Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 12:58:54 +0000
Subject: M-G: Re: M-I: China, Trotsky and bourgeois-conciliationism


> Date:          Sat, 8 Mar 1997 09:45:20 -0500 (EST)

> Proyect writes on Trotsky's concept of permanent revolution:

> David, this formula is not even worth 2 cents. You like to repeat it like
> a parrot but this is not Marxism. You show an eagerness to answer my
> Trotsky quotes with other Trotsky quotes, but this is not the method of a
> Marxist but of scholasticism. What interests is not what Trotsky said
> about China in 1927, but what happened afterward in 1937, 1947 and 1957,
> etc. Trotskyism is simply not the place to go on these matters since it is
> satisfied with repeating the "lessons of 1927".
> 
 The reason I stopped with 1927 is that if you dont understand what 
was going on then there is no way you can make it up afterwards. The 
Trotsky quotes I used were fuller quotes expanding on your own 
quotes.  They showed that we agreed on a national-democratic 
revolution going over to a socialist revolution, its timing dependent 
on the SU and the world revolution.  What you do not accept is that 
the initial democratic revolution must be led by the armed 
proletariat itself mobilising the `plebian masses' - the poor 
peasantry etc - which was not possible unless the CCP broke from the 
KMT and established its organisation and political independence. 
Hence Trotsky's distinction between the two methods of fighting: 
bourgeois-conciliationist vs the worker-peasant. (147). The 
bourgeois-conciliationist method (liquidation in the KMT) would see
the national-democratic revolution succumb to the reaction of the KMT. 
Trotsky was proven right.

This lesson is crucial for understanding what happened then. The 
beheading of the second Chinese revolution led to a Maoist deviation 
in which the peasantry became the leading class. The Third Chinese 
revolution was therefore a national revolution led by the CCP at the 
head of the peasantry. This revolution was bureaucratic from birth 
without the active leading role of the proletariat and created a 
transitional deformed workers state. Because it fell short of 
socialism it was also an incomplete national-democratic revolution.
 A political revolution in which the workers kicked out the bureaucracy 
would have opened the way to socialism; instead today we see an advanced 
capitalist restoration underway under the reactionary bourgeois 
`sign' of completing the national-democratic revolution.The crime of 
1927 comes back to haunt the second Chinese counter-revolution. 

As for Nicaragua.  The Sandinistas led a partly successful  national
revolution but remained trapped inside the "bourgeois-conciliationist" 
method. Because they had a menshevik view of history and their role 
in it, they could not  establish their political and organisational 
independence from the bourgeoisie on the basis of the 
"worker-peasant" method Trotsky spoke of in China.  As a result their  
regime failed to make the transition to socialism, and of course 
failed to realise  the national-democratic revolution, and predictably 
succumbed to the bourgeois reaction, again in the name of `completing 
the national-democratic revolution. 

In this way Stalinism/menshevism, by suppressing the opposition and 
Trotskyism,  contained the world revolution, limited national 
revolutions to at best bureaucratic workers states, and set the scene 
for todays counter-revolutionary defeat of those workers gains and 
the restoration of capitalism.  

So the significance of 1927 is that it confirms the lessons of 
permanent revolution in 1917 and provides a method for understanding 
and concsiously intervening in every national-democratic revolution since. 
The Chinese Trotskyists did that.  In Nicaragua real Trotskyism, 
rather than fake SWP-type `trotskyism', was also suppressed like every 
other expression of independent working class politics.

Dave.



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