In both Russia and China, and the same applies to all industrialising economies, in the era of imperialism, the working-class is forced to carry through the tasks of the bourgeois revolution, in the process of fighting for its own class interests, but that does not mean that its goal is the creation of bourgeois-democracy, as the epigones presented it, or as suggested by the reformists and social-democrats. The actual struggle determines whether, and for how long a bourgeois parliament may be established, for example, but there is no reason why the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and its tasks, may not be carried through without any such institutions, instead, all being completed via soviets/workers and peasants councils, as part of the proletarian revolution.
“To advance at present the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, when the role not only of the Chinese bourgeoisie but also of “democracy” has already been tested through and through, when it has become absolutely certain that “democracy” will, in the coming struggles, play its role of hangman even more than in the past, simply means to create the means of covering up the new forms of Guomindangism and to set a trap for the proletariat.” (p 137)
Similarly, as Trotsky sets out, in The Action Programme For France, Marxists, in the absence of workers having actually broken from bourgeois-democracy, completely, fight against attacks on it from fascists, but they undertake this fight on the basis of proletarian, not bourgeois methods. They oppose bans by the bourgeois state, or reliance on the police to deal with the fascists, instead relying on street mobilisations by workers, and the creation of workers' defence squads, militia, the creation of factory committees, workers' councils and so on. The emphasis is on fighting the fascists not supporting bourgeois-democratic institutions. Indeed, the whole point of fighting the fascists, using these proletarian means is to expose the sham of bourgeois democracy, and the superiority of workers' democracy, so as to break the workers away from their illusions in bourgeois-democracy, and move directly to a proletarian revolution.
Trotsky quotes Lenin's comment from 1917, that those that continued to argue for the Democratic Dictatorship (bourgeois-democracy) should be relegated to the archives of “Old Bolsheviks”, and had passed over into the ranks of the petty-bourgeois, in opposition to the workers. Even more is this the case where that bourgeois-democracy has long been established.
“Of course, it is by no means a question of calling the Communist Party of China immediately to revolt to capture power. The tempo depends entirely upon the circumstances.” (p 138)
The result of the defeats was to set the workers on the back foot, and that could not be changed by revolutionary phrase-mongering. And, Trotsky, also, sets out, again, the idiocy of the catastrophists who think that some kind of long depression is required to spur workers into radicalism.
“The verbiage, half concealed by the resolution of the ECCI, about an imminent revolutionary resurgence, because numberless people are being executed in China and a terrific commercial and industrial crisis is raging in the country, is criminal light-mindedness and nothing else. After three overwhelming defeats, an economic crisis does not rouse, but on the contrary depresses the proletariat, which, as it is, has already been bled white; the executions only destroy the politically weakened Party.” (p 138)
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