Comintern and China

[GracchusBabeuf]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0omBEr1SbI4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNXD7LSPlko
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=315vdbeT7hk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU04s9aOoVE
Excellent videos:thumbup1:

[Kléber]

holy distortion of history batman.. love how he brushes over the fact that Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) was elected to the Comintern against Trotsky's lone dissenting executive vote

Trotsky's ACTUAL Analysis (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/china/index.htm)

[RedStruggle]

How exactly did the video "distort" Trotsky or history?For a start, the absurd view that Mao was always supportive of the line of the Comintern. During the first stage of the Chinese Revolution it was certainly true that Mao supported the Comintern's line of entering the KMT which basically shows that Mao was guilty of the same kind of right opportunism as the Comintern and Stalin himself - during this period Mao and the Comintern were in opposition to the CPC's leaders, specifically Chen Duxiu and Zhang Guotao, who opposed any notion that a socialist revolution was not possible in China or that the only course for the CPC was to constitute itself as a "bloc within", instead of maintaining itself as an independent organization, and were ultimately forced to accept the Comintern's line when its representative, Maring, cited the right of the Comintern to determine the positions of national Communist Parties. Once the CPC had been forced into the countryside as a result of the events of 1927 and especially when the party was facing serious military attacks in Jiangxi and its other southern base areas, however, Mao certainly did not go along with the Comintern - he found himself oppossed by a number of party activists who had been trained in the USSR and sent back to China in order to take control of the CPC under the leadership of Wang Ming (these activists being known as the Returned or 28 Bolsheviks - the fact that Harpal Brar manages to present an overview of the relationship between Mao, the CPC, and the Comintern without even mentioning this group is a pretty poor indication of his grasp of Chinese history and intellectual honesty) and who argued that the foremost objective of the party should be to re-take control of the cities by means of armed insurrections, launched from the countryside, in combination with uprisings by the urban underground*. Mao argued, by contrast, that the party should continue its strategy of guerrilla warfare, and as such was opposed to the Comintern. Interestingly, in addition to supporting urban insurrections, Wang Ming and his fellow activists also argued from the mid-1930s onwards that the party should enter into a united front with the KMT and that this united front should include Chiang Kai-shek, and whilst Mao initially took a different line, arguing that there should be a united front but without Chiang, he ended up taking the line of Wang after Wang had basically been deprived of his authority within the party. It's also worth pointing out that during the period 1945/6, Stalin called on the CPC to pursue negotiations with the KMT with the eventual aim of entering into a coalition government, and it was only due to Mao's refusal to do this and the party's pursuit of armed struggle that the CPC came to power a few years later and the Chinese Revolution was even possible. Thank goodness Mao didn't just do everything Stalin told him to do!

*In this sense they held a similar line to Li Lisan, who became the leader of the party in the immediate aftermath of 1927 and was responsible for the Nanchang Insurrection - it is actually interesting that the party was ordered to carry out various insurrections (the creation of the Canton Commune being the most important urban insurrection apart from the Nanchang Insurrection) immediately after being expelled from the cities because it shows that the Comintern was willing to rapidly abandon its previous line that the only possible revolution in the immediate term was an anti-feudal revolution under the leadership of the KMT and that this line was therefore less about having an objective assessment of the strategic possibilities and balance of class forces that existed in China in the 1920s and more a reflection of the changing class interests of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union as well as the Comintern's failure to appreciate the full impact of the brutal events of 1927. In other words, the Comintern went from having a line that denied any possibility of the Chinese working class pursuing an independent role to the line that a socialist revolution was an immediate possibility, in spite of the working class having suffered a devastating defeat and not being in any condition to seize power. Harpal Brar does not seem to even acknowledge this change - he pretends that the Comintern always stuck to the stage-based conception of revolution which formed the basis of its strategy up to 1927 and even accuses Trotsky of supporting the formation of Soviets when this was actually what the Comintern was trying to do (through bureaucratic impositions) and when Trotsky was calling for the CPC to try and stabilize the situation and restore the confidence of the working class by working through the existing trade unions and supporting economic struggles.

I lie awake at night, anticipating a semi-honest Stalinist defense of the Comintern's line in China...if such a thing is even possible.

[RedStruggle]

Also, Stalin (and Brar, in support of Stalin's line) basically stated that the KMT was a progressive anti-feudal organization without providing any support for this allegation (which is essential to the claim that the bourgeoisie could play a progressive role in China and that the role of the CPC was to give support to the agrarian revolution instead of seeking to carry out the agrarian revolution as part of or as a precursor to a socialist revolution, in accordance with the theory of permanent revolution, which does not deny the role of the peasantry by any honest account) or any appreciation of how the KMT changed during the course of its existence. Let's look at KMT agrarian policy in detail:

