In China, the CP, via its betrayals, lost the support of the industrial workers, without whom the proletarian revolution was impossible. It became increasingly a party of the peasantry, essentially a version of the Left KMT/Russian SR's, especially after the Left KMT allied, again, with the KMT of Chiang Kai Shek. It turned to rural guerilla warfare. Stalin's statement that there was nothing surprising in the fact, if it were true that the peasants had created soviets, shows that this was a process outside the control of the Communist Party, and had nothing to do with the proletarian revolution.
“But we say that the appearance of the soviet government under these circumstances is absolutely impossible. Not only the Bolsheviks but even the Tsereteli government or half-government of the soviets could make its appearance only on the basis of the cities. To think that the peasantry is capable of creating its soviet government independently, means to believe in miracles. It would be the same miracle to create a peasant Red army. The peasant partisans played a great revolutionary role in the Russian Revolution, but under the existence of centres of proletarian dictatorship and a centralized proletarian Red army.” (p 299)
This gives a clue to the nature of Maoism, and the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Not proletarian revolution, but peasant guerrilla war, and the establishment of a Bonapartist, military regime, resting on the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie. It was a model repeated in numerous places in subsequent decades. But, as Trotsky notes, even a Red Army, requires weapons and other industrial products. They can be supplied from outside, but, in reality, a revolution depends upon industrial workers in the towns and cities, providing them.
In the same way, such a Bonapartist regime still faces the question of class, i.e. the property question. It can try to act in the class interests of the peasant/petty-bourgeoisie, as with Mao, initially, or Pol Pot, but will fail disastrously, or it can try to act in the interests of capital, be it large-scale socialised capital, or statised capital, in order to industrialise, as with the various Arab regimes, or it can base itself on the industrial proletariat, and seek to develop the economy on that basis, which, itself, means committing to permanent revolution.
Stalin, of course, given the weakness of the Chinese Communist Party, and of the Chinese workers, could not base himself on the proximity of a proletarian revolution, in China. That was out of the question, for the foreseeable future. So,
“This is why Stalin, swimming in the wake of the peasant uprising, is compelled, in spite of all his earlier declarations, to link the peasant soviets and the peasant Red army with the bourgeois-democratic dictatorship. The leadership of this dictatorship, which is too heavy a task for the Communist Party, is delivered to some other political party, to some sort of a revolutionary x. Being that Stalin hindered the Chinese workers and peasants from conducting their struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, then somebody must now help Stalin by taking in hand the soviet government as the organ of the bourgeois democratic dictatorship.” (p 299)
Stalin wanted to gain the reflected glory of a Chinese revolution, albeit one that his policies had undermined, and despite the fact that this was a bourgeois revolution not a proletarian revolution, whose form masked its class content. It provided cover for the betrayals and failures of Stalinism in the preceding period. Trotsky notes,
“We warn: the Chinese proletariat will again have to pay for this whole shameful concoction.” (p 300)
And, with the coming to power of Mao Zedong's Bonapartist regime, so they did, and the same could be said of similar processes in Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba et al. The shame of the petty-bourgeois, nationalist “Left” is that, in contrast to Trotsky's warnings, his opposition to the Popular Front, the arming of the KMT, and need to plot and support an independent revolutionary path for the proletariat, based on permanent revolution, they have, instead, acted as cheerleaders for these reactionary nationalist forces, as they are again doing, now, in Ukraine and Russia.
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