Thursday 18 July 2024

Stalin and The Chinese Revolution, 7. The Organizers of the “Infusion of Workers’ and Peasants’ Blood”

7. The Organizers of the “Infusion of Workers’ and Peasants’ Blood”


“The leading organ of the Comintern wrote on March 18, 1927, about three weeks prior to the Shanghai overturn:

“The leadership of the Guomindang is at present ill with a lack of revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ blood. The Chinese Communist Party must aid in the infusion of this blood, and then the situation will radically change.”” (p 272)

Similar sentiments are to be found today, amongst the social-imperialists, in relation to Ukraine, as they bay like wolves for more weapons of mass destruction to be poured into Ukraine, bring ever more death and mutilation to workers on both sides of the war, both fighting for the imperialistic class interests of their rulers, rather than their own class interests. The bourgeoisie, of course, only require the workers' blood to achieve their own ends, as Engels described, in his Preface To The Condition of The Working class.

As Marx described, in his 1850 Address, the bourgeoisie, and democratic petty-bourgeoisie, utilise the workers, and choose when to break that alliance, contrary to the delusion of the Stalinists, and others such as the AWL, who believe that it is they that are using “imperialism”, or “the capitalist state”, to defend the interests of workers. As Marx says, the workers cannot prevent the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie from breaking from them and betraying the bourgeois revolution, but they certainly can prepare for it, and prevent, or at least minimise, the damage to workers' interests resulting from that betrayal.

That is why Marxists insist on the independent political and military organisation of the workers, and no reliance, or confidence in bourgeois-democracy, or the bourgeois state. It is why they point to the class nature of that state and democracy, and seek, from the beginning, to break workers from their illusions in them too. The bourgeoisie only requires the “blood”, i.e. support of the workers, so long as they fulfil its class interests, and ditches them, unceremoniously, when it no longer needs them, or when the workers seek to advance their own interests. Indeed, as 1848, 1927 and 1936 demonstrated, clearly, rather than see the workers advance their own interests, at the expense of the bourgeoisie, the latter will ally with its former class enemies, with the colonial oppressor, or with fascism, against the workers.

Yet, despite the disaster of Chiang Kai Shek's coup, the Stalinists proclaimed vindication of their policy.

“The ECCI assumes that the tactic of the bloc with the national bourgeoisie in the already declining period of the revolution was absolutely correct. The Northern expedition alone [!] serves as historic justification for this tactic ...” (p 273)

As Zelensky's corrupt, anti-working-class regime uses the war to step up its attacks on Ukrainian workers (and Putin does the same), and the Ukrainian oligarchs take the opportunity of war profiteering, they join with western imperialism in London, to discuss how the Ukrainian workers can be further exploited, and Ukrainian resources pillaged, when the war ends. The betrayal of Ukrainian workers, in their alliance with Zelensky, facilitates that, and no doubt they, and the western social imperialists will respond that they had foreseen all of that, because they knew that imperialism and the capitalist state only defends workers interests for its own ends.

“Here is Stalin all the way through. The Northern expedition, which incidentally proved to be an expedition against the proletariat, serves as a justification of his friendship with Chiang Kai-shek. The ECCI has done everything it could to make it impossible to draw the lessons of the bloodbath of the Chinese workers.” (p 273)

So too, today, with the apologism of the social-imperialists, and their alliance with NATO and Zelensky.


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