Sun Yat Sen, who had fled for his safety to Japan, returned to China, in 1916, and, with the Russian revolution having been accomplished, and the Communist International established, he invited its representatives to Canton, where the KMT had established a provisional government, in 1923. By this time, China, like Russia before it, had experienced rapid development of large-scale industrial capital, in its major cities, and, again, much of it was the result of investment by large-scale capital from the imperialist states. As with Russia, that meant a rapid development of a young, highly concentrated industrial proletariat, and one, from the start, able to look to the lessons of revolutionary workers in Europe, and in Russia.
Similarly, Chinese peasants were able to look to the example of the USSR, and the role of the Bolsheviks in carrying through the agrarian revolution. That meant that the Chinese Communist Party attracted large numbers of both industrial workers and peasants. The latter is significant, because, as Trotsky describes, unlike Russia where the peasants were led to create the S.R's to represent their interest, in China, the peasants created no such party, being subsumed within the Communist Party. That meant that the only parties pursuing the bourgeois-national revolution were the Communist Party and the KMT.
The policy of the Comintern was clearly set out in its Theses On The National and Colonial Questions, drawn up by Lenin, and adopted at its Second Congress, in 1922. The principles of the theses flow from the theory of Permanent Revolution, developed by Trotsky, on the basis of Marx's analysis of the revolutions of 1848, and also adopted by Lenin in his April Theses. In short, it notes the role of the revolutionary proletariat, in all such bourgeois-national revolutions, in the age of imperialism, and the need, thereby, to subsume the bourgeois-national revolution into the proletarian revolution.
On this basis, it sets out that, whilst Marxists acknowledge the abstract rights of colonies and annexed nations to secede, they will only support such movements, in practice, under certain conditions. One of those conditions is the existence of a revolutionary proletariat and peasantry, organised in a communist party, whose role is to be the agent of this process of permanent revolution, organised, not only to fight against any colonial/imperialist power, or feudal/oriental rulers, but also to be ready to fight against the national bourgeoisie with whom they are merely temporarily allied.
The Chinese Communist Party fulfilled that criteria, and an alliance with the petty-bourgeois masses for the purpose of carrying through the bourgeois national revolution was in order. However, that same theses, and the principles of permanent revolution, required the Communist Party to be politically, militarily and organisationally independent from the KMT. The Stalinists, who took over the CPSU, and the Comintern, following Lenin's withdrawal from active politics in 1923, failed to apply those principles. They returned to the Menshevist ideas they clung to in opposition to Lenin, in April 1917.
In place of the principles of permanent revolution, they adopted their old position of the stages theory, which had led them to argue support for the bourgeois provisional government of Milyukov/Kerensky, in 1917. Instead of warning against the bourgeois nature of the KMT government, and the fact that it would turn against the workers and poor peasants, they called it a “bloc of four classes” which had been united as a result of the role of foreign imperialism, and all of which now had a shared interest, rather than the reality of their antagonistic class interests. The social-patriots, and social imperialists make the same argument, today, in supporting the bourgeois government of Zelensky, and its NATO backers.
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