The Political Situation in China and the Tasks of the Bolshevik-Leninist Opposition

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At the February [1928] Plenum of the ECCI and the Sixth Congress of the Comintern a basically false evaluation of the situation in China was made. So as to cover up for the terrible defeats, it was declared that the revolutionary situation is maintained (“between two waves”), and that as before the course is toward armed uprising and soviets.

In fact, the second Chinese revolution of 1925-27 ended in a series of crushing defeats, without having completed its tasks. Now we have an inter-revolutionary period, under the complete sway of bourgeois counterrevolution and with a strengthening of the position of foreign imperialism.

It is impossible to predict how long the inter-revolutionary period will last, since it depends on many factors, internal and international. But the rise of a third revolution is inevitable; it is absolutely and completely grounded in the conditions of the defeat of the second revolution.

The tasks of the Chinese Communist Opposition, i.e., the Bolshevik-Leninists, are to understand the causes of the defeats clearly, to evaluate correctly the present situation, to regroup the staunchest, bravest, and most tested elements of the proletarian vanguard, to seek again the paths to the masses on the basis of transitional demands, and in all fields of social life to prepare the working class for the third Chinese revolution.

The second Chinese revolution was defeated in three stages in the course of 1927: in Shanghai, Wuhan, and Canton. All three defeats were the direct and immediate consequence of the basically false policy of the Communist-International and the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.

The completely opportunist line of the Comintern found its expression in the four questions which determined the fate of the Chinese revolution:

1. The question of the party. The Chinese Communist Party entered a bourgeois party, the Kuomintang, while the bourgeois character of this party was disguised by a charlatan philosophy about a "workers’ and peasants’ party” and even about a party of "four classes” (Stalin-Martinov). The proletariat was thus deprived of its own party at a most critical period. Worse yet: the pseudo-Communist Party was converted into an additional tool of the bourgeoisie in deceiving the workers. There is nothing to equal this crime in the whole history of the world revolutionary movement. The responsibility falls entirely on the ECCI and Stalin, its inspirers.

Since even now in India, Korea, and other countries "workers’ and peasants’ ” parties, i.e., new Kuomintangs, are still being instituted, the Chinese Communist Opposition considers it necessary, on the basis of the experience of the second Chinese revolution, to declare:

Never and under no circumstances may the party of the proletariat enter into a party of another class or merge with it organizationally. An absolutely independent party of the proletariat is a first and decisive condition for communist politics.

2. The question of imperialism. The false course of the Comintern was based on the statement that the yoke of international imperialism is compelling all “progressive” classes to go together. In other words, according to the Comintern's Stalinist theory, the yoke of imperialism would somehow change the laws of the class struggle. In fact, the economic, political, and military penetration of imperialism into China’s life brought the internal class struggle to extreme sharpness.

While at the bottom, in the agrarian bases of the Chinese economy, the bourgeoisie is organically and unbreakably linked with feudal forms of exploitation, at the top it is just as organically and unbreakably linked with world finance capital. The Chinese bourgeoisie cannot on its own break free either from agrarian feudalism or from foreign imperialism.

Its conflicts with the most reactionary feudal militarists and its collisions with the international imperialists always take second place at the decisive moment to its irreconcilable antagonism to the poor workers and peasants.

Having always behind it the help of the world imperialists against the Chinese workers and peasants, the so-called national bourgeoisie raises the class struggle to civil war more rapidly and more mercilessly than any other bourgeoisie in the world, and drowns the workers and peasants in blood.

It is a gigantic and historical crime that the leadership of the Comintern helped the Chinese national bourgeoisie to mount the backs of the workers and peasants, while shielding it from the criticism and protests of revolutionary Bolsheviks. Never in the history of all revolutions has the bourgeoisie had such a cover-up and such a disguise as the Stalinist leadership created for the Chinese bourgeoisie.

The Opposition reminds the Chinese workers and the workers of the whole world that as little as a few days before the Shanghai coup of Chiang Kai-shek, Stalin not only suddenly called for trust and support for Chiang Kai-shek, but also subjected to fierce repressions the Bolshevik-Leninists (“Trotskyists”) who had given warning in time of the defeat in store for the revolution.

