Where the lesson learned by Trotsky was that the weakness lay in the betrayals of Stalinism, as it subordinated the international socialist revolution to its commitment to the alliance with the bourgeoisie, and that the solution to that was to reject that strategy, and build the independent, revolutionary organisations of the working-class, not in sectarian isolation, but on the basis of a workers' united front, the petty-bourgeois “Left” has responded to its, and the workers' weakness by diluting its programme even more, in practice, and by subordinating its programme to that of the bourgeoisie. To exactly which section of the bourgeoisie it subordinates itself has simply become a question of moralism, of what Kantian categorical imperative determines its views of what is the greater or lesser immediate evil, to which it feels bound to respond.
“The influence of the October revolution, in spite of the years of epigone leadership, is still so great in China that the peasants call their movement “soviet” and their partisan bands – ”Red armies”. This shows once more the depths of Stalin’s philistinism in the period when, coming out against soviets, he said that we must not scare off the masses of the Chinese people by “artificial sovietization”. Only Chiang Kai-shek could have been scared off by it, but not the workers, not the peasants, to whom, after 1917, the soviets had become symbols of emancipation.” (p 298)
These “soviets”, of course, were not soviets in the Bolshevik sense, again illustrating the difference between form and content. The Stalinists themselves turned the concept into an administrative shell, a front, much as with the mushroom growth of various front organisations, created by the various “Left” sects, today. The Stalinist soviets were cover for their failures and betrayals, as with the Canton soviet government. But, as described, they were generally based on peasants, not industrial workers, and Menshevist or Narodnik/SRist in nature. However, as Trotsky notes, where the peasants did create, soviets, spontaneously, they necessarily brought with them their own bourgeois-democratic illusions.
“The Chinese peasants, it is understood, inject no few illusions into the slogan of soviets. It is pardonable in them. But is it pardonable in the leading chvostists who confine themselves to a cowardly and ambiguous generalization of the illusions of the Chinese peasantry, without explaining to the proletariat the real meaning of events?” (p 298)
A similar thing can be said about the demand for national self-determination, or The Workers' Government etc. It is, again, the basis of the workers' United Front, as against the bourgeois Popular Front. That ordinary workers might adopt the abstract concept of “national independence”, whether in the form of an oppressed colony, or in the form of Brexit, or Scottish independence, or defence of the Ukrainian fatherland, without consideration of the question of class, is forgivable, because we don't expect workers to spontaneously develop a revolutionary class consciousness. If they did, Socialism would already have long since been established. It doesn't change the fact that their adoption of these concepts means, in practice, adoption of the reactionary agenda of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalists, whilst the role of the Marxist is to explain that to them. Instead, the petty-bourgeois “Left”, simply tails those workers, and others.
It is forgivable that ordinary workers may confuse a Labour government with a Workers' Government, but, again, it is not forgivable for Marxists to do so. That workers may seek the “lesser-evil” of a Labour government, as against a Tory government may be understandable, but that is not the case for a Marxist, who must explain to those workers the class nature of such a Labour government, and whose interests it will serve, which will not be those of the workers. Failure to do that leads inevitably to disappointment of the workers, and a feeling of betrayal not only by the Labour government, but also, by those elements of the “Left” that failed to warn them of it, and provide them with an alternative.
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