Despite correctly describing the inadequate nature of the CP's agrarian programme, Chen arrived at disastrous conclusions, because he, again, posed it in terms of waiting for the revolution to be extended across China. But, how was the revolution to be extended if peasants, in the rest of China, did not see any benefit in those areas where it had already unfolded. Again, that was the lesson learned in 1917, in Russia.
“... this is simply a blind repetition of the old, well-known and outworn formula of national-liberal deception of the masses: First the victory, then the reform. First we will “extend” the country – for whom: for the large landowner? – and then, after the victory, we will concern ourselves very tranquilly with the “deepening”.” (p 71)
As Trotsky says, this is always the mantra of the bourgeoisie and its agents in the labour movement, used to deceive the masses. WWI was to be the war to end all wars, and initiate a period of peace and harmony, and social progress. In fact, it simply initiated the period of attacks on workers' pay and conditions across Europe, and, with a ten year delay, in the US too. It simply prepared the ground for an even more industrialised slaughter, in WWII, to continue to resolve the contradictions that underpinned WWI.
And, again, the same arguments were raised in WWII, with nonsense about fighting fascism, and for national independence, and how, after the war, the door would be open to social progress. Instead, in Britain, workers were subjected to a further ten years of rationing, national service as Britain tried to hold on to its colonial empire, and its privileges, whilst money was wasted on developing nuclear weapons, and the old private capitalists that had bled dry the staple industries, were handed huge sums as “compensation” for nationalisation of the industries they had destroyed. In the US, there was McCarthyism, as the US began a 40 year Cold War against its erstwhile “anti-fascist” ally, the USSR.
The advances, in the period, were not at all those gifted to the workers by a bourgeoisie thankful for having saved its skin, but were ones that were prised from its fingers by a working-class, strengthened by a growing labour shortage. When that reached crisis point again, in the 1970's, the bourgeoisie responded, again, by resort to a strong state and fascist irregulars, and, as soon as new technologies allowed labour to be replaced, the bourgeoisie was quick to slap it down, and reverse those gains extracted from it, in the previous period.
But, in Ukraine, today, the government is not offering, even, the kind of jam tomorrow that bourgeois governments often do, in these conditions. On the contrary, it is imposing even more attacks on Ukrainian workers, which could only intensify, were it to win with the backing of NATO. Zelensky's anti-working class agenda fits well with those of the newly elected right-wing populist Milie, in Argentina, as with his fellow attendees Bolsonaro, and Orban. Indeed, its that massive backing from NATO, and the fact that its own labour movement has made no demands on it, that emboldens it to ignore them, and simply whip them harder like a beast of burden.
“To this, every intelligent and half-way sensible peasant will answer comrade Chen Duxiu: “If the Wuhan government today, when it finds itself encircled by foes and needs our peasant support for life and death – if this government does not dare now to give us the land of the large landowners or does not want to do it, then after it has extricated itself from its encirclement, after it has vanquished the enemy with our help, it will give us just as much land as Chiang Kai-shek gave the workers of Shanghai.”” (p 71)
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