Reitman, Freedom of the Press Foundation. Originally published at pressfreedomfoundation.org. Supporters raised more than $80,000 to cover the costs of a stenographer at Manning's trial, providing the only transcript available! On May 9, 2013, we made a bold claim on this website. We promised to crowd-fund enough money to hire independent court reporters to provide transcripts of the entire Manning court martial. We knew that it was vital that the public have a virtual seat in Chelsea Manning’s trial1. A public record of the court proceedings could fuel better, more accurate, and more frequent news coverage of the trial and could hold the government to account for its actions during the court martial. The government had forbidden tape recorders or cameras from entering the courtroom, so the only way to get an accurate accounting of the proceedings was sending in someone to take notes by hand. Read more... Help us continue to cover 100% of Pvt. Manning's legal fees! Donate today.

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***Honor Civil War Union General William Tecumseh Sherman

DVD REVIEW

Sherman's March, General Sherman and his boys, History Channel, 2004

The ultimate outcomes of the American Civil War of 1861-65 were both the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery. Both were worthy historical outcomes from the perspective of today’s militant leftists. The Civil War, however, went through various twists and turns socially, politically, morally and militarily before final victory. The docu-drama under review here presented by the History Channel takes a look at a big and decisive slice of the military aspect (and a little of the moral and political aspects as well along the way) - Union General Sherman’s “total” war march through Georgia (and then north through the Carolinas to join up with General Grant before Richmond) in order to break the will of the Southern population to continue the fight.

Needless to say even today there are still some very deep emotions drawn out concerning this military strategy, North and South. As my sympathies lie with the North the title of this entry pretty much says it all- Honor the General’s work. Why? As presented here the fundamental problem on the battlefield was to end the stalemate as quickly as possible by a military breakthrough. Head to head bloody encounters between the armies in the field were indecisive. That the South would at some point run out of resources, men and materials, could be projected. But at what cost in Union men and materials. Moreover a struggle to the bitter end would make political settlement that much harder (which turned out to be the case anyway). Under those circumstances bold actions like the seizure of the military and industrial depot that was Atlanta and a run to the coast at Savannah cutting off Southern supply lines (rail lines, really) was the beginning of wisdom.

Of course in Southern hagiography this strategy was beyond the pale and southerners, and particularly southern politicians from that time to this have made that point. Ironically Sherman’s own personal feelings about blacks and slavery were not that far from the southerners but as a Union man and a military man he needed to take a bold move against the odds. Moreover, his policy of having his army ‘live off the land’
(foraying, in the etiquette of the day) could be justified on purely military grounds. Any competent commander will tell you that one way to keep army morale up is to have it do useful work with few causalities unless necessary. After many, too many, bloody encounters for seemingly nebulous objectives here was an army that was basically kept intact through the Georgia campaign and then later up through the Carolinas. Nice work, “bummers”.

Much has been made, and I think correctly, that Sherman’s efforts were the first serious application of the notion of “total” war with which we have over the last century and a half become all too familiar. Simply put, this is the notion that militarily virtually nothing is off limits, including civilian populations, in the pursuit of the military/political objectives of a campaign. The real question becomes then not for or against such strategies in principle but whether the cause is just. America’s total war against the Vietnamese people in the 1960’s and 70’s is an example of the unjust use of that concept. Sherman’s use, though, is a just example. Hail General Sherman and “Uncle Billy’s boys”.
*******

MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA

LYRICS

Bring the good ol' Bugle boys! We'll sing another song,
Sing it with a spirit that will start the world along,
Sing it like we used to sing it fifty thousand strong,
While we were marching through Georgia

Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee.
Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free,
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia.

How the darkeys shouted when they heard the joyful sound,
How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found,
How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,
While we were marching through Georgia.

Yes and there were Union men who wept with joyful tears,
When they saw the honored flag they had not seen for years;
Hardly could they be restrained from breaking forth in cheers,
While we were marching through Georgia.

"Sherman's dashing Yankee boys will never make the coast!"
So the saucy rebels said and 'twas a handsome boast
Had they not forgot, alas! to reckon with the Host
While we were marching through Georgia.

So we made a thoroughfare for freedom and her train,
Sixty miles of latitude, three hundred to the main;
Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain
While we were marching through Georgia.

***The Working Class Buries One Of Its Own

Commentary

This space is usually devoted to ‘high’ politics and culture thus the personal is usually limited to some experience of mine that has a direct political point. Sometimes, however, a story is so compelling and makes the point in such a poignant manner that no political palaver is necessary. Let me tell the tale. But first, as always, let us have a little historical context for this commentary.

In the 20th century January was traditionally the month to honor fallen working class leaders such as Lenin, Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. That tradition still goes on, however, more in the European working class movement than here. January can and should, however, also be a time to honor other working class people, those down at the base, as well. Over the last year I have posted a couple of such stories (See Hard Times in Babylon and An Uncounted Casualty of War in the May 2007 archives.) Here in its proper place is another about a fallen daughter of the class who died this January.

In An Uncounted Casualty of War (hereafter, Uncounted), written last May, I noted that I had then recently returned to the old working class neighborhood where I grew up. Maybe it is age, maybe it is memory, maybe it is the need at this late date to gain a sense of roots but that return has haunted me ever since. I have gone back a couple of times since then to hear more of what had happened to those in the old neighborhood from a woman who continues to live there and had related the above story to me. This one is about the fate of my childhood friend Kenny's (the subject of the Uncounted commentary) mother Margaret. Read it and weep.

As I mentioned in Uncounted our little family started life in the housing projects, at that time not the notorious hell holes of crime and deprivation that they later became but still a mark of being low, very low, on the social ladder at a time when others were heading to the Valhalla of the newly emerging suburbs. By clawing and scratching my parents saved enough money to buy an extremely modest single-family house. The house was in a neighborhood that was, and is, one of those old working class neighborhoods where the houses are small, cramped and seedy, the leavings of those who have moved on to bigger and better things.

The neighborhood nevertheless reflected the desire of the working poor in the 1950’s, my parents and others, to own their own homes and not be shunted off to decrepit apartments or dilapidated housing projects, the fate of those just below them on the social ladder. That is where I met Kenny and through him his family, including his mother Margaret. She seemed like a nice woman although I never got to know her well.

As I also mentioned in Uncounted in my teens I had lost track of Kenny who as he reached maturity took the death of a friend who died in Vietnam very hard. Harder than one can even imagine. The early details are rather sketchy but they may have involved drug use. The overt manifestations were acts of petty crime and then anti-social acts like pulling fire alarms and walking naked down the street. At some point Kenny was diagnosed as schizophrenic. I make no pretense of having adequate knowledge about the causes of mental illnesses but someone I trust has told me that such a traumatic event as his friend’s death can trigger the condition in young adults. In any case, the institutionalizations inevitably began. And later the halfway houses and all the other forms of control for those who cannot survive on the mean streets of the world on their own. Apparently, with drugs and therapy, there were periods of calm but for over three decades poor Kenny struggled with his inner demons. In the end the demons won and he died a few years ago while in a mental hospital.

Needless to say Kenny’s problems were well beyond his mother and father’s ability to comprehend or control. His father, like mine, had limited education and meager work prospects. In short, there were no private resources for Kenny and he and they were thus consigned to public institutionalization schemes. The shame of this, among other things, led to his father’s early death many, many years ago. His mother, strong Irish Catholic working class woman that she was, shouldered the burden by herself until Kenny’s death. The private and public horrors and humiliations that such care entailed must have taken a toll on her most of us could not stand. Apparently in the end it got to her as well as she let her physical appearance go down, became more reclusive and turned in on herself reverting in conversation to dwelling on happier times as a young married woman in the mid-1940’s.

Kenny’s woes, however, as I recently found out were only part of this sad story. Kenny had two older brothers whom I did not really know well because they were not around. Part of that reason was they were in and out of trouble or one sort or another and were not around the neighborhood much. My neighborhood historian related to me that at some point both sons had dropped out of sight and had not been seen by their mother for over thirty years. They are presumed to be dead or that is the story Margaret told my historian. In any case, since Kenny’s death Margaret’s health, or really her will to live went down hill fairly rapidly. Late last year she was finally placed in a nursing home where she died this month. Only a very few attended her funeral and her memory is probably forgotten by all except my historian friend and myself in this poor commentary.

