The Chinese Question After The Sixth Congress
Introduction
“The lessons and the problems in the strategy and tactics of the Chinese revolution constitute at the present time the greatest teaching for the international proletariat. The experience gained in 1917 has been altered, disfigured and falsified to the point of unrecognizability by the epigones brought to power on the waves of defeats of the world’s working class. Henceforth, one is compelled to extract the 1917 revolution from beneath mountains of impurities under which it has been buried. The revolution has verified the policy of Bolshevism by resorting to the method of reductio ad absurdum. The strategy of the Communist International in China was a gigantic game of “losers win”. The young generation of revolutionists must be taught the alphabet of Bolshevism by using the Chinese antithesis contrasted to the experience gained in October.” (p 152)
Trotsky, and the Opposition, in May 1927, had correctly evaluated the errors of Stalin's Theses, at the time that the consequences of those errors were unfolding, with Chiang's April coup. Here, more than a year later, Trotsky is able to draw up a more detailed balance sheet of the events. As he notes, above, the bowdlerisation, and simply lying and distortion, that Stalinism engaged in, relating to Bolshevik teaching, and the lessons of the Russian Revolution, both led to the defeat, in China, and was used to cover up its role in that defeat.
But, it also paved the way for the errors in Germany that led to the victory of Hitler, and his ability, in the following years, to consolidate that power. After all, not only did Hitler not win a majority of votes in the election, being made Chancellor only by the support of the other bourgeois parties, but the vote for the Nazis was already fracturing, and beginning to decline, as Trotsky pointed out, a feature of the heterogeneous and contradictory nature of the social forces upon which Bonapartism rests. The Communists and Socialists still had the support of millions of workers, and a correct strategy by the Communist International could have brought him down.
The errors were made, again, in Spain, leading to the victory of Franco, but also set the basis for the errors in the post-war period. Stalinism essentially split, with Maoism being its form in largely peasant economies, and the implementation of guerrilla warfare, whereas, in industrialised economies, its Popular Frontism turned it into just another social-democratic ideology, often of a conservative variety, as it blocked with right-wing social democrats and liberals against Trotskyist, and New Left groupings.
Stalinism, in Russia, arose as a petty-bourgeois ideology, based on the new administrative and managerial layers of society. That petty-bourgeois ideology, shaped by the dominance of the peasantry, in China, developed into Maoism, as the party lost its initial proletarian base, and came to rest on the peasantry. But, in Europe and North America, this weight of Stalinism, on the chest of the labour movement, also had its effect. The “Trotskyist” and “New Left” groupings, that grew in the post-war period of expansion, themselves did so, largely, on the basis of resting on the petty-bourgeoisie/middle-class, this time being the student movement. It leaves the need to remove the covering of years of petty-bourgeois shit dumped over the genuine Marxist teachings, and to build, once again, genuine revolutionary parties, based on the working-class.
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