At every stage, the Stalinists did the opposite of what a revolutionary strategy, based on Permanent Revolution required. Only after each one of these policies had failed did they advocate the policy that they should have adopted to have avoided that failure. When Chiang Kai Shek organised his coup, utilising his monopoly of weapons, against the disarmed worker communists, in Shanghai, the Stalinists argued for arming those workers, and for soviets to be established. But, as Trotsky says, doing so after the slaughter is pointless, and demanding the arming of workers before you have created the soviets that are the basis of such arming is simply adventurist and phrase-mongering.
Even then, the Stalinists made the same mistake, in seeking to subordinate the Chinese communists to the Left KMT of Wang Chin Wei. They opposed the creation of soviets, again, in Wuhan, where Wang had his government. But, as with the bourgeois Liberal politicians in the Spanish Popular Front Republican government, it was a shadow. The Spanish Stalinists and centrists accommodated the bourgeois-liberals, in the popular front, as they did in France, and elsewhere, simply for the appearance of having broad support, and the fiction of retaining the support of the bourgeoisie. But, the Spanish liberals represented no significant social forces, as the bourgeoisie had already gone over to Franco. The liberals only got into parliament by standing under the banner of the Popular Front.
In China, the bourgeois-democratic government of Wang was a similar fiction, being the same kind of lash-up of leaders of political parties, but with no real social support. It was a bureaucratic, administrative fiction. Unlike Russia, in February 1917, however, there were no soviets representing those social forces, and able to drive the revolution forward either. The Stalinists insisted on no soviets, once again, for fear of frightening Wang and the bourgeoisie. The result was the same, as Wang, having betrayed the revolution, reconciled with Chiang Kai Shek.
Only then did the Stalinists swing violently in the opposite direction, engaging in an adventurist and putschistic strategy, with the Canton uprising. To cover these past mistakes, the idea that they did not matter, were all necessary stages of the process and learning experience for the workers and peasants, was advanced, under the cover of an empty conception of permanent revolution. The revolution was permanent, extending for years into the future, and so, these catastrophes were now to be understood as inevitable stages in that process! The same ridiculous notion was applied, in Germany, after the victory of Hitler, under cover of the idea “Hitler now, our turn next”.
The Stalinists had covered their mistakes in the same way following each catastrophe. After the Shanghai massacre, they had claimed, for example, that their membership, in Shanghai, had risen. As Trotsky points out, when this report was given to the ECCI, not a murmur was raised to question it. No one checked its truth, no one questioned the physical destruction of thousands of the most advanced workers, and their replacement, in the party, by what?
But, after mistake after mistake, catastrophe after catastrophe, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party resolved, in November 1927,
“Not only is the strength of the revolutionary movement of the toiling masses of China not yet exhausted, but it is precisely only now that it is beginning to manifest itself in a new advance of the revolutionary struggle. All this obliges the plenum of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party to recognize that a directly revolutionary situation exists today (November 1927) throughout China.” (p 158-9)
It was nonsense. It is the same kind of nonsense that the social-imperialists purvey, when one camp of them talks about the war being conducted by NATO/Ukraine being one pursued by Ukrainian workers, whilst their opposing camp speaks in the same terms about the war being conducted by the Russian state.
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