I am a working- class political person. That is the great legacy that my parents left me, intentionally or not. Are there any great political lessons to be learned here? No, but I swear that when we build the new society that this country and this world needs we will not let the Kennys of the world be shunted off to the side. And we will not let the Margarets of the world, our working class mothers, die alone and forgotten. As for Kenny and Margaret may they rest in peace.

In Honor Of The 64th Anniversary Year Of The Chinese Revolution of 1949- From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-Problems Of The Chinese Revolution (1927) –Stalin and the Chinese Revolution-August 26, 1930-Prinkipo

Click on link below to read on-line all of Leon Trotsky's book, Problems Of The Chinesee Revolution

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/pcr/index.htm

Markin comment (repost from 2012):

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 (1949) 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

---

Stalin and the Chinese Revolution-August 26, 1930-Prinkipo

Facts and Documents

The Chinese revolution of 1925-27 remains the greatest event of modern history after the 1917 revolution in Russia. Over the problems of the Chinese revolution the basic currents of Communism come to clash. The present official leader of the Comintern, Stalin, has revealed his true stature in the events of the Chinese revolution. The basic documents pertaining to the Chinese revolution are dispersed, scattered, forgotten. Some are carefully concealed.

On these pages we want to reproduce the basic stages of the Chinese revolution in the light of articles and speeches by Stalin and his closest assistants, as well as decisions of the Comintern dictated by Stalin. For this purpose we use genuine texts from our archives. We especially present excerpts from the speech of Khitarov, a young Stalinist, at the 15th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which were concealed from the Party by Stalin. The readers will convince themselves of the tremendous significance of the testimony of Khitarov, a young Stalinist functionary-careerist, a participant in the Chinese events, and at the present time one of the leaders of the Young Communist International.
In order to make the facts and citations more comprehensible, we think it useful to remind the readers of the sequence of the most important events in the Chinese revolution.

• March 20th, 1926 – Chiang Kai-shek’s first coup in Canton.
• Autumn 1926 – the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI, with the participation of a Chiang Kai-shek delegate from the Guomindang.
• April 13, 1927 – coup d’état by Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai.
• The end of May 1927 – the counter-revolutionary coup of the “Left” Guomindang in Wuhan.
• The end of May 1927 – the Eighth Plenum of the ECCI proclaims it the duty of Communists to remain within the “Left” Guomindang.
• August 1927 – the Chinese Communist Party proclaims a course toward an uprising.
• December 1927 – the Canton insurrection.
• February 1928 – the Ninth Plenum of the ECCI proclaims for China the course towards armed insurrection and soviets.
• July 1928 – the Sixth Congress of the Comintern renounces the slogan of armed insurrection as a practical slogan.
  

1) The Bloc of Four Classes

Stalin’s Chinese policy was based on a bloc of four classes. Here is how the Berlin organ of the Mensheviks appraised this policy:

“On April 10 [1927], Martynov, in Pravda, most effectively and in a quite Menshevik manner, showed the correctness of the official position which insists on the necessity of retaining the bloc of four classes, on not hastening to overthrow the coalition government, in which the workers sit side by side with the big bourgeoisie, not to impose Ôsocialist tasks’ upon it prematurely.” [1]

What did the policy of coalition with the bourgeoisie look like? Let us quote an excerpt from the official organ of the Executive Committee of the Comintern:

“On January 5, 1927, the Canton government made public a new strike law in which the workers are prohibited from carrying weapons at demonstrations, from arresting merchants and industrialists, from confiscating their goods, and which establishes compulsory arbitration for a series of conflicts. This law contains a number of paragraphs protecting the interests of the workers But along with these paragraphs there are others, which limit the freedom to strike more than is required by the interests of defence during a revolutionary war.” [2]

In the rope placed around the workers by the bourgeoisie the threads (“paragraphs”) favourable to the workers are traced. The shortcoming of the noose is that it is tightened more than is required “by the interests of defence” (of the Chinese bourgeoisie). This is written in the central organ of the Comintern. Who does the writing? Martynov. When does he write? On February 25, six weeks before the Shanghai bloodbath.

2) The Perspectives of the Revolution According to Stalin

How did Stalin evaluate the perspectives of the revolution led by his ally, Chiang Kai-shek? Here are the least scandalous parts of Stalin’s declaration (the most scandalous parts of it were never made public):

“The revolutionary armies in China [that is, the armies of Chiang Kai-shek] are the most important factor in the struggle of the Chinese workers and peasants for their liberation. For the advance of the Cantonese means a blow at imperialism, a blow at its agents in China, and freedom of assembly, freedom of press, freedom of organization for all the revolutionary elements in China in general and for the workers in particular.” [3]

The army of Chiang Kai-shek is the army of workers and peasants. It bears freedom for the whole population, “for the workers in particular”.

What is needed for the success of the revolution? Very little:

“The student youth (the revolutionary youth), the working youth, the peasant youth – all these are a force that can advance the revolution with seven league boots, if it should be subordinated to the ideological and political influence of the Guomindang.” [4]

In this manner, the task of the Comintern consisted not of liberating the workers and peasants from the influence of the bourgeoisie but, on the contrary, of subordinating them to its influence. This was written in the days when Chiang Kai-shek, armed by Stalin, marched at the head of the workers and peasants subordinated to him, “with seven-league boots”, towards. the Shanghai coup d’état.

3) Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek

After the Canton coup d’état, engineered by Chiang Kai-shek in March 1926, and which our press passed over in silence, when the Communists were reduced to the role of miserable appendices of the Guomindang and even signed an obligation not to criticize Sun-Yat-Sen-ism, Chiang Kai-shek – a remarkable detail indeed! – came forward to insist on the acceptance of the Guomindang into the Comintern: in preparing himself for the role of an executioner, he wanted to have the cover of world Communism and – he got it. The Guomindang, led by Chiang Kai-shek and Hu Hanmin, was accepted into the Comintern (as a “sympathizing” party). While engaged in the preparation of a decisive counter-revolutionary action in April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek at the same time took care to exchange portraits with Stalin. This strengthening of the ties of friendship was prepared by the journey of Bubnov, a member of the Central Committee and one of Stalin’s agents, to Chiang Kai-shek. Another “detail”: Bubnov’s journey to Canton coincided with the March coup d’état of Chiang Kai-shek. What about Bubnov? He made the Chinese Communists submit and keep quiet.

After the Shanghai overturn, the bureaux of the Comintern, upon Stalin’s order, attempted to deny that the executioner Chiang Kai-shek still remained a member of the Comintern. They had forgotten the vote at the Political Bureau, when everybody, against the vote of one (Trotsky), sanctioned the admission of the Guomindang into the Comintern with a consultative voice. They had forgotten that at the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI, which condemned the Left Opposition, “comrade Shao Li-tse”, a delegate from the Guomindang, participated. Among other things he said:

“Comrade Chiang Kai-shek in his speech to the members of the Guomindang, declared that the Chinese revolution would be inconceivable if it could not correctly solve the agrarian, that is, the peasant question. What the Guomindang strives for is that there should not be created a bourgeois domination after the nationalist revolution in China, as happened in the West, as we see it now in all countries except the USSR We are all convinced, that under the leadership of the Communist Party and the Comintern, the Guomindang will fulfil its historic task.” [5]

This is how matters stood at the Seventh Plenum in the autumn of 1926. After the member of the Comintern, “comrade Chiang Kai-shek”, who had promised to solve all the tasks under the leadership of the Comintern, solved only one: precisely the task of a bloody crushing of the revolution, the Eighth Plenum in May 1927 declared in the resolution on the Chinese question:

“The ECCI states that the events fully justified the prognosis of the Seventh Plenum.”

Justified, and right to the very end! If this is humour, it is at any rate not arbitrary. However, let us not forget that this humour is thickly coloured with Shanghai blood.

4) The Strategy of Lenin and the Strategy of Stalin

What tasks did Lenin set before the Comintern with regard to the backward countries?

“It is necessary to carry on a determined struggle against the attempt to surround the bourgeois democratic liberation movements in the backward countries with a Communist cloak.”

In carrying this out, the Guomindang, which had promised to establish in China “not a bourgeois régime”, was admitted into the Comintern.

