The Canton Insurrection, Democratic Dictatorship or a Dictatorship Of The Proletariat - Part 4 of 8

The ECCI argued that the Chinese Revolution must enable China to progress towards socialism, but this transition to socialism was set for some indefinite future period. In the meantime, the bourgeois-democratic revolution had the task of establishing national unification, and freeing China from the role of foreign imperialism, in its economy and affairs.

In fact, in the age of imperialism, achieving those goals, as history had shown, in practice, required moving beyond the limitations of the bourgeois-democratic national revolution, to the international, proletarian revolution. In the age of imperialism, no nation is truly independent, even the largest and strongest. No economy stands apart from the global economy.

“This object could be attained only if the revolution did not stop merely at the solution of the bourgeois-democratic tasks, but by growing over from one stage into another, that is, by constantly (or permanently) developing, led China towards socialist development. This is precisely what Marx understood by the term “permanent revolution”. How then can one speak of a non-capitalist path of development of China on the one hand, and on the other, deny the permanent character of the revolution in general?” (p 131-2)

Indeed, as with the argument against Socialism In One Country, in Russia, the concept of permanence requires that the revolution is international, spreading out to the developed economies. But, at least, a proletarian revolution, in China, at that point, could have linked up to the USSR, taking them both out of the total dominance of the market and exchange-value.

The position of the Stalinists was similar to that of the Narodniks, criticised by Lenin in the 1890's, in which, on the basis of a petty-bourgeois socialist ideology, they foresaw a non-capitalist path of development, for Russia, in which the state was some kind of neutral, non-class state. The same ideas re-emerged, after the 1917 February Revolution, and form the basis of Third Worldist ideologies, as well as most “anti-imperialist”, and “anti-capitalist” groups. The same idea is utilised by the USC, in their support for the Ukrainian capitalist state, which they disguise by talk of supporting only some abstract, non-class “Ukraine”, or “Ukrainian people”, as though these are not comprised of antagonistic classes, driven by their own class interests. The USC's position is simply a repeat of the Stalinist “Bloc of Four Classes”.

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