Sun had initially raised the slogan “land to the tiller”, drawing his inspiration from the proponent of common land ownership, Henry George. However, the transformation of the party into a Leninist party-army with the foundation of the Whampoa Party Academy in 1924 challenged the party's early agrarian radicalism as many of those who joined the Academy and later became leading members of the party or army were themselves the sons of the gentry elite, such that, during the Northern Expedition, their lands were exempted from the reform efforts being conducted under the leadership of the CPC. Chiang himself, for example, was a member of a family of landlords and salt merchants. The establishment of the Nanjing government in 1928 and the subsequent emergence of a polity in which there no clear lines of authority drawn between the KMT and the institutions of government and the formal distribution of offices did not accurately reflect the actual distribution of political power (i.e., the creation of a party-state) involved ever-larger numbers of gentry flocking to the KMT and the government being forced to rely on the cooperation and support of the gentry to maintain its authority at the local level, so that the leading party official in any given community was invariably the local landlord or the leader of the most powerful lineage group. The extent to which the party had changed in the process of coming to power is demonstrated by the contrast between Sun's slogan and the Land Law of 1930. The Law had its origins in the 1926 decision to make rent reduction an official plank in the KMT party platform, the reduction being 25 percent, and the same policy that the CPC would later come to adopt during the Anti-Japanese War, with the original KMT version recognizing 50 percent of the main crop as the maximum rent then being collected, so that the 25 percent reduction was to be made on this maximum. After reduction the maximum possible rent would therefore be 37.5 percent of the main crop, with subsidiary crops not being subject to rent payments. The Law also contained provisions whereby peasants who had tilled land belonging to an absentee owner for more than ten years had the legal right to by the land. It was revised in 1937 so that rents were not allowed to exceed 8 percent of land value, with the intention of reducing rents further and gradually transferring ownership of land to the peasant, but in spite of all these provisions, which were in any case very moderate, none of them were ever consistently implemented, not least because landlords insisted that cases be brought to court, and the state would never have been willing to allow for those on whom it depended to be prosecuted through the legal system, even if peasants had been able to pay the charges. The result was that patterns of land ownership basically remained the same or became more unequal under the KMT.

[RedStarOverChina]

I'm no Trotskyist, but the videos are pretty misleading.

It's common knowledge that Mao wasn't a diligent follower of the Soviet Line. The Soviets wanted workers' urban uprisings as opposed to peasant guerrilla war. In China, the representatives of the Soviet Line were called "the 28 Bolsheviks"---which of course, didn't include Mao. Mao fought against them.

Mao was pretty pissed at Stalin for giving directions that clearly didn't have the CPC's best interests at heart---either that or he simply didn't put enough thought into it. In Mao Zedong's own words, "he (Stalin) picked on us four times", and that he's "pissed" every time he thinks of it.

So when Mao first met Stalin in Moscow, his first words were: "I‘ve always been a target of repression and alienation, and I have no where to air my grievances." Stalin replied, interrupting him: "You're a victor. Victors don't complain."

In their conversations in Moscow, the argument got so heated that Stalin once hung up the phone on Mao.
http://static16.photo.sina.com.cn/bmiddle/48b0011fx719cd4aea96f&690 (http://photo.blog.sina.com.cn/showpic.html#blogid=48b0011f0100enni&url=http://static16.photo.sina.com.cn/orignal/48b0011fx719cd4aea96f&690)
Anyone who's seen this picture could tell they weren't a happy couple.

In another expression of his anger, Mao once told a Soviet official that he plans to write a critique about Stalin's meddling in China's affairs before he dies, and threatens to publish it in "ten thousand years".

[RedStarOverChina]

Mao couldn't publicly disagree with him. Stalin was like the Pope.

And I don't think it's conflicting that Mao admired Stalin yet simultaneously was extremely pissed off and disagreed with his policies.

[RedStruggle]

Who expressed this view?Harpal Brar, within the first few minutes of the first video.


Are you denying that there was a left-wing of the KMT which was basically what the Chinese Communists were allied with anyway?When are you referring to, exactly? The CPC were only allied with the Wuhan government (which is what historians generally mean when they talk about the "left-wing" of the KMT) for a brief period after they were attacked by Chiang in April 1927. Then, after they were effectively betrayed by Wuhan as well they ended up in the countryside with no allies, at which point the party began proclaiming that socialist revolution was an immediate possibility in China and that planning for urban insurrections was the most important priority, in accordance with the Comintern's new line, which undermined all of the arguments that had been used in the pre-1927 period to show why it was necessary for the CPC to abandon its political independence and look to the KMT to carry out agrarian and democratic reforms. So you will have to explain who exactly you mean by the "left-wing" of the KMT and how this supports whatever argument you are trying to put forward.


In spite of your hollow attempts to divert the topic, you haven't explained what your alternative would have been to transform a semi-feudal, semi-colonial country like China to socialism other than through a New Democratic revolution as carried out by the Chinese workers in alliance with the peasantry.You seem to be conflating a number of distinct issues here. The idea of New Democracy was only developed by Mao during the middle of the Sino-Japanese War in 1940 in his essay entitled 'On New Democracy' in which he argued that the immediate revolutionary priority in China was a New Democratic revolution, carried out under the leadership of a bloc of four classes, consisting of the peasantry, the working class, the petty-bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie, all submitting to the dominant position of the CPC. In Mao's view, the revolution would be directed not against private ownership of the means of production or commodity production as such but rather against remnants of feudal ownership and exploitation in the countryside, including highly unequal patterns of land holdings, as well as the various ways in which China's sovereignty and development had been undermined by imperialism. The idea of New Democracy is similar to the line of the Comintern in the 1920s in that it assumes that a socialist revolution must come at some point in the future after the tasks of New Democracy have already been carried out but it is also different in that at no point after 1927 or when he was developing the theory of New Democracy did Mao argue that the New Democratic revolution or any of its component reforms would be carried out under the leadership of the KMT - he had learned from the experiences of the CPC and acknowledged that the KMT was fundamentally a party of the landlords and would have to be overthrown as part of the anti-feudal revolution. So it's all very well to say that a socialist revolution was not an immediate possibility in China and that an anti-feudal revolution had to come first but you can't jump from this premise and simply assert that the line of the Comintern in the early 1920s was correct - you have to show that the KMT was both able and willing to carry out the anti-feudal revolution, which it wasn't.