Lenin, it is understood, recognized the necessity of a temporary alliance with the bourgeois-democratic movement, but he understood by this, of course, not an alliance with the bourgeois parties, duping and betraying the petty-bourgeois revolutionary democracy (the peasants and the small city folk), but an alliance with the organizations and groupings of the masses themselves – against the national bourgeoisie. In what form, then, did Lenin visualize the alliance with the bourgeois democracy of the colonies? To these, too, he gives an answer in his thesis written for the Second Congress:

“The Communist International should enter into a temporary alliance with the democratic bourgeoisie of the colonies and backward countries, but should not fuse with it and must unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement – even in its embryonic form.”

It seems that in executing the decisions of the Second Congress, the Communist Party was made to join the Guomindang and the Guomindang was admitted into the Comintern. All this summed up is called Leninism.

5) The Government of Chiang Kai-shek as a Living Refutation of the State

How the leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union appraised the government of Chiang Kai-shek one year after the first Canton coup d’état (March 20, 1926) may be seen clearly from the public speeches of the members of the Party Political Bureau.

Here is how Kalinin spoke in March 1927, at the Moscow factory Goshnak:

“All the classes of China, beginning with the proletariat and ending with the bourgeoisie, hate the militarists as the puppets of foreign capital; all the classes of China look upon the Canton government as the national government of the whole of China in the same way.” [6]

Another member of the Political Bureau, Rudzutak, spoke a few days later at a gathering of the street car workers. The Pravda report states:

“Pausing further on the situation in China, comrade Rudzutak pointed out that the revolutionary government has behind it all the classes of China.” [7]

Voroshilov spoke in the same spirit more than once.

Truly in vain did Lenin clear the Marxian theory of the state from the petty-bourgeois garbage. The epigones succeeded in a short time in covering it with twice as much refuse.
As late as April 5, Stalin spoke in the Hall of the Columns in defence of the Communists remaining inside the party of Chiang Kai-shek, and what is more, he denied the danger of a betrayal by his ally: “Borodin is on guard!” The coup occurred exactly one week later.

6) How the Shanghai Coup Took Place

In this connection we have the exceptionally valuable testimony of a witness and participant, the Stalinist Khitarov, who arrived from China on the eve of the Fifteenth Congress and appeared there with his information. The most important points of his narrative have been deleted by Stalin from the Minutes with the consent of Khitarov himself: the truth cannot be made public if it so crushingly proves all the accusations the Opposition directed against Stalin. Let us give the floor to Khitarov [8]:

“The first bloody wound has been inflicted upon the Chinese revolution in Shanghai by the execution of the Shanghai workers on April 11-12.

“I would like to speak in greater detail about this coup because I know that in our party little is known about it. In Shanghai there existed for a period of 21 days the so-called People’s Government in which the Communists had a majority. We can therefore say that for 21 days Shanghai had a Communist government. This Communist government, however, showed complete inactivity in spite of the fact that the coup by Chiang Kai-shek was expected any day.

“The Communist government, in the first place, did not begin to work for a long time under the excuse that, on the one hand, the bourgeois part of the government did not want to get to work, sabotaging it, and, on the other hand, because the Wuhan government did not approve of the composition of the Shanghai government. Of the activity of this government three decrees are known, and one of them, by the way, speaks of the preparation of a triumphal reception to Chiang Kai-shek who was expected to arrive in Shanghai.

“In Shanghai, at this time, the relations between the army and the workers became acute. It is known, for instance, that the army [that is, Chiang Kai-shek’s officers – L.T.] deliberately drove the workers into slaughter. The army for a period of several days stood at the gates of Shanghai and did not want to enter the city because they knew that the workers were battling against the Shantungese, and they wanted the workers to be bled in this struggle. They expected to enter later. Afterwards the army did enter Shanghai. But among these troops there was one division that sympathized with the workers – the First Division of the Canton army. The commander, Say-O, was in disfavour with Chiang Kai-shek, who knew about his sympathies for the mass movement, because this Say-O himself came from the ranks. He was at first the commander of a company and later commanded a division.

“Say-O came to the comrades in Shanghai and told them that there was a military coup in preparation, that Chiang Kai-shek had summoned him to headquarters, had given him an unusually cold reception and that he, Say-O, would not go there any longer – because he feared a trap. Chiang Kai-shek proposed to Say-O that he get out of the city with his division and to go to the front; and he, Say-O, proposed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party that they agree that he should not submit to Chiang Kai-shek’s order. He was ready to remain in Shanghai and fight together with the Shanghai workers against the military overthrow that was in preparation. To all this, our responsible leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Duxiu included, declared that they knew about the coup being prepared, but that they did not want a premature conflict with Chiang Kai-shek. The First Division was let out of Shanghai, the city was occupied by the Second Division of Bai-Sung Gee and, two days later, the Shanghai workers were massacred.”

Why was this truly stirring narrative left out of the Minutes (p.32)? Because it was not at all a question of the Chinese Communist Party but of the Political Bureau of the Soviet Union.

On May 24, 1927, Stalin spoke at the Plenum of the ECCI:

“The Opposition is dissatisfied because the Shanghai workers did not enter into a decisive battle against the imperialists and their myrmidons. But it does not understand that the revolution in China cannot develop at a fast tempo. It does not understand that one cannot take up a decisive struggle under unfavourable conditions. The Opposition does not understand that not to avoid a decisive struggle under unfavourable conditions (when it can be avoided), means to make easier the work of the enemies of the revolution ...”

This section of Stalin’s speech is entitled: The Mistakes of the Opposition. In the Shanghai tragedy Stalin found mistakes ... by the Opposition. In reality the Opposition at that time did not yet know the concrete circumstances of the situation in Shanghai, that is, it did not know how much more favourable the situation still was for the workers in March and the beginning of April, in spite of all the mistakes and crimes of the leadership of the Comintern. Even from the deliberately concealed story of Khitarov it is clear that the situation could have been saved even at that time. The workers in Shanghai are in power. They are partly armed. There is all the possibility of arming them far more extensively. Chiang Kai-shek’s army is unreliable. There are sections of it where even the commanding staff is on the side of the workers. But everything and everyone is paralysed at the top. We must not prepare for the decisive struggle against Chiang Kai-shek, but for a triumphal reception to him. Because Stalin gave his categorical instructions from Moscow: not only do not resist the ally, Chiang Kai-shek, but on the contrary, show your loyalty to him. How? Lie down on your back and play dead.

At the May Plenum of the ECCI, Stalin still defended on technical, tactical grounds this terrible surrender of positions without a struggle, which led to the crushing of the proletariat in the revolution. Half a year later, at the Fifteenth Congress of the CPSU, Stalin was already silent. The delegates at the Congress extended Khitarov’s time so as to give him a chance to end his narrative which gripped even them. But Stalin found a simple way out of it by deleting Khitarov’s narrative from the Minutes. We publish this truly historic document here for the first time.

Let us note in addition one interesting circumstance: While smearing up the course of events as much as possible and concealing the really guilty one, Khitarov singles out for responsibility Chen Duxiu whom the Stalinists had until then defended in every way against the Opposition, because he had merely carried out their instructions. But at that time it was already becoming clear that comrade Chen Duxiu would not agree to play the role of a silent scapegoat, that he wanted openly to analyse the reasons for this catastrophe. All the hounds of the Comintern were let loose upon him, not for mistakes fatal to the revolution but because he would not agree to deceive the workers and to be a cover for Stalin.

7) The Organizers of the “Infusion of Workers’ and Peasants’ Blood”

The leading organ of the Comintern wrote on March 18, 1927, about three weeks prior to the Shanghai overturn:

“The leadership of the Guomindang is at present ill with a lack of revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ blood. The Chinese Communist Party must aid in the infusion of this blood, and then the situation will radically change.”

What an ominous play on words! The Guomindang is in “need of workers’ and peasants’ blood”. The “aid” was rendered in the fullest measure: in April-May, Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei received a sufficient “infusion” of workers’ and peasants’ blood.

With regard to the Chiang Kai-shek chapter of Stalin’s policy, the Eighth Plenum (May 1927) declared:

“The ECCI assumes that the tactic of the bloc with the national bourgeoisie in the already declining period of the revolution was absolutely correct. The Northern expedition alone [!] serves as historic justification for this tactic ...”

And how it serves!

