Fruits of Stalin's Popular Frontism

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Students at Canton University hold nationalist rally on July 28, Fifty years ago, on December 13; 1927, bommunist workers in Canton made their last tand in defence of the Canton Commune, itself the last bloody catastrophe in the tragic story bf the 1925-1927 revolution in China.

Only a year earlier an estimated 30 million peasants were organised in peasant associations, land seizure was widespread, half of China had Fallen to a supposedly revolulionary army, and China's largest city Shanghai was on the verge of a workers' insurrection.

General It was only two and a half years since the workers pf Shanghai and Canton had gun the revolution by a veneral strike against the burdet of twelve students by British soldiers. * There are two reasons why It is very important to understand the failure of this thatled to, and the policies that led to it.

Firstly the defeat of the revolution in China led to the consolidation of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. To justify our rejection of the theory of 'socialism in one country put forward by the Stalinists it is necessary to show that the defeat in China was not inevitable.

alternative We must show that the path of world revolution was not a pious dream, but a real and necessary alternative to ¡fascism, the second world • war and the consequent death of 100 milion people.

Secondly the theory of the 'bloc of four classes' in backward countries which was the cornerstone of the disastrous policy of the Comintern is still alive and • kicking.

A million workers and peasants murdered in Indonesia are among its more recent victims, and a similar fate could well await the workers of Southern Africa if their present leadership is not overthrown.

This theory says that workers, peasants, petit-bourgeois elements, and the national bourgeoisie have a common interest in defeating imperialism.

Theory of stages

It originates from a theory of stages: that the working class should support the struggle for a national government based on private property ownership; and that only later will the working class independently lead the oppressed classes against its own bourgeoisie.

Of course this theory is nothing new to students of the Russian Revolution. It is precisely the theory put forward hu the Mensheviks to jus with Godfrey ify their collaboration the bourgeois Cadet Independence If it had not been for the principled struggle of Lenin and Trotsky for the complete independence of the working class, and against a theory of stages, there is no doubt that the Russian revolution would have suffered the same fate as the Chinese.

The lessons of the Russian revolution for other backward countries were put forward clearly at the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1922:

'There are to be found in the dependent countries two distinct movements which every day grow further and further apart from each other. One is the bourgeois nationalist movement with a programme of political independence under the bourgeois order, and the other is the mass action of the poor and ignorant peasants and workers for their liberation from all types of exploitation.

The former attempt to control the latter and often succeed to a certain extent, but the Communist International must struggle against such control and help develop the class consciousness of the working masses.

For the overthrow of the foreign capitalists which is the first step towards revolution in the colonies the cooperation of the bourgeois nationalist elements is useful.

But the foremost and necessary task is the formation communist parties which will organise the peasants and workers and lead them to revolution and to the establishment of soviet republics.

Thus the masses in the backward countries may reach communism not through capitalist developadvanced capitalist countries.

The Chinese Communist Party had to decide its attitude to the weak but growing nationalist party the Kuomintang.

Students

This party had its basis of support in the students and Chinese intelligensia, although it had already gained some support both from the working class and the national bourgeoisie.

This had been shown by 1926 the strike wave which accompanied student demonstrations against an imperialist carve-up of China in 1919.

Military academy

The Communists after Comintern advice decided to enter the Kuomintang in 1922. They worked to transform the Kuomintang into an effective mass organisation.

With Soviet help they established a military academy which trained an officer corps for the future Kuomintang army. But very soon they began to back away from conflicts with the right-wing leadership and programme of the Kuomintang, for fear of provoking an open split.

This was a fundam ental erIor because the Kuomintang depended for gaining power on movement of workers and peasants which went far beyond its boul geois Illusions If the Communists had clearly drawn the class lines between themselves and the right-wing programme of the Kuomintang there is no doubt which the mass movement would have chosen.

As it was, enormous illusions were sown in the masses about the first Kuomintang government which they thrust into power in Canton in 1924.

But the programme of the Kuomintang was entirely bourgeois. It stood for the unification of China which was split up between countless warlords with private armies.

It stood for bourgeois democracy where an 'enlightened' government would rule in the interests of the people's livelihood, and would ensure that peasants had a fair deal from landlords.