And your assertion that the New Democratic revolution was a revolution of the working class and peasantry needs to be substantiated and turned into something more than a slogan in light of the fact that the working class was a tiny proportion of CPC party membership by 1949 (around 5%) and workers played almost no active role in the events of that year - in fact the party ordered them to continue production as it took control of the cities.


He clearly differentiated between the imperialist leaning big bourgeosie and a certain nationally oriented patriotic fraction, with whom the workers could form a united front against imperialism.I know what Mao wrote and I reject any suggestion that there was a section of the bourgeoisie which didn't face pressure to side with imperialism in the face of agrarian or anti-imperialist mass movements or that there was anything feudal (semi- or otherwise) about China by the time the CPC was founded in 1921. Let's look at the issue of feudalism first. I hold that during the late Qing and throughout the Republic the Chinese countryside experienced the increasing penetration of capitalist property relations and commodities that had been produced in advanced capitalist countries for the world market and that this process of penetration resulted in the elimination of whatever elements of feudalism might otherwise have remained and had a profound impact on peasant life:

Huang, writing in reference to economic changes in North China, notes that, prior to the economic changes of the nineteenth century, the countryside was characterized by the predominance of sharecropping, which was dependent on resident landlordism and involved a considerable amount of contact between landlords and tenants, with arrangements often taking place between kin or friends, such that they rarely assumed the form of written or legal contracts, and the personalized nature of the relationship meant that tenants were also expected as a matter of custom to perform various other duties for landlords in addition to fulfilling their side of economic transactions, such as helping him move soil and manure, making small household repairs, and giving token wedding and funeral gifts to the members of landlord families. In this context, it is significant, that, according to Huang, the sharecropping system came to be replaced by a fixed-rent system in the late nineteenth century as a result of landlords moving to urban areas, this system being regarded as simpler from the viewpoint of the landlords because it was less time-consuming than the more traditional forms of exploitation and did not require landlords to be resident in the community where their land was located, with agreements generally taking place between landlords and tenants who were not previously known to one another, frequently with the aid of intermediaries, whose names were included in written agreements. The introduction of fixed rents was different in economic terms from sharecropping in that under the latter both landlords and their tenants shared in the gains as well as the losses of harvests, whereas, under fixed rents, the size of the harvest and the payments made to landlords were separated (although whether fixed rents meant a higher or lower proportion of produce being paid on average depended on area and the type of crop within particular areas) with the eventual shift towards fixed rents based on money instead of quantities of grain exposing peasants and landlords to external forces and the dictates of supply and demand in ways that sharecropping did not, as, when prices of consumption goods increased, there was greater pressure for landlords to raise rents in order to keep up, and when the demand for rentals exceeded the supply, some landlords were prepared to bump one tenant for another in order to receive a higher rent – as such there was a much more rapid turnover in land rentals, the same being true of wage labourers, with turnovers becoming even more rapid as a result of wartime inflation, and villagers developing the term “duanqian” to describe the unfortunate practice of tenant bumping.

Although Huang does not accept that there was a moral economy in any meaningful sense when sharecropping was still predominant, and also notes that independent farming was able to remain in existence, at least in North China, this analysis speaks to the withering-away of feudal relations and social relationships becoming harsher, as any shared interests that might once have existed were eliminated by new forms of exploitation and replaced with relationships based on antagonism. Isaacs goes even further than this, noting that “feudalism in its classical form” had long been eliminated in China due to land becoming alienable, with the penetration of commercial capital resulting in the establishment and entrenchment of “essentially bourgeois forms of exploitation”, and merchant, industrial, and agrarian capital coming to be concentrated in the hands of the same ruling class, tied to imperialism. Isaacs also contends that the handicrafts on which peasants had traditionally relied to supplement their incomes were undermined as a result of the import of foreign goods and that this was a central force behind peasants being pressured into selling or mortgaging their land. Although not sharing the same analysis of imperialism as Isaacs and others, Eastman has also accepted that social relationships became harsher, with a crucial milestone in this process being the abolition of the traditional examination system in 1905, as previously the men who had studied under this system adhered to a common ideology and served as leaders of society and community figures with a concern for social welfare and an ability to communicate local concerns to government officials, but the abolition of this system meant that the group lost much of their superior status, and young men, having studied in towns and cities, found themselves with an education that had little relevance to rural life, having also become accustomed to the amenities and culture of city life. The erosion of these traditional elites meant that, according to Eastman, it was possible for power in villages and other rural communities to pass to new leaders such as merchants, usurers, unschooled landlords, militia leaders, bandit chieftains, and similar individuals, whose influence and power derived from wealth and physical force, so that, in the Cantonese village of Nanching in the 1920s and 30s, the community leader had once been a successful bandit and opium trafficker but came to acquire power in the village because he was wealthy and able to influence local government through his former boss. It should finally be noted that the entrenchment of capitalism involved increasingly close links being forged between the countryside and the cities, not only in that the inputs and consumer products of peasants came to assume the form of commodities that had been produced in urban areas or imported, but also in that peasant families came to rely on the urban economic situation in a very direct way, as they increasingly sent one or more of their members to work in industrial enterprises in order to provide an additional form of income, sent home in the form of remittances. Thus, in the case of the Shanghai cotton industry, whilst some women were from Shanghai itself, the vast majority were from the Jiangnan and Subei villages, with these workers continuing to identify in terms of their native-origin whilst they were employed in the industry. The sending of peasant women to work in the cities could also have a darker dimension, in the form of the selling of girls and the signing of contracts between peasant families and local representatives of the Green Gang and other such organizations and labour rackets, with families often receiving $30 for three years as the standard price, this price of the family allowance as it was known being distributed in three stages, the first the smallest, in order to ensure that girls worked for the duration of her contracts, with her wages being taken by the contractor. The selling of women to contractors was by no means a new phenomenon and can be viewed as an extension of the traditional practice of selling and indenturing women as brides and servants but the contractor was certainly a new figure in the rural social landscape and the prevalence of contracting can be viewed both as evidence of immiseration and as a further way in which peasants became directly linked to and dependent on capitalist accumulation, including international economic trends.

