“The process of economic recovery will, in turn, correspond to the mobilization of new tens and hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers, to the tightening up of their ranks, to the increase of their specific gravity in the social life of the country and by that an increase in their revolutionary self-confidence.” (p 179)
However, that is not some mechanical process. As seen after WWII, its first manifestation takes the form of economistic, syndicalist, sectional industrial struggle, not class struggle. It takes years for the workers to rebuild their organisations and leadership, and the existing leadership exercises a huge conservative weight on that development. In China, the Communist Party turned away from the working-class, and towards the peasantry, and the guerrilla war conducted in rural areas, so it prevented this development of the working-class, described by Trotsky.
“At the beginning, the augmentation of the specific gravity and the class self-confidence of the proletariat will make itself felt in a rebirth of the strike struggle, in the consolidation of the trade unions. It is needless to say that serious possibilities are thus opened up before the Chinese Communist Party. Nobody knows how long it will have to remain in a clandestine existence. In any case, it is necessary to reinforce and to perfect the illegal organizations in the course of the coming period. But this task cannot be accomplished outside of the life and the struggle of the masses.” (p 179)
Trotsky, again, sets out the way Marxists “support” bourgeois-democratic institutions in the same way that a rope supports a hanged man. The Chinese bourgeoisie had held a conference in Shanghai that reflected its victory over the workers and peasants, and represented a pre-parliament in which it set out its agenda for a National Assembly. What should be the position of Marxists? Recognising that the majority of the masses did not yet have a revolutionary consciousness, the Marxists should also demand the convocation of a Constitutional Assembly.
“The Communist Party can and should formulate the slogan of a Constituent Assembly with full powers, elected by universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage. In the process of agitation for this slogan, it will obviously be necessary to explain to the masses that it is doubtful if such an assembly will be convened, and even if it were, it would be powerless so long as the material power remains in the hands of the Guomindang generals. From this flows the possibility of broaching in a new manner the slogan of the arming of the workers and the peasants.” (p 183)
In other words, just as the Bolsheviks did, in 1917, as they agitated for soviets alongside the demand for a Constituent Assembly, and as Trotsky did in The Action Programme For France. It is a means of working alongside the reality that the masses have not yet broken with bourgeois-democracy, whilst creating the means and dynamic for achieving that break.
“By judiciously combining these slogans, by advancing each of them at the proper time, the Communist Party will be able to tear itself out of its clandestine existence, make a bloc with the masses, win their confidence, and thus speed the coming of the period of the creation of soviets and of the direct struggle for power.” (p 184)
The demand for a Constituent Assembly, and other facets of bourgeois-democracy, is not in order to obtain “breathing space” as the Stalinists and opportunists argue, but only a recognition of the fact that the masses have not yet broken from their illusions in them. All the while, the Marxists keep up their relentless criticism of the sham nature of that bourgeois-democracy, and, in their practical activity, for example, solving the problems of the agrarian revolution, do so by proposing revolutionary, proletarian solutions.
“If it should succeed, in this connection, in passing over a period of parliamentarism (which is possible, even probable, but far from inevitable), this will permit the proletarian vanguard to scrutinize its enemies and adversaries by examining them through the prism of parliament. In the course of the pre-parliamentary and parliamentary period, this vanguard will have to conduct an intransigent struggle to win influence over the peasants, to guide the peasantry directly from the political point of view. Even if the National Assembly should be realized in an arch-democratic manner, the fundamental problems would nevertheless have to be solved by force. Through the parliamentary period, the Chinese Communist Party would arrive at a direct and immediate struggle for power, but by possessing a maturer historical basis, that is, surer premises for victory.” (p 184-5)
That is the antithesis of the approach of the Stalinists and their Popular Front with the bourgeoisie, which, all along, sought to even oppose the spontaneous action of the masses and creation of soviets. It sought, instead, to channel it into arbitration panels and negotiation with the bourgeoisie, via the institutions of bourgeois-democracy.
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