In other words it accepted the whole system of land ownership which was completely unequal. and dominated by absentee landlords.

Land seizure

And it accepted the right of capitalists to employ labour on whatever terms it could enforce on the impoverished and dispossessed peasants who flocked to the Chinese cities. In contrast the peasant movement around Canton quickly moved beyond demands for rent reductions to the seizure of lands and refusal to pay rents, interest, and taxes.

The spread of commercial agriculture into South and Central China over the previous fifty years had totally ruined the bulk of the peasants.

Unable to compete with more efficient and highly capitalised methods the peasants had been forced to sell their land and move further and further into debt to landlords and moneylenders.

By the 1920s over half the peasants were entirely landless while about 10% of the population owned 80% of the land. There could be no solution to these problems as long as land and capital remained in private hands.

This in itself made a stable bourgeois regime in China impossible, and provided a constant driving force for the revolutionary movement.

But it was among the workers that organisation and political activity grew most rapidly.

Demonstrations

There were 15 million workers in China of whom about 3 million were true industrial workers. These were concentrated in the sea and riverside cities penetrated by foreign capital.

By 1924 a million workers were organised by trade unions and a series of economic and political strikes shut down both foreign and native owned industries.

The culmination was the strikes arising out of the murder by British soldiers of twelve students on a worker-student solidarity march on May 30th, 1925. Half a million workers throughout China went on strike.

On June 11th a strikers' demonstration in Hankow was attacked by British sailors killing another eight people. Finally British and French troops in Canton fired on a demonstration killing 52 people.

The result was a general strike in Hongkong and Shameen, the foreign concession in Canton, which lasted fifteen months. The strikers elected the first Soviet in China.

Boycott

The Soviet took over control of the streets in Canton and operated a complete boycott of Hongkong and Shameen.

Two thousand pickets enforced the strike and boycott, and offenders were brought before a workers' The demands of the strike included an eight hour day, no child labour, the right to Stalin free speech and right to vote.

This state of affairs was of course unacceptable not only to the foreign powers, but also to the native bourgeoisie.

The Kuomintang was brought to power by the mass movement but its leaders immediately began to negotiate a "return to normality" with the British authorities.

At the same time as preparing for the Northern expedition to unify China the bourgeois leadership prepared a decisive blow to crush the mass movement in Canton :.020.

and curb influence.

On the other hand the Communists were completely blinded by the positions now being put forward by Stalin and the Comintern. The Stalinists were fast abandoning the perspective of world They considered that their interests in China would best be served not by a struggle for working class leadership but by a strong nationalist movement to upset the Western powers.

They therefore began to redefine the nature of the Kuomintang to justify the Chinese Communist Party's subservience to it.

Rather than a bourgeois-nationalist party with which the Communists had a temporary alliance, the

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and Li Ta-chao leaving the First Congress of the KMT side by side The execution of communists after the Canton uprising of 1927 Sun Yat-sen Kuomintang was now a revolutionary bloc of the workers, peasants, intellectuals, and urban democracy on the basis of a community of class interests of these strata in the struggle against the imperialists and the whole militarist-feudal order.

"Reliable ally"

Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the young bour geois officers in the Kuomin tang, was described as 'the most reliable ally" of the Communists.

MEAS The Communists were told to try and hold back the peasants from land seizure because this would undermine the unity of the Kuomintang.

Chiang Kai-shek had no illusions of unity. On March 20 1926 he arrested all Soviet advisors and Communists holding important positions.

Disarmed

He occupied the headquarters of the CantonHongkong strike committee and disarmed the pickets.

He then called a conference of the Kuomintang to recognise his victory.

The Communists were told they could remain in the Kuomintang only. if they accented certain conditions.

They could not criticise the Kuomintang programme. They had to hand over a list of their members. They could not serve as the head of any departments. All instructions from the CP's Central Committee had to be submitted to a joint committee of the two parties for approval.

Many members of the Communist Party were convinced by this practical confirmation of the class nature of the Kuomintang.

But Borodin, the Comintern representative persuaded them that it would be wrong to leave the Kuomintang. He argued that the conflict could be put off until the Northern expedition had brought new masses into action.

So the Comintern proceeded to cover up all news of the coup for over a year.

