The revolution, when it came, both in 1905 and in 1917, was led by the workers. Those workers first established factory committees, and this was followed by the creation of workers' councils/soviets, in each area, to which delegates were directly elected from the workplaces. Rather than establishing bourgeois parliamentary democracy, the workers spontaneously established soviets, as an expression of their own self-government, as the workers in Paris had done, in 1871. The peasants followed suit, in rural areas, and, in 1917, in conditions of war, the soldiers and sailors, drawn from the ranks of the workers and peasants, also sent their own delegates that became a powerful weapon in the revolution itself.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks made the algebraic formula more precise, on the basis of these developments. They changed the formulation to The Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat Leading The Peasantry. But, by this time, it was also apparent that these soviets already held power in society. Although the peasants and petty-bourgeoisie still demanded the convocation of a National Assembly, in which their numbers would translate into political representation, and large numbers of workers still had illusions in such a parliament, it was clear that the only way it was going to be convened was if the soviets themselves brought it about.
But, if the soviets already held power in society, what was the point of a National Assembly, which would, at some point, have come into conflict with the soviets? Moreover, the National Assembly would reflect the numerical weight of the peasantry, as against the soviets, where it was the workers that held sway, and where the Bolsheviks were becoming dominant, on the basis of their opposition to the war, and the bourgeois-defencism of the Mensheviks et al. It was on that basis that Lenin raised the demand for “All Power To The Soviets”, and began to prepare the ground, not for a bourgeois parliamentary government, but a soviet government.
Stalin, Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev had never accepted Lenin's dropping of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry, seeing it as capitulation to Trotsky and Permanent Revolution. In China, therefore, they resurrected that old formula. Indeed, the Stalinists even adopted the formula of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Peasantry and Proletariat.
In Russia, the peasants had established the SR's as a political party representing their interests. When the Bolsheviks established the Soviet Government, they shared power, in it, with the SR's, for eighteen months. But, in China, the peasants had not even risen to this level! They found their representation only through the Communist Party, and following the slaughter of the worker-communists in 1927, they formed an increasing social weight within it, thereby, having a crucial impact on the subsequent events, as it moved from the cities to rural areas, and proceeded on the basis of rural guerrilla warfare, rather than proletarian revolution.
“The year 1917 showed that when the peasantry bears on its back a party (the Socialist Revolutionaries) independent of the vanguard of the proletariat, this party proves to be in complete dependence upon the imperialist bourgeoisie. In the course of the period from 1905 to 1917, the growing imperialist transformation of the petty-bourgeois democracy as well as of international Social Democracy, made gigantic progress. It was because of this that in 1917 the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry was really realized in the dictatorship of the proletariat, drawing with it the peasant masses. By this very token, the “transformation by growth” of the revolution, passing from the democratic phase to the socialist stage, already took place under the dictatorship of the proletariat.” (p 208)
That was seen again with the Popular Front governments in France, Czechoslovakia and Spain, in the 1930's. It is seen again, today, with Ukraine, where the social-democracy has affiliated itself directly with Zelensky's corrupt regime, itself directly dependent on US imperialism. And, worse than that, even outside Ukraine, it is manifest both in the position of social-democracy, but also of a petty-bourgeois “Left” that has tied itself to that imperialism in a most debased and debauched form, claiming that “imperialism defends the interests of workers”!!!
What makes this position so miserable is that China was a developing economy, seeking to carry through a bourgeois-democratic, national revolution, whereas Ukraine is already an independent, capitalist state, imperialist in nature, given the dominance within it of monopoly capitalism, and ties to global finance capital. It is already a bourgeois-democracy, albeit a grossly dysfunctional and corrupt one. If socialists should raise any demands, in relation to it, it is the need to oppose the current corrupt political regime of Zelensky, and for the implementation of measures of consistent democracy within it. Instead, both social democracy and the petty-bourgeois “left”, have thrown themselves entirely into the camp of that corrupt, illiberal and anti-working-class regime, and its imperialist backers, cutting off any possibility of a credible struggle for consistent democracy, let alone an independent working-class alternative.
That they do so under cover of claims of “anti-imperialism”, or “the right to national self-determination”, is merely a continuation of that petty-bourgeois, Stalinist/Menshevik Popular Frontism that the “Left” has pursued in relation to actual national liberation struggles for the last 80 years, i.e. it is “idiot anti-imperialism”. That has simply reached its own culmination in which “anti-imperialist”, national liberation, based on subordination of workers' interests to those of the bourgeoisie (bloc of four classes/Popular Frontism), has evolved into subordination of those interests to imperialism – just a different imperialism to the one, supposedly, being opposed. It is “anti-imperialism” as “pro-imperialism”, or to give it its true description – campism. In essence, its no different to the campism of social-democracy, prior to WWI and WWII.
Trotsky explained why the betrayal and defeat of the Chinese Revolution, and subsequent stabilisation, made it impossible to raise the demand for the Democratic Dictatorship, in future.
“The period of inter-revolutionary stabilization corresponds to the development of the productive forces, to the growth of the national bourgeoisie, to the growth and the increase of the cohesion of the proletariat, to the accentuation of the differentiation in the villages and to the continuation of the capitalist degeneration of democracy à la Wang Jingwei or any other petty-bourgeois democrat, with their “third party”, etc. In other words, China will pass through processes analogous in their broad outlines to those through which Russia passed under the régime of June 3.” (p 209)
The Bolshevik evaluation that this would culminate in revolution had been confirmed. The contradictions, in Russia, had been sharpened by its more rapid capitalist development, spurred on by the regime of Stolypin.
“The social changes which the inter-revolutionary régime will introduce in China depend especially upon the duration of this régime. But the general tendency of these modifications is henceforth indisputable: it is the sharpening of the class contradictions and the complete elimination of the petty-bourgeois democracy as an independent political power. But this signifies precisely that in the third Chinese revolution, a “democratic” coalition of the political parties would acquire a still more reactionary and more anti-proletarian content than that of the Guomindang in 1925-27. There is therefore nothing left to do but to make a coalition of classes under the direct leadership of the proletarian vanguard. That is the road of October. It involves many difficulties, but there exists no other.” (p 209)
In Ukraine, not only the social-democracy, but also those that still claim to be Marxists, have adopted the diametrically opposite and reactionary policy. Instead of seeking to unite the revolutionary and democratic forces under the leadership of the working-class, they have adopted the position of Stalin/Bukharin, and subordinated the workers and democratic forces under the hegemony of the corrupt regime of Zelensky, the oligarchs, western capitalist states, and NATO imperialism. It is a betrayal of the international working class, and socialism on an epochal scale, equivalent to that prior to WWI.
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