Eastman, Family, Fields and Ancestors: Continuity and Change in Chinese Economic History, 1550–1949 (1988)
Honig, Sisters and Strangers (1986)
Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (1985)
Isaacs, The Tragedy of The Chinese Revolution (1938)


Now, let's turn to the question of the bourgeoisie. My contention is that different segments of the ruling class exhibited a tendency to close rank both in the economic sense that different forms of property came to be concentrated in the hands of the same individuals and also in the political sense that even those individual capitalists whom Mao regarded as patriotic or "national" tended to side with compradors and the impeiralist powers when faced with energetic mass movements. This dynamic of the whole of the bourgeoisie being willing to take the side of imperialism was in large part the result of an additional tendency, that is the tendency for democratic and anti-imperialist movements to move beyond the narrow set of aims that were compatible with bourgeois class interests and challenge the political and economic rule of the bourgeoisie. This is compelling evidence in favour of the theory of permanent revolution because it shows that a revolutionary process cannot simply be halted at the stage of the democratic revolution and that the bourgeoisie in oppressed nations such as China cannot play any progressive role, and these dynamics and tendencies can be best observed through an analysis of the 1925 May 30th Movement:

it is also this movement which reveals the class structure of Chinese society in the 1920s, and the extent to which struggles could rapidly evolve and threaten the class interests of the bourgeoisie. This movement, having its origins in the murder of a Chinese worker by a Japanese foreman, and immediately giving rise to a far-reaching strike wave and the creation of the Shanghai General Union, which encouraged unionization drives and kept watch over scabbing attempts, is centrally relevant for the essay not only because of the immediate increase in industrial unrest in foreign-owned factories, primarily in Shanghai, but also because the declaration of a strike and boycott of all foreign goods in Hong Kong in late June after a serious of further murders led to more than 100,000 workers in that city taking the unprecedented move of traveling to the vicinity of Canton, bringing all foreign and commercial activity to a stop, and, for the first time in China's history as a capitalist society, creating an organ of democratic working-class rule which can justifiably be described as a Soviet, as acknowledged by Isaacs. The strikers took control of gambling and opium dens and transformed them into canteens and dormitories, and an army of 2000 pickets was raised from amongst the strikers in order to put a barrier around Hong Kong and Xiamen, with all of the strikers organizing themselves into a committee of 800 delegates, with one representative for every fifty strikers, all of them subject to instant recall, who then in turn nominated thirteen men to function as an executive committee. This committee organized a hospital and seventeen schools for men and women workers and for their children were established and maintained, with special committees also handing funds and contributions, the auctioning of confiscated goods, and the keeping of records, whilst also publishing a weekly newspaper, 'The Labour Way'. Strikers were organized to undertake voluntary work, which included building a road from Canton to Whampoa, and even took control of twelve river boats to apprehend smugglers. A strikers’ court was set up which tried offenders against the boycott or other disturbers of public order. The task of covering all lines of communication along the Guangdong coast and at all ports was carried out with the co-operation of the peasant associations, due to strikers having spread to the villages to raise support for the boycott and advance the movement for agrarian reform, with peasant pickets patrolling the coast at Shantou, Haifeng, Pingshang, and other points, to make the blockade complete. The creation of this body, which, in addition to being called a Soviet, also carried the designation “Government Number Two”, can be regarded as a pivotal moment in modern Chinese history because it represented the first time that the working class had stepped forward as an autonomous force, not only challenging imperialism through mass mobilization, but also the privileges of Chinese capitalists, including their political power. The extent to which the Soviet did damage the interests of the imperialist powers is evident from the comments of an official from the British Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, who, apart from lamenting that “the [Country] Club is empty, all servants gone”, also captured the economic impact of the boycott by pointing out that during the months before the crisis between 160 and 240 boats came through the harbour of Canton each month, but that the figures had fallen to less than 30 whilst the strike was taking place.

