The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, acting under the guidance and leadership of Stalin/Bukharin, and the ECCI, had drawn the following conclusion.
“Wherever this is objectively possible, we must immediately prepare and organize armed insurrections.” (p 212)
In other words, a swing from the opportunist policy, of the previous period, where, in conditions of rising revolutionary activity, the workers and peasants were told to support the bourgeoisie and KMT, not to set up soviets etc., to, now, in a counter-revolutionary period, an adventurist policy of organising armed insurrections!
The Kiangsu Committee document sets out the material conditions in which the policy was advanced. They note that
“the workers of Hunan, after the cruel defeat, are abandoning the leadership of the Party, that we are not confronted with an objectively revolutionary situation ... but in spite of this ... the Central Committee says plainly that the general situation, from the economic, political and social [precisely! – L.T.] point of view is favourable to the insurrection.” (p 212)
And, it also notes the consequence of loss of support from workers, and increased social weight of the peasantry, in the party, which was also to play a crucial role in the development of the Chinese Party, and the class nature of the revolution it accomplished in 1949.
“Since it is already no longer possible to launch revolts in the cities, the armed struggle must be transferred to the villages. That is where the centres of the uprising must be, while the town must be an auxiliary force.” (p 212)
This was not just a significant factor in determining the class nature of the 1949 Chinese Revolution, but was also significant for the class nature of revolutions elsewhere. In the rest of Asia, be it Korea or Vietnam, or else in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the dominant social force was that of the peasant and petty-bourgeois masses, often supported by, or even acting as agents of, external powers (most clearly observable in relation to Bangladesh whose “national revolution” was simply the product of Indian militarism, much as the 2011 “Libyan National Revolution” was purely the product of NATO militarism, and the successive Afghan revolutions have been purely the product of Russian militarism, followed by NATO militarism).
The dominant force in these “revolutions” was not the industrial proletariat. Where, a revolutionary proletarian movement existed, it was either subordinated to these bourgeois, and reactionary petty-bourgeois, nationalist movements, or else, as in Vietnam, was physically liquidated by the Stalinists and nationalists.
This was in contrast to the Theses On The National and Colonial Questions, which, as Trotsky emphasised, said,
“the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations.”
And, which also notes,
“the need constantly to explain and expose among the broadest working masses of all countries, and particularly of the backward countries, the deception systematically practised by the imperialist powers, which, under the guise of politically independent states, set up states that are wholly dependent upon them economically, financially and militarily. Under present-day international conditions there is no salvation for dependent and weak nations except in a union of Soviet republics.”
The same was true in Cuba, and Latin America, but was also seen in Africa, including South Africa. The ANC, despite the existence of a developed capitalist economy, and sizeable industrial proletariat, concentrated in and around cities, engaged in the same kind of guerrilla warfare seen elsewhere.
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