13. The Canton Uprising
“On August 7, 1927, the special conference of the Chinese Communist Party condemned, according to previous instructions from Moscow, the opportunist policy of its leadership, that is, its whole past, and decided: to prepare for an armed insurrection.” (p 285)
In other words, the workers had been misled by the Stalinists, in their demand to enter and support the KMT, which then, organised a coup, in April, resulting in thousands of them being murdered by a counter-revolutionary KMT government, established in Nanking. The workers abandoned the Communist Party, and went into retreat. The Stalinists repeated the error, and demanded the peasants support the Left KMT, which, then, followed the same path. Eventually, the Left KMT allied again with the KMT.
Following these avoidable, and so all the more demoralising defeats, the revolutionary wave subsided, and a period of counter-revolution took its place. Yet, having held back the workers and peasants, in the previous period of revolutionary advance, Stalin and the ECCI chose this moment to call for an insurrection in Canton!
The reason had nothing to do with revolutionary strategy, or the interests of Chinese workers.
“Stalin’s special emissaries had the task of preparing an insurrection in Canton timed for the Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in order to cover up the physical extermination of the Russian Opposition with the political triumph of the Stalinist tactic in China.” (p 285)
The Chinese leaders, who merely implemented Stalin's orders, were scapegoated for the failure of those policies. The Opposition that had correctly warned, from the start, that such policies would lead to disaster, was expelled and persecuted. The Canton insurrection was simply a cynical piece of theatre, using the blood of Chinese communists, to distract attention. The Canton insurrection inevitably failed, and Stalin, again, blamed the Chinese communists for what was the failure of his own strategy.
“On February 7, 1928, Pravda wrote:
“The provincial armies fought undividedly against Red Canton and this proved to be the greatest and oldest shortcoming of the Chinese Communist Party, precisely insufficient political work for the decomposition of the reactionary armies.”
“The oldest shortcoming”! Does this mean that it was the task of the Chinese Communist Party to decompose the armies of the Guomindang? Since when?” (p 286)
How could it be the job of the Chinese communists to decompose the KMT's armies, given that, from the start, Stalin had demanded that these armies represented the armed people fighting imperialism, just as, today, the USC claim that they are supporting the “armed people” of Ukraine, as against the reality that what they are supporting is a heavily armed, and NATO backed, imperialist state, just as what Stalin backed was a heavily armed Chinese bourgeoisie!
“On February 25, 1927, a month and a half prior to the crushing of Shanghai, the central organ of the Comintern wrote:
“The Chinese Communist Party and the conscious Chinese workers must not under any circumstances pursue a tactic which would disorganize the revolutionary armies just because the influence of the bourgeoisie is to a certain degree strong there” [Die Kommunistische Internationale, February 25, 1927, p.19.]” (p 286)
And, of course, this was not an aberration.
“And here is what Stalin said – and repeated on every occasion – at the Plenum of the ECCI on May 24, 1927:
“Not unarmed people stand against the armies of the old régime in China, but an armed people in the form of the revolutionary army. In China, an armed revolution is fighting against armed counter-revolution.”” (p 286-7)
This is the same nonsensical claim made, today, by the idiot, pro-imperialist, “anti-imperialists”, be they those backing the camp of NATO/Ukraine, or those backing the camp of Russia/China. Both deny the reality of an inter-imperialist war, reactionary on both sides. The pro-NATO/Ukraine camp present a fantasy of an anti-imperialist “people's war”, being fought by Ukrainian “people”, which is implied means Ukrainian workers. Their mirror image, the pro-imperialists backing Putin, make the same claim that it is engaged in a “people's war” against NATO imperialism.
“In the summer and autumn of 1927, the armies of the Guomindang were depicted as an armed people. But when these armies crushed the Canton insurrection, Pravda declared the “oldest [!] shortcoming” of the Chinese Communists to be their inability to decompose the “reactionary armies”, the very ones that were proclaimed “the revolutionary people” on the very eve of Canton.
Shameless mountebanks! Was anything like it ever seen among real revolutionists?” (p 287)
To which the answer is clearly no, and applies even more, today, when social-imperialists attempt to portray the war being fought by two heavily armed nuclear blocs, and their professional armies, as being “people's wars” fought by armed workers for their own, rather than imperialist interests.
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