Manuilsky elides the question of the nature of the class dictatorship, having given the peasants the leading role, by talking, instead, about communists, rather than workers. He says,
““The Chinese revolution has at its disposal a Red army, it is in possession of a considerable territory, at this very moment it is creating on this territory a soviet system of workers’ and peasants’ power in whose government the Communists are in the majority. And this condition permits the proletariat to realize not only an ideological but also a state hegemony over the peasantry.” [Our emphasis.]” (p 232)
But, the Communist Party had lost its worker members, as a result of its betrayal, in April 1927, in Shanghai. It was a Communist Party, itself, now, of peasants not workers, and that conditioned its outlook, programme and tactics. The same is true of today's “Left” sects comprised not of workers, but of petty-bourgeois students, and former students, and with a corresponding effect on their outlook, programme and tactics. They resemble the sects of the 19th century, such as the ILP and SDF, which Engels advised his supporters to avoid like the plague, and, instead, to orientate to the mass workers' organisations, directly, themselves.
To talk about a proletarian “state hegemony over the peasantry” was nonsense, because, in the vast majority of the country, it was the bourgeoisie, and its state, that exerted hegemony over the proletariat. This same fantasy is embraced by the social-imperialists, who delude themselves into the belief that, in the Ukraine-Russia war, it is somehow the workers that are fighting a war of national independence, rather than fighting and dying, as in all imperialist wars, on behalf of the interests of their own ruling class.
“In what way can the proletariat realize “state hegemony” over the peasantry, when the state power is not in its hands? It is absolutely impossible to understand this. The leading role of the isolated Communists and the isolated Communist groups in the peasant war does not decide the question of power. Classes decide and not parties. The peasant war may support the dictatorship of the proletariat, if they coincide in point of time, but under no circumstances can it be substituted for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Is it possible that the “leaders” of the Comintern have not learned even this from the experiences of the three Russian revolutions?” (p 233)
In fact, this is a contradiction that exists in all such transitional periods. As described earlier, the state, itself, is forced to become either a capitalist state representing the interests of capital, or a workers' state representing the interests of labour. But, that is not true of the political regime/government. Russia, from 1870, had a capitalist state, but the political regime remained that of Tsarism. After the revolution of 1917, the state was a workers' state, but the political regime rested upon a large, professional, middle-class bureaucracy - Bonapartism. As I have described, elsewhere, it is the epitome of social-democracy, in that it reflects the dominance of large-scale socialised capital, and its requirement for ever expanding regulation and planning of production and distribution.
In bourgeois states, this same middle-class bureaucracy performs the same function, but the bourgeoisie remains the ruling-class, and consequently, the state continues to represent its interests. That does not mean that, especially in conditions of bourgeois-democracy, the government may not represent the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie, as with the Tories or Republicans and, now, Blue Labour), or may attempt to represent the interests of workers, as with Allende. In those conditions, the government/political regime comes up against the permanent state bureaucracy, and only if the government, actually, is able to represent a serious threat to the interests of capital is the state forced to, openly, show its hand via the organisation of a coup. In between, all sorts of soft coups are possible, as with the removal of Truss's government in Autumn 2022.
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