China: Stalinism and national liberation

China: Stalinism and national liberation Alan Harding British Communist Party theoretician Monty Johnstone concludes his summary of the Stalinist case against Trotsky with an extended metaphor from the sport of kings: "If you looked at the record of a horse that had failed, despite persistent attempts, even to win a place in a single important race, wouldn't you ask yourself whether he hadnt got certain congenital defects as a racchorse? And would you not be better advised to back one that had won a dozen races in the same period, even though he'd crashed some of his fences and had not yet carried off the Derby or the Grand National?"

Johnstone's political judgements are about as valuable as the racing tips of a man who thinks the same horse could succeed on the flat and as a steeplechaser. A brief survey of the models and regimes he espouses indicates that crashing a few fences is a euphemism for running off the course and then changing the rules to say that this means winning.

In the Soviet Union, head of state and Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev proclaims to the world that the Stalinist system is a failure. In Eastern Europe political leaders announce that their future lies in restoring the capitalist market and bourgeois parliamentary forms. China and Cuba, states which once inspired a younger generation of Western admirers, lost their radical appeal many years ago.

The reactionary character of Chinese Stalinism has also been exposed in recent years, particularly with the 'excesses' of the 'cultural revolution' between 1966 and 1969, the regime's cynical superpower diplomacy and the pro-capitalist reform programme introduced after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976.

Fifty years ago the imperial army would go to shoot off mortars, 85

artillery field pieces and anti-tank guns as a form of entertainment. Today, off-duty Japanese businessmen can de the same at the North China International Shooting Academy near Peking? Despite encouraging Japanese and Western businessmen to come to China the regime still has problems competing on the world market. This year's March congress of the Chinese Communist Party addressed this problem by attacking the living standards of the masses with a decision to clamp down on the import of consumer goods.

Since the death of Enver Hoxha in 1985 even Albania can no longer be relied on to uphold the values of traditional Stalinism When the England football team visited recently the regime issued enough entry visas to cover the team, management and journalists. Officials even printed special t-shirts to greet England's travelling fans. Causescu's Romania stands alone as a paragon of old-fashioned Stalinist virtues as its people experience a regression to third world levels of poverty and repression. The failure of Stalinist states as role models for social progress raises two important questions: how did these regimes come into being? How did they succeeded in appropriating the banner of revolutionary change while defining the possibilities of human emancipation in such narrow terms?

1. Revolution and Let's begin by clarifying the approach of the first congress of the the Communist Communist International in 1919: International *The victory of the proletariat is guaranteed by the disruption of the enemy's power and the organisation of proletarian power. The bourgeois state has to be shattered and a proletarian state machine constructed." The first sentence contains two propositions. The first asserts the objective condition on which the success of working class revolution depends: the disruption of the enemy's power: The second proposition emphasises the subjective role of the working class movement in shaping circumstances to ensure revolutionary success. Though in practice these two moments of the revolutionary process cannot be separated, they can be distinguished analytically to clarify the issues at stake. Let's take first "the disruption of the enemy's power".

86 Imperialism is an epoch of stagnation and decay, a period of

economic, political and social crisis. Tendencies towards recession unleash competitive rivalries and class conflicts at three levels: between the imperialist powers, between them and the countries they dominate, and within the metropolitan countries themselves. Struggles have often been most acute in the colonial and semi-colonial countries where the burden of imperialist oppression has been most intense. In these countries mass struggles for national liberation have taken advantage of the decline of imperialist powers or of inter-imperialist rivalries to win advances in democratic rights. However, given the persistence of global imperialist power, such gains have proved to be limited and insecure.

All the characteristic features of the imperialist poch were revealed in the global crisis of the capitalist order which culminated in the First World War. Revolutionary upsurges had already taken place in Mexico in 1910 and China in 1911, but the cataclysmic struggle to redivide the world among the imperialist powers unleashed struggles for liberation among the masses dominated by imperialism, particularly in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

The first congresses of the Comintern were centrally concerned with ensuring the anti-imperialist content of the struggle for national liberation.* The Comintern theses begin by recognising that the First World War had weakened the hold of imperialism over the backward capitalist world. Even after Germany's defeat in 1919, tensions continued between the rising world powers of America and Japan and the enfeebled European empires. Examples of imperialist rivalry include America's disagreements with Britain and France for control over Middle Eastern oilfields and with Japan for influence in the Pacific. In addition to competing with each other the imperialist countries faced internal crises. The establishment of powerful Communist parties in most Western nations, linked up through the Communist International and inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution, constituted a serious domestic threat to the capitalist world order. The most unstable big power was Japan, a state still struggling towards modernity only half a century after the 1868 Meiji restoration jolted it out of feudal torpor At a time of major internal economic and political difficulties the imperialist powers were shaken by a wave of national revolutionary movements from Morocco and Egypt, through the Middle East, to India, China and Korea, Take, for example, 87 the case of Turkey.

