In 1848, the workers' movement was still in its infancy, many of these lessons still to be learned from bitter experience. Yet, Marx had set them out in 1850, used the experience to warn workers in 1871, in Paris, and further such lessons were learned, then, in 1905, and in 1917. In China, not only were the lessons well known, but, unlike 1848, 1871, or 1905 and 1917, a large Chinese Communist Party already existed. Yet, on the basis of Stalin's mistakes, it was destroyed, and the revolution lost, with disastrous consequences for the world revolution too.
The analogy with 1848 was even recognised by the Stalinists, but Trotsky notes,
“Cavaignac would have been impossible without the Ledru-Rollins, the Louis Blancs and the other phrasemongers of the all-inclusive national front. And who played these roles in China? Not only Wang Jingwei, but also the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, above all their inspirers of the ECCI. Unless this is stated openly, explained and deeply impressed, the philosophy of – the two paths of development will only serve to screen opportunism à la Louis Blanc and Martynov, that is, to prepare a repetition of the April tragedy at a new stage of the Chinese revolution.” (p 35)
That role, today, is played by the social-patriots, in the Ukrainian labour movement, and, more shamefully, by the social-imperialists, in the West, such as the USC.
What determines the revolutionary perspective from the reformist perspective is that the latter sees the attainment, or defence of bourgeois-democracy as an end in itself, whereas the former sees it only in terms of a necessary stepping-stone, in conditions where the majority of workers have not yet broken from their illusions in it. The revolutionary never appeases those illusions, and always insists on engaging in any such struggle on the basis of the use of proletarian and revolutionary methods, not bourgeois methods and institutions.
Hence, in The Action Programme for France, Trotsky argues that, to fight the fascist attacks on bourgeois-democracy, the workers did not need parliamentary blocs with bourgeois liberals, nor reliance on the capitalist police, but, instead, their own defence squads, creation of factory committees, workers' militia, and the creation of workers and peasants soviets, i.e. the means by which the workers defend against “betrayal” by the bourgeoisie, and also the means by which they can move forward to proletarian revolution.
“In order to have the right to speak about the struggle for the Bolshevik path of the democratic revolution, one must possess the principal instrument of proletarian policy; an independent proletarian party which fights under its own banner and never permits its policy and organization to be dissolved in the policy and organization of other classes. Without assuring the complete theoretical, political and organizational independence of the Communist Party, all talk about “two paths” is a mockery of Bolshevism. The Chinese Communist Party, in this whole period, has not been in alliance with the revolutionary petty-bourgeois section of the Guomindang, but in subordination to the whole Guomindang, led in reality by the bourgeoisie which had the army and the power in its hands. The Communist Party submitted to the political discipline of Chiang Kai-shek.” (p 35)
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