10. Stalin Again Disarms the Chinese Workers and Peasants
Trotsky quotes from the speech of Chitarov at the Eighth Plenum of the CPSU.
“What was the policy of the CC of the Communist Party at this time, during this whole [Wuhan] period? The policy of the CC of the Communist Party was carried on under the slogan of retreat ...” (p 276)
In the Minutes, these dots are followed by a break. It signified that a section of the speech had been removed. The removal showed the treacherous nature of the Stalinist leadership. I have, previously, referred to the way the AWL use similar physical and logical chopping of historic texts, in order to treacherously bowdlerise the positions of Trotsky, Lenin etc. The removed section, presented by Trotsky, said,
“At the same time, some responsible comrades, Chinese and non-Chinese, invented the so-called theory of retreat. They declared: the reaction is advancing upon us from all sides. We must therefore immediately retreat in order to save the possibility of legal work, and if we retreat, we will save this possibility, but if we defend ourselves or attempt to advance, we will lose everything.” (p 276)
This illustrated the opportunist nature of the Stalinist position, in relation to the KMT. In the following section that was printed in the Minutes, Chitarov went on,
“Under the slogan of retreat – in the revolutionary period, at the moment of the highest tension of the revolutionary struggles – the Communist Party carries on its work, and under this slogan surrenders one position after another without a battle: To this surrender of positions belongs: the agreement to subordinate all the trade unions, all the peasant unions and other revolutionary organizations to the Guomindang; the rejection of independent action without the permission of the Central Committee of the Guomindang; the decision on the voluntary disarming of the workers’ pickets in Hankow; the dissolution of the pioneer organizations in Wuhan; the actual crushing of all the peasant unions in the territory of the national government, etc.” (p 277)
That could be an account of the Corbyn leadership, faced with an onslaught from the Right. The Stalinist advisors of Corbyn gave him similar advice, drawing up spreadsheets of potential allies and opponents within the PLP, which amounted to some kind of grading laundry into several degrees of dirtiness.
“Precisely in those days (end of May 1927), when the Wuhan counter-revolution began to crush the workers and peasants, in the face of the Left Guomindang, Stalin declared at the Plenum of the ECCI (May 24, 1927):
“The agrarian revolution is the basis and content of the bourgeois democratic revolution in China. The Guomindang in Hankow and the Hankow government are the centre of the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary movement.” (p 277-8)
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