China, indeed, continued to face enormous tasks, in terms of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, removing all of the remnants of oriental despotism, slavery and colonialism. But, that was precisely why those tasks could not be resolved by the amorphous forces of the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie. That a peasant army, under Mao Zedong, carried through such a revolution, in 1949, depended on particular historic conditions, during and after WWII, in which British colonialism was in retreat, Japanese imperialism, which had swept across China, was defeated, and facing a rapidly advancing USSR, which also provided support for the Chinese Communist Party.
“The unification and emancipation of China is now an international task. It is no less international than the existence of the USSR. This task can be solved only by means of a desperate struggle of the suppressed, hungry and downtrodden masses under the direct leadership of the proletarian vanguard, a struggle not only against world imperialism, but also against its economic and political agency in China – the bourgeoisie, including also the “national” and democratic bourgeois flunkeys. And that is the road, leading towards the proletarian dictatorship.” (p 134)
Unfortunately, this prognosis was proved correct, in the case of both the USSR and China, in the negative. Both sank into a bourgeois-counter-revolution, presided over by an anti-working-class, Bonapartist regime. Trotsky sets out the timeline of the Russian Revolution, as described by Lenin. Between November 1917 and July 1918, the workers and peasants carried out the agrarian revolution. This is the period of Peasant War, as against proletarian revolution. The workers, during this period, were still experimenting with workers' control, rather than the confiscation of the means of production, a process which was introduced at a forced pace, under War Communism, as a consequence of the Civil War, and imperialist intervention.
“In other words, that which the theoretical formula of “the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” sought to unite was disunited in the course of the actual class struggle.” (p 135)
It was also during the course of the proletarian revolution that the agrarian revolution was actually accomplished.
“This is the dialectical dissociation of the democratic dictatorship which the leaders of the ECCI failed to understand. They have landed in a political blind alley, mechanically condemning any “skipping over the bourgeois-democratic stage” and endeavouring to guide the historical process by means of circular letters.” (p 135)
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