In Russia, because the bourgeois-democratic revolution involved a Peasant War, against the old landed aristocracy, it combined the rich, middle and poor peasants, all of whom suffered at the hands of the landlords. Indeed, the richer peasants often took the lead. But, no such alliance was possible in China. In Russia, it is only when the revolution poses further tasks, such as the rights of agricultural wage labourers, employed by the richer peasants, and the diverging interests of the poor peasants that this alliance fractures.
“If in Russia the poor peasant committees acted only in the second stage of the October revolution, towards the middle of 1918, in China they will appear on the scene, in one form or another, as soon as the agrarian movement revives. The breaking-up of the rich peasants will be the first and not the second step in the Chinese October.” (p 125)
This different historical development, in China, compared to Russia, presented other challenges. In Russia, there was also large scale foreign investment, as there was in China, but, in Russia, it was always under the auspices of the Tsarist state. That was not the case in China, where British, Japanese and other imperialist powers also backed up control of that capital by deployment of their own military power. Unlike Russia, therefore, where a unitary state existed, and the task of the Bolsheviks was to try to retain it, whilst also assuaging the interests of the numerous nationalities within it, the task, in China, was to create such a unified state.
One of the reasons these foreign imperialist powers imposed themselves, on China, was not only for its resources, but also because of the size of its population, presenting them with a huge market that acted as a safety valve whenever those imperialist states suffered an overproduction of commodities. In Russia, the soviets established power, because they absorbed the Russian soldiers and sailors, and they enforced workers' control of production in large industries. But, in China, even where soviets were established, workers' control in industry, owned by foreign imperialists, had to deal with the military power of the imperialists. Rather than going through a stage of workers' control, therefore, the Chinese revolution had to go straight to a confiscation of those large industries. Similarly, in order to protect the economy from dumping by imperialist countries, it needed to establish a monopoly of foreign trade. All of these are measures of the proletarian, rather than bourgeois-democratic revolution.
“The bourgeois and the proletarian poles of the Chinese nation are opposed to each other even more intransigently, if this is possible, than they were in Russia, inasmuch as, on the one hand, the Chinese bourgeoisie is directly bound up with foreign imperialism and its military machine and, on the other hand, the Chinese proletariat has from the very beginning established relations with the Comintern and the Soviet Union. Numerically, the Chinese peasantry constitutes an even more overwhelming mass than the Russian peasants; but, crushed in the vice of world contradictions upon the solution of which in one way or another its fate depends, the Chinese peasantry is even less capable than the Russian of playing a leading role. This is now no longer a theoretical forecast; it is a fact tested through and through and from all sides.” (p 127)
That was true, in 1928, but, in the years that followed, and, in the specific conditions that arose during WWII, it proved not to be true. The Chinese Communist Party, having facilitated the destruction of its proletarian base, moved increasingly to base itself on the peasantry. Trotsky had described the merger of the Comintern and Kuomintang, in China, as the Kuomintern, and the CCP came, more and more, to resemble the Left Kuomintang than a proletarian party. Its strategy under Mao Tse Tung, became that of peasant based, guerrilla warfare, focused in rural areas, rather than the program of proletarian revolution, based in large urban centres. The result of that determined the character of the revolution carried through, and the class nature of the state it created.
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