The opposition had, correctly, warned of the error in subordinating the communists to the KMT, and, then, to the Left KMT, as well as warning of the danger of adventurism, represented by the Canton uprising.
“The very same opportunist line which, by the policy of capitulation to the bourgeoisie, already brought the revolution, at its first two phases, the heaviest defeats, “grew over” in the third phase, into a policy of adventurous attacks upon the bourgeoisie, and made the defeat final.” (p 142-3)
The fact of making mistakes is not where the problem lies, because mistakes are inevitable, in trying to orientate to real events. Even without mistakes, defeats occur. Events can also force the revolutionaries to pursue a course they would not ideally have chosen. Marx argued against the Paris workers rising in revolt in 1871, but, when they did, threw his weight behind them. In the July Days of 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were similarly forced to back actions by the workers they rightly saw as premature. The Bolsheviks would not have chosen to engage in “War Communism”, but had to to deal with the needs of fighting the Civil War.
“If the leadership had not been in such a hurry yesterday to skip over the defeats which it had brought about, it would have begun by explaining to the Communist Party of China that victory is not gained at one blow, that on the road to insurrection there is still a period of intense, constant and fierce struggles for political influence on the workers and peasants.” (p 143)
The later strategy of Mao Zedong, of a rural based guerrilla war, rather than a proletarian revolution, could also be seen to have its origins in this earlier adventurism. Trotsky refers to the reports in Pravda, of the armies of Ho Lung and Ye Ting, which were described as revolutionary armies, but these armies, comprised mainly of peasants, were marching through the countryside, not bringing about revolution in the urban areas. It is the kind of guerrilla war seen later in other parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Yet, Pravda gave no account of the program that these supposed revolutionary armies were marching under.
“Without first organizing the Communist Party against the Guomindang in its entirety, without agitation among the masses for soviets and a soviet government, without an independent mobilization of the masses under the slogan of the agrarian revolution and national emancipation, without the creation, extension and strengthening of the local soviets of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies, the uprising of Ho Lung and Ye Ting, even leaving aside their opportunist policy, could not fail to be an isolated adventure, a pseudo-Communist Makhno feat; it could not but clash against its own isolation, and it has clashed.” (p 143-4)
Only in exceptional cases have these strategies succeeded in their own terms. Never have they succeeded in bringing about a proletarian revolution. Whenever they have succeeded in their own terms, they have brought about some form of Bonapartist regime, and repression of the workers and peasants, often worse than existed before. Providing "Left" cover for these reactionary, petty-bourgeois movements was warned against by Lenin in The Theses On The National and Colonial Questions, and the consequence of doing so, given the inevitably reactionary regimes they created, has defamed and set back the cause of socialism for the last century.
“The February resolution of the ECCI combats certain putschistic tendencies in the Communist Party of China, that is, the tendencies towards armed skirmishes. It does not say, however, that these tendencies are a reaction to the entire opportunist policy of 1925-27, and an unavoidable consequence of the purely military orders, handed down from above, to “change step” without appraising all that had been done, without an open revaluation of the basis of the tactics, without a clear prospect. Ho Lung’s march and the Canton insurrection were (and under such circumstances, had to be) outbursts of putschism.” (p 144)
In Europe, and North America, Stalinism's Popular Front strategy aligned the CP's with the reformists and bourgeoisie apart from the brief interlude of the Third Period madness. In the rest of the world, it aligned them with and subordinated them to the peasant and petty-bourgeois parties. In the period after WWII, it followed its rational course, via Eurocommunism, of turning the CP's into conservative, social-democratic parties pure and simple. The national-socialist rump of those parties, left behind, became the basis of petty-bourgeois reactionary nationalism, that easily welded to right-wing nationalism and populism in the red-brown front. Elsewhere, in the world, it turned them into these peasant based guerrilla armies.
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