The Stalinists had abandoned their independence and subordinated themselves to the KMT and the national bourgeoisie, and yet they attempted to deny the reality.
“"While fighting in the ranks of the revolutionary Guomindang,” say Stalin’s theses, “the Communist Party must preserve its independence more than ever before.” Preserve? But to this day the Communist Party has had no such independence. Precisely its lack of independence is the source of all the evils and all the mistakes. In this fundamental question, the theses, instead of making an end once and for all to the practice of yesterday, propose to retain it “more than ever before”. But this means that they want to retain the ideological, political and organizational dependence of the proletarian party upon a petty-bourgeois party, which is inevitably converted into an instrument of the big bourgeoisie.” (p 36-7)
“In order to justify a false policy, one is forced to call dependence independence, and to demand the preservation of what ought to be buried for all time.” (p 37)
In China, it had the benefit of a rapidly growing workers' mass movement, powerful growth of trades unions, based on rapid capital accumulation, in the towns and cities, and many of those workers looked to the Communist Party as their party, rather than the social-democrats, given the success of the revolution in Russia. Similarly, a revolutionary agrarian movement saw the peasants recognising that the Bolsheviks had given land to Russian peasants. Everything was in favour of a strong development of the Chinese Communist Party, but the Stalinist threw it away, by subordinating themselves to the KMT, and they did the same thing, a decade later, in Spain. In China, Trotsky said, if in the conditions that existed, the Communist Party was to continue to be subordinated in that way, it would be better not to have such a party at all.
“It is better not to constitute any Communist party at all than to discredit it so cruelly at the time of a revolution, that is, just at the time when the Party is being joined to the working masses with bonds of blood and when great traditions are being created that are destined to live for decades.” (p 37-8)
And, given the debilitating consequences of Maoism, and Guevarism, in later decades, that proved to be the case. Together with the discredit brought by Stalinism and the infection of the workers' movement with petty-bourgeois nationalist ideas, they have brought, it has set back the cause of Socialism more than a century.
The Stalinists, rather than examining their mistakes in China, attacked the Trotskyists, who had correctly predicted the course of events. A theme adopted was that the Trotskyists did not understand the tempo of events, in China. Opportunists frequently raise these kinds of objection to the Marxists, claiming that they are trying to impose some given, previous analysis and model that does not take into consideration the specific conditions and characteristics in the particular country, at the time. The POUMists raised this objection in Spain, and Pivert did so in France. Yet, as Trotsky responds, in all these cases, it was the opportunists that applied the same model of the Popular Front, and, on each occasion, with the same disastrous results.
In April, 1927, the Chinese bourgeoisie showed what it thought of the Stalinists ideas about the tempo of events, and launched its coup, via Chiang Kai Shek, and the KMT.
“The Communist Party, the proletariat, as well as the Left Guomindang people, showed themselves completely unprepared for this blow. Why? Because the leadership counted upon a slower tempo, because it remained hopelessly behindhand, because it was infected with chvostism.” (p 38)
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