The Chinese Opposition declares that all who support or spread or defend in relation to the past the legend that the “national” bourgeoisie is able to lead the masses to a revolutionary struggle are traitors. The tasks of the Chinese revolution can really be solved only on condition that the Chinese proletariat, at the head of the oppressed masses, throws off bourgeois political leadership and seizes power. There is no other way.

3. The question of the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry. In this question too which has decisive importance for China, just as for all countries of the East, the policy of the Comintern constitutes a Menshevik falsification of Marxism. When we, the Opposition, spoke of the necessity for a revolutionary alliance of the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie, we had in mind the oppressed masses, the tens and hundreds of millions of poor of town and countryside. The Comintern leadership understood and understands by the petty bourgeoisie those petty-bourgeois summits, overwhelmingly intellectuals, who, under the form of democratic parties and organizations, exploit the rural and urban poor, selling them out at the decisive moment to the big bourgeoisie. For us, it is not a matter of an alliance with Wang Ching-wei against Chiang Kai-shek, but of an alliance with the toiling masses against Wang Ching-wei and Chiang Kai-shek.

4. The question of soviets. The Bolshevik theory of soviets was replaced by an opportunist falsification, subsequently supplemented by adventurist practice.

For the countries of the East, just as for the countries of the West, soviets are the form of organization which can and must be created from the very first stage of a broad revolutionary upsurge. Soviets usually arise as revolutionary strike organizations, and then extend their functions and increase their authority in the eyes of the masses. At the next stage they become the organizations of a revolutionary uprising. Finally, after the victory of the uprising they are transformed into the organs of revolutionary power.

In hindering the Chinese workers and peasants from creating soviets, the Stalinist leadership of the Comintern artificially disarmed and weakened the toiling masses before the bourgeoisie and gave it the opportunity to crush the revolution. The subsequent attempt in December 1927 to set up a soviet in Canton in twenty-four hours was nothing but a criminal adventure, and it prepared only for the final defeat of the heroic workers of Canton by the unrestrained military.

These are the basic crimes of the Stalinist Comintern leadership in China. Taken together they indicate a substitution of Menshevism, perfected and taken to its limits, for Bolshevism. The crushing of the second Chinese revolution is above all a defeat for the strategy of Menshevism, which this time appeared under a Bolshevik mask. It is not by chance that in this the whole of the international social democracy was in solidarity with Stalin and Bukharin.

Without understanding the great lessons for which the Chinese working class has paid so dearly there can be no movement forward. The Chinese Left Opposition bases itself on these lessons, wholly and completely. The Chinese bourgeoisie, after the defeat of the popular masses, was compelled to endure the dictatorship of the military. This is for the given period the only possible form of state power, flowing from the irreconcilable antagonisms of the bourgeoisie toward the popular masses on the one hand and the dependence of the bourgeoisie on foreign imperialism on the other. Individual layers and provincial groups of the bourgeoisie are not content with the rule of the sword, but the big bourgeoisie as a whole cannot keep itself in power otherwise than with the sword.

The inability of the “national” bourgeoisie to stand at the head of a revolutionary nation makes democratic parliamentarism unacceptable to it. Under the name of a temporary regime of “guardianship of the people,” the “national” bourgeoisie is establishing the rule of military cliques.

These last, which reflect the special and local interests of various groups of the bourgeoisie, come one after the other into conflicts and open wars, which are the reward for a crushed revolution

It would be pitiful and contemptible now to try to determine which of the generals is “progressive,” so as to again bind up the fate of the revolutionary struggle to his sword.

The task of the Opposition is to counterpose the workers and the poor to the whole social mechanism of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie. It is not the Stalinist policy of collaboration and alliances with leaders, but the irreconcilable class policy of Bolshevism that will be the Opposition’s line.

From the end of 1927 the Chinese revolution gave way to counterrevolution which is still continuing to deepen. The clearest expression of this process is the fate of the Chinese party. At the Sixth Congress the number of members of the Chinese Communist Party was boastfully given as one hundred thousand. The Opposition said then that after 1927 the party would hardly be able to keep even ten thousand members. In fact, the party today musters not more than three to four thousand, and its decline is still going on. The false political orientation, which at every step comes into irreconcilable contradiction with the facts, is destroying the Chinese Communist Party and will inevitably lead it to its doom, if the Communist Opposition does not secure a basic change in its whole policy and in the whole party regime.

