March-April 1928
First Letter, March 2, 1928
Pravda prints in several installments an extensive article entitled, "The
Significance and Lessons of the Canton Insurrection." This article is truly
remarkable for the invaluable, substantiated, and firsthand information it contains as
well as for its lucid exposition of contradictions and confusion of a principled nature.
It begins with an evaluation of the social nature of the revolution itself. As we all
know, it is a bourgeois-democratic, a workers' and peasants' revolution. Yesterday it was
supposed to unfold under the banner of the Kuomintang-today it unfolds against the
Kuomintang.
But according to the author's appraisal, the character of the revolution, and even the
entire official policy, remains bourgeois democratic. We turn next to the chapter that
deals with the policy of the soviet power. Here we find stated that: "in the
interests of the workers, the Canton Soviet issued decrees establishing . workers' control
of production, effecting this control through factory committees [and] . . .
nationalization of large-scale industry, transport, and banks."
It goes on to enumerate the following measures: "the confiscation of all the
apartments of the big bourgeoisie for the use of the toilers. . .
Thus the workers were in power in Canton, through their soviets. Actually the entire power
was in the hands of the Communist Party, i.e., the party of the proletariat. The program
included not only the confiscation of whatever feudal estates still exist in China, not
only the workers' control of production, but also the nationalization of large-scale
industry, banks, and transport, as well as the confiscation of bourgeois apartments, and
all their property for the use of the toilers. The question arises: If such are the
methods of a bourgeois revolution, then what would the socialist revolution look like in
China? What other class would do the overthrowing and by what sort of different measures?
We observe that given a real development of the revolution, the formula of a
bourgeois-democratic, a workers' and peasants' revolution applied to China in the present
period, in the given stage of its development, proved to be a hollow fiction, a bagatelle.
Those who insisted upon this formula prior to the Canton insurrection, and above all those
who insist on it now, after this insurrection, are repeating (under different conditions)
the principled mistake committed by Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, and the rest in the year
1917.~~
An objection may be raised that the problem of the agrarian revolution in China has not
been solved as yet! True. But neither was it solved in our own country prior to the
establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In our country it was not the
bourgeois-democratic but the proletarian socialist revolution that achieved the agrarian
revolution which, moreover, was far more deepgoing than the one that is possible in China,
in view of the historical conditions of the Chinese system of land ownership. It may be
said that China has not matured for the socialist revolution as yet. But that would be an
abstract and a lifeless manner of posing the question. Was Russia, then, if taken by
itself, ripe for socialism? Russia was ripe for the dictatorship of the proletariat as the
only method of solving all national problems; but so far as socialist development is
concerned, the latter, proceeding from the economic and cultural conditions of a country,
is indissolubly bound up with the entire future development of the world revolution. This
applies in whole and in part to China as well. If eight or ten months ago this was a
forecast (rather belated, at that), then today it is an irrefutable deduction from the
experience of the Canton uprising. It would be erroneous to argue that the Canton uprising
was an adventure by and large, and that the actual class relations were reflected in it in
a distorted form.
In the first place the author of the above-mentioned article does not at all consider the
Canton insurrection as an adventure, but as an entirely lawful stage in the development of
the Chinese revolution. The general official point of view is to combine the appraisal of
the revolution as bourgeois democratic with an approval of the program of action of the
Canton government. But even from the standpoint of appraising the Canton insurrection as a
putsch, one could not arrive at the conclusion that the formula of the
bourgeois-democratic revolution is viable. The insurrection was obviously untimely. It
was. But the class forces and the programs that inevitably flow from them were disclosed
by the insurrection in all their lawfulness. The best proof of this is: that it was
possible and necessary to foresee in advance the relation of forces that was laid bare by
the Canton insurrection. And this was foreseen.
This question is most closely bound up with the paramount question of the Kuomintang.
Incidentally, the author of the article relates, with assumed satisfaction, that one of
the fighting slogans of the Canton overturn was the cry: "Down with the
Kuomintang!" The banners and insignia of the Kuomintang were torn down and trampled
underfoot. But only recently, even after the "betrayal" of Chiang Kai-shek, and
after the "betrayal" of Wang Ching-wei, we heard solemn vows that: "We will
not surrender the banner of the Kuomintang!" Oh, these sorry revolutionists! .
The workers of Canton outlawed the Kuomintang, proclaiming all its tendencies illegal.
