Trotsky sets out all of the things that the Chinese Communist Party did that led up to the catastrophe. Knowing the fact that Chiang Kai Shek had launched a coup in 1926, they even hid this fact, as part of trying to continue the bloc with the KMT; they attempted to use the Right, but were used by it; they failed to exercise independent organisation and politics; they sacrificed the interests of workers in practice; so as to maintain the bloc with the KMT, they failed to seriously try to win over the soldiers, and allowed the KMT to establish a “military dictatorship of the centre”, i.e. of the counter-revolution.
“On the very eve of the coup d’état we blew the trumpets for Chiang Kai-shek. We declared that he had “submitted to discipline”, and that we had succeeded “by a skilful tactical manoeuvre in forestalling an abrupt turn to the right that threatened the Chinese revolution”. We remained behind the events all along the line. At every step we lost in tempo to the benefit of the bourgeoisie.” (p 39-40)
The same disastrous results flowed from every such Popular Front, and, repeatedly, we see those same kinds of practice of denying the right-wing, corrupt, anti-working-class nature of the bourgeois regime or forces that are being supported, in the name of maintaining a broad front, for peace against imperialism, or against fascism, and so on. Indeed, against all sorts of things, rather than ever for Socialism.
The Stalinists tried to cover their mistakes by even claiming that Chiang Kai Shek had been provoked by the ultra-left excesses of the workers of Shanghai!
“The “mistake” of the Chinese workers lies in the fact that the critical moment of the revolution found them unprepared, unorganized and unarmed. But that is not their mistake, it is their misfortune. The responsibility for it falls entirely upon a bad leadership, which let every interval pass.” (p 40)
There is also a lesson, here, in relation to the experience of the “Left”, in Britain with Corbynism. Corbyn, and his supporters, again guided by these same Stalinist principles, at every stage, failed to separate themselves from the Right, entrenched in the PLP, and the party bureaucracy, and local councils. In the story of the Chinese revolution, they occupy the same role as the Left Kuomintang.
The “Left”, inside the LP, is engaged in a Popular Front. The Labour Party is a party whose membership is comprised of workers, the large majority of whom are progressive social-democrats, but whose leadership, in parliament, is comprised of conservative social-democrats. In other words, the party members are still dominated by the ideas of bourgeois-democracy, but have some vague notion that it can be used to win some significant improvements for workers, both in terms of living standards and position in society. The conservative leadership has no such illusion, and sees its role solely in pro-capitalist terms, in which it is there to advance the interests of capital, which it can't distinguish from the interests of shareholders etc., and, only as some possible side effect, might that, then, benefit the workers it hopes will continue to get them elected.
In 1917, the Bolsheviks raised the demand “Down with the capitalist ministers”, in relation to the Provisional Government, as they sought to pressure the reformists within it to transform it from a Popular Front into a Workers Government, comprised of reformists and centrists. The equivalent would be, in relation to the Labour Party, to demand “Down with the capitalist MP's”, meaning 90% of the PLP! But Corbyn, and his backers, when he was Leader, made all the same mistakes as the Stalinists, in China, in 1925-7. Instead of driving forward with a democratisation of the party, to get those right-wing, pro-capitalist MP's deselected, they pulled back on the reins of party members seeking to hurry that along.
At each stage, they attempted to maintain that bloc with the Right-wing MP's, who simply used that to launch their coup against him, and, even after that, they still failed to move against the Right, instead accommodating the Right further, as it shifted its strategy to undermining Corbyn's supporters, in the membership, by launching, first, its abortive claims about “intimidation”, and infiltration, aimed at Momentum, before latching on to its successful tack of its fake war on “anti-Semitism”. In the latter case, the failure of Corbyn and the leadership to stand up to the Right was compounded by the fact that they were complicit in witch-hunting thousands of party members, the consequence of which was the witch-hunting of Corbyn himself.
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