Nevertheless Trotsky and the opposition had • considered the situation and were now recommending withdrawal from the Kuomintang.

Canton was placed under a military dictatorship which eventually ended the strike with no concessions from the British. Meanwhile the Northern expedition went from one triumph to another.

The combination of a disciplined army and the mass mobilisation of workers and peasants was irresistible. By November 1926 most of Central China had been occupied.

As the nationalist government occupied each successive area, they immediately began to take action against the mass movement.

This was true in the more Western provinces occupied by the 'Left Kuomintang.

But the ferocity of Chiang Kai-shek's attacks on the masses in the more Eastern provinces actually held up his advance for several months.

This gave the Communist Party the opportunity to use the mass movement Central China to build an alternative power centre to Chiang Kai-shek. But Comintern policy prevented this being done.

The Kuomintang had now been admitted as a sympathising section of the Comintern, against Trotsky's sole dissenting vote!

In October 1926- Stalin telegraphed the Chinese Communists to keep the peasant movement from going too far to avoid alienating the Kuomintang generals.

Even Mao Tse-tung who was always a firm supporter of the bloc of four classes theory had harsh words to say about the 'don't go too far' policy:

'A revolution is an uprising, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. A rural revolution is a revolution by which the peasantry overthrows the authority of the feudal landlord class. If the peasants do not use the maximum of their strength they can never overthrow the authority of the landlords which has been deeply rooted for thousands of years. All the actions labelled as "going too far" had a revolutionary significance in this period. To put it bluntly, it was necessary to create a brief reign of terror in every rural area; otherwise one could never suppress the activities of the counterrevolution or overthrow the authority of the gentry'.

Unfortunately the Communists had allied the themselves precisely with a section of this gentry. In March 1927 the Communists were given the ministries of Labour and Agriculture in the new National Government, which was set up in Wuhan in Central China.

As the Kuomintang newspaper put it:

'The Communist Party will have to fulfill its obligations to enable the party (the Kuomintang) and the government to exercise full control over the mass movement'.

Chiang Kai-shek was meanwhile aiming all his strength at the capture of China's financial centre Shanghai, where he would be able to do a deal with the imperialists.

The major obstacle that faced him was the working class movement in Shanghai.

Huge demonstrations in support of the Northern expedition were held. in Shanghai in November and December 1926, in spite of repressive measures by the local warlord and British authorities.

On February 17 Kuomintang troops reached to within twenty five miles of the city. The Communist-led General Labour Union called general strike under the slogan ''Hail Chiang Kai-shek". • But they made no plans for an inssurection, assuming Kuomintang troops would shortly enter the city.

Reign of terror

Chiang Kai-shek however, had no such sense of solidarity with the striking workers.

He ordered his troops to cease their advance while a reign of terror was unleashed on the workers in Shanghai.

Spontaneously an uprising began to develop, but without plans or discipline this was crushed with great But the movement began to press forward again after only a few days.

rushed 10,000 troops and fleet to Shanghai.

The Shanghai workers this time made plans for a simultaneous general strike and insurrection on March Workers' A workers' militia of 5,000 was set up, and plans were made for the capture of police stations and post and telephone offices.

The militia had only 150 firearms to begin with, so that attacks were mainly made with clubs, axes, and knives until sufficient arms had been captured. * 800,000 workers answered the strike call and within twenty four hours, the picket had eliminated the last resistance to the revolution.

The same day, Chiang Kaishek's soldiers entered the city, having disobeyed orders to remain where they were.

The division which marched in was the most class conscious in the army and the one Chiang • Kai-shek would have least wished to have in the city.

Chiang himself arrived on March 20 and at once started discussion with the Chinese bourgeoisie and the imperialists on a counter-revolution.

Central Committee Chiang gave orders for the 3000 pro-communist troops to leave the city.. Their commandant responded by personally meeting the Central Committee of the CCP and offering to arrest Chiang to forestall a coup.

But publicly the Communists following instructions from Moscow were still denying the possibility of a betrayal by Chiang in the face of his obvious preparations for a coup.

Privately the Comintern was instructing the Communists to hide or bury their arms to avoid a military conflict with Chiang.

