Having led the Chinese workers into slaughter, at the hands of Chiang Kai Shek, Stalin repeated the error, by aligning with the Left Kuomintang, of Wang Chin Wei. This same kind of phenomenon has been seen in the post-war period, with one charismatic leader after another, be it Guevara and Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Chavez and Morales, or Zelensky and Putin, and so on, built up and appealed to as the new great hope of “anti-imperialism”, by the petty-bourgeois “Left”, and each time with the same, predictable, disastrous and demoralising results.
In China, Stalin argued that these were two governments, essentially representing a condition of dual power. On the one hand, following the coup, there was Chiang Kai Shek's reactionary government in Nanking, and, on the other, a revolutionary government of the Left Kuomintang, in Wuhan. Again, Stalin argued that soviets could not be established, which would be seen as a challenge to the revolutionary government, with which Stalin sought to ally.
“We called this characterization of the situation “false, superficial, vulgar”. We called this so-called Wuhan government the “leaders of Wuhan” and showed that in Southern China, after the abrupt veering of the civil war to another class line, there is no government as yet, that one must be first created.” (p 67)
And, indeed, as the 1917 Russian Revolution demonstrated, if you really wanted to establish a revolutionary government, the creation of soviets was essential, from a proletarian standpoint, because it is necessary to organise the arming of the workers, to ensure its ability to guard its interests, guns in hand, and to exert the social pressure to enable a Constituent Assembly to be formed.
Trotsky cites the speech of Tchen Du-Siu, at the convention of the Chinese Communist Party, on April 29th, to illustrate the correctness of the Opposition's analysis.
“Neither Stalin nor we had this speech when Stalin wrote his theses and we wrote a criticism of them. Chen Duxiu characterizes the situation not on the basis of a general analysis of the circumstances but on the basis of his direct observations. Now, what does Chen Duxiu say of the new revolutionary movement? He declares plainly that “it would be a mistake” to consider the Wuhan government an organ of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship: “It is not yet a government of the worker and peasant masses but solely a bloc of leaders”. But is this not word for word what we said against Stalin?” (p 67)
But, this is also characteristic of the Popular Front and cross-class, popular-frontist bodies in general. It has been a feature of the bodies set up as fronts by CP's and by the SWP, for example, with CND, ANL and so on. The same can be seen with the cross-class popular front of the USC, and the way they talk in general, abstract terms about “Ukraine”, “Ukrainian people”, and so on, all of which distract from the reality of their alliance with the Ukrainian bourgeois leaders, like Zelensky, and the Ukrainian capitalist state. The same can be seen in the opposing social-imperialist camp supporting Putin's Russia. They also talk in the same fantastic terms, as though a war is being fought by the “Russian people” with whom they are allied, rather than the reality of a war fought by the Russian capitalist state, and with which they are, thereby, allied.
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