The Ottoman empire was a casualty of the First World War and in the Treaty of Sevres, part of the Versailles settlement, it was formally dismembered. But within two years a new nationalist regime under Kemal Ataturk and the "Young Turks" had installed a secular, modernising republic. Moreover, the new regime successfully fought the victorious Allied powers and reclaimed territory that Turkey had lost at Sèvres.

Ataturk's regime survived in defiance of the West due to the strength and cohesiveness of Turkish nationalism, the weak and divided condition of the imperialist powers and their concern at the possible spread of Soviet influence southwards. Turkey's reintegration into the Western sphere had to wait until after the Second World War, when the Soviet Union reached the pinnacle of its diplomatic recognition at the Tehran and Yalta conferences. Once the East-West power bloes were stabilised Turkey took its place as Nato's most easterly outpost.

Throughout the backward capitalist world, the crisis of imperialism has created opportunities for radical nationalist liberation movements similar to those in Turkey. Of all the disturbances in the international balance of power resulting from the conclusion of the Second World War, none was more important than that affecting China.

2. Imperialist Marx and Engels recognised the key significance of China for domination of the evolution of the international class struggle. In Marx's China judgement, the coming rising of the European peoples will depend more on what happens in the Heavenly Empire than on any other event Engels in 1895 remarked that the capitalist conquest of China will speed up the overthrow of capitalism in Europe and America'® The stagnant Chinese empire began to suffer increasing Western intervention from the carly nineteenth century. As the world's leading maritime, commercial and industrial power, Britain was in the forefront of opening up China. A combination of diplomatic and military tactics in the Opium Wars between 1837 and 1842 succeeded in turning hundreds of thousands of Chinese into opium addicts and in opening China to British trade. As other great powers followed, a peculiar form of domination was established.

The imperialist powers found it advantageous to preserve the Chinese regime. This was due to the extent of Chinese territory, its great distance from the metropolitan countries, the difficulty 88 of subjugating such a large population, and the rivalries among

the great powers themselves. The empire continued as before: the emperor was regarded as divine and the country was administered by an elite class of mandarins trained in Confucian philosophy. The vast peasant majority continued to suffer the exactions of landlords and the effects of an increasingly corrupt and inefficient central administration.

European imperialist powers forced the emperor to cede territory and, more importantly, trading concessions in China's major ports. From the enclaves of Nanking, Canton and Shanghai Western entrepreneurs traded with the interior, established a transport infrastructure, and then began to create major industrial centres. The existence of dynamic urban markets reproduced capitalist commercial relations in the agricultural hinterlands which serviced the great trading centres.

While the emperor was still worshipped within the Forbidden City in Peking, capitalism came to Shanghai.

In the colonial world capitalism usually developed partially from a backward rural base with commercial capital predominant. This meant that the differentiation of a capitalist class from the remnants of pre-capitalist agrarian and bureaucratic structures usually happened slowly. The process was modified in China, however, by the sharp social differentiation which took place in the concessionary areas of Canton, Nanking and especially Shanghai.

After 1918 the changed balance of power among the imperialist states had crucial consequences for China. The postwar Paris peace conference acknowledged the greater importance of Japan in the region by granting the German concessionary interests in Shantung to Japan. Given Japan's closeness to China, this was an important shift. In the short term the most important consequence was to unleash Chinese national sentiment against the imperialist powers who felt they could divide China's vital interests among themselves.

Great power rivalry continued at the expense of China in the twenties with each imperialist power backing its own client warlords and pushing regional interests at the expense of central government. The peculiar form of domination in China turned it into a battlefield of competing interests which prevented the emergence of a cohesive national identity.

The pattern of imperialist domination of China changed during the late twenties and early thirties. Britain and France continued their relative decline, Japanese power increased rapidly following its invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and 89 America was concerned to prevent Japanese domination of

south-east Asia. Although Japanese expansion China and meant more territorial occupation and military conflict, it provided the Chinese with the potential for playing off the imperialist powers against one another, It was this complex situation which Mao Zedong addressed with his famous essays "On contradiction", which can be read as exercises in pragmatic power politics with the objective of ensuring the survival of the Chinese state? The explosion of rivalry between Japan and the Allied powers in 1941 made possible the emergence of an independent China.

