Trotsky says its impossible to say what might create the conditions for a resurgence of the revolutionary movement, which could come from internal sources, or some external event. In fact, it was the latter.
“It is not excluded that the first period of the coming third revolution may repeat, in a greatly abridged and modified form, the stages which have already been gone through, for example, by presenting some new parody of the “common national front”. But this first period will probably suffice to permit the Communist Party to put before the popular masses its “April theses”, that is, its program and tactics for the capture of power.” (p 139)
And, indeed, that was the case. World War II is often dated as 1939-45, just as WWI is dated as 1914-18. In fact, that only reflects the involvement of the main imperialist protagonists. The First World War can be dated back to, at least, the Balkan Wars, if not to earlier conflicts such as the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, and the Second World War started much earlier, as with the Second Sino-Japanese War that began in 1937. In reality, the material conditions for it, and dynamic towards war, date back further than that.
Illustrating, Trotsky's point about the idiocy of seeing WWII, as a war between “democratic imperialism”, and fascism, and the reality of military alliances comprising both fascist and “democratic” regimes, China was supported by an alliance comprising the US, UK, the USSR and Nazi Germany, prior to the latter forming an alliance with Japan, following the bombing of Pearl Harbour, and declaration of war on it by the US.
The war forced a second popular front between the CCP, and Kuomintang. The weakness of the CCP, having lost its proletarian base in the cities, was manifest in the fact that Japan was able to take control of the cities, but not the vast rural areas, further driving the CCP into the arms of the peasantry, and reliance on guerrilla warfare, rather than proletarian revolution. Japan, having had a rapid victory over Russian Tsarism in 1905, and, now, having swept across much of China, made the mistake of attacking Russia again. In 1939, Japan was heavily defeated at Khalkin Gol, in one of the first large tank battles of WWII. It was a major reason for Japanese militarists switching their attention to the attack on US interests in the Pacific.
The soviet military advance into Manchuria, and Mongolia, and seemingly unstoppable advance into Japan itself, is what brought about the Japanese total surrender to the US, as Japanese capital preferred a deal with US imperialism, and a continuation of capitalism, to a defeat at the hands of the USSR, and overthrow of its capitalist regime. But, similarly, this rapid soviet military advance, and the support given to the Chinese CP, is what enabled the latter to defeat the Kuomintang, and establish the People's Republic of China, in 1949. The name itself “People's”, reflects the petty-bourgeois, populist nature of the CCP, and of its “revolution”, and the nature of the Bonapartist regime established.
Rather than it leading to the workers seizing power, it resulted in a peasant army, led by Mao Zedong, seizing power, and establishing a Stalinoid, Bonapartist regime. As in Eastern Europe, as Trotsky had previously described, in relation to Poland, the liquidation of the old exploiting classes and the property forms upon which they rested – landed property and capital – meant that the workers became the ruling class, even though they did not directly hold political power in their own hands. Yet, the working-class, in China, represented a small minority of society, and the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, suffered from all of the deficiencies of such heterogeneous classes previously identified by Marx. The Bonapartist regime of the CCP, therefore, presided over the creation of another deformed workers' state.
The path to this development was created by the Comintern. Its failed policies had led to the coup of Chiang Kai Shek, and the loss of the advanced workers, concentrated in the big towns and cities. But, even after those mistakes, it continued along the same path. Its draft programme said,
“The transition to the proletarian dictatorship is possible here [in China] only after a series of preparatory stages [?], only as a result of a whole period of the growing over [?] of the bourgeois-democratic revolution into the socialist revolution.” (p 139)
It was Menshevist “stagism” and tailism, not Marxism. It opened he door for Mao to build his party/military apparatus, not on the basis of the proletariat, whose revolution was, thereby, postponed to the indefinite future, but on the basis of the peasantry and guerrilla war, fought in rural areas.
“In other words, all the “stages” that have already been gone through are not taken into account. What has been left behind, the draft program still sees ahead. This is exactly what is meant by dragging behind the tail. It leaves gates wide open for new experiments in the spirit of the Guomindang course. Thus, the concealment of the old blunders inevitably prepares the road for new errors.
If we enter the new rise, which will develop at an incomparably more rapid rate than the last one, with the outlived plan of “democratic dictatorship”, there can be no doubt that the third revolution will be lost just as the second one.” (p 139-40)
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