Marx's analysis does not say that the peasantry/petty-bourgeoisie cannot carry through revolutions, particularly where its solidified under a Bonapartist leader, or military junta. It says it cannot form the ruling class. Having carried through such a revolution/Peasant War, the state must represent the interests of capital or labour, must become some form of capitalist or workers' state, albeit with whatever deformations.
Alternatively, if, as with Pol Pot, in Cambodia, the aftermath of NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, or as with the Taliban in Afghanistan, prior to 2001, and after 2021, it tries to turn the clock back from capitalist development, to some form of agrarian society, or small commodity producing economy, everything that goes with it is restored such as landlordism, warlordism and so on, the disintegration of the nation state, leading to a failed state and collapse.
China, too, was in danger of suffering that fate, under Mao and the Cultural Revolution, and Great Leap Forward, which cost the lives of millions from starvation, until it was reversed, but, at which point, the course was set by the state to represent the interests of capital, symbolised in the policies of Deng Xiaoping.
“Let us recall that immediately after the May Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, which entrusted the leadership of the agrarian revolution to the Left Guomindang, the latter began to exterminate the workers and peasants. The position of the ECCI became completely untenable. At all costs, there had to be, and that without delay, “left” actions in China to refute the “calumny” of the Opposition, that is, its irreproachable prognosis. That is why the Chinese Central Committee, which found itself between the hammer and the anvil, was obliged, in August 1927, to turn the proletarian policy topsy-turvy all over again.” (p 212-3)
The revolution, to be progressive, could only be one led by a revolutionary, industrial proletariat, drawing the poor peasants and urban petty-bourgeois behind it. That was what the Bolsheviks did in 1917, and why The Theses On The National and Colonial Questions, as cited by Trotsky, emphasises that its only those revolutionary forces, organised, not only to fight against landlordism, imperialism etc., but also against their own bourgeois-democracy that can be supported. Its why Marxists should not support the guerrilla wars of, say, the Viet Cong, the ANC, FARC, PIRA, and so on, even if we would, simultaneously, oppose the old landlord/feudal regime, imperialism and so on. Opposing one does not at all imply supporting the other, on the basis of some kind of moralistic lesser-evilism, or “my enemy's enemy is my friend”, campism, as Trotsky explains in “Learn To Think". We are not bourgeois democrats, nor nationalists, our goal is international socialism not bourgeois nationalism.
Indeed, for that reason, even less can we accept the idea that imperialism defends the interests of workers or oppressed peoples, as social-imperialists like the AWL, and the USC would have us believe! As Trotsky points out in Lenin and Imperialist War.
“If revolutionary and progressive movements beyond the boundaries of ones own country could be supported by supporting ones own imperialist bourgeoisie then the policy of social patriotism was in principle correct. There was no reason, then, for the founding of the Third International.”
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