By 1945 Japanese power had been annihilated, Britain and France were reduced to playing minor roles while America was not yet ready to risk a major war entailing possible conflict with the Soviet Union in China. Washington chose to act through the discredited surrogate of Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang. After 1945, for the first time since the Opium Wars, China was free from foreign intervention. The Comintern's first proposition was fulfilled: the enemy's power had been well and truly disrupted. Let's move on to consider whether there was a movement in China which could have established proletarian power. It may seem arbitrary and even disrespectful to question the 3. Class conflict revolutionary credentials of those who have fought heroically in in China liberation struggles. But, as Lenin said, without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement and no successful proletarian revolution. The history of the twentieth century reveals the courage and commitment of thousands of unnamed working class fighters. It also provides abundant testimony to the need for revolutionary theory and leadership by a revolutionary party. China provides a particularly clear example. Class conflict in China from the turn of the twentieth century took the form of a struggle to make a national revolution and establish a national state. China's peculiar relations with imperialism left it with a very feeble bourgeoisie and a large, heavily concentrated, working class. The term comprador bourgeoisie' is widely used to describe a section of an indigenous capitalist class that depends for its survival on its relation with imperialism. The term could have been invented to describe the role of the Chinese bourgeoisie in the foreign concessions.

The absence of a coherent bourgeois opposition to imperialist 90 domination did not preclude anti-foreign sentiment. The most

serious manifestation of this was the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, which owed nothing to the national bourgeoisie. Hostility to foreign rule was expressed as an attempt to defend traditional Chinese society. The movement aimed to rescue the emperor from foreign domination and place him at the head of a movement of national regeneration. It was savagely crushed.

In 1911, the revolution led by Sun Yat Sen was initiated by a section of the intelligentsia influenced by Western ideas.

Intellectuals such as Chen Tu Hsui were divided over the way forward for Chinese society, but united by the desire to free China from the foreigner: 'Chen was well aware of the fact that much of the achievement of the modern West lay in the realm of productive economic activity and he was convinced that the removal of the fetters of Confucianism and the liberation of the energies of the individual could produce similar results in China." The intelligentsia hoped that if China could absorb Western ideas such as 'democracy' and 'science' it could take over the role of its oppressors. The 1911 revolution never succeeded in establishing a central, stable state authority. Nor was it able to achieve Sun Yat Sen's three principles of national unity: national independence, complete democracy in the interests of the people, and the well-being of the nation. Sun Yat Sen's appeal to the patriotism of the generals fell on deaf ears and they soon assumed power.

His attempts to convince the imperialists that they would benefit from Chinese unity were no more successful. The great powers were not eager to negotiate on an equal footing with a formally constituted Chinese state. They preferred to deal with warlords.

After the First World War China was swept by a maelstrom of social movements which ignored the official government. The Versailles treaty favouring Japan provided a focus for antiimperialist sentiment. In 1919 a wave of anti-landlord and anticapitalist protests took off under the banner of the 4 May Movement. In the countryside peasant enthusiasm for land occupation and direct action against the landlords reached the scale of the Taiping rebellions of the 1860s."

On 30 May 1925, police in the British concession in Shanghai fired on demonstrators, killing several. A major wave of working class unrest against imperialist interests urged the nationalist Guomindang government into more direct action against the 91 warlords and their government in Peking. The action, which

included strikes in Shanghai and Canton and a boycott of foreign goods and persons in Hongkong, was so effective that workers had to step in to organise the distribution of goods to working class areas. A state of dual power prevailed In most colonial countries rival class forces coexisted in liberation movements even until after independence had been achieved. But in China the intensity of class conflict split the national movement along class lines at an early stage. China's pivotal position in the imperialist order had produced an acutely polarised and fixed pattern of class differentiation. Worker and capitalist, peasant and landlord, could not be contained in one movement. It is striking that in China there was no parallel to the radical petit-bourgeois tradition of the Narodniks and Social Revolutionaries in Russia.

The Chinese bourgeoisie was so weak that it could not even stick to Sun Yat Sen's three principles of national unity.

Regional, communal and ethnic divisions, which have often come to the fore after independence, fragmented the Chinese bourgeoisie long before independence. The pursuit of sectional interests enabled the warlords to keep their own armies with which they controlled certain territories and plundered others.

