Trotsky sets out the different conditions, in Asia and Europe, and North America, which, at the time, contributed to the potential for a revolutionary situation.
“But the predictions which announce that the revolution will break out in Asia first and then in Europe already have a more conditional character. It is possible, even probable, but it is not at all inevitable. New difficulties and complications, like the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, or else the accentuation of the commercial and industrial crisis, under the pressure of the United States, can in the nearest future confront the European states with a directly revolutionary situation, as was the case in Germany in 1923, in England in 1926 and in Austria in 1927.” (p 170-171)
In fact, as a consequence of the laws of Permanent Revolution, as Marx had set out, back in 1849, the defeat of the proletariat, becomes also, the defeat of its erstwhile bourgeois and petty-bourgeois allies too, as well as of other aspirations for national liberation, because the tasks of that bourgeois-democratic, national revolution, are, now, only capable of being truly fulfilled by a successful proletarian revolution, on an international scale. The old bourgeois-democratic ideals, such as national independence, were no longer truly achievable without international proletarian revolution, and so became, utopian and, therefore, reactionary delusions, dividing and distracting the global proletariat from its real enemy, its own ruling bourgeois class.
“It was necessary, beyond everything else, to follow the development of the class struggle in the history of our own day, and to prove empirically, by the actual and daily newly created historical material, that with the subjugation of the working class, accomplished in the days of February and March, 1848, the opponents of that class – the bourgeois republicans in France, and the bourgeois and peasant classes who were fighting feudal absolutism throughout the whole continent of Europe – were simultaneously conquered; that the victory of the "moderate republic" in France sounded at the same time the fall of the nations which had responded to the February revolution with heroic wars of independence; and finally that, by the victory over the revolutionary workingmen, Europe fell back into its old double slavery, into the English-Russian slavery. The June conflict in Paris, the fall of Vienna, the tragi-comedy in Berlin in November 1848, the desperate efforts of Poland, Italy, and Hungary, the starvation of Ireland into submission – these were the chief events in which the European class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class was summed up, and from which we proved that every revolutionary uprising, however remote from the class struggle its object might appear, must of necessity fail until the revolutionary working class shall have conquered; – that every social reform must remain a Utopia until the proletarian revolution and the feudalistic counter-revolution have been pitted against each other in a world-wide war.”
(Marx – Wage Labour and Capital)
The fact that the revolutionary wave had only just risen in China, did not make the resumption more, but less, likely, especially given the circumstances of defeat.
“In the course of the period which followed the revolution of 1905, it produced great revolutionary disturbances and coups d’état in the countries of the East (Persia, Turkey, China). But in Russia itself, the revolution revived only twelve years later, in connection with the imperialist war.” (p 171)
It was another imperialist war, and the dissolution of the old colonial empires that opened the door for the 1949 Chinese Revolution. But, again, Trotsky sets out the difference between that revolution, which was really a Peasant War, with the Russian Revolution, of 1917, which was a proletarian revolution, subsuming the Peasant War within it.
“With us the wave of fall and decline went through the years 1907-08, 1909 and partly 1910, when, thanks in large measure to the revival of industry, the working class began to come to life.” (p 171)
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