In continuing to cover up for its errors, the present leadership of the Comintern is clearing the way in the Chinese workers’ movement for two enemies: social democracy and anarchism. The revolutionary movement can only be defended from these complementary dangers by the Communist Opposition, which wages an irreconcilable struggle against both the opportunism and the adventurism which inevitably flow from the Stalinist leadership of the Comintern.

There is at present no mass revolutionary movement in China. All that can be done is to prepare for it. The preparation must consist in attracting ever wider circles of workers into the political life of the country, on the basis that exists now in an epoch of triumphant counterrevolution.

The slogan of soviets, as a slogan for the present, is now adventurism or empty talk.

The struggle against the military dictatorship must inevitably assume the form of transitional revolutionary-democratic demands, leading to the demand for a Chinese Constituent Assembly on the basis of universal direct, equal, and secret voting, for the solution of the most important problems facing the country: the introduction of the eight-hour day, the confiscation of the land, and the securing of national independence for China.

Having rejected transitional revolutionary-democratic slogans, the Sixth Congress left the Chinese Communist Party without any slogans and thereby denied it the possibility of approaching the task of mobilizing the masses under conditions of counterrevolution.

The Chinese Opposition condemns the lifeless irrelevance of such a policy. The Chinese Opposition predicts that as soon as the workers start to emerge from their paralysis they will inevitably throw up democratic slogans. If the Communists stand back, the revival of political struggle will go to the benefit of petty-bourgeois democracy, and it is possible to predict in advance that the present Chinese Stalinists will follow in its wake, giving the democratic slogans not a revolutionary, but a conciliatory interpretation.

The Opposition therefore considers it necessary to make clear in advance that the real road to a solution of the problems of national independence and the raising of the standard of living of the mass of the people is a basic change in the whole social structure by means of a third Chinese revolution.

At present, it is still difficult to predict when and in what ways the revolutionary revival in the country will start. There are, however, symptoms which allow the conclusion to be drawn that political revival will be preceded by a certain economic revival, with a greater or lesser participation of foreign capital.

An economic upsurge, even a weak one of short duration, will again assemble the workers in the factories, raise their feeling of class self-confidence, and thereby create the conditions for the setting up of trade-union organizations and for a new extension of the influence of the Communist Party. An industrial upsurge would in no case liquidate the revolution. On the contrary, in the last analysis it would revive and sharpen all the unsolved problems and all the now repressed class and subclass antagonisms (between the military, the bourgeoisie and “democracy,” between the “national” bourgeoisie and imperialism, and, finally, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie as a whole). The upsurge would lead the Chinese popular masses out of oppression and passivity. The inevitable new crisis after this could serve as a new revolutionary impulse.

Of course, factors of an international character could hinder or possibly accelerate these processes.

The Opposition therefore does not bind itself to any ready-made scheme. Its duty is to follow the actual development of the internal life of the country and the whole world situation. All the tactical turns of our policy must be timed to the real situation of each new stage. And our general strategic line must lead to the conquest of power.

The dictatorship of the Chinese proletariat must include the Chinese revolution in the international socialist revolution. The victory of socialism in China, just as in the USSR, is thinkable only in the conditions of a victorious international revolution. The Opposition categorically rejects the reactionary Stalinist theory of socialism in one country.

The immediate tasks of the Opposition are:

a) to publish the most important documents of the Bolshevik- Leninists (Opposition);

b) to commence as soon as possible publication of a weekly political and theoretical organ of the Opposition;

c) to select, on the basis of a clear conception, the best, most reliable elements of communism, capable of withstanding the pressure of counterrevolution, creating a centralized faction of Bolshevik-Leninists (Opposition) and preparing themselves and others for a new upsurge;

d) to maintain constant active contact with the Left Opposition in all other countries, so as to attain in the shortest possible time the construction of a strong, ideologically united international faction of Bolshevik-Leninists (Opposition).

Only such a faction, openly and boldly coming out under its own banner, both inside the Communist parties and outside them, is capable of saving the Communist International from decay and degeneration and returning it to the path of Marx and Lenin.