By making temporary alliances with each other and individual imperialist powers the warlords ensured the continued division of China. Given its weakness the bourgeoisie was incapable of leading the national liberation struggle.

The Guomindang was the party of the national bourgeoisie. Its leader Chiang Kai-shek saw himself as the Chinese Ataturk destined to lead a united China to victory and independence, but his party lacked the social weight to carry through this project.

Indeed both the Guomindang and its sympathetic warlords were in the pockets of the imperialist powers. In practice Chiang Kai-shek was forced, despite his subjective inclinations, into a closer relationship with imperialism.

Warlord China in the twenties was the country of Josef von Sternberg's Shanghai Express: a world of corruption, mercenary interest and imperialist intrigue where Chinese lives came very cheap. But it was also a China where the working class had the power to challenge imperialist domination and, more importantly, the strength also to sweep away the national bourgeoisie. It'is in this context that we must place the rise, historic defeat, subsequent transformation and triumph of the Chinese Communist Party. 92

After its foundation in 1921 the Chinese Communist Party grew rapidly as a result of the impact of the Russian Revolution and the popular desire for national identity and independence. Given the Chinese party's lack of a theoretical tradition and political experience, it inevitably came to rely heavily on the Comintern.

After Stalin's ascendancy in 1924 the policy of the Comintern was increasingly determined, not by the interests of the international working class, but by the narrow preoccupations of the Soviet bureaucracy.

We have not the space here to go fully into the much debated question of the role of the Comintern in the defeat of the Chinese Communist Party. It is enough to note that the Comintern's advice that the Chinese party subordinate itself to the Guomindang flew in the face of the communists proven capacity to win support among workers and peasants. While the Guomindang was still influential its organisational capacity was limited. The Comintern did not take advantage of this, but instead set about training the nationalist cadres as though they were members of the Communist Party.

In April 1927 Chiang Kai-shek, fearing the growing strength of the proletarian forces, turned against his erstwhile communist allies. His Guomindang troops decimated workers" organisations in Shanghai and conducted mass executions of tens of thousands of Communist Party members, with the assistance of lists provided by party leaders. The Comintern made matters worse by urging the Communist Party to shift from abject collaboration to adventurist insurrection. Most of the rest of the party cadre was destroyed in the futile uprisings of August and September 1927. The Chinese Communist Party was all but destroyed in 1927.

The remaining sections were forced to retreat into remote country areas to avoid liquidation. Between 1927 and 1934 the party was no longer a political organisation but rather a military one. It became a guerrilla army that was only able to establish temporary rural bases that came under continual Guomindang attack. Mao Zedong now became an important figure, above all as a military leader. In the early campaigns his masterly command of the principles of guerrilla warfare enabled the Red Army to survive. But in the 'third campaign, Mao was forced to adopt a strategy of confrontation by the Moscow-trained party leadership. The Red Army was only saved by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria which compromised the Guomindang.

93 By the end of 1934 the Guomindang was more concerned to

destroy the Red Army than it was to defeat the Japanese. Faced with encirclement in the south, the Red Army was forced to embark on the Long March to escape the Guomindang. Once it had secured bases in the far north in 1936, the Red Army was in a position to launch a guerrilla war against the Japanese and to establish its reputation as the force that could unite China against the foreign aggressor.

It was during the Long March that Mao assumed the political leadership of the Chinese Communist Party for the first time.

The leadership in place when the remnants of the Red Army reached Yenan is recognisable as the ruling group of postrevolutionary China. It was in this crucial period that the Sinification of a party that had previously been run from Moscow took place. 4. The triumph of After the Shanghai massacres the Chinese Communist Party Maoism lost its urban base. Continued repression under first the Guomindang and later the Japanese occupying forces prevented a communist revival in the cities. The communist guerrilla forces retained a few urban members who were supplemented with activists who left the cities to join with bandits and other declassed rural elements. Making a virtue out of necessity, the communists now identified the peasantry as the leading force in the Chinese revolution. The Communist Party did not respond to the 1927 debacle by rejecting the Stalinist line of the Comintern. It chose instead to modify it in line with what appeared to be China's objective conditions. While collaborating with the Guomindang the party argued that merchants would lead the anti-imperialist alliance.