The Comintern representatives in Shanghai urgently contacted Moscow criticising the whole policy of subordination to the national bourgeoisie and demanding a bold policy to prevent a coup.

But their letter was disregarded. The sympathetic soldiers were told to accept their order to leave the city.

Shanghai workers were thus deprived not only of all foreknowledge of Chiang Kaishek's intentions, but also of the means to resist.

Chiang brought in loyal troops and strengthened them with ur iderworld thugs recruited by the secret societies.

Before dawn on April 12 they fell upon the unprepared worker pickets defending the headquarters of the General Labour Union, and other working class organisations and massacred them.

(One of the few pickets to escape was Chou-En-lai the future Prime Minister).

The General Labour Union then foolishly called a protest demonstration which resulted in 300 being machine-gunned.

This was the start of a reign of terror in Shanghai in which many thousands lost their lives.

The General Labour Union was dissolved and a state controlled "Workers Trade Alliance" set up in its place.

The Comintern was now forced to admit Chiang's treachery. But it still refused to admit that its policy of a bloc with the Chinese bourgeoisie was wrong.

In Stalin's eyes, the events in Shanghai confirmed that a revolution led by the working class was not on the cards and that a sympathetic bourgeois China was the best that the Soviet Union could hope for.

He therefore instructed the CP to form an alliance with the left KMT.

Only the left opposition was still insisting on the possibility and necessity of a socialist revolution.

To this end the CP agreed to the disarmament of worker pickets in Wuhan.

33ica Students and workers protest a To prove their case they pointed to the development of the peasant and workers' movement in West Central This area was still controlled by the left Kuomintang, and the Communists themselves were struggling to hold back the mass movement.

If they had adopted an independent socialist policy even at this late hour, there was a possibility they could have turned back the tide of reaction that was about to overwhelm them.

The left KMT were caught between fear of the mass movement and fear of Chiang Kai-shek. Their response was to try a series of deals with various Northern Chinese warlords.

When these warloads deserted them for their natural ally Chiang, these 'lefts' had to make their final choice.

And there was really no choice for them. They came from the propertied classes, and the mass movement challenged the right of property. Within two months of the Shanghai coup the left KMT had decided to expel the Communists and destroy the labour movement in Wahan.

In a further month they accepted formally the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek.

Meanwhile the mass movement had been left leaderless as the Communists counselled moderation and compromise in the face of the terror campaign that was unleashed by the bourgeoisie.

Only then, when the whole of Central China was under reactionary control did the Communists plan a series ultra-left uprisings.

All of these ended in bloody defeats.

The last and bloodiest defeat was at Canton. As has been described above, Canton was subjected to a military dictatorship after Chiang's coup there in March 1926.

The workers' organisations had been all but destroyed there. Without the support of the mass of the workers, the Communists now organised an uprising of 3,000 supporters in the city and proclaimed a •socialist commune.

Retaken Within two days, the city was retaken by the Kuomintang with 6,000 killed.

Summing up the events of 1925 to 1927, it is clear that the possibilities of establishling a working class leadership in the struggle against imperialism existed.

Given a bold independent leadership and programme, the tens of millions peasants and workers brought into action during the revolution would have made the establishment of a bourgeois regime impossible and would have gone on to confront the task of establishing a socialist state. As it was, the social tension in the Chinese countryside over the land question was so intense that the Kuomintang's rule was always unstable.

It would only be maintained by constant terror and support from imperialism. gainst imperialist domination But the defeat of thr working class in 1927 left ar imprint on China and on thi Chinese Communist Party which lasts to this day.

In April 1927, the CCI had 60,000 membersof whon 30,000 were workers. A yea later half the members ha‹ been killed, and there wer only 3,000 workers left in thi party and not a singl functioning industrial cell.

The first signs of a retur of political activity in th working class were in 196:

during the 'Cultural Revolu tion' and these were quick!!

crushed.

This retreat from an activ part in the overthrow o imperialism enabled ..th Stalinist leadership of th CCP to pursue a policy o strengthening their own stat at the expense of intel national revolution and o their own working class.

On the international scale the defeat in China dealt a crushing blow to the hopes of spreading the Russiar It thereby weakened Trotsky and the left opposi tion, although their analysi had been correct if somewhal belated, it strengthened Stalir and made more certain the triumph of fascism Germany.