Here is Stalin all the way through. The Northern expedition, which incidentally proved to be an expedition against the proletariat, serves as a justification of his friendship with Chiang Kai-shek. The ECCI has done everything it could to make it impossible to draw the lessons of the bloodbath of the Chinese workers.

8) Stalin Repeats His Experiment with the “Left” Guomindang

Further on, the following remarkable point is left out of Khitarov’s speech:

“After the Shanghai coup, it has become clear to everyone that a new epoch is beginning in the Chinese revolution; that the bourgeoisie is retreating from the revolution. This was recognized and immediately so stated. But one thing was left out of sight in connection with this – that while the bourgeoisie was retreating from the revolution, the Wuhan government did not even think of leaving the bourgeoisie. Unfortunately, among the majority of our comrades, this was not understood; they had illusions with regard to the Wuhan government. They considered the Wuhan government almost an image, a prototype of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.” [The omission is on page 33.]

“After the Wuhan coup, it became clear that the bourgeoisie is retreating ...”

This would be ridiculous if it were not so tragic. After Chiang Kai-shek slew the revolution in the face of the Workers disarmed by Stalin, the penetrating strategists finally “understood” that the bourgeoisie is “retreating”. But having recognized that his friend Chiang Kai-shek was retreating, Stalin ordered the Chinese Communists to subordinate themselves to that same Wuhan government which, according to Khitarov’s information at the Fifteenth Congress, “did not even think of leaving the bourgeoisie”. Unfortunately “our comrades did not understand this”. What comrades? Borodin, who clung to Stalin’s telegraph wires? Khitarov does not mention any names. The Chinese revolution is dear to him, but his hide – is still dearer.

However, let us listen to Stalin:

“Chiang Kai-shek’s coup d’état means that there will now be two camps, two armies, two centres in the South: a revolutionary centre in Wuhan and a counter-revolutionary centre in Nanking.”

Is it clear where the centre of the revolution is located? In Wuhan!

“This means that the revolutionary Guomindang in Wuhan, leading a decisive struggle against militarism and imperialism, will in reality be transformed into an organ of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry ...”

Now we finally know what the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry looks like!

“From this it follows further [Stalin continues], that the policy of close collaboration of the lefts and the Communists inside the Guomindang acquires a particular force and a particular significance at the present stage. that without such a collaboration the victory of the revolution is impossible.” [9]

Without the collaboration of the counter-revolutionary bandits of the “Left” Guomindang, “the victory of the revolution is impossible”! That is how Stalin, step after step – in Canton, in Shanghai, in Hankow – assured the victory of the revolution.

9) Against the Opposition – For the Guomindang

How did the Comintern regard the “Left” Guomindang? The Eighth Plenum of the ECCI gave a clear answer to this question in its struggle against the Opposition.

“The ECCI rejects most determinedly the demand to leave the Guomindang ... The Guomindang in China is precisely that specific form of organization where the proletariat collaborates directly with the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry.”

In this manner the ECCI quite correctly saw in the Guomindang the realization of the Stalinist idea of the “two-class workers’ and peasants’ party”.

The not unknown Rafes, who was at first a minister under Petlura and afterwards carried out Stalin’s instructions in China, wrote in May 1927 in the theoretical organ of the Central Committee of the CPSU:

“Our Russian Opposition, as is known, also considers it necessary for the Communists to leave the Guomindang. A consistent defence of this viewpoint would lead the adherents of the policy to leave the Guomindang, to the famous formula proclaimed by comrade Trotsky in 1917: ÔWithout a tsar, but a labour government!’, which, for China, might have been changed in form: ÔWithout the militarists, but a labour government!’ We have no reason to listen to such consistent defenders of leaving the Guomindang.” [10]

The slogan of Stalin-Rafes was: “Without the workers, but with Chiang Kai-shek!” “Without the peasants, but with Wang Jingwei!” “Against the Opposition, but for the Guomindang!”

10) Stalin Again Disarms the Chinese Workers and Peasants

What was the policy of the leadership during the Wuhan period of the revolution? Let us listen to the Stalinist Khitarov on this question. Here is what we read in the Minutes of the Fifteenth Congress:

“What was the policy of the CC of the Communist Party at this time, during this whole [Wuhan] period? The policy of the CC of the Communist Party was carried on under the slogan of retreat ...

“Under the slogan of retreat – in the revolutionary period, at the moment of the highest tension of the revolutionary struggles – the Communist Party carries on its work, and under this slogan surrenders one position after another without a battle: To this surrender of positions belongs: the agreement to subordinate all the trade unions, all the peasant unions and other revolutionary organizations to the Guomindang; the rejection of independent action without the permission of the Central Committee of the Guomindang; the decision on the voluntary disarming of the workers’ pickets in Hankow; the dissolution of the pioneer organizations in Wuhan; the actual crushing of all the peasant unions in the territory of the national government, etc.”

Here is pictured quite frankly the policy of the Chinese Communist Party, the leadership of which actually helps the “national” bourgeoisie to crush the people’s uprising and to annihilate the best fighters of the proletariat and the peasantry.

But the frankness here is treacherous: the above citation is printed in the Minutes after the omission cited above by the line of periods. Here is what the section concealed by Stalin says:

“At the same time, some responsible comrades, Chinese and non-Chinese, invented the so-called theory of retreat. They declared: the reaction is advancing upon us from all sides. We must therefore immediately retreat in order to save the possibility of legal work, and if we retreat, we will save this possibility, but if we defend ourselves or attempt to advance, we will lose everything.”

Precisely in those days (end of May 1927), when the Wuhan counter-revolution began to crush the workers and peasants, in the face of the Left Guomindang, Stalin declared at the Plenum of the ECCI (May 24, 1927):

“The agrarian revolution is the basis and content of the bourgeois democratic revolution in China. The Guomindang in Hankow and the Hankow government are the centre of the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary movement.” [11]

To a written question of a worker as to why no soviets were being formed in Wuhan, Stalin replied:

“It is clear that whoever calls at present for the immediate creation of soviets of workers’ deputies in this [Wuhan] district, is attempting to jump [!] over the Guomindang phase of the Chinese revolution, and he risks putting the Chinese revolution in a most difficult position.”

Precisely: In a “most difficult” position! On May 13, 1927, in a conversation with students, Stalin declared:

“Should soviets of workers’ and peasants’ deputies, in general, be created in China? Yes, they should, absolutely they should. They will have to be created after the strengthening of the Wuhan revolutionary government, after the unfolding of the agrarian revolution, in the transformation of the agrarian revolution, of the bourgeois-democratic revolution into the revolution of the proletariat.”

In this manner, Stalin did not consider it permissible to strengthen the position of the workers and peasants through soviets, so long as the positions of the Wuhan government, of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, were not strengthened.

Referring to the famous theses of Stalin which justified his Wuhan policy, the organ of the Russian Mensheviks wrote at that time:

“Very little can be said against the essence of the Ôline’ traced there [in Stalin’s theses]. As much as possible to remain in the Guomindang, and to cling to its left wing and to the Wuhan government to the last possible moment: Ôto avoid a decisive struggle under unfavourable conditions’; not to issue the slogan ÔAll power to the soviets’ so as not to Ôgive new weapons into the hands of the enemies of the Chinese people for the struggle against the revolution, for creating new legends that it is not a national revolution that is taking place in China, but an artificial transplanting of Moscow sovietization’ – what can actually be more sensible ...?” [12]

On its part, the Eighth Plenum of the ECCI, which was in session at the end of May 1927, that is, at a time when the crushing of the workers’ and peasants’ organizations in Wuhan had already begun, adopted the following decision:

“The ECCI insistently calls the attention of the Chinese Communist Party to the necessity of taking all possible measures for the strengthening and development of all mass organizations of workers and peasants ... within all these organizations it is necessary to carry on an agitation to enter the Guomindang, transforming the latter into a mighty mass organization of the revolutionary petty-bourgeois democracy and the working class.”

“To enter the Guomindang” meant to bring one’s head voluntarily to the slaughter. The bloody lesson of Shanghai passed without leaving a trace. The Communists, as before, were being transformed into cattle herders for the party of the bourgeois executioners (the Guomindang), into suppliers of “workers’ and peasants’ blood” for Wang Jingwei and company.

