In China, as already detailed, Stalinism let slip a golden revolutionary opportunity, in the 1920's. The Chinese proletariat had grown rapidly, and gave its support to the Chinese Communist Party. Unlike the Russian peasants, which had created their own peasant party – the S.R.'s – the Chinese peasants had not. They too gave their support to the Chinese Communist Party. The prestige of the Communist Party and of the Comintern was high, following the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, in 1917. But, Stalinism squandered this opportunity, and betrayed the Chinese Revolution.
Its policy of the Popular Front (bloc of four classes), subordinated the workers and poor peasants to the Chinese national bourgeoisie, via the KMT, in the name of pursuing the limited goal of an “anti-imperialist” struggle, and bourgeois national revolution. For Stalin, this was driven not only by his factional struggle against the Left Opposition, which led him to oppose permanent revolution, and the ideas which guided Lenin in the Russian Revolution, and his principles for revolutionaries in relation to the national and colonial questions, but also by his own theoretical weakness. Stalin reverted to the same ideas he had prior to Lenin's April Theses. In addition, having adopted the theory of Socialism In One Country, and the consequent abandonment of the international socialist revolution, in order to try to obtain a “breathing space” from imperialism, by not antagonising it, Stalin, and consequently the Comintern, attempted to appease imperialism, by showing them that it could be trusted to hold back any attempts to move beyond purely bourgeois democratic revolutions, and if need be, to sabotage any attempts to do so.
That strategy was disastrous. After Chiang Kai Shek's coup in April 1927, the Chinese workers abandoned the Communist Party, as a result of its betrayal. That strengthened the social weight of the peasants in the Chinese Communist Party. Stalin repeated the error by subordinating the workers to the Left Kuomintang, with the same results, and when the Left Kuomintang allied once more with the KMT, the Chinese Communist Party, effectively took its place, as a revolutionary peasant party, becoming basically a Chinese equivalent of the Narodniks, or S.R.'s. Its political programme and revolutionary strategy, from the late 1920's, reflected that, as it abandoned the programme and strategy of proletarian revolution for the program of Peasant War, and rural guerrilla warfare, epitomised by Mao Zedong, and the PLA. Indeed, in his youth, Mao was influenced by the anarchist ideas of Kropotkin.
In the early 1920's, Mao's activity inside the KMT, was almost exclusively directed towards organisation of the peasantry, whose revolutionary potential he promoted. In 1924, after the Stalinists took the Chinese Communists into the KMT, Mao was elected on to the latter's Central Executive Committee, in Guangzhou. He proposed four resolutions to decentralise power to urban and rural bureaus. In 1926, he ran the KMT's Peasant Movement Training Institute.
As detailed in previous sections, following the disaster of the Stalinist's Popular Front strategy, leading to the coup of Chiang Kai Shek, and its sequel with the Left KMT, not only did the Communist Party lose its proletarian base, leaving it dominated by peasants, but, it resorted to adventurist stunts, like the Canton Uprising, and increasingly turned to those measures of Peasant War, and rural guerrilla warfare typical of a peasant party, and which Mao had promoted. That condition of civil war between the Chinese Communist Party and the KMT, carried out in rural areas, continued for the next ten years. During this period, all of the deficiencies of Peasant War, disconnected from proletarian revolution in the urban areas, previously described by Trotsky, were apparent. It was during this time that Mao became leader of the Chinese Communist Party, on the basis of assuming the position of its military commander.
Much as with the mythology created around the defeat of the British Army at Dunkirk, the Long March conducted by Mao's Peasant Army has also been romanticised. Yet, it was a similar disaster to that of Dunkirk. Of the 100,000 that set out on the march, only about 8,000 reached the final destination, in Shanxii.
No comments:
Post a Comment