In truth, and owing to the nationalist character of the movement, the Soviet also involved workers lending support to the the nationalists at Whampoa. For example, workers were employed as carriers in the KMT armies whilst the committee remained in existence. This does not diminish the importance of the body, or the thesis of this essay, however, because the radical phase of the May 30th Movement also revealed that anti-imperialist struggles could not be limited to a small set of objectives, and that, when faced with an energetic movement from below, China's capitalists and the the KMT would side with imperialism. The movement, according to Waldron, was initially solely nationalist in its orientation such that the General Chamber of Commerce collected funds for the strikers in foreign-owned factories (motivated partly by the fact that these factories being out of action allowed Chinese enterprises to take control of a larger share of the market, if only for a limited period of time) and even northern warlords sought to lend support in order to avoid being seen as on the side of imperialism. The General Chamber of Commerce did not, however, join the Workers', Merchants; and Students' Federation that was set up on June 6th and when it agreed to present the Federation's demands to the Peking government in the middle of June it refused to include those demands (out of a total of seventeen) which related to the working class as well as those which posed serious challenges to imperialism, including the right to strike, Chinese control over the police of the International Settlement, and the abolition of extraterritoriality. The bourgeoisie moved closer to imperialism and the merchants withdrew from the strike when, after dialogue between these groups and foreign capitalists, the latter agreed to enhance the political strength of the former by admitting wealthy Chinese to the Municipal Council and re-opening negotiations on restoring tariff control. Isaacs also reports that at this time there was increasing interaction between workers employed in foreign-owned and indigenous enterprises and that when the latter realized that their conditions were often worse than those of their fellow workers in spite of the supposed nationalism of their employers they too began to take strike action with the aim of extracting economic concessions and union rights from their employers, and that this, combined with the decision to shut off electricity in Chinese factories on July 6th, led the bourgeoisie to openly oppose the movement by cutting off the provision of funds, and then, as the movement increasingly assumed the character of a class struggle, send in gangsters and their hired thugs to break up the General Labour Union, in cooperation with the Fengtien military clique. The same tendency for the ruling class to side with imperialism can be observed in the changing relationship between the CPC and the KMT, despite the latter being rooted primarily in the gentry, as the militant stance of the working class during the May 30th Movement as well as the expansion of the CPC, whose membership had increased to 10,000 by the end of 1925, with most of these recruits being drawn directly from the ranks of the working class, were important factors behind Chiang's March 20 coup, which resulted in the KMT's Russian advisers being placed under house arrest, the CPC being made to provide a complete list of its members to the KMT, and no longer being allowed to serve as heads of bureaus at the KMT headquarters, or send directives to its members without having first consulted with the KMT, with the CPC subsequently being prohibited from holding more than one third of the seats on executive committees at central, municipal, and district levels. The experience of the May 30th Movement and its aftermath thus indicates that the CPC could rapidly transform itself into a mass organization, and that the political condition of the working class was such that Soviet power could be established at a local level, but at the same time it also demonstrated that the “bloc within” strategy represented a limitation on the party's ability to pursue state power, and that mass struggles could easily endanger the alliance, making the united front not only unnecessary, especially from 1925 onwards, but also impossible in the long-term.

Chesneaux, 'The Chinese Labour Movement 1919-1927' (1980)
Harrison, 'The Making of the Republican Citizen' (2000)
Isaacs, 'The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution' (1938)
Waldron, 'From War to Nationalism: China’s Turning Point, 1924–1925' (1995)

[Die Neue Zeit]

This dynamic of the whole of the bourgeoisie being willing to take the side of imperialism was in large part the result of an additional tendency, that is the tendency for democratic and anti-imperialist movements to move beyond the narrow set of aims that were compatible with bourgeois class interests and challenge the political and economic rule of the bourgeoisie. This is compelling evidence in favour of the theory of permanent revolution because it shows that a revolutionary process cannot simply be halted at the stage of the democratic revolution and that the bourgeoisie in oppressed nations such as China cannot play any progressive role

What about divides among the petit-bourgeoisie (assuming small farmers owning their own land are included here)?


A new "Bloc of Dispossessed Classes and National Petit-Bourgeoisie" in the Third World, but based on separate class organizations, would be: proletariat, hired hands performing unproductive labour (butlers, housemaids, and even military assembly line folks), proper lumpenproletariat (prostitutes where illegal, rank-and-file gangsters), coordinators (mid-level managers, academics with subordinate research staff, doctors without general practice businesses, and spetsy / "specialists"), and nationalistic petit-bourgeoisie of urban and rural areas.

Of course, scrap the last demographic and perhaps also the second-to-last one in developed countries.

[RedStruggle]

Since you answered your own question there, yes the KMT were not willing to carry out an anti-feudal revolution since they represented the feudal land lordsIt's nice that you agree with me, but unfortunately this puts you on the same side as Trotsky, not Stalin, whose position Brar is trying to defend. During the first united front the Comintern did not argue that the KMT represented the large landlords, the designation they actually applied and which served as the rationale for the CPC pursuing the "bloc within" strategy even when they were being forced to make political concessions in order to maintain the alliance was a "bloc of four classes", the idea being that the KMT did not have a specific class character, being comprised of the same four classes that Mao would later identify as the supporters of New Democracy, but did have a progressive orientation in relation to the landlords - in fact Brar quotes this in the video, so why you are trying to pretend that the Comintern had a different position is beyond me.


The answer is simple: to drive out the Japanese imperialists, of course to the extent to which the KMT were willing to drive them out.Again, you are conflating two distinct issues. Brar's video and this discussion is about the first united front, during the period 1922/3-1927. The rationale for the first united front was that China was undergoing an agrarian and anti-imperialist revolution under the leadership of the KMT and that it would only be right for the CPC to break the alliance and pursue a more independent course once the tasks of the democratic revolution had been completed. When the KMT broke with the CPC in 1927 (resulting in the deaths of thousands of party activists and trade unionists in Shanghai) the response of the Comintern and Stalin was not to recognize that the previous line had been wrong and that the KMT could not play a progressive role but to call on the CPC to ally with the so-called left-wing faction of the KMT in the southern city of Wuhan (under Wang Jingwei, who would later go on to lead the occupation government under the Japanese) until the CPC were defeated there as well, at which point the Comintern line swung to the left, with the CPC being ordered to seize control of urban centers and initiate a socialist revolution - directly contradicting the previous line that the Chinese Revolution would have to proceed by stages due to China being a semi-feudal country. The anti-Japanese alliance you are referring to is the second united front, and began in 1937, at the start of the Sino-Japanese War, after almost a decade of civil war.