11) The Stalinist Experiment with Ministerialism

In spite of the experience of the Russian Kerenskiad and the protests of the Left Opposition, Stalin wound up his Guomindang policy with an experiment in ministerialism: two Communists entered the bourgeois government in the capacity of ministers of labour and agriculture – the classic posts of hostages! – under the direct instructions of the Comintern: to paralyse the class struggle with the aim of retaining the united front. Such directives were constantly given from Moscow by telegraph until August 1927.

Let us hear how Khitarov depicted Communist “ministerialism” in practice before the audience of delegates at the Fifteenth Congress of the CPSU. “You know that there were two Communist ministers in the government,” says Khitarov. The rest of this passage is deleted from the Minutes:

“Afterwards, they [the Communist ministers] stopped coming around to the ministries altogether, failed to appear themselves and put in their places a hundred functionaries. During the activity of these ministers not a single law was promulgated which would ease the position of the workers and peasants. This reprehensible activity was wound up with a still more reprehensible, shameful end. These ministers declared that one of them was ill and the other wished to go abroad, etc., and therefore asked to be released. They did not resign with a political declaration in which they would have declared: You are counter-revolutionists, you are traitors, you are betrayers – we will no longer go along with you. No. They declared that one was allegedly ill. In addition, Tang Pingshan wrote that he could not cope with the magnitude of the peasant movement, therefore he asked that his release be granted. Can a greater disgrace be imagined? A Communist minister declares that he cannot cope with the peasant movement. Then who can? It is clear, the military, and nobody else. This was an open legalization of the rigorous suppression of the peasant movement, undertaken by the Wuhan government.”

This is what the participation of the Communists in the “democratic dictatorship” of the workers and peasants looked like. In December 1927, when Stalin’s speeches and articles were still fresh in the minds of all, Khitarov’s narrative could not be printed, even though the latter – young but precocious! – in looking after his own welfare, did not say a word about the Moscow leaders of Chinese ministerialism and even referred to Borodin only as “a certain non-Chinese comrade”.

Tang Pingshan complained – Khitarov raged hypocritically – that he could not cope with the peasant movement. But Khitarov could not help knowing that this was just the task that Stalin set before Tang Pingshan. Tang Pingshan came to Moscow at the end of 1926 for instructions and reported to the Plenum of the ECCI how well he coped with the “Trotskyists”, that is, with those Communists who wanted to leave the Guomindang in order to organize the workers and peasants. Stalin was sending Tang Pingshan telegraphic instructions to curb the peasant movement in order not to antagonize Chiang Kai-shek and the bourgeois military staff. At the same time, Stalin accused the Opposition of underestimating the peasantry.
The Eighth Plenum even adopted a special Resolution on the Speeches of comrades Trotsky and Vuyovitch at the Plenary Session of the ECCI. It read:

“Comrade Trotsky ... demanded at the Plenary Session the immediate establishment of the dual power in the form of soviets and the immediate adoption of a course towards the overthrow of the Left Guomindang government. This apparently [!] ultra-left [!!] but in reality opportunist [!!!] demand is nothing but the repetition of the old Trotskyist position of jumping over the petty-bourgeois, peasant stage of the revolution.”

We see here in all its nakedness the essence of the struggle against Trotskyism: the defence of the bourgeoisie against the revolution of the workers and peasants.

12) Leaders and Masses

All the organizations of the working class were utilized by the “leaders” in order to restrain, to curb, to paralyse the struggle of the revolutionary masses. Here is what Khitarov related:

“The congress of the trade unions [in Wuhan] was postponed from day to day and when it was finally convened no attempt whatsoever was made to utilize it for the organization of resistance. On the contrary, on the last day of the congress, it was decided to stage a demonstration before the building of the National government with the object of expressing their sentiment of loyalty to the government. (Lozovsky: I scared them there with my speech.)”

Lozovsky was not ashamed at that moment to bring himself forward. “Scaring” the same Chinese trade unionists whom he had thrown into confusion, with bold phrases, Lozovsky succeeded on the spot, in China, in not seeing anything, not understanding anything, and not foreseeing anything. Returning from China, this “leader” wrote:

“The proletariat has become the dominant force in the struggle for the national emancipation of China.” [13]

This was said about a proletariat whose head was being squeezed in the iron manacles of Chiang Kai-shek. This is how the general secretary of the Red International of Labour Unions deceived the workers of the whole world. And after the crushing of the Chinese workers (with the aid of all sorts of “general secretaries”), Lozovsky derides the Chinese trade unionists: those “cowards” got scared, you see, by the intrepid speeches of the most intrepid Lozovsky. In this little episode lies the art of the present “leaders”, their whole mechanism, the whole of their morals!

The might of the revolutionary movement of the masses of the people was truly incomparable. We have seen that in spite of three years of mistakes the situation could still have been saved in Shanghai by receiving Chiang Kai-shek not as a liberator but as a mortal foe. Moreover, even after the Shanghai coup d’état the Communists could still have strengthened themselves in the provinces. But they were ordered to submit themselves to the “Left” Guomindang. Khitarov gives a description of one of the most illuminating episodes of the second counter-revolution carried out by the Left Guomindang:

“The coup in Wuhan occurred on May 21-22 The coup took place under simply unbelievable circumstances. In Changsha the army consisted of 1,700 soldiers, and the peasants made up a majority of the armed detachments gathered around Changsha to the number of 20,000. In spite of this, the military command succeeded in seizing power, in shooting all the active peasants, in dispersing all revolutionary organizations and in establishing its dictatorship only because of the cowardly, irresolute, conciliatory policy of the leaders in Changsha and Wuhan. When the peasants learned of the coup in Changsha they began to prepare themselves, to gather around Changsha in order to undertake a march on it. This march was set for May 21. The peasants started to draw up their detachments in increasing numbers towards Changsha. It was clear that they would seize the city without great effort. But at this point a letter arrived from the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in which Chen Duxiu wrote that they should presumably avoid an open conflict and transfer the question to Wuhan. On the basis of this letter, the District Committee dispatched to the peasant detachments an order to retreat, not to advance any further; but this order failed to reach two detachments. Two peasant detachments advanced on Wuhan and were there annihilated by the soldiers.” [14]

This is approximately how matters proceeded in the rest of the provinces. Under Borodin’s guidance – ”Borodin is on guard!“ – the Chinese Communists carried out very punctiliously the instructions of Stalin: not to break with the Left Guomindang, the chosen leaders of the democratic revolution. The capitulation at Changsha took place on May 31, that is, a few days after the decisions of the Eighth Plenum of the ECCI and in full conformity with these decisions.

The leaders indeed did everything in order to destroy the cause of the masses!
In that same speech of his, Khitarov declares:

“I consider it my duty to declare that in spite of the fact that the Chinese Communist Party has for a long time committed unheard-of opportunist errors. we do not, however, need to blame the Party masses for them To my deep conviction (I have seen many sections of the Comintern), there isn’t another such section so devoted to the cause of Communism, so courageous in its fight for our cause as are the Chinese Communists. There are no other Communists as courageous as the Chinese comrades.” [15]

Undoubtedly, the revolutionary Chinese workers and peasants revealed exceptional self-sacrifice in the struggle. Together with the revolution, they were crushed by the opportunist leadership. Not the one that had its seat in Canton, Shanghai and Wuhan but the one that was commanding from Moscow. Such will be the verdict of history!

13) The Canton Uprising

On August 7, 1927, the special conference of the Chinese Communist Party condemned, according to previous instructions from Moscow, the opportunist policy of its leadership, that is, its whole past, and decided: to prepare for an armed insurrection. Stalin’s special emissaries had the task of preparing an insurrection in Canton timed for the Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in order to cover up the physical extermination of the Russian Opposition with the political triumph of the Stalinist tactic in China.

On the declining wave, while the depression still prevailed among the urban masses, the Canton “soviet” uprising was hurriedly organized, heroic in the conduct of the workers, criminal in the adventurism of the leadership. The news of the new crushing of the Canton proletariat arrived exactly at the moment of the Fifteenth Congress. In this manner, Stalin was smashing the Bolshevik-Leninists exactly at the moment when his ally of yesterday, Chiang Kai-shek, was crushing the Chinese Communists.
It was necessary to draw up new balance sheets, that is, once more to shift the responsibility on to the executors. On February 7, 1928, Pravda wrote:

“The provincial armies fought undividedly against Red Canton and this proved to be the greatest and oldest shortcoming of the Chinese Communist Party, precisely insufficient political work for the decomposition of the reactionary armies.”

