Lenin, in 1917, raised the demand for the Constituent Assembly, in conditions where the bourgeois revolution was underway, and was seeing the establishment of workers, peasants and soldiers soviets. It was these revolutionary organs which, for Lenin, were the means of establishing the Constituent Assembly, and, as with Trotsky's approach, in The Action Programme, the purpose of doing so was not any thought of supporting bourgeois-democracy, as some kind of good in itself, or means of obtaining breathing space, but was because large sections of workers and peasant retained illusions in it that had to be shattered in its practice.
Would that happen? No one could say in advance; history would decide, but, as Marx set out in the 1850 Address, the independent organisation of the workers, arms in hand, was a necessary means of making it more difficult for the bourgeoisie to deceive them, and to use the institutions of bourgeois-democracy against them. It creates the potential for the growing over into the proletarian revolution, and guards against counter-revolution.
“The slogan of the Constituent Assembly becomes an empty abstraction, often simple charlatanry, if one does not add who will convoke it and with what program. Chiang Kai-shek can raise the slogan of a Constituent Assembly against us even tomorrow, just as he has now raised his “workers’ and peasants’ program” against us. We want a Constituent Assembly convoked not by Chiang Kai-shek but by the executive committee of the workers’ and peasants’ soviets. That is the only serious and sure road.” (p 24)
Compare that with the Menshevist position of those on “the Left”, today, who argue the case to “support” bourgeois-democracy, when its under attack from fascists, a line also taken by the USC to justify a popular front with NATO and the Ukrainian capitalist state, against Russian “fascism”. Bukharin, who acted as Stalin's attorney, during this period, justified the popular front (bloc of four classes) by referring to the prevalence of feudalism in the Chinese economy, which plays the same role as “fascism”, as justification for popular frontism, by opportunists, today. Even were Bukharin's claims correct, Trotsky notes, it would be no more justification than was the existence of feudal remnants in Russia in 1917. In 1917, had the Bolsheviks adopted that position, they would have been in no position to have mobilised against the coup by Kornilov. In China, it meant that they were disarmed when that coup was undertaken by Chiang Kai Shek.
“No matter how great the specific weight of the typically “feudal” elements in Chinese economy may be they can be swept away only in a revolutionary way, and consequently not in alliance with the bourgeoisie but in direct struggle against it.” (p 25)
In an undeveloped, agrarian economy, like China, as with Russia, the agrarian question cannot be resolved by legislation from above, as it had been in Britain, France and most of Western Europe. The raising of agricultural productivity requires a development of industry, in the towns. That not only provides the machines required, but it also means that it provides the industrial commodities for consumption that the peasants require, now that domestic production is destroyed.
In Russia, that was supposed to be the basis of the smytchka, the alliance between workers and peasants. But, industrial production lagged, and did not provide the commodities the peasants needed. Peasants held back their production, as agricultural prices fell, and industrial prices rose – the Scissors Crisis – a gap that continued to widen, like the blades of scissors. That led to administrative seizures of peasants production, which, in turn, provoked a rebellion by peasants, destruction of commodities and so on.
The fact that, in such conditions, revolutionaries support the forms of the bourgeois revolution should not be confused with the different substance contained in the position of the revolutionaries compared to that of the reformists. To quote Lenin from a different context, the revolutionaries support bourgeois-democracy in the same way that a rope supports a hanged man. For the Stalinists to have cited the bourgeois nature of the Chinese revolution, against the Trotskyists, simply exposed this difference between the reformist and revolutionary perspective.
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