The Chinese Revolution and The Theses of Comrade Stalin - Part 28 of 47

The Stalinists, having prepared the coup of Chiang Kai Shek, now argued for arming the workers in Nanking, but not in Wuhan, where the left KMT formed the government. They argued against forming soviets, because, in Wuhan, they would be seen as challenging the government of the Left KMT. Trotsky notes,

“These words fairly reek with the apparatus-like, bureaucratic conception of revolutionary authority. The government is not regarded as the expression and consolidation of the developing struggle of the classes, but as the self-sufficient expression of the will of the Guomindang. The classes come and go but the continuity of the Guomindang goes on for ever.” (p 46)

Claiming that Wuhan and the Left KMT was the centre of the revolution was not true. Chiang Kai Shek inherited the old state bureaucracy to support his regime, but the Left KMT had nothing.

“The slogan of soviets is a call for the creation of real organs of the new state power right through the transitional régime of a dual government.” (p 47)

In conditions of dual power, this is always the case. The bourgeois government has at its disposal the army, police, courts, media, churches, and so on. That remains the case, in the event of a Workers' Government, comprising centrists and reformists, and, in this latter case, the state acts as a check upon it, ready to pounce at the sign of weakness. It requires a countervailing, organised power of the workers, which history indicates comes in the form of soviets/workers councils. During the 1984-5 British Miners' Strike, every area saw Trades Councils establish Miners' Support Committees, though these necessarily acted, mostly, to organise fund raising, mobilisation for mass pickets, and so on.

They could not go much beyond that, because of the level of class consciousness, and failure to mobilise the whole labour movement in active support, unlike the 1926 General Strike. But, in 1926, what was required, and what could have developed in 1984-5, was permanently in session councils of workers in each area. That would have countered the effective martial law that Thatcher implemented, and that Baldwin/Churchill implemented during the General Strike.

Trotsky sets this out, in conditions of a Popular Front government, such as that of Kerensky, or of the KMT, or that in Spain, in the 1930's, as well as in the event of a Workers' Government of centrists and reformists.

“The attitude of the soviets to the revolutionary Guomindang will correspond to the attitude of the revolutionary Guomindang to the soviets. In other words: to the extent that the soviets arise, arm themselves, consolidate themselves, they will tolerate over them only such a government as bases itself upon the armed workers and peasants. What makes the soviet system valuable is the fact that, especially in directly revolutionary epochs, it furnishes the best means of guaranteeing agreement between the central and local government authorities.” (p 47)

So, in February 1917, the bourgeois Provisional Government was confronted by the power of the soviets. As Lenin pointed out, the reality was that the soviets controlled the streets, not the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks raised the demand “Down With The Capitalist Ministers”, aimed at the centrists and reformists in that government, to transform it from a Popular Front government to a Workers' Government, for reasons Trotsky describes in The Transitional Programme.

“The Bolshevik-Leninists resolutely rejected the slogan of the “workers’ and peasants’ government” in the bourgeois-democratic version. They affirmed then and affirm now that. when the party of the proletariat refuses to step beyond bourgeois democratic limits, its alliance with the peasantry is simply turned into a support for capital, as was the ease with the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries in 1917, with the Chinese Communist Party in 1925-27, and as is now the case with the “People’s Front” in Spain, France and other countries.

From April to September 1917, the Bolsheviks demanded that the SRs and Mensheviks break with the liberal bourgeoisie and take power into their own hands. Under this provision the Bolshevik Party promised the Mensheviks and the SRs, as the petty bourgeois representatives of the worker and peasants, its revolutionary aid against the bourgeoisie categorically refusing, however, either to enter into the government of the Mensheviks and SRs or to carry political responsibility for it. If the Mensheviks and SRs had actually broke with the Cadets (liberals) and with foreign imperialism, then the “workers’ and peasants’ government” created by them could only have hastened and facilitated the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But it was exactly because of this that the leadership of petty bourgeois democracy resisted with all possible strength the establishment of its own government. The experience of Russia demonstrated, and the experience of Spain and France once again confirms, that even under very favourable conditions the parties of petty bourgeois democracy (SRs, Social Democrats, Stalinists, Anarchists) are incapable of creating a government of workers and peasants, that is, a government independent of the bourgeoisie.”

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