“The oldest shortcoming”! Does this mean that it was the task of the Chinese Communist Party to decompose the armies of the Guomindang? Since when?

On February 25, 1927, a month and a half prior to the crushing of Shanghai, the central organ of the Comintern wrote:

“The Chinese Communist Party and the conscious Chinese workers must not under any circumstances pursue a tactic which would disorganize the revolutionary armies just because the influence of the bourgeoisie is to a certain degree strong there” [16]

And here is what Stalin said – and repeated on every occasion – at the Plenum of the ECCI on May 24, 1927:

“Not unarmed people stand against the armies of the old régime in China, but an armed people in the form of the revolutionary army. In China, an armed revolution is fighting against armed counter-revolution.”

In the summer and autumn of 1927, the armies of the Guomindang were depicted as an armed people. But when these armies crushed the Canton insurrection, Pravda declared the “oldest [!] shortcoming” of the Chinese Communists to be their inability to decompose the “reactionary armies”, the very ones that were proclaimed “the revolutionary people” on the very eve of Canton.

Shameless mountebanks! Was anything like it ever seen among real revolutionists?

14) The Period of Putschism

The Ninth Plenum of the ECCI met in February 1928, less than two months after the Canton insurrection. How did it estimate the situation? Here are the exact words of its resolution:

“The ECCI makes it the duty of all its sections to fight against the slanders of the Social Democrats and the Trotskyists who assert that the Chinese revolution has been liquidated.”

What a treacherous and at the same time miserable subterfuge! Social Democracy considers in reality that the victory of Chiang Kai-shek is the victory of the national revolution (the confused Urbahns went astray on this very same position). The Left Opposition considers that the victory of Chiang Kai-shek is the defeat of the national revolution.

The Opposition never said and never could have said that the Chinese revolution in general is liquidated. What was liquidated, confused, deceived and crushed was “only” the second Chinese revolution (1925-27). That alone would be enough of an accomplishment for the gentlemen of the leadership!
We maintained, beginning with the autumn of 1927, that a period of ebb is ahead in China, of the retreat of the proletariat, the triumph of the counter-revolution. What was Stalin’s position?
On February 7, 1928, Pravda wrote:

“The Chinese Communist Party is heading towards an armed insurrection. The whole situation in China speaks for the fact that this is the correct course Experience proves that the Chinese Communist Party must concentrate all its efforts on the task of the day-to-day and widespread careful preparation of the armed insurrection.”

The Ninth Plenum of the ECCI, with ambiguous bureaucratic reservations on putschism, approved this adventurist line. The object of these reservations is known: to create holes for the “leaders” to crawl into in the event of a new retreat.

The criminally light-minded resolution of the Ninth Plenum meant for China: new adventures, new skirmishes, breaking away from the masses, the loss of positions, the consuming of the best revolutionary elements in the fire of adventurism, the demoralization of the remnants of the Party. The whole period between the conference of the Chinese party on August 7, 1927, and the Sixth Congress of the Comintern on July 8, 1928, is permeated through and through with the theory and practice of putschism. This is how the Stalinist leadership was dealing with final blows to the Chinese revolution and the Communist Party.
Only at the Sixth Congress did the leadership of the Comintern recognize that:

“The Canton uprising was objectively already a ‘rearguard battle’ of the receding revolution.” [17]

“Objectively”! And subjectively? That is, in the consciousness of its initiators, the leaders? Such is the masked recognition of the adventurist character of the Canton insurrection. However that may be, one year after the Opposition, and what is more important, after a series of cruel defeats, the Comintern recognized that the second Chinese revolution had terminated together with the Wuhan period, and that it cannot be revived through adventurism. At the Sixth Congress the Chinese delegate, Chan Fi-Yun, reported:

“The defeat of the Canton insurrection has delivered a still heavier blow to the Chinese proletariat. The first stage of the revolution was in this manner ended with a series of defeats. In the industrial centres, a depression is being felt in the labour movement.” [18]

Facts are stubborn things! This had to be recognized also by the Sixth Congress. The slogan of armed insurrection was eliminated. The only thing that remained was the name “second Chinese revolution” (1925-27), “the first stage” of which is separated from the future second stage by an undefined period. This was a terminological attempt to save at least a part of the prestige.

15) After the Sixth Congress

The delegate of the Chinese Communist Party, Duxiu, declared at the Sixteenth Congress of the CPSU:

“Only Trotskyist renegades and Chinese Chen Duxiuists say that the Chinese national bourgeoisie has a perspective of independent development [?] and stabilization [?].”

Let us leave aside the abuse: these unfortunate people would never be in the Lux boarding house if they did not address their abuse to the Opposition. This is their only resource. Tang Pingshan thundered in exactly the same manner against the “Trotskyists” at the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI before he went over to the enemy. What is curious in its naked shamelessness is the attempt to father us, Left Oppositionists, with the idealization of the Chinese “national bourgeoisie” and its “independent development”. Stalin’s agents, as well as their leader, fulminate because the period after the Sixth Congress once more revealed their complete incapacity to understand the change in circumstances and the direction of its further development.

After the Canton defeat, at a time when the ECCI in February 1928 – was steering the coarse towards an armed insurrection, we declared in opposition to this:

“The situation will now change in the exactly opposite direction; the working masses will temporarily retreat from politics; the Party will grow weak which does not exclude the continuation of peasant uprisings. The weakening of the war of the generals as well as the weakening of the strikes and uprisings of the proletariat will inevitably lead in the meantime to some sort of an establishment of elementary processes of economic life in the country and consequently to somewhat of an even, though very weak, commercial and industrial rise. The latter will revive the strike struggles of the workers and permit the Communist Party, under the condition of correct tactics, once more to establish its contact and its influence in order that later, already on a higher plane, the insurrection of the workers may be interlocked with the peasant war. That is what our so-called ‘liquidationism’ consisted of.”

But, apart from abuse, what did Duxiu say about China in the last two years? First of all, he stated, after the fact:

“In Chinese industry and commerce a certain revival was to be marked in 1928.”

And further:

“In 1928, 400,000 workers went on strike, in 1929, the number of strikers had already reached 750,000. In the first half of 1930, the labour movement was still further fortified in the tempo of development.”

It is understood that we must be very cautious with the figures of the Comintern, including Duxiu’s. But regardless of the possible exaggeration of the figures, Duxiu’s exposition bears out entirely our prognosis at the end 1927 and the beginning of 1928.

Unfortunately, the leadership of the ECCI and the Chinese Communist Party took their point of departure from the directly opposite prognosis. The slogan of armed insurrection was dropped only at the Sixth Congress, that is, in the middle of 1928. But aside from this purely negative decision the Party did not receive any new orientation. The possibility of economic revival was not taken into consideration by it. The strike movement went on to a considerable extent apart from it. Can one doubt for an instant that if the leadership of the Comintern had not occupied itself with stupid accusations of liquidationism against the Opposition and had understood the situation in time, as we did, the Chinese Communist Party would have been considerably stronger, primarily in the trade-union movement? Let us recall that during the highest ascent of the second revolution, in the first half of 1927, there were 2,800,000 workers organized in trade unions under the influence of the Communist Party. At the present time, there are, according to Duxiu, around 60,000. This in the whole of China!
And these miserable “leaders”, who have worked their way into a hopeless corner, who have done terrific damage, speak about the “Trotskyist renegades” and think that by this slander they can make good the damage. Such is the school of Stalin! Such are its fruits!

16) The Soviets and the Class Character of the Revolution

What, according to Stalin, is the role of the soviets in the Chinese revolution? What place has been assigned to them in the alternation of its stages? With the rule of what class are they bound up?

During the Northern Expedition, as well as in the Wuhan period, we heard from Stalin that soviets can be created only after the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, only on the threshold of the proletarian revolution. Precisely because of this the Political Bureau, following right behind Stalin, stubbornly rejected the slogan of soviets advanced by the Opposition:

“The slogan of soviets means nothing but an immediate skipping over the stage of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the organization of the power of the proletariat.” [19]

On May 24, after the Shanghai coup d’état and during the Wuhan coup, Stalin proved the incompatibility of soviets with bourgeois-democratic revolution in this manner:

“But the workers will not stop at this if they have soviets of workers’ deputies. They will say to the Communists – and they will be right: If we are the soviets, and the soviets are the organs of power, then can we not squeeze the bourgeoisie a little, and expropriate ‘a little’? The Communists will be empty windbags if they do not take the road of expropriation of the bourgeoisie with the existence of soviets of workers’ and peasants’ deputies. Is it possible to and should we take this road at present, at the present phase of the revolution? No, we should not.”

