Trotsky points to other factors, in relation to this activity, and its announcement, as with the Canton rebellion, in 1927.
“The rebellion of Zhu de appears to be a reproduction of the adventurist campaigns of Ho Lung and Ye Ting in 1927 and the Canton uprising timed for the moment of the expulsion of the Opposition from the Russian Communist Party.” (p 228)
Trotsky advances another potential motivation, which is that it was really designed to open a second front against Chiang Kai Shek, to distract his army as it seized the Chinese Eastern Railway. The railway, under the control of the USSR, had been a point of contention, inside the CPSU, previously, as mentioned earlier. It was strategically important for the USSR, and Trotsky had always warned against enabling Chiang Kai Shek to obtain control of it, a danger that was made possible by Stalin's alliance with him, and the KMT having been brought into the Comintern.
“Has this insurrection, wholly partisan in character, as its aim to cause Chiang Kai-shek uneasiness at his rear? If that is what it is, we ask who has given such counsel to the Chinese Communists? Who bears the political responsibility for their passing over to guerrilla warfare?” (p 228)
When Chiang Kai Shek seized the railway, it posed a threat to the USSR, precisely because the Chinese bourgeoisie, and the KMT, were tied to imperialism, despite the KMT's claims of “anti-imperialism”. Again, the similarities with Ukraine and NATO, today, are obvious, and illustrate why claims that defensive actions can only be justified against an actual invasion amounts to pure sophistry.
But, the real threat to the USSR, represented by Chiang Kai Shek's seizure of the railway, Trotsky says, should, then, have provoked a response from the USSR itself, not its back door utilisation of the Chinese workers to launch an adventurist, and purely diversionary uprising, in China.
“... it is quite clear that the proletariat of the USSR, which has power and an army in its hands, cannot demand that the vanguard of the Chinese proletariat begin a war at once against Chiang Kai-shek, that is, that it apply the means which the Soviet government itself does not find possible, and correctly so, to apply.” (p 228)
In other words, the USSR could have launched a revolutionary war against China, to achieve the revolution that the Chinese workers had been unable to carry out. That would have been like the revolutionary wars that France undertook, under Napoleon Bonaparte. But, Marxists do not advocate such wars, as an artificial means of spreading revolution. Such a war, launched by the USSR, would undoubtedly have given the imperialists, standing behind China, the excuse, again, to start a war with the USSR. Again, the parallels with Kosovo, and subsequently Georgia and Ukraine are striking, and, now, the bombing of Iran by the Zionist state, has all the same hallmarks.
It is one thing to oppose the opportunist strategy of Stalin/Bukharin of seeking to appease the Chinese bourgeoisie/KMT, and its imperialist backers, via their alliance with the KMT, and subordination of the Chinese CP to it, but quite another to propose that the Red Army substitute for the Chinese workers and carry out the revolution for them! It is also quite different to suggest that the Red Army undertake a limited action to prevent the seizure of the Chinese Eastern Railway, as against launching an all-out war against China, and its imperialist backers, although the first might lead to the second.
“Had a war begun between the USSR and China, or rather between the USSR and the imperialist patrons of China, the duty of the Chinese Communists would be to transform this war in the shortest time into a civil war. But even in that case the launching of the civil war would have to be subordinated to general revolutionary policy; and even then the Chinese Communists would be unable to pass over arbitrarily, and at any moment at all, to the road of open insurrection, but only after having assured themselves of the necessary support of the worker and peasants masses. The rebellion in Chiang Kai-shek’s rear, in this situation, would be an extension of the front of the Soviet workers and peasants; the fate of the insurgent Chinese workers would be intimately bound up with the fate of the soviet republic; the tasks, the aims, the perspectives would be quite clear.” (p 228-9)
No such clear perspective or rationale existed, leading only to a further defeat, and degeneration of the Chinese Party.
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