Date: Sat, 8 Mar 1997 01:31:04 +0000
Subject: M-G: Trotsky votes for Chiang Kai-shek


Godena claims that Trotsky supported Chiang Kai-shek in the 
Comintern. Actually the Kuomintang  was admitted to the 
Comintern as a "sympathising section" in March 1926 over Trotsky's 
opposition. Chiang Kai-shek was at the same time made an honorary 
member of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Comintern.

 Here is what Trotsky wrote about the KMT.  
(All quotes from Leon Trotsky on China. LTOC) 
"Let us take the entire tactical, or rather strategical line in China 
as a whole. The Kuomintang is the party of the liberal bourgeoisie in 
the period of revolution - the liberal bourgeoisie that draws behind 
it, deceives, and betrays the workers and peasants.
The Communist Party, in accordance with your directives, remains 
throughout all the betrayals within the Kuaomintang and submits to 
its bourgeois discipline. 
The Kuomintang as a whole enters into the Comintern and does not 
submit to its discipline, but merely utilizes the name and authority 
of the Comintern to dupe the Chinese workers and peasants".  August 
1st 1927. (LTOC 253)
"Even worse, the KMT, to this day, remains a member of the Comintern. 
Which KMT? the KMT of Chiang Kai-shek or that of Wang Ching-wei? But 
now they have united. Thus the entire KMT of Chiang Kai-shek and Wang 
Ching-Wei still belongs to the Comintern. You are in a hurry to expel 
Vujovic and myself. But you have forgotten to expel the 
comrades-in-arms Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Ching-wei"  Sept 1927 (LTOC 
273).
"The Kuomintang went infinitely further and secured a place for 
itself not on ly in the Peasants' International and the League 
against Imperialism, but even knocked at the doors of the Comintern 
and was welcomed there with the blessing of the Politburo and the 
AUCP, marred by only one dissenting vote."  June 1928 (LTOC 339)
"After the Canton coup, engineered by Chiang Kai-shek in March 1926, 
and which our press passed over in silence, when the communists were 
reduced to miserable appendages of the KMT and even signed an 
obligation not to criticise Sun Yat-senism, Chiang Kai-shek - a 
remarkable detail indeed! - came forward to insist on the acceptance 
of the KMT into the Comintern: in preparing himself for the role of 
executioner, he wanted to have the cover of world communism and - he 
got it. The KMT, led by Chiang Kai-shek and Hu Han-min,  was accepted 
into the Comintern (as a "sympathising" party). While engaged in the 
preparation of a decisive counter-revolutionary action in April 1927, 
Chiang Kai-shek at the same time took care to exchange portraits with 
Stalin.
"After the Shanghai overturn, the bureaus of the Comintern, upon 
Stalin's order, attempted to deny that the executioner Chiang 
Kai-shek still remained a member of the Comintern. They had forgotten 
the vote at the Political Bureau, when everybody against the vote of 
one (Trotsky), sanctioned the admission of the KMT into the Comintern 
with a consultative voice. They had forgotten that at the Seventh 
Plenum of the ECCI, which condemned the Left Opposition, "Comrade 
Shao Li-tzu," a delegate from the KMT, participated.
This is how matters stood at the Seventh Plenum in the autumn of 
1926. After the member of the Comintern, "Comrade Chiang Kai-shek" 
who had promised to solve all the tasks under the leadership of the 
Comintern, solved only one: precisely the task of a bloody crushing 
of the revolution, the Eight Plenum in May 1927 declared in the 
resolution on the Chinese question: 
"The ECCI states that the events fully justified the prognosis of the 
Seventh Plenum". 
Justified, and right to the very end!  If this is humor, it is at any 
rate not arbitrary. However, let us not forget that this humor is 
thickly colored with Shanghai blood". August 1930 (LTOC 445-6).

Having disposed of that piece of Godena garbage, what about his 
claim that Trotsky did not oppose the CCP's entry into the KMT until 
not long  before April 1927.  This is Godena playing around with 
the latter day Stalinist school of falsification relying on sources 
like E.H. Carr e.g. who claims that : "It was not until after Chiang 
Kai-shek's `betrayal' of the communists in the summer of 1927 that 
the opposition, and especially Trotsky, became anxious to claim 
credit for having consistently opposed the Kuomintang alliance." 
(History of Soviet Russia Vol.3 part 2 784). 
This is an good example of falsification. 

In reality Trotsky opposed the CCP's entry into the KMT from 
1923  because it was premised on the theory of the "bloc of four classes" 
and meant the liquidation of the CCP into the KMT.   He later stated 
that before 1925, when the May 30th movement saw the party rapid
 grow from around 1000 to 57,000 by 1927  (Van de Ven, 149) that: 
"The participation of the CCP in the Kuomintang was perfectly correct 
in the period when the CCP was a propaganda society which was only 
preparing itself for future independent political activity..." (LTOC, 114).  
But for Trotsky this entrist tactic would not have been liquidationist. 
Trotsky always insisted that in any alliance in a national revolution, 
the proletariat maintain its armed independence at all costs.