Clearly, you lack a basic grasp of the chronology of modern Chinese history and your major aim is not to improve your understanding of the period or even to analyze Comintern policy but simply to defend Stalinism by any means possible - even when that means claiming that Stalin was putting forward positions that were held by Trotsky (like the KMT representing the interests of landlords) and failing to acknowledge the rationale behind Comintern policy at different points in time.


It depends on what you mean by "workers"People who sell their labour power in exchange for a wage, having no ownership or control over the means of production - what makes you think I would use any other definition?


From your comments about the "party", it seems you don't regard the Chinese Communists as workers.The majority of them weren't, no, because the party was based in the countryside for most of its existence, especially after 1927, so that it drew most of its supporters from the ranks of the poor and middle peasants, and most of its leaders were originally members of the intelligentsia, including Mao himself. The party's conquest of power was marked by a persistent refusal to support the struggles of the working class - as I've already noted when the party was approaching cities workers were encouraged to continue production, partly in order to avoid exacerbating the problem of inflation, which was an important factor behind the KMT's failure to retain support amongst urban inhabitants during the post-1945 period. The small number of supporters the party retained amongst the ranks of the working class and in China's urban centers were called upon to form worker pickets, which were given the task of protecting property, and preventing workers from taking militant action against industrial capitalists (there was a similar process at work in several rural provinces such as Hunan and Hubei, as the party found it necessary to restrain peasants who would often try and expropriate the industrial properties of landlords in the towns once the land reform process had been carried out, or whilst redistribution was being implemented) and yet there were still cadres (many from the rural areas) who ignored the party's instructions by seeking to apply the methods of class struggle that had been used to mobilize the population in the countryside, and who took seriously the party's earlier rhetoric in support of industrial unrest, with these cadres spreading themselves throughout residential areas and small-scale enterprises in order to build worker resistance on a large scale - the reaction of the leadership and Liu Shaoqi in particular (the response was applied firstly by Liu in Tianjin and then extended to the rest of the cities) is telling, as the party dealt with the "problem" by centralizing political organization and relocating deviant cadres to the modern economic sector, the educational sphere, and government administration, so that they could be more easily supervised. The party's industrial policies during the period of post-war reconstruction further reflect the unwillingness of leaders to allow for independent activity on the part of the working class as well as the absolute priority given to restoring production and the long-term goal of capital accumulation, as the new government instituted policies calling for labour discipline and enforced the authority of mangers to limit wages and fire excess personnel, with workers also being called upon to accept the "reasonable" settlement of disputes.

There is a clear contrast here between the bureaucratic approach of the CPC in 1949 and the Russian Revolution, as the latter was centered around workers taking control of their enterprises, and Soviets forming the basis of the new state.


What exactly are you alleging by stating that 5% of the party were workers (what are your sources for that)?That the events of 1949 weren't a socialist revolution, and that China has never been socialist. I look forward to you proving otherwise. As for the party's composition in 1949, it's not disputed by any historian that workers were a tiny minority in the party by that date and that the party had basically become an organization of the peasantry and intelligentsia - take any textbook on Chinese history you like, I recommend Spence (1999). If you think that workers did make up a sizable proportion of party membership then you're simply wrong.


Are you saying the rest were bourgeoisie?No, and I've never suggested as such.


80% of the Chinese population were peasantsThe fact that most of the Chinese population was made up of peasants isn't evidence that there was anything feudal about China in 1921 or that China needed to go through New Democracy or a KMT-led agrarian revolution before socialism was possible - you could say similar things about Russia in 1917. The issue that you and other Maoists seem to miss is that feudalism has a precise definition - it is not a synonym for lots of people living in the countryside. A feudal society is one in which producers are not free to sell their labour power or other kinds of property as they please as under capitalism but are also not owned directly by institutions or individual members of the ruling class - it is this latter feature which makes producers under feudalism different from slaves and which means that feudalism can be considered a more advanced mode of production compared to the slave-based societies which preceded it. A feudal society involves producers being tied to a member of the ruling class, with production taking the form of use values, and exploitation being maintained through physical coercion - the process of exploitation under feudalism typically involves producers being made to hand over a proportion of their crop to the local landlord (i.e. sharecropping, with some of this crop then being used by the landlord to meet their obligations to the state - the existence of chains of obligations is arguably one of the key features of the state apparatus under feudalism) although feudal societies have also involved producers being made to perform other duties as well, such as entering into military service, or working on the landlord's land for a given number of days each year. I showed above that China did not exhibit any of these key features by the late Qing (with the countryside becoming even more subject to capitalist penetration during 1911-1949 - I think the breakdown of the moral economy and corresponding monetization of exploitation are particularly important) so I see nothing much to add to that account until you respond to it. I'll simply note that an additional process we might identify as evidence of China not being feudal by the 20th century is the changes to the tax system implemented under the late Ming, in the 16th century, whereby corvee labour was abolished and replaced with a "single whip" tax system based entirely on the payment of silver coin - this was important because the fact that peasants received copper coin in exchange for their produce and that the price of silver was increasingly being determined by international trade patterns meant that even peasants in the Chinese interior who were unlikely to ever come into contact with a foreigner or even consume foreign products were becoming integrated into an emerging capitalist world-system, with their fortunes being made dependent on global economic trends.