What does this imply? It implies that for the solution of the fundamental national tasks,
not only the big but also the petty bourgeoisie could not put forward such a force as
would enable the party of the proletariat to solve jointly with it the tasks of the
"bourgeois-democratic revolution." But "we' are overlooking the
many-millioned peasantry and the agrarian revolution. . . . A pitiable objection . for the
key to the entire situation lies precisely in the fact that the task of conquering the
peasant movement falls upon the proletariat, i.e., directly upon the Communist Party; and
this task cannot be solved in reality differently than it was solved by the Canton
workers, i.e., in the shape of the dictatorship of the proletariat whose methods from the
very outset grow over inevitably into socialist methods. Conversely, the general fate of
these methods, as well as of the dictatorship as a whole, is decided in the last analysis
by the course of world development, which naturally does not exclude but on the contrary
presupposes a correct policy on the part of the proletarian dictatorship, that consists of
strengthening and developing the alliance between the workers and peasants, and of an
all-sided adaptation to national conditions, on the one hand, and to the course of world
development, on the other. To play with the formula of the bourgeois-democratic
revolution, after the experience of the Canton insurrection, is to march against the
Chinese October, for without a correct general political orientation, revolutionary
uprisings cannot be victorious, no matter how heroic and self-sacrificing they may be.
To be sure, the Chinese revolution has "passed into a new and higher phase"-but
this is correct not in the sense that it will begin surging upward tomorrow or the next
day, but in the sense that it has revealed the hollowness of the slogan of the bourgeois-
democratic revolution. Engels said that a party that misses a favorable situation and
suffers a defeat as a result, turns into a nonentity. This applies to the Chinese party as
well. The defeat of the Chinese revolution is not a bit smaller than the defeat in Germany
in 1923. Of course, we must understand the reference to "nonentity" in a
sensible way. Many things bespeak the fact that the next period in China will be a period
of revolutionary reflux, a slow process of assimilating the lessons of the cruelest
defeats, and consequently, the weakening of the direct influence of the Communist Party.
Thence flows the necessity for the latter to draw profound conclusions in all questions of
principles and tactics. And this is impossible without an open and all-sided discussion of
all the fatal mistakes perpetrated hitherto.
Of course this activity must not turn into the activity of self- isolation. It is
necessary to keep a firm hand on the pulse of the working class in order not to commit a
mistake in estimating the tempo, and not only to identify a new mounting wave, but also to
prepare for it in time.
Second Letter [Undated]
Your letter was also twenty-two days in transit. It is difficult to discuss vital
questions under such conditions, and in my opinion the Chinese question belongs among the
most vital ones, because the struggle is still unfolding in China, the partisan armies are
in the field, and an armed insurrection has been placed on the agenda, as you no doubt
know from the resolution of the last plenum of the ECCI. 75
To begin, I want to reply to a minor but aggravating point. You say that I needlessly
polemicize against you under the pseudonym of Zinoviev. In this you are entirely mistaken.
I believe, incidentally, that the misunderstanding arose as a result of the irregular mail
delivery. I wrote about the Canton affair at a time when I was apprised of the famous
letter of the two musketeers 7'i; in addition to this, reports came from Moscow that they
had been supplied with secretaries in order to expose "Trotskyism." I felt
certain that Zinoviev would publish several of my letters on the Chinese question in which
I set out to prove that in no case would there be such a special epoch in the Chinese
revolution as an epoch of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry,
because incomparably fewer preconditions exist there than in our own country, and as
experience, and not theory, has already shown us, the democratic dictatorship of the
proletariat and peasantry as such failed to materialize in our own country. Thus, my
entire letter was written with a view to the past and future "exposures" on the
part of Zinoviev.
In referring to the charge of ignoring the peasantry, I did not for a moment forget
certain of our disputes on China-but I had no reason whatever to put in your lips this
banal charge against me: for you, I trust, recognize that it is possible, without in the
least ignoring the "peasantry," to arrive at a conclusion that the only road for
solving the peasant question lies through the dictatorship of the proletariat. So that
you, my dear E.A.-please do not take offense at a hunter's simile-assume gratuitously the
role of a startled hare who concludes that the rifle is being aimed at him when the
pursuit follows a totally different track.
