The fact that many of these Bonapartist regimes proceeded on the basis of state-capitalist policies, as with Assad, Nasser and so on, fitted well with a “Left” whose own conception of “Socialism” was riddled with the same statism, demands for nationalisation, welfarism, and owed more to Lassalle and the Fabians than to Marx. But, the Menshevist/Stalinist policy that privileged the bourgeois national revolution over the international proletarian revolution, in line with the stages theory, did not even demand that. Again, the basis of that, in Stalinism, was fairly obvious.
As part of the global strategic game played out between the USSR and imperialism, the USSR and its agents within the various “Communist Parties”, were actually not too concerned whether those bourgeois nationalist forces, carrying through bourgeois national revolutions, were progressive, even in the bourgeois-democratic sense. On the contrary, to have regimes that were more clearly aligned to the USSR, it was easier if these regimes shared the same bureaucratic/totalitarian nature as that of the USSR. The task, on a global scale, was to establish, via these national revolutions, regimes that were drawn out of the sphere of influence of imperialism, and into that of the USSR.
And, indeed, as in Spain, in the 1930's, the last thing the Stalinists, in the USSR, wanted was any actually independent proletarian revolution. That would have undermined the Stalinist bureaucracy's own position, but would also have upset the arrangement it had reached with imperialism, after WWII. That knowledge, by the bourgeoisie, in many of these countries, however, meant that their fears of permanent revolution could be discarded. If the workers began to press their own demands, threatening to push the revolution beyond bourgeois limits, they could always count on the local Stalinists, backed by Moscow, to help them to suppress the workers. Indeed, these bourgeois forces did, frequently, present themselves in those same “communist” colourations.
As these bourgeois national liberation struggles and movements against the military adventures of imperialism played a large role, also, for the “Left” outside the Stalinist parties, so this privileging of “anti-imperialism”, over the positive struggle for socialism, became firmly entrenched. On that basis, eyes were closed to the reactionary nature of many of the forces leading those national independence struggles, in Algeria, Iran and so on, as only the fact of opposition to “imperialism”, was considered.
“Passing over from the opportunism openly practised in the form of collaboration (1924-27), it made an abrupt zig-zag at the end of 1927 by resorting to adventures. After the Canton insurrection, it rejected putschism and passed into the third phase, the most sterile one, seeking to combine the old opportunistic premises with a purely formal, ineffectual radicalism, which at a certain period bore in Russia, the names of “ultimatism” and “Otzovism”, and which constitutes the worst variety of ultra-leftism.” (p 153-4)
And, that was manifest in the policy of the Communist International, of The Third Period, until the catastrophe of that, in Hitler's victory, the Anti-Comintern Alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan, and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, and so on, led to Stalin's fear of a renewed attack on the USSR, and so his scrabble to appease “democratic-imperialism”, and an even more abasing return to the Popular Front, along with open avowals, as in Spain, to oppose proletarian revolution.
Trotsky notes that the defeats suffered had cost the Chinese Communist Party the bulk of its worker members and this was not compensated by having attracted to it new members from amongst the peasantry. The same is true of the “Left” sects that, long ago, lost their support within the industrial working-class, and substituted for it recruitment of students, each year culling a new intake at the Fresher's Fairs, the large majority of whom pass through the sects and out again, before taking up positions in the professions, or as SPAD's, having served this right of passage that can be added to, or left out of, their C.V.'s, as required. Starmer epitomises these parvenus. Trotsky described it, in relation to the peasants and the CPC.
“... it is only one form of the dissolution and the liquidation of the CPC, for, by losing its proletarian nucleus, it ceases to be in conformity with its historical destination.” (p 155)
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