Contents "The internationalist proletarian" n.16
LESSONS FROM THE DEFEAT OF THE CHINESE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION OF 1926-1927
In these notes we will recall the process of the betrayal of the Chinese proletarian revolution, on the ashes of which the current false Chinese socialism developed, the loincloth of the current capitalist power, guarantor of the world counterrevolution.
Theses on the national and colonial question
At the II Congress of the III International (1920), the Theses on the national and colonial question, among others, had been approved. They contained the tactics to be followed by the communists and their parties in the countries where the anti-feudal and/or anti-colonial revolution was still pending. These Theses had established the following tactical limits:
" 11.- With regard to the more backward states and nations, in which feudal or patriarchal and patriarchal-peasant relations predominate, it is particularly important to bear in mind: (...) fifth, the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form." (Theses on the national and colonial question, II Congress of the Communist International, August 1920).
"9.- (...) In the first stage of its development the revolution in the colonies must be carried out according to the programme of purely petty-bourgeois demands, such as distribution of the land and so on. But from this it must not be concluded that the leadership in the colonies can be allowed to fall into the hands of the bourgeois democrats. On the contrary, the proletarian parties must carry out an intensive propaganda of communist ideas and found workers’ and peasants’ councils at the first opportunity. These councils must work in the same way as the Soviet Republics in the advanced capitalist countries in order to bring about the final overthrow of the capitalist order throughout the whole world." (Supplementary Theses on the National and Colonial Question, II Congress of the Communist International, August 1920).
It can be seen in the development of the Communist Party of China (CPC) the disastrous consequences of transgressing the limits of such tactics, and particularly the consequences of sacrificing the complete organizational autonomy of the communist organization.
A Party sacrificed as soon as it was born
On 1st July 1921 the Communist Party of China was founded in Shanghai, which should act in accordance with the Theses of the II Congress. However, already in August 1922 the envoy of the International Maring imposed the decision that the members of the Communist Party of China must also join the Chinese bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang party, arguing that it should be “transformed from within”, an imposition completely contrary to the theses of the II Congress.
The submission to the Kuomintang (and later to the left Kuomintang) was postulated in greater or lesser measure since then by the International and had its apogee precisely on the dates immediately preceding the great proletarian defeat of 1926 – 1927, reaching the point where the degenerated International named the Kuomintang as a sympathizing party in the VI Enlarged Executive (after having institutionalized this completely anomalous figure since the V Congress of 1924) and Chiang Kai-shek himself as an honorary member of the Presidium of the International. The representative of the degenerated International in China at that time stated that “in the present period, the communists must do coolie work for the Kuomintang”.
The rehabilitation of Menshevism
Martinov, a former ‘economist’ and then Menshevik whose political past was rehabilitated in Russia and in the International by Stalinism, set the stage (in a contrary line to the Theses of the II Congress): “In China the initiative emanates from the industrial bourgeoisie and from the bourgeois intellectuals and therefore the Chinese Communist Party must strive not to create obstacles to the revolutionary army against the great feudal lords, against the militarists of the North and against imperialism”. (Review of the Communist International No. 5, March 1927).
This is how the deformed tactic of the CPC is described in the report presented to the VII Enlarged Executive (1926):
"The greatest danger consists in this: that the movement of the masses progresses towards the left. (...) It is extraordinarily difficult for us to define the tactic in relation to the petty and middle bourgeoisie, since strikes of workers working for artisans or strikes of employees are nothing more than conflicts within the petty bourgeoisie itself. And since the one and the other of the parties in struggle (that is, the employers and the workers) are necessary for the national united front (...) The employees of enterprises supplying objects of basic necessity should never appeal to strike if there is the slightest possibility of reaching concessions by a peaceful way. (...) Being afraid of the elementary development of the workers' movement, the Party has consented to compulsory arbitration in Canton and then in Hankou."
The double betrayal: metropolis and periphery
At the same time that the Chinese revolution (then periphery of capitalism) was betrayed, also the miners' strike in Great Britain (then metropolis of capitalism), which became a general strike for 9 days, was betrayed. With this double betrayal the premises of the world revolutionary resumption were tragically eliminated at the same time that the Stalinist counterrevolution took control of the 3rd International.
During 1926 at least 169 strikes took place in Shanghai in which more than 200,000 workers participated. On March 21st, 1927, the Shanghai General Union called for a general insurrectionary strike. Chiang Kai-shek approached Shanghai while the armed workers' groups were repressed. He declared martial law and began the repression in Shanghai. The degenerated International went on to accuse Chiang Kai-shek of being a traitor and to consider the left of the Kuomintang government in Wuhan as the center of the revolution. Shortly thereafter, acting on the basis of lurches and without a plan, the degenerated International went on to consider that the Chinese revolution was at its apex and called to carry out insurrections. Without any kind of conditions nor preparation, they all failed.
Consequences and lessons
In December 1927 several groups of armed workers insurrected and were able to take control of Canton with a workers' program (reduction of the working day, confiscation and distribution of private property, etc.). The Chinese proletariat made a last demonstration of revolutionary energy but all the previous actions of opportunism had condemned it to defeat. The Kuomintang reorganized and brutally repressed the Cantonese workers. The Commune in Canton lasted from December 11th to 13th, 1927.