And what will become of the Guomindang after passing over to the proletarian revolution? Stalin had it all figured out. In his discourse to the students on May 13, 1927 which we already quoted, Stalin replied:

“I think that in the period of the creation of soviets of workers’ and peasants’ deputies and the preparation for the Chinese October, the Chinese Communist Party will have to substitute for the present bloc inside the Guomindang the bloc outside the Guomindang.”

Our great strategists foresaw everything – decidedly they foresaw everything, except the class struggle. Even in the matter of going over to the proletarian revolution Stalin solicitously supplied the Chinese Communist Party with an ally, with the same Guomindang. In order to carry out the socialist revolution, the Communists were only permitted to get out of the ranks of the Guomindang, but by no means to break the bloc with it. As is known, the alliance with the bourgeoisie was the best condition for the preparation of the “Chinese October”. And all this was called Leninism

Be that as it may, in 1925-27 Stalin posed the question of soviets very categorically, connecting the formation of soviets with the immediate socialist expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It is true he needed this “radicalism” at that time not in defence of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie but on the contrary in defence of the bourgeoisie from expropriation. But the principled posing of the question was at any rate clear: the soviets can be only and exclusively organs of the socialist revolution. Such was the position of the Political Bureau of the CPSU, such was the position of the ECCI.
But at the end of 1927 an insurrection was carried out in Canton to which a soviet character was given. The Communists had the power. They decreed measures of a purely socialist character (nationalization of the land, banks, dwellings, industrial enterprises, etc.) It would seem we were confronted with a proletarian revolution. But no. At the end of February 1928, the Ninth Plenum of the ECCI drew up the balance of the Canton insurrection. And what was the result?

“The current year in the Chinese revolution is a period of bourgeois-democratic revolution, which has not been completed. The tendency towards jumping over the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution with the simultaneous appraisal of the revolution as a ‘permanent’ revolution is a mistake similar to the one made by Trotsky in 1905.”

But ten months before that (April 1927) the Political Bureau declared that the very slogan of soviets (not Trotskyism, but the slogan of soviets!) means the inadmissible skipping of the bourgeois-democratic stage. But now, after a complete exhaustion of all the variations of the Guomindang, when it was necessary to sanction the slogan of soviets, we were told that only Trotskyists can connect this slogan with the proletarian dictatorship. This is how it was revealed that Stalin, during 1925-27, was a “Trotskyist”, even though the other way around.

It is true that the program of the Comintern also made a decisive turn in this question. Among the most important tasks of the colonial countries, the program mentioned: “The establishment of a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry based on the soviets.” Truly miraculous! What was yesterday incompatible with the democratic revolution was today proclaimed to be its foundation base. One would seek in vain for any theoretical explanation of this complete somersault. Everything was done in a strictly administrative manner.
In what instance was Stalin wrong? When he declared the soviets incompatible with the democratic revolution or when he declared the soviets to be the basis of the democratic revolution? In both instances. Because Stalin does not understand the meaning of the democratic dictatorship, the meaning of the proletarian dictatorship, their mutual relationship, and what role the soviets play in connection with them.
He once more revealed it best, even though in a few words, at the Sixteenth Congress of the CPSU.

17) The Chinese Question at the Sixteenth Congress of the CPSU

In his ten-hour report Stalin, however anxious he was to do so, could not completely ignore the question of the Chinese revolution. He devoted to it exactly five phrases. And what phrases! Indeed, “a lot in a little”, as the Latinists say (multum in parvo). Desiring to avoid all sharp corners, to refrain from risking generalizations and still more from concrete prognoses, Stalin in five phrases succeeded in making all the mistakes still left for him to make.

“It would be ridiculous to think, [Stalin said] that this misconduct of the imperialists will pass for them unpunished. The Chinese workers and peasants have already replied to this by the creation of soviets and a Red army. It is said that a soviet government has already been created there. I think that if this is true then there is nothing surprising in it. There is no doubt that only soviets can save China from complete dismemberment and impoverishment.” [20]

“It would be ridiculous to think.” Here is the basis for all the further conclusions. If the misconduct of the imperialists will inevitably provoke a reply in the form of soviets and a Red army, then how is it that imperialism still exists in the world?

“It is said that a soviet government has already been created there.” What does it mean: “It is said”?Who says so? And what’s most important, what does the Chinese Communist Party say about it? It is part of the Comintern and its representative spoke at the Congress. Does it mean that the “soviet government” was created in China without the Communist Party and without its knowledge? Then who is leading this government? Who are its members? What party holds power? Not only does Stalin fail to give a reply, but he does not even put the question.

“I think that if [!] this is true then [!] there is nothing surprising in it.” There is nothing surprising in the fact that in China a soviet government was created about which the Chinese Communist Party knows nothing and about whose political physiognomy the highest leader of the Chinese revolution can give us no information. Then what is there left in the world to be surprised at?

“There is no doubt that only soviets can save China from dismemberment and impoverishment.” Which soviets? Up to now, we have seen all sorts of soviets: Tsereteli’s soviets, Otto Bauer’s and Scheidemann’s, on the one hand, Bolshevik soviets on the other. Tsereteli’s soviets could not save Russia from dismemberment and impoverishment. On the contrary, their whole policy went in the direction of transforming Russia into a colony of the Entente. Only the Bolsheviks transformed the soviets into a weapon for the liberation of the toiling masses. What kind of soviets are the Chinese? If the Chinese Communist Party can say nothing about them, then it means that it is not leading them. Then who is? Apart from the Communists, only accidental, intermediate elements, people of a “third party”, in a word, fragments of the Guomindang of the second and third sort, can come to the head of the soviets and create a soviet government.

Only yesterday Stalin thought that “it would be ridiculous to think” of the creation of soviets in China prior to the completion of the democratic revolution. Now he seems to think – if his five phrases have any meaning at all – that in the democratic revolution the soviets can save the country even without the leadership of the Communists.
To speak of a soviet government without speaking of the dictatorship of the proletariat means to deceive the workers and to help the bourgeoisie deceive the peasants. But to speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat without speaking of the leading role of the Communist Party means once more to convert the dictatorship of the proletariat into a trap for the proletariat. The Chinese Communist Party, however, is now extremely weak. The number of its worker-members is limited to a few thousand. There are about fifty thousand workers in the Red trade unions. Under these conditions, to speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat as an immediate task is obviously unthinkable. On the other hand, in South China a broad peasant movement is unfolding itself in which partisan bands participate. The influence of the October revolution, in spite of the years of epigone leadership, is still so great in China that the peasants call their movement “soviet” and their partisan bands – ”Red armies”. This shows once more the depths of Stalin’s philistinism in the period when, coming out against soviets, he said that we must not scare off the masses of the Chinese people by “artificial sovietization”. Only Chiang Kai-shek could have been scared off by it, but not the workers, not the peasants, to whom, after 1917, the soviets had become symbols of emancipation. The Chinese peasants, it is understood, inject no few illusions into the slogan of soviets. It is pardonable in them. But is it pardonable in the leading chvostists who confine themselves to a cowardly and ambiguous generalization of the illusions of the Chinese peasantry, without explaining to the proletariat the real meaning of events?
“There is nothing surprising in it,” says Stalin, if the Chinese peasants, without the participation of the industrial centres and without the leadership of the Communist Party, created a soviet government. But we say that the appearance of the soviet government under these circumstances is absolutely impossible. Not only the Bolsheviks but even the Tsereteli government or half-government of the soviets could make its appearance only on the basis of the cities. To think that the peasantry is capable of creating its soviet government independently, means to believe in miracles. It would be the same miracle to create a peasant Red army. The peasant partisans played a great revolutionary role in the Russian Revolution, but under the existence of centres of proletarian dictatorship and a centralized proletarian Red army. With the weakness of the Chinese labour movement at the present moment, and with the still greater weakness of the Communist Party, it is difficult to speak of a dictatorship of the proletariat as the task of the day in China. This is why Stalin, swimming in the wake of the peasant uprising, is compelled, in spite of all his earlier declarations, to link the peasant soviets and the peasant Red army with the bourgeois-democratic dictatorship. The leadership of this dictatorship, which is too heavy a task for the Communist Party, is delivered to some other political party, to some sort of a revolutionary x. Being that Stalin hindered the Chinese workers and peasants from conducting their struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, then somebody must now help Stalin by taking in hand the soviet government as the organ of the bourgeois democratic dictatorship. As a motivation for this new perspective we are presented with five arguments in five phrases. Here they are:

1. “It would be ridiculous to think”;
2. “it is said”;
3. “if it is true”;
4. “there is nothing surprising in it”;
5. “there is no doubt”.

