Leon Trotsky

“ To advance now the slogan of a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry after the role not only of the Chinese bourgeoisie, but also of Chinese “democracy” has been put to a thorough test, after it has become absolutely incontestable that ’’democracy” will play even a greater hangman’s role in the coming battles than in the past’to advance this slogan now is simply to create the means of covering up the new varieties of Kuomintangism and to prepare a noose for the proletariat. ”

“ We are entering in China into a period of reflux, and consequently into a period in which the party deepens its theoretical roots, educates itself critically, creates and strengthens firm organizational links in all spheres of the working class movement, organizes rural nuclei, leads and unites partial, at first defensive and later offensive, battles of the workers and the peasant poor. What will turn the tide in the mass movement? What circumstances will give the necessary revolutionary impulsion to the proletarian vanguard at the head of the many-millioned masses? ”

“ After three major defeats an economic crisis does not rouse but, on the contrary, depresses the proletariat which, us it is, has already been bled white, while the executions only destroy the politically weakened party. ”

“ The Soviet appears most often and primarily in connection with strike struggles which have the perspectives of revolutionary development, but are in the given moment limited merely to economic demands. The masses must sense and understand while in action that the Soviet is their organization, that it marshals the forces for a struggle, for resistance, for self-defense, and for an offensive. ”

“ Had the leadership not hurried yesterday to leap over the defeats which it had itself brought about, it would first of all have explained to the Communist Party of China that victory is not gained in one sweep, that on the road to the armed insurrection there still remains a period of intense, incessant, and savage struggle for political influence on the workers and peasants. ”

“ The February 1917 revolution in Russia left unsolved all the internal and international problems which had led to the revolution, serfdom in the villages, the old bureaucracy, the war, and economic debacle. Taking this as a starting point, not only the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, but also a considerable section of the leadership of our own party tried to prove to Lenin that the “present period of the revolution is a period of the bourgeois-democratic revolution.” ”

“ An analogy between China and Russia is entirely admissible if we find the proper approach to it, and Lenin made excellent use of such an analogy. Moreover he did so not after but before the events, as if he had foreseen the future blunders of the epigones. Hundreds of times Lenin had to defend the October Revolution of the proletariat that had the audacity to conquer power notwithstanding the fact that the bourgeois-democratic tasks had not been solved. ”

“ There are sufficient grounds for assuming that the smashing of the Chinese revolution, directly due to the false leadership, will permit the Chinese and foreign bourgeoisie to overcome to a lesser or greater degree the frightful economic crisis now raging in the country. Naturally, this will be done on the backs and bones of the workers and peasants. ”

“ When the date for the insurrection is set, there is no Soviet. To create an elected Soviet is not an easy matter. It is necessary that the masses know from experience what a Soviet is, that they understand its form, that they have learned something in the past to accustom them to an elected Soviet organization. There was not even a sign of this in China, for the slogan of Soviets was declared to be a Trotskyite slogan precisely in the period when it should have become the nerve center of the entire movement. ”

“ If we are to understand by “liquidation” of the revolution the fact that the labor and peasant offensive has been beaten back and drowned in blood, that the masses are in a state of retreat and decline, that before another onslaught there must be, apart from many other circumstances, a molecular process at work among the masses which requires a certain period of time, the duration of which cannot be determined beforehand ”

“ Here, for instance, is what Lenin wrote about the Soviets in the epoch of the first revolution:
“The Social Democratic Labor Party of Russia [the name of the party at that time] has never refused to utilize at moments of greater or smaller revolutionary upsurge certain non-party organizations of the type of Soviets of Workers’ Deputies in order to strengthen the influence of the social democrats on the working class and to consolidate the social democratic labor movement.” ”

“ Without first counterposing the communist party to the Kuomintang as a whole, without the party’s agitation among the masses for Soviets and a Soviet government, without an independent mobilization of the masses under the slogans of the agrarian revolution and of national emancipation, without the creation, broadening, and strengthening of the local Soviets of workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies, the insurrection of Ho Lung and Yeh Ting, even apart from their opportunist policy, could not fail to be only an isolated adventure, a pseudo-Communist Makhno feat ”

“ He explained later that this dictatorship met with its further extension during the first period of Soviet power from November 1917 until July 1918, when the entire peasantry, together with the workers, effected the agrarian revolution while the working class did not as yet proceed with the confiscation of the mills and factories, but experimented with workers’ control. ”

“ The first wave of the broad revolutionary movement of workers and peasants which in the main proceeded under the slogans, and to a considerable extent under the leadership of the communist party, is over. ”

“ Soviets and Revolution In the February resolution of the E.C.C.I. the representatives of the Comintern, “Comrade N. and others,” are made responsible for the “absence of an elected Soviet in Canton as an organ of insurrection.” Behind this charge in reality lies an astounding admission. ”

“ In other words, all the “stages” that have already been gone through are not to be taken into account. The draft program still sees ahead what has already been left behind. This is precisely what is meant by a tail-endist formulation. ”