The theory of permanent revolution, and the Comintern Theses On The National and Colonial Questions, required that the communists warn against the the role of the bourgeoisie, and its political party, the KMT. It required that they maintain a strict political, military and organisational independence from their temporary, unreliable ally. It required that the Comintern seek to ensure that it was the revolutionary forces organised by the Chinese communists that were adequately armed, trained and organised. All of that was perfectly possible, in China, given the size of the Chinese Communist party, and its growing support, not just amongst the industrial workers, but also the poor peasants.
Instead, the Comintern, now under the direction of Stalin and Bukharin, did the opposite. They armed the KMT, and argued against the arming or the workers and poor peasants. As with the pro-imperialist supporters of NATO/Zelensky, today, they played down the bourgeois nature of the KMT, and its close ties to imperialism, and played up its “anti-imperialism”. When the Chinese workers and poor peasants spontaneously began to create soviets, the Stalinists opposed them, arguing there was no need for soviets, as the KMT fulfilled all these functions. The Chinese communists were instructed to liquidate themselves in the KMT, as Stalin/Bukharin sought to appease the bourgeoisie, and avoid it splitting from the bourgeois-national revolution.
In fact, as Trotsky describes, whilst Lenin, in The Theses of The National and Colonial Questions, talks about a temporary alliance with these bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist forces, even that was distorted by the Stalinists, just as it is, today, by the petty-bourgeois nationalist “Left”. Trotsky makes clear that what Lenin had in mind, was not a temporary, tactical alliance with the political parties of those bourgeois classes, but directly with the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois masses themselves. Trotsky emphasised the following points made by Lenin, in the Theses,
“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.”
“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.”
And, in relation to this latter, Trotsky notes,
“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.”
Contrast that to the subordination of workers to the Ukrainian bourgeoisie and its state, and to NATO imperialism, in the position of the Ukrainian social-chauvinists, and of the western social-imperialists, in organisations such as the Ukraine Solidarity Committee, a position that Trotsky describes when utilised by the Stalinists as communo-patriotism.
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