Here it is, administrative argumentation in all its power and splendour!

We warn: the Chinese proletariat will again have to pay for this whole shameful concoction.

18) The Character of Stalin’s “Mistakes”

There are mistakes and mistakes. In the various spheres of human thought, there can be very considerable mistakes which flow from the insufficient examination of the object, from insufficient factual data, from a too great complexity of the factors to be considered, etc. Among these we may consider, let us say, the mistakes of meteorologists in foretelling the weather, which are typical of a whole series of mistakes in the sphere of politics. However, the mistakes of a learned, quick-witted meteorologist are often more useful to science than the conjecture of an empiric, even though it is accidentally substantiated by facts. But what should we say of a learned geographer, of a leader of a polar expedition who would take as his point of departure that the earth rests on three whales? Yet the mistakes of Stalin are almost completely of this last category. Never rising to Marxism as a method, making use of one or the other “Marxian-like” formulas in a ritualistic manner, Stalin in his practical actions takes as his point of departure the crassest empirical prejudices. But such is the dialectic of the process: these prejudices became Stalin’s main strength in the period of revolutionary decline. They were the ones that permitted him to play the role which subjectively he did not want. The cumbersome bureaucracy, separating itself from the revolutionary class that conquered power, seized upon Stalin’s empiricism for his mercenariness, for his complete cynicism in the sphere of principles, in order to make him its leader and in order to create the legend of Stalin which is the holiday legend of the bureaucracy itself. This is the explanation of how and why the strong but absolutely mediocre person who occupied third and fourth roles in the years of the rise of the revolution proved called upon to play the leading role in the years of its ebb, in the years of the stabilization of the world bourgeoisie, the regeneration of Social Democracy, the weakening of the Comintern and the conservative degeneration of the broadest circles of the Soviet bureaucracy.

The French say about a man: His defects are his virtues. Of Stalin it can be said: his defects proved to be to his advantage. The gear teeth of the class struggle meshed into his theoretical limitedness, his political adaptability, his moral indiscriminateness, in a word, into his defects as a proletarian revolutionist, in order to make him a statesman of the period of the petty-bourgeois emancipation from October, from Marxism, from Bolshevism.
The Chinese revolution was an examination of the new role of Stalin – by the inverse method. Having conquered power in the USSR with the aid of the strata who have been breaking away from the international revolution and with the indirect but very real aid of the hostile classes, Stalin automatically became the leader of the Comintern and by that alone the leader of the Chinese revolution. The passive hero of the behind-the-scenes apparatus mechanism had to show his method and quality in the events of the great revolutionary flow. Within this lies the tragic paradox of Stalin’s role in China. Having subordinated the Chinese workers to the bourgeoisie, put the brakes on the agrarian movement, supported the reactionary generals, disarmed the workers, prevented the appearance of soviets and liquidated those that did appear, Stalin carried out to the end that historic role which Tsereteli only attempted to carry out in Russia. The difference is that Tsereteli acted on the open arena, having arrayed against him the Bolsheviks – and he immediately and on the spot had to bear the responsibility for his attempt to betray to the bourgeoisie a fettered and duped working class. Stalin, however, acted in China primarily behind the scenes, defended by a powerful apparatus and draped in the banner of Bolshevism. Tsereteli supported himself on the repressions of the power of the Bolsheviks by the bourgeoisie. Stalin, however, himself applied these repressions against the Bolshevik-Leninists (Opposition). The repressions of the bourgeoisie were shattered by the rising wave. Stalin’s repressions were fostered by the ebbing wave. This is why it was possible for Stalin to carry out the experiment with the purely Menshevik policy in the Chinese revolution to the end, that is, to the most tragic catastrophe.
But what about the present left paroxysm of the Stalinist policy? To see in this episode – and the left zigzag with all its significance will nevertheless go down into history as an episode – a contradiction to what has been said, can be done only by very near-sighted people who are foreign to an understanding of the dialectic of human consciousness in connection with the dialectic of the historic process. The decline of the revolution as well as its rise does not move along a straight line. The empirical leader of the down-sliding of the revolution – ”You think that you are moving but you are being moved” (Goethe) – could not help at a certain moment but take fright at that abyss of social betrayal to the very edge of which he was pushed in 1925-27 by his own qualities, utilized by forces half-hostile and hostile to the proletariat. And since the degeneration of the apparatus is not an even process, since the revolutionary tendencies within the masses are strong, then for the turn to the left from the edge of the Thermidorian abyss there were sufficient points of support and reserve forces already at hand. The turn assumed a character of panicky jumps, precisely because this empiric foresaw nothing until he had reached the very brink of the precipice. The ideology of the jump to the left was prepared by the Left Opposition – it only remained to utilize its work in bits and fragments, as befits an empiric. But the acute paroxysm of leftism does not change the basic processes of the evolution of the bureaucracy, nor the nature of Stalin himself.
The absence in Stalin of theoretical preparation, of a broad outlook and creative imagination – those features without which there can be no independent work on a large scale – fully explains why Lenin, who valued Stalin as a practical assistant, nevertheless recommended that the Party remove him from the post of general secretary when it became clear that this post might assume independent significance. Lenin never saw in Stalin a political leader.
Left to himself, Stalin always and invariably took up an opportunistic position on all big questions. If Stalin had no important theoretical or political conflicts with Lenin, like Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and even Rykov, it is because Stalin never held on to his principal views and in all cases of serious disagreement simply kept quiet, retreated to one side and waited. But for all that, Lenin very often had practical organizational-moral conflicts with Stalin, frequently very sharp ones, precisely for those Stalinist defects which Lenin, so carefully in form but so mercilessly in essence, characterized in his “testament”.
To all that has been said we must add the fact that Lenin worked hand in hand with a group of collaborators, each of whom brought into the work knowledge, personal initiative, distinct talent. Stalin is surrounded, particularly after the liquidation of the right wing group, by accomplished mediocrities, devoid of any international outlook and incapable of producing an independent opinion on a single question of the world labour movement.
In the meantime, the significance of the apparatus has grown immeasurably since Lenin’s time. Stalin’s leadership in the Chinese revolution is just the fruit of the combination of theoretical, political and national limitedness with huge apparatus power. Stalin has proved himself incapable of learning. His five phrases on China at the Sixteenth Congress are permeated through and through with that same organic opportunism which governed Stalin’s policy at all the earlier stages of the struggle of the Chinese people. The undertaker of the second Chinese revolution is preparing before our very eyes to strangle the third Chinese revolution at its inception.

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Notes

1. Sotsialisticheski Vestnik, no.8, April 23, 1927, p.4.

2. Die Kommunistische Internationale, March 1, 1927, no.9, p.408.

3. On the Perspectives of the Chinese Revolution, p.46.

4. ibid., p.55.

5. Minutes of the Enlarged Executive of the Communist International, [German Edition], November 30, 1926, pages 403-4.

6. Izvestia, March 6, 1927.

7. Pravda, March 9, 1927.

8. Sixteenth session of the XV Congress of the CPSU, December 11, 1927.

9. Problems of the Chinese Revolution, pp.125-7.

10. Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya, p.54.

11. Minutes [German edition], page 71.

12. Sotsialisticheski Vestnik, no.9 [151], p.1.

13. Workers’ China, p.6.

14. Minutes, p.34.

15. Minutes, p.36.

16. Die Kommunistische Internationale, February 25, 1927, p.19.

17. Pravda, July 27, 1928.

18. Pravda, July 17, 1928, No.164.

19. From the written Reply of the Political Bureau to the Opposition theses, April 1927.

20. Political Report of the CC to the 16th Party Congress, Pravda, June 29, 1930.