I came to the opinion that there would not be any democratic dictatorship of the
proletariat and peasantry in China from the time the Wuhan government was first formed. I
based myself precisely upon the analysis of the most fundamental social facts, and not
upon the manner in which they were refracted politically, which, as is well known, often
assumes peculiar forms, since, in this sphere, factors of a secondary order enter in,
including national tradition. I became convinced that the basic social facts have already
cleared the road for themselves through all the peculiarities of political
superstructures, when the Wuhan shipwreck destroyed utterly the legend of the left
Kuomintang, allegedly embracing nine-tenths of the entire Kuomintang. In 1924-25, it was
almost an accepted commonplace that the Kuomintang was a workers' and peasants party. This
party "unexpectedly" proved to be bourgeois capitalist. Then another version was
created, that the latter was only a "summit," but that the genuine Kuomintang,
nine-tenths of the Kuomintang was a revolutionary peasant party. Once again, it turned out
"unexpectedly" that the left Kuomintang, in whole and in part, proceeded to
smash the peasant movement which, as is well known, has great traditions in China and its
own traditional organizational forms that became widespread during these years. That is
why, when you write in the spirit of absolute abstraction that "it is impossible to
say today whether the Chinese petty bourgeoisie will be able to create any sort of parties
analogous to our SRs, or whether such parties will be created by the right-wing communists
who split off, etc.," I reply to this argument from "the theory of
improbabilities" as follows:
In the first place, even were the SRs to be created, there would not at all follow from
this any dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, precisely as none followed in our
own country, despite immeasurably more favorable conditions; secondly, instead of guessing
whether the petty bourgeoisie is capable in the future- i.e., with the further aggravation
of class relations-of playing a greater or lesser independent role (suppose a piece of
wood suddenly fires a bullet?), one should rather ask why did the petty bourgeoisie prove
incapable of playing such a role in the recent past, when it had at its disposal the most
favorable conditions- the Communist Party was driven into the Kuomintang, the latter was
declared a workers' and peasants' party, it was supported by the entire authority of the
Communist International and the USSR, the peasant movement was far-flung and sought for
leadership, the intelligentsia was widely mobilized since 1919, etc., etc.
You write that China still faces the "colossal problem of the agrarian
bourgeois-democratic revolution." To Lenin, this was the root of the question. Lenin
pointed out that the peasantry even as an estate is capable of playing a revolutionary
role in the struggle against the estate of the landed nobility, and the bureaucracy
indissolubly linked up with the latter, crowned by the tsarist autocracy. In the
subsequent stage, says Lenin, the kulaks will break with the workers, and together with
them a considerable section of the middle peasants, but this will take place during the
transition to the proletarian revolution, as an integral part of the international
revolution. But how do matters stand in China? China has no landed nobility; no peasant
estate, fused by community of interests against the landlords. The agrarian revolution in
China is aimed against the urban and rural bourgeoisie. Radek has stressed this often-even
Bukharin has half-understood this now. In this lies the gist of the matter!
You write that "the social content of the first stage of the future third Chinese
revolution cannot be characterized as a socialist overturn." But we run the risk here
of falling into Bukharinistic scholasticism, and of occupying ourselves with splitting
hairs over terminology instead of with a living characterization of the dialectic process.
What was the content of our revolution from October 1917 to July 1918? We left the mills
and factories in the hands of the capitalists, confining ourselves to workers' control; we
expropriated the landed estates and put through the petty- bourgeois SR program of the
socialization of land; and to crown it all, during this period, we had a coparticipant in
power in the form of the Left SRs. One could say with complete justification that
"the social content of the first stage of the October revolution cannot be
characterized as a socialist overturn." I believe it was Yakovlev and several other
Red professors who spilled a great deal of sophistry over this. Lenin said that we
completed the bourgeois revolution en route. But the Chinese revolution (the
"third") will have to begin the drive against the kulak at its very first
stages; it will have to expropriate the concessions of foreign capitalists, for, without
this, there cannot be any unification of China in the sense of a genuine state sovereignty
in economics and politics. In other words, the very first stage of the third Chinese
revolution will be less bourgeois in content than the first stage of the October
revolution.
On the other hand, the Canton events (as earlier Chinese events, etc.) demonstrated that
the "national" bourgeoisie, too, having behind it Hong Kong, 77 foreign
advisers, and foreign cruisers, assumes such a position in relation to the slightest
independent movement of workers and peasants as renders workers' control of production
even less likely than was the case among us. In all probability we shall have to
expropriate mills and factories, of any size, at the very first moments of the "third
Chinese revolution."