The second paragraph of the same resolution of the February plenum of the E.C.C.I. says:
“The first wave of the broad revolutionary movement of workers and peasants which in the main proceeded under the slogans, and to a considerable extent under the leadership of the communist party, is over. It ended in several centers of the revolutionary movement with heaviest defeats for the workers and peasants, the physical extermination of the communists and revolutionary cadres of the labor and peasant movement in general.” (Our emphasis.)
When the “wave” was surging high, the E.C.C.I. said that the whole movement was entirely under the blue banner and leadership of the Kuomintang which even took the place of Soviets. It is precisely on that ground that the communist party was subordinated to the Kuomintang. But that is exactly why the revolutionary movement ended with “heaviest defeats.” Now when these defeats have been recognized, an attempt is being made to erase the Kuomintang from the past as if it had never existed, as if the E.C.C.I. had not declared the blue banner its own.
There have been no defeats either in Shanghai or in Wuhan in the past; there were merely transitions of the revolution “into a higher phase” — that is what we have been taught. Now the sum total of these transitions is suddenly declared to be “heaviest defeats for the workers and peasants.” However, in order to mask to some extent this unprecedented political bankruptcy of forecasts and evaluations, the concluding paragraph of the resolution declares:
“The E.C.C.I. makes it the duty of all sections of the C.I. to fight against the social democratic and Trotskyist slanders to the effect that the Chinese revolution has been liquidated [?].”
In the first paragraph of the resolution we were told that “Trotskyism” was the idea of the permanent Chinese revolution, that is, a revolution which is precisely at this time growing over from the bourgeois to the socialist phase; from the last paragraph we learn that according to the “Trotskyists,” “the Chinese revolution has been liquidated.” How can a “liquidated” revolution be a permanent revolution? Here we have Bukharin in all his glory.
Only complete and reckless irresponsibility permits of such contradictions which corrode all revolutionary thought at its roots.
If we are to understand by “liquidation” of the revolution the fact that the labor and peasant offensive has been beaten back and drowned in blood, that the masses are in a state of retreat and decline, that before another onslaught there must be, apart from many other circumstances, a molecular process at work among the masses which requires a certain period of time, the duration of which cannot be determined beforehand; if “liquidation” is to be understood in this way, it does not in any manner differ from the “heaviest defeats” which the E.C.C.I. has finally been compelled to recognize.
Or are we to understand liquidation literally, as the actual elimination of the Chinese revolution, that is, of the very possibility and inevitability of its rebirth on a new plane? One can speak of such a perspective seriously and so as not to create confusion only in two cases—if China were doomed to dismemberment and complete extirpation, an assumption for which there is no basis whatever, or if the Chinese bourgeoisie would prove capable of solving the basic problems of Chinese life in its own non-revolutionary way. Is it not this last variant which the theoreticians of the “bloc of four classes,” who directly drove the communist party under the yoke of the bourgeoisie, seek to ascribe to us now?
History repeats itself. The blind men who did not understand the scope of the defeat of 1923, for a year and a half accused us of “liquidationism” towards the German revolution. But even this lesson, which cost the International so dearly, taught them nothing. At present they use their old rubber stamps, only this time substituting China for Germany. To be sure, their need to find “liquidators” is more acute today than it was four years ago, for this time it is much too obviously apparent that if anybody did “liquidate” the second Chinese revolution it was the authors of the “Kuomintang” course.
The strength of Marxism lies in its ability to foretell. In this sense the Opposition can point to an absolute confirmation in experience of its prognosis. At first concerning the Kuomintang as a whole, then concerning the “Left” Kuomintang and the Wuhan government, and, finally, concerning the “deposit” on the third revolution, that is the Canton insurrection. What further confirmation could there be of one’s theoretical correctness?
The very same opportunist line, which through the policy of capitulation to the bourgeoisie has already brought heaviest defeats to the revolution during its first two stages, “grew over” in the third stage into a policy of adventurous raids on the bourgeoisie and thus made the defeat final.
Had the leadership not hurried yesterday to leap over the defeats which it had itself brought about, it would first of all have explained to the Communist Party of China that victory is not gained in one sweep, that on the road to the armed insurrection there still remains a period of intense, incessant, and savage struggle for political influence on the workers and peasants.
On September 27, 1927, we said to the Presidium of the E.C.C.I.:
“Today’s papers report that the revolutionary army has occupied Swatow. It is already several weeks that the armies of Ho Lung and Yeh Ting have been advancing. Pravda calls these armies revolutionary armies. . . . But I ask you: what prospects does the movement of the revolutionary army which captured Swatow raise before the Chinese revolution? What are the slogans of the movement? What is its program? What should be its organizational forms? What has become of the slogan of Chinese Soviets, which Pravda suddenly advanced for a single day in July?”
Without first counterposing the communist party to the Kuomintang as a whole, without the party’s agitation among the masses for Soviets and a Soviet government, without an independent mobilization of the masses under the slogans of the agrarian revolution and of national emancipation, without the creation, broadening, and strengthening of the local Soviets of workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies, the insurrection of Ho Lung and Yeh Ting, even apart from their opportunist policy, could not fail to be only an isolated adventure, a pseudo-Communist Makhno feat; it could not fail to crash against its own isolation. And it has crashed.
The Canton insurrection was a broader and deeper repetition of the Ho Lung-Yeh Ting adventure, only with infinitely more tragic consequences.
The February resolution of the E.C.C.I. combats putschistic moods in the Communist Party of China, that is, tendencies toward armed uprisings. It does not say, however, that these tendencies are a reaction to the entire opportunist policy of 1925–1927, and an inevitable consequence of the purely military command issued from above to “change the step,” without an evaluation of all that had been done, without an open revaluation of the basis of the tactic, and without a clear perspective. Ho Lung’s campaign and the Canton insurrection were—and under the circumstances could not fail to be—breeders of putschism.
A real antidote to putschism as well as to opportunism can be only a clear understanding of the truth that the leadership of the armed insurrection of the workers and poor peasants, the seizure of power, and the institution of a revolutionary dictatorship fall henceforth entirely upon the shoulders of the Communist Party of China. If the latter is permeated thoroughly with the understanding of this perspective, it will be as little inclined to improvise military raids on towns or armed insurrections in traps as to chase humbly after the enemy’s banner.
The resolution of the E.C.C.I. condemns itself to utter impotence by the fact alone that in arguing most abstractly concerning the inadmissibility of leaping over stages and the harmfulness of putschism, it entirely ignores the class content of the Canton insurrection and the short-lived Soviet regime which it brought into existence. We Oppositionists hold that this insurrection was an adventure of the leaders in an effort to save their “prestige.” But it is clear to us that even an adventure develops according to laws which are determined by the structure of the social milieu. That is why we look to the Canton insurrection for the features of the future phase of the Chinese revolution. These features fully correspond with our theoretical analysis made prior to the Canton uprising. But how much more imperative it is for the E.C.C.I., which holds that the Canton uprising was a correct and normal link in the chain of struggle, to give a clear class characterization of the Canton insurrection. However, there is not a word about this in the resolution of the E.C.C.I., although the Plenum met immediately after the Canton events. Is this not the most convincing proof that the present leadership of the Comintern, because it stubbornly pursues a false policy, is compelled to occupy itself with the fictitious errors of 1905 and other years without daring to approach the Canton insurrection of 1927, the meaning of which completely upsets the blueprint for revolutions in the East which is set down in the draft program?