Drawing on that same Hoover Institute which Godena is so familiar 
with (and the Harvard College Library, no doubt also a Godena 
stomping place), the editors of LTOC give the lie to  E.H. Carr and 
co.
>From April 1926, that is right after the Canton coup, Trotsky demands 
that the CCP immediately withdraw from the KMT. This is confirmed by 
Stalin himself in Vol 9 of his Works.(LTOC 22)Then on September 27, 
1926 there is a formal resolution (found in the Trotsky Archive) repeating 
the call for the CCP to break with the KMT. Then there is a series of 
articles and letters sounding the alarm at the coming counter-revolution: 
March 4;  March 22; March 29; March 31; April 3.  After the second 
Chiang coup in Shanghai on April 12 Trotsky follows with many 
articles exposing the rotten role of the Stalinist Comintern in 
killing the second Chinese Revolution.

This is something Godena doesnt want to hear, because he is looking 
for historical excuses to cover this Stalinist/Menshevik crime. His 
latest is seizing on the book by Hans J.Van de Ven "From 
Friend to Comrade" University of California Press, 1991.  Van de Ven 
argues that the Chinese revolution was not very likely given the 
immaturity of the CCP. I could go on to pull  Van de Ven's shameless 
menshevik apologetics apart but this reply is already getting over 
long and hes not really worth it.  
Van de Ven's position,  of course, runs counter to the  
position argued by  many authorities, that the revolution was in its 
first days  in Shanghai in March 1927, only to be put down by the 
treachery of the KMT.  Most sources credit the KMT with beheading the 
revolution and murdering 10s of thousands of communist cadre. A 
number, including Chinese Trotskyist Peng Shu-tse, in his book ("The 
Chinese Communist Party in Power" Monad, 1980) blame the intervention 
of the Comintern and its disastrous policy of forcing the CCP to bloc 
with the KMT.  It is not only Trotskyists who claim this. 
Chang Kuo-tao, one of the founding leaders of the CCP, and by no means 
a Trotskyist,  in his Autobiography,  blames the policy of KMT-CCP 
cooperation. "The CCP actually was too inexperienced and lacking in 
vigilance. It naively implemented the policy of the KMT-CCP 
cooperation and had too optimistic illusions about the national 
united front. As a matter of fact the dictatorial character of 
militarists, the stubornness of conservative feudal forces, the 
reactionary character of the bourgeoisie, and the shaky nature of the 
petty bourgeoisie are all characteristics of the social structure of 
China." (The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party 1921-1927. 585).
Chang Kuo-tao, reflecting on the Comintern policy says that "CCP 
comrades often said "The Communist International does not understand 
the China situation". This statement was very true. As a matter of 
fact, within the entire circle of communism or even socialism, from 
Marx through the present, distant Asia had been unfamiliar. All of 
Moscow's actions in China were rash, done witih a desire for 
immediate results and profits, and smacked of speculation and 
adventure". 

But this is not the whole story. Lurking behind Moscow's adventurism 
was its cynical menshevik foreign policy of promoting popular fronts 
with the reactionary bourgeoisie in national revolutions leading invariably to 
a counter-revolutionary smashing of the emerging socialist revolution.

In his exemplary Introduction to LTOC, the leading Chinese Trotskyist 
Peng Shu-tse,  documents blow by blow the tragedy of the beheaded 
Chinese revolution.  He sums up his analysis by quoting Trotsky:
"It is not possible to understand the meaning of the methods of the 
October uprising without a study of the methods of the Chinese 
catastrophe". But what are "the methods of the Chinese catastrophe"? 
They are Stalin's methods of empiricism, as well as formal logic. For 
example, when Stalin observed "imperialist oppression", he thought 
that this type of oppression was the same toward all classes. Thus 
class contradictions could be liquidated, or at least weakened. From 
this he arrived at the conclusion of class collaboration, upon which 
the policies of the "bloc of four classes" and "KMT-CCP 
collaboration" were based. 
Trotsky, in accordance with the dialectical method, believed that 
imperialist oppression "inevitably pushes the national bourgeoisie 
into an open bloc with imperialism. The class struggle between the 
bourgeoisie and the masses of workers and peasants is not weakened, 
but on the contrary, it is sharpened by imperialist oppression to the 
point of bloody civil war at every serious conflict". The complete 
history of the second Chinese revolution vividly verifies Trotsky's 
analysis and predictions, while, at the same time, proving the 
complete bankruptcy of Stalin's analysis and predictions. It 
demonstrates the decisive significance of the use of Marxist methods 
- dialectics - in a revolution." (LTOC 96-97)

Dave.



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