In 1923, in Germany, the opportunist line led to the revolutionary opportunities being missed, and was followed by adventurist calls for General Strikes, and so on, as though they could be conjured from thin air by administrative appeals. The same thing happened in China. On a general level, the opportunism of the Popular Front strategy gave way to the idiocy of Third Period sectarianism, between 1928-34.
The resolution of the February Plenum of the ECCI, spoke of the revolutionary wave taking place under the leadership and slogans of the Communist Party. It goes on to note the heavy defeats and massacre of the revolutionary cadres. But, in fact, as Trotsky notes, during the period of revolutionary upsurge, the ECCI had been claiming that it was the KMT that was leading it, and was the basis of arguing the need for the communists to subordinate themselves to it. It was argued that it even removed the need for soviets. A similar opportunist argument is given by social-imperialists, in relation to Ukraine, for example, in the statement of the AWL's Jim Denham that imperialism and the capitalist state defends workers interests “for its own reasons”.
It was that subordination, and failure to organise soviets, that brought about the defeats and massacres. The Stalinists, in their resolution, acknowledging those defeats, then wiped from history the leading role of the KMT, and their subordination to it, leaving the defeat and disasters as some kind of unavoidable event.
“Formerly we were told that there were no defeats either in Shanghai or in Wuhan, there were merely transitions of the revolution “into a higher phase”. That is what we were taught. Now the sum total of these transitions is suddenly declared to be “heavy defeats for the workers and peasants”. However, in order to mask to some extent this unprecedented political bankruptcy of perspective and judgement, the concluding paragraph of the resolution says:
The ECCI makes it the duty of all sections of the Comintern to fight against the Social-Democratic and Trotskyist slander to the effect that the Chinese revolution has been liquidated [?].” (p 140-41)
This, again, was nonsensical. The same resolution had previously described the Trotskyist position as saying that the revolution was permanent. So, how, then, could the Trotskyist position be that it was liquidated? If by liquidated is meant that it had suffered severe defeats, which set back the workers and revolutionary elements for an indeterminate period, then how is that different from what the resolution itself admitted, when it spoke of such defeats, and so, how could this be slander?
If by liquidation is meant that the possibility of revolution itself no longer existed that would require that, either, China itself ceased to exist, or that the Chinese bourgeoisie became capable of transforming the country by non-revolutionary means. There was no reason to assume the former, and the opposition did not support the latter, though that is what the Stalinists sought to imply.
This was a repeat of what had happened in Germany, in 1923, where the Stalinists had accused the Opposition of being liquidationists, for having pointed out that the Stalinists had let the revolutionary moment slip by.
“It is true that the need of finding “liquidators” is far more acute than it was four years ago; for at the present time, it is too obvious that if anybody did “liquidate” the second Chinese revolution, it was the authors of the course towards the Guomindang.” (p 142)
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