The bourgeois revolution embraces the Peasant War, whose central feature is the agrarian revolution and land reform. The old landlord class has to be disbanded, and its huge estates broken up, with land redistributed to the peasants. The Bolshevik revolution had shown how the Peasant War could be merged into the proletarian revolution, and the peasants could be offered means by which to voluntarily combine their efforts to form cooperatives and so on. This was in contrast to he experience of the bourgeois revolution, in which the agrarian revolution simply sets in train the process by which the peasants become differentiated, and a large section of them transformed into day labourers, debt slaves, and paupers. The basis of appealing to peasants was, then, already established, and described in The Theses On The National and Colonial Questions. But as Chen Duxiu described, the program in China was wholly inadequate.
“With regard to the agrarian movement, comrade Chen Duxiu admits honestly that the agrarian program of the Party (reduction of rent payments) is completely insufficient. The peasant movement, he says, “is being transformed into the struggle for land. The peasantry arises spontaneously and wants to settle the land question itself.” Further on, comrade Chen Duxiu declares openly: “We followed a too pacific policy. Now it is necessary to confiscate the large estates” If the content of these words is developed in a Marxian manner, it constitutes the harshest condemnation of the whole past line of the Communist Party of China, and the Comintern as well, in the agrarian question of the Chinese revolution. Instead of anticipating the course of the agrarian movement, of establishing the slogans in time and throwing them among the peasant masses through the workers, the revolutionary soldiers and the advanced peasants, the Chinese Communist Party remained a vast distance behind the spontaneous agrarian movement. Can there be a more monstrous form of chvostism?” (p 69-70)
The policy the Stalinists pursued, in these conditions, Trotsky says, was not merely Menshevist, but liberal. The position of the USC is similar, but worse. Take, for example, what it says about opposing NATO imperialism, in Europe. Is this to be done by an EU wide workers' movement, demanding EU states withdraw from NATO, or even that the EU itself establish an EU army to pursue its own imperialist aims, rather than being subordinated to the interests of US imperialism, which would be the rational, social-democratic solution? No, they write, instead,
“The best way to ensure that US militarism is pushed out of Europe is to encourage the development of strong, independent countries whose borders are respected by their neighbours, not to view these countries as pawns in an inter-imperialist chess game.”
In other words, at a time when the EU has demonstrated that, in the age of imperialism, the nation state is a reactionary relic of the past, their program amounts to a sentimental appeal for the strengthening of such relics! They don't even make that reactionary appeal on the basis of some Menshevist or even social-democratic concept of “social-democracy in one country”, but purely on the basis of strengthening these existing bourgeois nation states. It is a collapse, at best, into liberalism, but actually into petty-bourgeois nationalism, and sovereigntism, reminiscent of the arguments of the Brexiters and Lexiters. Compared to that, even the demand of Paul Mason, for a strengthening of NATO is more rational.
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