Stalin had described the KMT, in 1925, as a “Workers and Peasants Party”. Trotsky notes that such a definition has nothing in common with Marxism. I'm not sure this is entirely accurate in its formulation. We do not seek to create such parties, which is why we oppose the calls for a new party that would be a Labour Party Mark II. But, the fact that we do not advocate such cross-class (catch-all) parties does not mean they do not exist, which is why the Labour Party Mark I, came into existence. Lenin described the Labour Party, for example, as a “bourgeois workers' party”, because its base and connection to the unions makes it proletarian, but, its ideology and its leadership is entirely bourgeois. In fact, all mass workers parties are, now, of that type.
Stalin's intention, in this description, was to present the KMT as an “anti-bourgeois alliance of workers and peasants”, and Trotsky says the workers and peasants did follow the KMT, but, as with today's mass workers' parties, its leadership and ideology was entirely bourgeois, right up to the time that Chiang Kai Shek launched his coup. A similar parallel could be drawn with the way that the Nazis drew their base from the petty-bourgeoisie and lumpen proletariat, the latter's “anti-capitalist” ideology being represented by Strasserism. But, the Nazi leadership and ideology was, itself, entirely bourgeois, and geared to the interests of the large-scale, socialised, industrial capital that the reactionary “anti-capitalism” of Strasserism opposed. Hitler, like Chiang Kai Shek, waited for his moment, and then struck down the Strasserites in the Night of the Long Knives.
“After the “withdrawal” of the bourgeoisie (that is, after it massacred the unarmed and unprepared proletariat), the revolution, according to Stalin, passes over to a new stage, in which it is to be led by the Left Guomindang, that is, by one, at least so we are to assume, that will finally realize the Stalinist idea of the “workers’ and peasants’ party”. The question arises: why then will the creation of workers’ and peasants’ soviets mean a war against the authority of the workers’ and peasants’ Guomindang?” (p 47-8)
Soviets are the means of protecting workers' interests against counter-revolution, in the period of dual power, but also means of pressing for a Workers Government. When the centrists and reformists betray the workers, by refusing to break with the bourgeoisie, they form the basis for replacing them with a soviet government. This is the revolutionary perspective of the period of advocacy of bourgeois-democratic revolution, and its defence against fascism or imperialism, not as an end in itself, but as the means by which illusions in that bourgeois-democracy are removed.
The Stalinists, in China, opposed soviets, because of the stages theory, and its requirement for them to act as cheerleaders for the national bourgeoisie. As part of that, they argued not only that soviets would frighten that bourgeoisie, but would provoke a response from British imperialism, whose gunboats sat in the Yangtze and other Chinese waters.
“This argument too is, of course, not formulated in Stalin’s theses, but it is paraded around everywhere in Party meetings (Martynov, Yaroslavsky and others). The school of Martynov would like to kill the idea of the soviets with fear of the British naval artillery. This artifice is not a new one. In 1917, the Social Revolutionists and the Mensheviks sought to frighten us by declaring that the seizure of power by the soviets would mean the occupation of Kronstadt and Petrograd by the Allies. We answered: only the deepening of the revolution can save it. Foreign imperialism will only reconcile itself to such a “revolution” as strengthens its own positions in China at the price of a few concessions to the Chinese bourgeoisie. Every real people’s revolution that undermines the colonial foundation of imperialism will inevitably meet with the latter’s furious resistance.” (p 50-51)
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