As a general thing, by the way, the category "peasants" isn't very specific, as the CPC's own categorization system distinguished between poor peasants, middle peasants, and rich peasants, and scholars have also drawn attention to how patterns of land ownership and the prevalence of tenancy in particular differed across China.


the national bourgeoisie are not imperialist that they can aid in the New DemocracyIn other words, the ruling class and working class can have the same (national) interests under certain conditions, and workers have to wait until industrial development has been accomplished under bourgeois rule before they pursue socialism. I think you're going to actually have to argue in favour of New Democracy as a concept (once you've cleared up your position on the relationship between the KMT and agrarian revolution, and shown that there was ever anything socialist about the PRC) instead of just re-stating Mao's position. I actually think I showed how the national bourgeoisie in China took the side of imperialism and wasn't willing to tolerate an agrarian revolution through my analysis of the May 30th Movement but you refused to engage with that, just like you refused to engage with my point regarding Wang Ming in my first post, the complete change in the line of the Comintern after 1927, and my analysis regarding the absence of feudalism in China.

What do you expect, though, it's not like intelligent or knowledgeable Stalinists actually exist, especially when it comes to China! :lol:

[bailey_187]

As much as i will defend Stalin where defense is due and challenge falsehoods, and the Stalin Society/Harpal Brar is helpful for that at times; when Stalin was clearly wrong, or when crimes are actually atributable to the Soviet Union (e.g Katyn), trying to deny this just discredits our attempts to respond to actual lies and falshoods (e.g. that 20million were killed, holodomor was intentional).

Stalin was a great Communist and part of our history. But, as a human being, he was wrong on many things and mistakes were makde. Why cant we just defend where defense is due, and admit when he was wrong?

[RedStruggle]

Why cant we just defend where defense is due, and admit when he was wrong?It's all very well for you to sit here and call on your fellow Stalinists to admit Stalin's mistakes whilst acknowledging Stalin as a great Communist, but for those of us who are interested in socialist revolution and the overthrow of imperialism it's a bit more than that - the Comintern policy in China threw away the possibility of revolution (which, in my view, represented the end of the revolutionary wave that began with the Easter Rising in 1916 and signified the restoration of capitalism in Soviet Russia) and the same is true of the positions adopted by the Comintern (and the Soviet government, after the abolition of the Comintern in 1943) in other contexts and at other points in time, including Spain in the 1930s, and Vietnam, amongst other countries, after WW2. The Comintern played a crucial role in preserving capitalism, just as the official Communist Parties played a crucial role in murdering so many Trotskyists, and other genuine revolutionaries. How dare you sit there and talk about the deaths of thousands of workers and revolutionaries (in 1927 in China alone) as if it's something that doesn't detract from Stalin's supposed merits, and doesn't say anything about the changing class orientation of the Comintern.

[bailey_187]

It's all very well for you to sit here and call on your fellow Stalinists to admit Stalin's mistakes whilst acknowledging Stalin as a great Communist, but for those of us who are interested in socialist revolution and the overthrow of imperialism it's a bit more than that - the Comintern policy in China threw away the possibility of revolution (which, in my view, represented the end of the revolutionary wave that began with the Easter Rising in 1916 and signified the restoration of capitalism in Soviet Russia) and the same is true of the positions adopted by the Comintern (and the Soviet government, after the abolition of the Comintern in 1943) in other contexts and at other points in time, including Spain in the 1930s, and Vietnam, amongst other countries, after WW2. The Comintern played a crucial role in preserving capitalism, just as the official Communist Parties played a crucial role in murdering so many Trotskyists, and other genuine revolutionaries. How dare you sit there and talk about the deaths of thousands of workers and revolutionaries (in 1927 in China alone) as if it's something that doesn't detract from Stalin's supposed merits, and doesn't say anything about the changing class orientation of the Comintern.



How dare you there are say that the 1000s of men and women who fought and died under then banner of Comintern were preserving capitalism. See, i can do that too.

Nice try with the "sit there" bit too, made me seem like a real armchairist. I suppose you are writing this while on your laptop on a picket line?

[RedStruggle]

See, i can do that too.

The difference being that my argument has substance - I recognize that the decisions made by the Comintern had concrete impacts in terms of their implications for revolutions around the world, and that the Comintern making bad decisions was not the result of occasional incompetence on the part of Stalin or any of its other leaders. Rather, its decisions, and especially its tendency to veer from left to right, reflected the situation inside the Soviet Union and especially the changing interests of the bureaucracy. You cannot analyze the history of the Comintern in class terms because you deny that there was such a thing as a ruling bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.

[bailey_187]

The difference being that my argument has substance - I recognize that the decisions made by the Comintern had concrete impacts in terms of their implications for revolutions around the world, and that the Comintern making bad decisions was not the result of occasional incompetence on the part of Stalin or any of its other leaders. Rather, its decisions, and especially its tendency to veer from left to right, reflected the situation inside the Soviet Union and especially the changing interests of the bureaucracy. You cannot analyze the history of the Comintern in class terms because you deny that there was such a thing as a ruling bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.

You know what i always find funny about the attacks you guy launch on the "Stalinist Comintern" is some of the inconsistencies.

So i was reading the SWP BNP pamphlet and it said about the "failure of the Stalinist bureacrcay to work with the Social Democrats to stop the Nazis". But then i could go pick up another SWP writing and it will screen its head of at "Stalinists uniting whith the Capitalist republic" to stop the Fascists there. Maybe i am missing something?
You could say that the civil war with workers taking up arms etc showed that a popular front tactic did not need to be followed whereas in Germany workers had not taken up arms and Anarchists not set up Communes so a popular front was what was needed, but by the same token the Fascists in Germany were not taking up arms in Germany like they were in Spain so the situation did not appear so desperate. I dont know much about Spain, so i cant comment on whether Cominterns line was correct....