It inaugurated a period of two decades of the mosi crushing defeats ever sufferer by the international working class.

Such are the penalties fol wrong alliances and wron!

policies in period

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PRU CHAMBERLAYNE reviews 'Love of Worker Bees' by Allexan Kollontai, republished in a new edition by Virago Books.

Kollontai wrote these three stories in 1920-23. Her aim was to propagandise in simple terms her ideas on: the dilemmas facing women revolutionaries in love and marriage.

She hoped to strengthen women in their struggle for emancipation and in their forging of a 'new morality'.

The rallying cry at the end of Vasilisa Malygina, the longest story is 'We must live!.. Live ad work, work and fight, live and love life..

It is only by throwing over the shackles of her marriage that Vasulisa can rediscover her revolutionary spirit and zest for activity Castigated Even when it was published in 1923 Love of Worker Bees was regarded dubiously as being preoccupied with sexual matters.

By the 1930s it was positively castigated as "petty bourgeois decadence' It was undoubtedly not attracted them to in the first place.

Invariably when revolutionary activity allowed a more settled existence traditional 'husband' expectations would emerge.

Vasilisa who has longed to be with Vladimir for months and months eventually leaves her exhausting but exciting work in setting up a housing commune to join him at his post in the provinces.

Absorb

There she is appalled to find that her ex-anarchist, Bolshevik activist husband, now director of a firm, has become totally absorbed in trade and business, has embraced NEP policies as an end in themselves rather than as a means to an end, and uses his party connections opportunistically.

He has acquired a large house and fitted it out luxuriously, employs servants expects Vasilisa to run the house and organise the entertainment of his business associates as 'the director's wife' , and also keeps bourgeois and decorative mistress.

Cynicism and privilege flourish under NEP and so does bureaucracy in the the contradiction being that strict bureaucratic discipline is in some sense necessary in order to control the resurgence of arrogant capitalist tendencies.

Soon Vasilisa has involved herself in organising poorly paid women workers in a mat factory and she even lands up helping her husband's loaders to win better conditions.

In this work she meets party activists whom she respects, most particularly a woman, Lisa, who has recently left her husband and reemerged into political life, who cannot understand why Vasilisa tolerates her position.

Embedded

For Vasilisa it takes a long time to realise the extent of her own depression and Kollontai inactivity.

So deeply embedded in her mind is the image of Vladimir as an active revolutionary, and so deep does her attachment to him run that she constantly tries to convince herself that that happiness will return.

She takes her own fears and anxieties about him as signs of her own love for him:

"The threads that bound him to her were fine but they were fast and tied so artfully that even Vasya herself had never noticed before how they trapped her' In The sisters, too, the husband who originally loves his wife for her strength and activism becomes impatient street market during the NEP period with her 'neglect of household tasks.

He also is a nepman, and as such comes to enjoy his comforts and privileges more then less.

Only the Three Generations shows a new woman who manages not to become tied down by love and domestic relationships because she treats sex altogether more casually interpreting "love' in a more general sense of comradeship and collectivity.

Relationships

This 'new kind' of love is not a developed theme in these stories; it is discussed more fully in some of Kollontai's other writings, where she sees jealous and possessive relationships as a consequence of bourgeois individual property relations.

Collective property relations should lay the material basis for transforming the emotional but this can only be achieved through struggle.

It is this struggle which Kollontai wanted to encourage women to take up, and the liberation she advocated stands out sharply from that sought by petty bourgeois feminists. For it is not personal liberation for personal ends which is sought, but for collective ends.

It is only by freeing themselves emotionally that Stalin (left) in 1926 women can their full strength the revolutionary struggle.

It is only because of the gains of the revolution that Vasilisa can her pregnancy at the end of the story, o established and the knowing that a creche can child collectively cared for.

But it is only because she has freed herself that she can devote her full energies her union work, to improving the conditions of workers-including the creche.

This commitment socialist ends is what makes this book revolutionary and socialist and by no means petty bourgeois as the Stalinists would have it.

----- pull-quotes -----

ment, but led by the class conscious proletariat of the

Fearing an attack on their concessions, the imperialists