Trotsky's Second Speech to the Eighth Plenum of the ECCI, in Moscow, May 1927
Having supported Chiang Kai Shek, right up to the point of his coup, and slaughter of thousands of communist workers, Stalin had thrown the same support behind the “Left” Kuomintang of Wang Chin Wei, and its government in Wuhan. Stalin opposed the setting up of workers and peasants' soviets, on the basis that they would be seen as challenging that government, and so leading to a split between it, and the Chinese communists. The Left KMT government was, Stalin said, all that was required to carry through the agrarian revolution. In other words, all of the mistakes made previously, in relation to Chiang Kai Shek.
But, these same mistakes were made in the post-war period, not only by Stalinists, but by those that called themselves Trotskyist, or part of some “New Left”. Whether in China, Korea, Vietnam, Algeria and the rest of the Middle East, across Africa, and Latin America, support was given to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist movements, simply on the basis of their “anti-imperialism”, with no regard for the class nature of these movements, and, usually, reactionary, anti-working class ideology, dressed up as some kind of “socialism”. It was a policy of Kantian moralism, based on “lesser-evilism” and “My enemy's enemy is my friend”, not Marxism. It repeatedly looked to some latest new hope for the revolution, with little thought about exactly what kind of revolution such forces would carry through, and what effect that would have, not just for workers in the given country, but on the development of workers' class consciousness globally.
Stalinism had done severe damage, on both these counts, but even it was not so grotesque as the regimes established by reactionary peasant and petty-bourgeois forces, under Pol Pot, or those like that of Khomeini in Iran, or the Taliban in Afghanistan.
“We have nothing in common with this policy. We do not want to assume even a shadow of responsibility for the policy of the Wuhan government and the leadership of the Guomindang, and we urgently advise the Comintern to reject this responsibility. We say directly to the Chinese peasants: The leaders of the Left Guomindang of the type of Wang Jingwei and Co. will inevitably betray you if you follow the Wuhan heads instead of forming your own independent soviets.” (p 96-7)
Compare that attitude to the way sections of the "Left" held out hopes in the regime of Mao Zedong, in China, after 1949, a regime, itself, based upon the Chinese peasants and petty-bourgeoisie, rather than Chinese workers, and so owing more to the heritage of the Left KMT than Lenin's Bolshevism. It was followed by those sections that took those ideas of rural guerrilla war as the basis of support for Guevarism, in Latin America, in Indo-China, and South Africa, again, necessarily based upon the peasants and petty-bourgeoisie, not the industrial proletariat.
The actual politics of such movements, whatever “Marxist” colouration they used as camouflage, was determined by that class character and composition. The charismatic leaders names changed – Mao, Ho, Fidel, Che, Mandela, Adams, Ortega, Chavez, Morales, Zelensky, Putin and so on – but the reactionary petty-bourgeois nature of those movements, and their politics remained, each time, necessarily disappointing those that threw their hopes and support behind them, as an index of their own impotence, like a drowning man snatching at straws. What makes the role of the USC so abysmal is that it has, similarly, thrown its support behind a capitalist state, and its regime that does not even attempt to hide its anti-working class nature, nor its own imperialist ambitions! And, the same is true for those that, in mirror image, have thrown their support behind Putin's Russia.
But, of course, the USC, on one side, and their mirror image, in those backing Putin, do that job for them. Rather than describe the actual war being fought by these two capitalist states, both with right-wing, viciously anti-working class regimes, and both backed by larger imperialist powers, they describe a wholly fantastic, non-existent war being fought out by the workers of each capitalist state, as though this was some revolutionary war, capable of transformation, at any moment, into a proletarian revolution! Of course, every war is fought using workers as the foot soldiers and cannon fodder. The point is that they are only that, wholly under the the discipline of the generals and the capitalist state. The war is not being fought for the workers interests, but for those of the respective capitalist states, and their respective imperialist camps.
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