3. Stalin and Chiang Kai Shek
For Marxists, opposition to imperialist military organisations, like NATO, and the demand for countries to withdraw from them, is fundamental and obligatory. Does that mean that we fetishise, and insist on such a demand, in the manifesto of workers' parties, at all times? No. Those parties are not Marxist parties, but bourgeois parties with which the majority of workers have not yet broken, and to which we must relate. At some points, emphasising the need for such withdrawal is appropriate, and, at others, not. So, when, a few years ago, Paul Mason argued that it was not necessary for Corbyn's Labour Party to emphasise withdrawal from NATO, if doing so might cost it the election, this was worth discussing. There is a qualitative difference between that and Paul Mason's current position, in which he argues that socialists should embrace NATO, and transform it into a force for progressive global change!!!
At least, though, Mason is honest enough to admit that he is not a Marxist, but the logic of his pro-imperialist position is adopted by other components of the USC that do continue to proclaim their “Marxist” credentials. The Chinese revolution had parallels to this too. Not only did Stalin, and the ECCI, proclaim that the KMT was the vehicle of progressive change, in China, and so subordinate the workers and peasants, and CCP, to it, but Stalin, on this basis, also brought the KMT into the Comintern, as a sympathising party.
“After the Canton coup d’état, engineered by Chiang Kai-shek in March 1926, and which our press passed over in silence, when the Communists were reduced to the role of miserable appendices of the Guomindang and even signed an obligation not to criticize Sun-Yat-Sen-ism, Chiang Kai-shek – a remarkable detail indeed! – came forward to insist on the acceptance of the Guomindang into the Comintern: in preparing himself for the role of an executioner, he wanted to have the cover of world Communism and – he got it” (p 264-5)
In similar vein, the social-imperialists of the USC give a left cover not only to Zelensky's corrupt, anti-working-class regime, and the Ukrainian capitalist state, but even to NATO imperialism and militarism!
Even as the KMT was being inducted into the Comintern, and the Left Oppositionists expelled from it, Chiang Kai Shek was preparing his coup against the Chinese worker communists. In the same way that the social-imperialists, today, bedeck themselves in Ukrainian flags (reminiscent of other idiot anti-imperialists who previously proclaimed “We Are All Hezbollah Now”), and carry the iconic images of Zelensky, so too Stalin and Chiang Kai Shek exchanged portraits.
“This strengthening of the ties of friendship was prepared by the journey of Bubnov, a member of the Central Committee and one of Stalin’s agents, to Chiang Kai-shek. Another “detail”: Bubnov’s journey to Canton coincided with the March coup d’état of Chiang Kai-shek. What about Bubnov? He made the Chinese Communists submit and keep quiet.” (p 265)
Of course, following Chiang Kai Shek's coup, the Stalinists tried to deny that the KMT was still a member of the Comintern, and attempted to dismiss the coup as all something they expected, because they always knew that it was allied with them “for its own interests”, to put it in the words of today's social-imperialists, who make the same apologetic argument for their alliance with, and subordination to the Ukrainian state and NATO.
Trotsky quotes from the minutes of the Politburo, in which he was the only one to vote against the admission of the KMT, and,
“They had forgotten the vote at the Political Bureau, when everybody, against the vote of one (Trotsky), sanctioned the admission of the Guomindang into the Comintern with a consultative voice. They had forgotten that at the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI, which condemned the Left Opposition, “comrade Shao Li-tse”, a delegate from the Guomindang, participated.” (p 265)
That was in the Autumn of 1926. A year later, and following the KMT's coup, in April 1927,
“...the Eighth Plenum in May 1927 declared in the resolution on the Chinese question:
“The ECCI states that the events fully justified the prognosis of the Seventh Plenum.”
Justified, and right to the very end! If this is humour, it is at any rate not arbitrary. However, let us not forget that this humour is thickly coloured with Shanghai blood.” (p 266)
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