Leon Trotsky on China

IT IS TIME TO UNDERSTAND, TIME TO RECONSIDER, AND TIME TO MAKE A CHANGE

May 27, 1927

Every day and, one might say, every hour brings news from China demonstrating the complete erroneousness of the line adopted by the plenum and the equally complete correctness of our predictions and proposals. This information is being concealed from the press. After the national bourgeoisie, exploiting the Kuomintang and our policy in the Kuomintang, smashed the workers, the so-called left Kuomintang-to whom the Communist Party was now subordinating itself-made an appeal in which it was proclaimed that "the peasants, workers, owners of businesses, and merchants-are all allies in the national revolution. . . . The Kuomintang is placing before itself the task of freeing from oppression not only the workers and peasants, but also the industrialists and merchants." (See the TASS dispatch-concealed from the press-dated May 25 from Hankow: Bulletin not for publication, no.117.)

This is precisely why the left Kuomintang is demanding that the workers observe "revolutionary discipline"-with respect to the industrialists and merchants. The left Kuomintang prohibits trade unions from arresting a counterrevolutionary, just as it prohibits peasants from seizing the landlords' land. By misleading us, the Chinese Communist Party is helping the Kuomintang in these efforts. Step by step, events are demolishing a policy based on illusions, conciliation, disregard for the class struggle, and the bloc of four classes, which was invented by Martynov and approved by Dan. This policy is erroneous, and it is ruinous. In light of the new facts and the recent dispatches, the plenum would do well to bury Bukharin's resolution, replacing it with a resolution of a few lines:

In the first place, peasants and workers should place no faith in the leaders of the left Kuomintang but they should instead build their soviets jointly with the soldiers. In the second place, the soviets should arm the workers and the advanced peasants. In the third place, the Communist Party must assure its complete independence, create a daily press, and assume the leadership in creating the soviets Fourth, the land must be immediately taken away from the landlords. Fifth, the reactionary bureaucracy must be immediately dismissed. Sixth, perfidious generals and other counterrevolutionists must be summarily dealt with. And finally, the general course must be toward the establishment of a revolutionary dictatorship through the soviets of workers' and peasants' deputies.


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