In Russia, the revolution, and the Red Army, defeated the reaction, and its support from the invading imperialist armies. In China, the Stalinists did try to hold the revolution back, in the name of not frightening the bourgeoisie, and the result was the counter-revolutionary coup of the KMT.
“Only the transition of the Chinese revolution to the phase of real mass action, only the formation of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets, only the deepening of the social program of the revolution, are capable, as our own experiences prove, of bringing confusion into the ranks of the foreign armed forces by arousing their sympathy for the soviets and thus really protecting the revolution from blows from without.” (p 51)
How different are these revolutionary sentiments compared to the USC, and its sycophantic cheerleading of Zelensky and NATO, and their mirror image in those social-imperialists that have likewise hitched their wagon to the camp of Putin and Xi.
Instead of soviets, Stalin proposed “revolutionary peasant committees, workers’ trade unions, and other mass organizations as preparatory elements for the soviets of the future”. (p 51) If they were preparatory to soviets, there must be some known path from one to the other, yet no such path is explained or described in Stalin's theses. These mass organisations, also, cannot be set up at will, but arise naturally from material conditions. As such, they are always a possible development, but their transformation into soviets is not at all something that arises spontaneously. In 1917, Lenin also argued that, if the Bolsheviks could not win a majority in the soviets, they would have to focus on the factory committees, where they did. In the absence of soviets, these other organisations inevitably have to perform all of the functions required by the agrarian and democratic revolution, which in itself means that they will engage in strikes and other activities that may just as well scare off the bourgeoisie or provoke the intervention of imperialism. So, all this proposal does is to set up organs to carry out the functions of soviets, but whilst being less suited to the task than are soviets.
“During all the preceding mass movements, the trade unions were compelled to fulfil functions closely approaching the functions of soviets (Hong Kong, Shanghai, and elsewhere). But these were precisely the functions for which the trade unions were entirely insufficient. They embrace a too small number of workers. They do not at all embrace the petty-bourgeois masses in the city that incline towards the proletariat.” (p 52)
This not only leaves large masses unorganised, and separated from the workers, making solidarity and coordination more difficult, it fosters division. The basis of trades unions is not class struggle, but economic, distributional struggle, often also based craft exclusiveness. A look at the multitude of separate strikes, by different groups, in the NHS, on the railways etc., illustrates that. What is worse, it leaves the door open to other forces to organise the petty-bourgeoisie, lumpen proletariat, and non-unionised workers, using reactionary, populist, “anti-capitalist” rhetoric.
“... such tasks as the carrying through of strikes with the least possible losses to the poorer population of the city, the distribution of provisions, participation in tax policy, participation in the formation of armed forces, to say nothing of carrying through the agrarian revolution in the provinces, can be accomplished with the necessary sweep only when the directing organization embraces not only all the sections of the proletariat, but connects them intimately in the course of its activities with the poor population in the city and country.” (p 52)
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