Mao endorsed this position: The present political problem in China is none other than the problem of the national revolution. To use the strength of the people to overthrow the militarists and foreign imperialism, with which the former are in collusion to accomplish their treasonable acts, is the historic mission of the Chinese people. This revolution is the task of the people as a whole. The merchants, workers, peasants, students and teachers should all come forward to take on the responsibility for a portion of the revolutionary work; but because of historical necessity and current tendencies, the work for which the merchants should be responsible in the national revolution is both more urgent and more important than the work that the rest of the people should take upon themselves.""• 94

In his report on the situation in rural Hunan, Mao boldly proclaimed the decisive revolutionary role of the peasantry: In a very short time, several hundred million peasants in China's central, southern, and northern provinces will rise like a tornado or tempest—a force so extraordinarily swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it. They will break through all the trammels that now bind them and push forward along the road to liberation."!

Mao did not blame the collaborationist strategy of the Comintern for destroying the urban base of the Communist Party and the vanguard of the Chinese proletariat. Instead the defeat of the working class was interpreted as proof of the impossibility of a Chinese revolution led by the workers and confirmation of the need to base a revolutionary strategy on the peasantry. Mao not only rejected the revolutionary role of the working class, but also made another significant departure from Marxism. For him, the orientation and consciousness (it is scarcely appropriate to use the term programme) of the existing movement was adequate and seemed to emerge fully formed.

For Mao the party was to simply harness the popular struggle of the masses. He did not see it as providing the political leadership required to forge a revolutionary vanguard.

In practice the Chinese Communist Party restricted its activities to organising the military struggle. But for Mao this was all that was required to unleash the latent revolutionary energy of the peasant masses. In effect the leading role in the Chinese revolution went to neither workers, nor peasants, nor party, but to the Red Army.

The peasants were not mobilised as a mass social movement to transform land relations, but were incorporated in large numbers into the military machine. The extent to which land was expropriated from landlords and rich peasants in the liberated zones was a matter of military expediency, not a question of strengthening popular power. The key agency was the army, not the organs of popular struggle arising from class relations in the countryside. The army's approach was designed so as not to antagonise its local relations with the Guomindang, and richer and poorer peasants. In conditions of civil war and foreign intervention, any national liberation movement is forced to make pragmatic decisions and follow different policies in different local circumstances. But the Chinese Communist Party's policy of 95 pursuing an alliance with landlords and rich peasants right up to

1949, when it ceased to be under military threat, indicates the moderate nature of its agrarian policy.

The extraordinary achievements of human endurance and martial valour accomplished by the Red Army on the Long March welded it into a fighting force with the discipline and élan to beat the Guomindang and hold its own against the Japanese. It also produced a new faith in the capacity of subjective effort to triumph over objective difficulties. Having achieved the impossible on the Long March, the party leadership was convinced it could accomplish the seizure of state power if it could rally enough resources of human will. Digging caves is the first step to the conquest of the Marxist heights' was one of the aphorisms that greeted the troops daily in Yenan.

The voluntarist conviction that motivated the great leap forward in 1958 and the 'cultural revolution' in 1966 originated in the spirit of the Long March. The approach was summed up in Mao's remarkable characterisation of the Chinese people as a blank page on which the the party leadership could write (and rewrite) Chinese history: 'Apart from their other characteristics, China's 600m people have two remarkable peculiarities; they are, first of all, poor, and secondly blank.

That may seem like a bad thing, but it is really a good thing. Poor people want change, want to do things, want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it. *2 Stalinism provided a framework within which the Chinese Communist Party could mould a cadre embodying the national will. From the start, the Chinese party was part of a movement for national self-respect and national self-determination. The Stalinisation of the Comintern around the notion of national roads to socialism reinforced the internal dynamic of the Chinese party and in turn provided it with greater coherence and legitimacy. The Chinese Communist Party transformed itself over two decades from marginal force to ruling power by establishing its leading role in the struggle for national unity and independence against the Japanese occupation.

When Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China in 1937, Chiang Kai-shek was forced by his own supporters to seek an alliance with the Communist Party. Between 1937 and 1945 the Red Army played the leading role in the war of national resistance'. Many of the more radical Guomindang activists and a new generation of fighters and intellectuals took the road to 96

Yenan to join Mao and the struggle for national unity. They felt no allegiance to the corrupt Guomindang regime which refused to engage the Japanese and was rightly seen as a client, albeit an unreliable one, of foreign powers. All those who aspired to nationhood gravitated into the orbit of the Communist Party.

Just as Stalinism expresses the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, so Maoism is the Chinese form of national corruption of Marxism-Leninism. Yet by organising the peasantry in a formidable military machine, the Chinese Communist Party led a successful national revolution in 1949.

