The Canton Insurrection, Democratic Dictatorship or a Dictatorship Of The Proletariat - Part 5 of 8

Trotsky notes that, in China, the period after 1927, was one of counter-revolution, not bourgeois-democratic revolution. The ECCI had concluded that the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic, national revolution had not been completed, and so it was this that characterised the nature of the revolution. This showed they had not learned the recent lessons in China, nor those of Russia in 1917.

“The revolution of February 1917 in Russia left unsolved all the internal and international problems which led to the revolution – feudalism in the villages, the old bureaucracy, the war and the economic ruin. Based upon this, not only the SRs and the Mensheviks, but also a considerable section of the leaders of our own party, tried to show Lenin that the “present period of the revolution is a period of the bourgeois-democratic revolution”. On this essential point, the resolution of the ECCI merely copies the objections made to Lenin in 1917 by the opportunists, against the struggle for the proletarian dictatorship.” (p 132)

The resolution also noted that, in China, not only had these tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution not been accomplished, but, unlike Russia, where the peasants had thrown up the S.R.'s, represented in the soviets, and in the revolutionary government, established with the Bolsheviks, no such revolutionary, bourgeois-democratic government had been established. The KMT represented the bourgeoisie, and it was only the CP that represented the proletariat and peasantry, but Stalin's policy forbade it from establishing soviets, or struggling for power, which would have meant accepting permanent revolution.

But, far from acknowledging that PR had again been validated, by the recent events, in China, the ECCI resolution concluded that “the tendency to skip over the bourgeois-democratic phase:

“... is all [!] the more harmful because such a formulation of the question excludes [?] the greatest national peculiarity of the Chinese revolution, which is a semi-colonial revolution.”

The only meaning that these senseless words can have is that the imperialist yoke will be overthrown by some sort of dictatorship other than the proletarian. But this means that the “greatest national peculiarity” has been dragged in at the last moment only in order to present in bright colours the Chinese national-bourgeois or the Chinese petty-bourgeois “democracy”. They can have no other meaning.” (p 133-4)

Again, we have seen this approach taken by all of the “anti-imperialists”, who seek to ignore the anti-working-class nature of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois national movements with which they bloc, and which, every time, results in catastrophe for the working-class, and the cause of international socialism. It is rightly described as “idiot anti-imperialism”, and the approach of the USC and its supporters fits that description to the letter.

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