Whatever, Stalin might have assured them, imperialism and the Chinese bourgeoisie, still saw the potential of proletarian revolution as their main enemy. Not surprisingly, then, on each occasion that the Chinese Stalinists subordinated themselves to one section or other of the Chinese bourgeoisie, first to Chiang's KMT, then to Wang's Left KMT, they were betrayed and slaughtered. As Trotsky had put it, in that article in relation to Germany,
“The thousands upon thousands of Noskes, Welses, and Hilferdings prefer, in the last analysis, fascism to Communism. But for that they must once and for all tear themselves loose from the workers. Today this is not yet the case. Today the Social Democracy as a whole, with all its internal antagonisms, is forced into sharp conflict with the fascists. It is our task to take advantage of this conflict and not to unite the antagonists against us.
The front must now be directed against fascism. And this common front of direct struggle against fascism, embracing the entire proletariat, must be utilized in the struggle against the Social Democracy, directed as a flank attack, but no less effective for all that.”
The strategy was to “not unite the antagonists against us”, but that is far from uniting with one of those antagonists themselves! There is no reason whatsoever, to agree to drink the poison of the one, as a precondition for knocking the revolver out of the hand of the other! The only unity proposed by Trotsky was a fighting unity, in action, with the social-democratic workers, still in thrall to the social-democracy, and bourgeois-democracy, and, thereby, to expose the leaders of the social-democracy, and the sham of bourgeois-democracy itself, i.e. to expose the true nature of the poisoner. In China, that meant not fighting the KMT, but not subordinating the workers to it either, as Stalin did.
That is the point of the united front, as against the popular front. The workers themselves (communist or social-democratic) see the need to fight the fascists/imperialists on the streets, so why not agree with them, and propose such joint action? The social-democratic workers with their illusions in it, have their minds poisoned by the leaders of that social-democracy, and their bourgeois-democratic ideology. The job of the Marxist is to expose the poisoners, not join the social-democratic workers in taking the poison! Then, when the leaders of those social-democratic parties baulk, and they always do baulk at such action, as against simply demanding the workers line up behind them to vote for them, the communists are able to expose them, and draw the workers away.
In Britain, Stalin had attempted to ally with the social-imperialists of the TUC, such as Citrine, via the Anglo-Russian Committee, in the hope that the TUC would support the Chinese Revolution, but, of course, much as the same elements in the labour movement, in Britain, had lined up with British imperialism to support the intervention forces seeking to support the counter-revolutionary “Whites”, in Russia, to overthrow the revolution, so they continued their support for British imperialism in China. In the process, the alliance with the TUC leaders, and failure to criticise and organise independently from them, led to the subsequent political disarming of the British workers, and defeat in the General Strike of 1926.
In Spain, the Stalinists reverted to the Popular Front, subordinating the workers to the bourgeois-republican government. It was not just the Stalinists. The biggest political force, on the Left, in Spain, at that time, was the Anarchist CNT. In addition the Popular Front, was supported by the centrists (wavering between reformism and revolution) of the POUM. But, as Trotsky described, although the Stalinists, Anarchists and POUMists subordinated themselves, and the workers to the bourgeois republicans, the reality was that the Spanish bourgeoisie, itself, was no longer standing behind the bourgeois parties, but had already swung behind Franco's fascists. The search for the votes of the Spanish bourgeoisie, by subordinating the workers to the bourgeois parties, therefore, was a search for the votes of a ghost class.
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