“Hence, the coup of April 13, 1927 struck a proletariat politically, organizationally and militarily disarmed against its own class instinct, and to which it was nevertheless impudent enough to give a glimpse of a possible ‘Chinese road to socialism’ at the precise moment when the very bases, international and only international, of such a perspective were being destroyed; it struck down a party induced to sacrifice itself to strengthen the class adversary by ceding to it even the secret of organizational centralization and the uniqueness of political leadership - a suicidal party.” (In memory of the proletarian militants murdered in Shanghai in April 1927 and in the succeeding months throughout China, Il Programma Comunista 6-7, 1977).
"China was the testing ground for the principles and tactics of class collaboration in the national and colonial movements. Denial of the autonomous role and specific objectives of the proletariat, “anti-imperialist” alliance with the bourgeois parties, adherence to the Menshevik theory of the need for a “democratic stage”: these are the principles which Moscow imposed in China and which the CPC made its own forever. Turning their backs on the teachings of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, on the lessons of the revolutions of 1848 and 1871 in Europe, as well as on the line followed by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, these positions not only led the Chinese proletariat to an irreparable defeat but were transferred to all the anti-colonial revolutions of Africa and Asia. With the proletariat defeated, it was still necessary to give an answer to the social question and a political framework to the accumulation of capital. It was the urgency of this response, the gravity of the antagonisms which had mobilized all the classes of the old society, which pushed Mao to play the role of “real Kuomintang”. Having refused to arm the Chinese workers, he armed the petty bourgeois peasantry. Having denied the conquest of political power by the proletariat, he assumed the responsibilities of founding “popular democracy”. (Le mouvement social en Chine, Programme Communiste, numbers 27 to 37 from 1964 to 1966).
Maoism means sunyatsenism
The party re-founded by Mao Zedong's line (practically absent from the first line of the CPC leadership until then) after the Canton defeat, peasant based and without any link to the urban proletariat, always followed the approach of Sun Yat-sen's Chinese bourgeois nationalism, becoming in reality the “true Kuomintang”. Mao himself acknowledged as much: " These views of ours are completely in accord with the revolutionary views of Dr. Sun Yat-sen (.... ) But all Communists and sympathizers with communism in China must struggle to achieve the objective of the present stage; they must struggle against foreign and feudal oppression to deliver the Chinese people from their miserable colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal plight and establish a proletarian-led new-democratic China whose main task is the liberation of the peasantry, a China of the revolutionary Three People's Principles of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, a China which is independent, free, democratic, united, prosperous and powerful. This is what we have actually been doing." (On Coalition Government, Mao Zedong, 1945).
However, what had Lenin said about Sun Yat-sen?
“Sun Yat-sen (...) a progressive Chinese democrat, he argues exactly like a Russian. His similarity to a Russian Narodnik is so great that it goes as far as a complete identity of fundamental ideas and of many individual expressions. (...) Bourgeois democracy in China, as we now see, has the same Narodnik colouring. (...) Indeed, what does the “economic revolution”, of which Sun Yat-sen talks so pompously and obscurely at the beginning of his article, amount to? It amounts to the transfer of rent to the state, i.e., land nationalisation, by some sort of single tax (...) or, in other words, nationalising the land. Is such a reform possible within the framework of capitalism? It is not only possible but it represents the purest, most consistent, and ideally perfect capitalism.” (Democracy and Narodism in China, Lenin, 1912).
That is, the approach of Mao's party, in line with that of Sun Yat-sen, was nothing other than the extension of the Chinese bourgeois revolution and the development of capitalism in China.
The bourgeois nature of Maoism, as of Stalinism, has allowed it or versions of it to be a suitable ideological shell for a variety of nationalist bourgeoisies - some revolutionary from a bourgeois point of view, others not even this - in different places of the world (China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.) where they have never represented a struggle for the overcoming of capitalism, nor in which neither communism nor socialism has ever been established.
The false Maoist socialism
The bourgeois politics of Maoism have always included the maintenance of wage labor (exploitation) and the guarantee of corporate profit (accumulation of capital):
"The policy of adjusting the interests of labor and capital will be adopted under the new-democratic state system. On the one hand, it will protect the interests of the workers, institute an eight- to ten-hour working day according to circumstances, provide suitable unemployment relief and social insurance and safeguard trade union rights; on the other hand, it will guarantee legitimate profits to properly managed state, private and co-operative enterprises, so that both the public and the private sectors and both labor and capital will work together to develop industrial production.” (On Coalition Government, Mao Zedong, 1945).
Consistently with its bourgeois character, Maoism will defend the survival of commodity production and the law of value in socialism, that is, the maintenance of capitalism, falsifying Marxism at convenience:
"Commodity production is not an isolated thing. Look at the context: capitalism or socialism. In a capitalist context it is capitalist commodity production. In a socialist context it is socialist commodity production [sic]." (Mao, annotations to the economic problems of socialism, 1959).
The Marxist approach
Against this approach of Stalinism and Maoism, which is that of the Proudhon-Bakunin-Dühring-Stalin-Mao line, we will recall in three simple quotations the line of Marxism, the line of communist revolution for the overcoming of commodity production:
"It is an incontrovertible truth, elementary to political economy, which even by everyday experience and the observation of ordinary people will confirm, that once you have exchange the small economy is bound to develop the petty-bourgeois-capitalist way." (Lenin, The Tax in Kind, 1921).
"the law of value is precisely the fundamental law of commodity production and also, consequently, of the highest form of this production, that is, capitalist production.” (Anti-Dühring, F. Engels, 1878).
“Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor.” (Critique of the Gotha Programme, K. Marx, 1875).