Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev were cowed, and Lenin won the day. The Bolsheviks argued for the Popular Front to be smashed, demanding “Down With The Capitalist Ministers”. That would have turned it into a Workers' Government comprised of reformist workers' parties, centrists and peasant parties. The Bolsheviks still would not have joined it, unless they had a clear majority, but would have urged it on, demanding it acted in workers' interests. But, as with all Popular Fronts, the reformists and centrists did not break with the bourgeoisie, leaving them subordinated to it.
As the class nature of the Provisional Government was, thereby, exposed, as it attacked the workers, so the Bolsheviks grew rapidly, and the battle between the government and the soviets sharpened. At the appropriate time, having argued for “All Power To The Soviets”, the Bolsheviks implemented that demand, with the soviets seizing state power.
The analysis of Permanent Revolution had been confirmed by history. It was not possible to pause history, on completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The workers would demand that their interests be pursued, and if the workers' parties refused to do that they would be destroyed. Apathy, if not opposition and disenchantment would infect the workers ranks, driving them into the arms of reaction. Trotsky makes the same point in relation to fascism, and the Spanish Revolution. It was not possible to mobilise workers on the basis of opposing fascism, and supporting some abstract “democracy”, because what the workers actually want is jobs, better standards of living and so on.
The same was true of WWII. The bourgeoisie and the Labour Party made all sorts of nonsensical arguments about the war being a “People's War” against fascism, but, after the war ended, all of the promises came to nothing, as after WWI. The Labour Government sent troops to break strikes, paid huge amounts of compensation to the former owners of core industries that had to be nationalised, because they had been starved of investment, and rationed food and other essentials for more than a decade, whilst spending huge sums on nuclear and other weapons, fighting a war in Korea, as well as maintaining a huge colonial empire by the power of the gun. Not surprisingly, the workers increasingly turned against it, leading to 13 years of Tory Government.
The approach of these bourgeois social democratic parties is always one of “lesser-evilism”, appealing to voters to support them, because the other party is worse. That is most apparent in French Presidential elections, where voters are encouraged to vote for candidates they would never otherwise support, solely to prevent the election of a fascist, as summed up in the infamous slogan “Vote for the crook, not the fascist”! But, not as bad is not the same thing as good, and, at times, apathy and antipathy, built up in the working class towards bourgeois parties is enough to get them to abstain, or even, for their more backward elements, to vote for outright reactionary parties that are able to present themselves as a radical alternative. It, then, gives added weight to the petty-bourgeoisie, whose strength lies in its numbers, not its socio-economic position and muscle.
Looking at the Chinese revolution, starting with the background to Sun Yat Senism, and through to the events of the 1920's, is useful in analysing these ideas and why they are significant today. But, these ideas also played a huge role in explaining events after WWII, with the creation of deformed workers' states in Eastern Europe, a deformed workers and peasants state in China, and similar formations in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and elsewhere. It explains the wrong-headed approach to the national liberation struggles that flourished, as imperialism, driven by the needs of multinational industrial capital, itself smashed apart the old colonial empires. Instead of an independent proletarian stance, the “Left”, under pressure from the Stalinist and Liberal milieu in which it operated – primarily amongst the student movement – adopted the same kind of popular frontist, petty-bourgeois nationalist agenda, in relation to the plethora of national liberation struggles, lining up alongside all sorts of anti-working class forces, simply on the basis of their supposed “anti-imperialism”.
The same legacy is witnessed, today, in relation to the war in Ukraine, and is used by one camp of “anti-imperialists” to support Ukraine, backed by NATO, and the other camp of “anti-imperialists” to back Russia, some way behind which stands China. It is idiot anti-imperialism taken to its extreme, in which it turns into its opposite, “pro-imperialism”, a reductio ad absurdum forced on it by reality.
In this series of posts, I will look at the lessons of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-7, and its betrayal by Stalinism. In the process, I will also briefly look at the history of China that led up to it, as well as the effects of it on China, and its 1949 Revolution, the role it plays in the development of Maoism, and of Guevarism and other guerrilla warfare alternatives to socialist revolution.
No comments:
Post a Comment