For the first time in the twentieth century it established a unified Chinese state (excluding Taiwan where Chiang Kai-shek rallied his forces with imperialist support). However, the goal of the Chinese Communist Party was national unification not social transformation. Both the party's Stalinist tradition and its roots in the popular movement dictated the priority of national independence over communist revolution. The effect of the 1927 defeat in removing the working class from the leading role in Chinese society ensured the limited character of the revolution.

A combination of national and international factors made the Chinese victory possible. In the immediate post-war period the imperialist powers were unable to intervene effectively. The Guomindang abandoned the struggle for national unity against Japan just as the weak Chinese bourgeoisie had thrown over its own national pretensions in the twenties. The organisational coherence and sense of purpose of the Chinese Communist Party enabled it to take advantage of this situation. In the process it elevated the tactic of guerrilla insurrection into a principle of revolutionary strategy. The flag of the new People's Republic-tive stars against a red background-summed up the outlook of the new regime. The larger star represented the party, with a cluster around it signifying the four classes of Chinese society. Between 1949 and 1953, when the first five year plan was announced, imperialist pressure isolated China against its will and then forced it into more radical measures. China initially tried to develop with a strategy of economic autarky and by using party cadre to mobilise the country's huge labour resources.

Only in July 1955 did Mao issue the report On the question of agricultural cooperation' which called for agricultural collectivisation. The fact that the Chinese regime pursued conservative economic and social policies did not reduce the impact of the 97 revolution on the imperialist order. The loss of China was the

single most important blow to imperialism in the post-war period. The Chinese revolution inspired anti-imperialist movements throughout the third world in the fifties and sixties.

Maoist guerrillaism acquired worldwide legitimacy as a development of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory and strategy. The Chinese experience further reinforced the Stalinist prejudice that nationalised property relations amounted to workers' control and workers' management. The imperialists' sustained hostility towards the Chinese regime simply added to its international prestige.

However, having acquired Marxist-Leninist legitimacy for nationalist revolution, the subsequent degeneration of Maoism now serves further to discredit communism around the world.

The stagnation of the Chinese economy and the recurrence of political repression have reinforced disillusionment with communism and encouraged a quest for new models: first Cuba, and most recently, Nicaragua.

Whereas Stalin and Mao proclaimed the revolutionary character of their regimes and their commitment to the traditions of Marxism-Leninism, the more recently established Stalinist regimes have made more cautious public pronouncements. In Nicaragua, the Sandinista leaders have repeatedly insisted on their moderate objectives. The Sandinista regime has pursued a deferential policy towards the owners of land and capital, while keeping a tight grip over the unions. Yet radicals in the West still hold it up as a model of social development. The hostility of US imperialism to Nicaragua appears to lend credibility to this view. But the Sandinista programme is less radical than those of a number of popular radical regimes that have come and gone in the third world since the end of the Second World War: Sukarno's Indonesia, Nkrumah's Ghana and Nasser's Egypt to name but three While Marxists in an imperialist nation unconditionally defend Nicaragua against imperialist intervention, we take this position irrespective of the nature of the regime. We should not draw the conclusion that because the US government is against them, the Sandinistas are introducing a revolutionary transformation of Nicaraguan society which provides a model of wider applicability. It is an indictment of the Stalinist movement that piecemeal land reform, subsidy of private capital and suppression of the right to strike is now seen as the acme of revolutionary achievement. Given the failure of many of Johnstone's earlier winners to stay the course, Western radicals have now embraced 98

a regime which has never tolerated any degree of workers" control and in which the state acts like a left-wing local authority. Notes 1. "Trotsky and world revolution", Cogito, second reprint, January 1977, pl6. 2. See "What's new in the new China?", by JK Fairbank, review article in New York Review of Books, 16 March 1989.

pp17-21. 3. Theses, Resolutions, and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International, 1980, p41.

4. The Bolshevik approach was elaborated in the famous Resolution on the national and colonial question drafted by Lenin at the third congress. See in particular 'Preliminary draft theses on the national and colonial questions, ibid.

pp76-81; and from the fourth congress. "The theses on the Eastern question' especially the section "The growth of the revolutionary movement in the East', ibid. pp409-410.

5. Cited in KS Karrol. China: The Other Communism.

1967, p52. 6. Ibid. 1960. 8. B Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, 195l, p9. See Mao's famous account of the Communist Party's work in his Report on an investigation of the peasant movement in Hunan'. * Peking foreign language press, 4 volumes, 1960-65.

10. Cited in S Schram, The Political Thought of Mao, 1969.

p140. 1. Ibid. ppl 79-80. 12. Ibid, p253. 99

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