It seems that whatever the Comintern does, due to your insistance that a mythical "bureacratic class" had taken over, everything has to be somehow linked to this "bureacratic class" serving its need.

[RedStruggle]

Maybe i am missing something? Yes, you are, namely the difference between a popular front and a united front. The SWP and Trotskyists in general (including Trotsky himself in the 1930s) argue that the KPD should have entered into a united front with the SPD whereby both of the parties (or, for a given united front, all the forces involved - a united front is designed to secure unified action on the broadest possible basis) would have fought together against the Nazis whilst also being allowed to retain their own political independence and put forward their own perspectives on the nature of fascism and so on - this was the correct course to take because even if the SPD had refused to enter into the united front the effect would still have been to strengthen the KPD and the fight against fascism because the SPD would have been exposed. In this sense Trotsky's argument was the same as Lenin's argument that the CPGB should try to affiliate with the Labour Party in the 1920s, as Lenin suggested that if affiliation were successful then the CPGB would be in a better position to engage with the labour movement and the members of the Labour Party but if it were unsuccessful it would still be progressive because it would expose Labour as a reformist and anti-communist organization. A popular front is different in that it involves progressive forces subordinating themselves to the imperatives of bourgeois politics and class interests, i.e. giving up their political independence. This difference cannot be stressed enough because it's what separates a popular front from a united front. A government coalition of the kind that existed in France is popular-frontist by its very nature because in order to maintain the coalition and the bourgeois state that underpins all government coalitions Communists will always be forced to make concessions and oppose movements that have the potential to challenge the state. This is why Trotskyists opposed the Popular Front government in France whilst supporting a united front in Germany, and why we distinguish between united and popular fronts.


everything has to be somehow linked to this "bureacratic class" serving its needNot at all, Trotsky also made poor decisions as well. His call for a constituent assembly in post-1927 China, for example. But what I want to ask you is how many more horrific positions would it have taken for you to acknowledge that the reactionary role of the Comintern was a result of it having an anti-worker class orientation and having undergone a process of bureaucratic degeneration, and not just its leaders having the bad luck to make a series of incompetent decisions? How many dead revolutionaries were necessary? This is what I often find with more intelligent Stalinists such as yourself - you say "yes, the Soviet Union had problems x y and z, but..." and it doesn't matter how many problems you acknowledge, you always end up arguing that it was still socialist, or progressive in some way. What would the tipping point have been for you - how many anti-women anti-worker policies would the Soviet Union need to have adopted?

[bailey_187]

What? How do you "expose" a party that has been pretty much in power for 15 years? The SPD had proved it was a thoroughly bourgeois party. The Spanish republic was also a "centre left" government was it not?

Despite bad policies, we still support the USSR as a Socialist state because "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence”, as they say.

How, as a Marxist can you say that anti-women policies somehow make a society no longer socialist? Since when did a part of the superstructure, as shit and disgusting as it may be, determine the mode of production? Lets not derail the thread though.

[Crux]

So because RedStruggle is in your opinion a "cult follower" because he is a trotskyist you will just disregard his arguments? Who's the cult follower here? And while a lack of information does not mean lack of intelligence it apparently does not exclude it either.

[Kléber]

What? How do you "expose" a party that has been pretty much in power for 15 years? The SPD had proved it was a thoroughly bourgeois party. The Spanish republic was also a "centre left" government was it not?
The SPD had not proved that to the millions of militant workers who still took part in its organizations, voted for it, and staffed its paramilitary Iron Front. Those people did not react happily to initiatives like the "Red Referendum" where the KPD helped the Nazis against the Social-Democrats. The sectarianism which the SPD and KPD showed to each other doomed them both.


Despite bad policies, we still support the USSR as a Socialist state because "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence”, as they say.
Well then, since you've quoted a Great Man, you must be right. We should support every reformist liar whose website we can find online. It's like comrade Keyshia Cole said: "It ain't where he's at / it's where he wanna be!"


How, as a Marxist can you say that anti-women policies somehow make a society no longer socialist?
Actually the onus is on apologists for the Soviet and Chinese revisionists to prove the USSR or PRC was ever "socialist" since that claim is based on phony government statements.


Since when did a part of the superstructure, as shit and disgusting as it may be, determine the mode of production?
Since when did the presence of a Great Man, as shiny and nice-smelling as he may have been, determine the mode of production?

The exploitation of workers and super-exploitation of marginalized groups like women domestic workers and the rural poor is not "part of the superstructure" you can airbrush out of the picture, it was systemic. Lenin was quite clear about how socialist he considered the system of bureaucratic privilege to be when he said "that is state capitalism."


I don't see how trying to criticize your cult leader's positions amounts to "defending Stalinism". I'm not trying to defend the Comintern or Stalin's positions, since I have not studied Chinese history except for a few introductory works. Brar may be trying to do the same, but you seem to be under the impression that it is Brar who is posting under my name? I can assure you that I am not Brar and have never met him.
You asked for an explanation and you got one. I can assure you that no one mistook you for Harpal Brar.


Nice point for your "side". This shows that you're here to prove Stalin was wrong and Trotsky was right in everything. This just betrays your cult-worshiping attitude towards Trotsky.Flip two words around, and you just made a great analysis of Brar's videos.


Lack of information does not equate to lack of intelligence.
It does equate to lack of an argument.