In the period up to Chiang Kai Shek's coup, the Stalinists opposed calling for the setting up of soviets, even where workers and peasants were doing so spontaneously, and they also opposed arming the workers. The reason was to avoid scaring off the bourgeoisie, in China, or provoking a response from imperialism. They pursued a similar course in Spain, with the same result. In Germany, in 1923, they were also too slow in advocating the setting up of soviets, and only when the revolutionary wave had ebbed did they do so. The same error was made in China, of proposing the establishment of soviets and arming the workers after the coup, and when the revolutionary wave was receding.
But, again, the same mistake was made, because, although, now, the Stalinists proposed arming the workers in Nanking, where Chiang Kai Shek had his base, the workers in Wuhan were not being armed, for fear of scaring off the Left KMT. And, here, too, is a less, in relation to Ukraine.
“The arming of the workers and peasants is an excellent thing. But one must be logical. In Southern China there are already armed peasants; they are the so-called National armies. Yet, far from being an “antidote to the counter-revolution”, they have been its tool. Why? Because the political leadership, instead of embracing the masses of the army through soldiers’ soviets has contented itself with a purely external copy of our political departments and commissars, which, without an independent revolutionary party and without soldiers’ soviets, have been transformed into an empty camouflage for bourgeois militarism.” (p 43)
The supposed revolutionaries, nay Trotskyists, of the USC, should take those words to heart, when they talk to us about a “people's war”, in Ukraine, and compare it with the reality of a war being conducted by the Ukrainian capitalist state, and, within which, the only significant armed groups are those of the neo-Nazis of the Azov Battalion and Right Sector/Volunteer Corps not to mention the various international white supremacist and Nazi groups that have trod a path to their door, as noted by the US Congress and Simon Weisenthal Centre, amongst others.
The same is true for the opposing camp of pro-Putin, social-imperialists who make the same claims of an “anti-imperialist” struggle, and people's war, as an equally fanciful description of the war conducted by Putin's army, supplemented by the Wagner Group, and other mercenaries.
Stalin's theses opposed the creation of soviets, on the basis that they would be an organ of class struggle against the revolutionary government of the KMT. That is precisely the difference between a revolutionary perspective, based on permanent revolution, and a reformist perspective, based on the Menshevist stages theory. Workers soviets were set up in Russia, and were the basis for demanding the Constituent Assembly; they provided the basis for resisting the counter-revolution. Had they existed in China, or Spain, or Chile, they would have performed the same function. And, where does the thrust of counter-revolution come from? It comes from within the existing state apparatus, for which bourgeois-democracy simply provides a superficial gloss.
“Against whom will the workers and peasants arm themselves? Will it not be against the governmental authority of the revolutionary Guomindang?” (p 43-4)
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