Leon Trotsky: Notes of a Journalist

Published March 1931

[Writing of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 3, 1930-1931, New York 1973, p. 185-191]

What Is Happening in the Chinese Communist Party?

Pravda of December 25, 1930, tells us: "In the fall of 1930, the Chinese Communist Party numbered 200,000 members. The party has uprooted the remnants of the ideas of Chen Tu-hsiu and has destroyed Trotskyism ideologically. [!]

"However, the complicated circumstances of struggle have recently given rise to certain reservations of a 'leftist' semi-Trotskyist character inside the party. A whole number of leading comrades, who believe that a revolutionary situation has matured on an international scale, have posed the question of beginning an immediate struggle for power on a full national plane, ignoring the necessity of consolidating the Soviet power in the regions already occupied by the Red Army. Proceeding from such an estimate, they consider it possible to cease the economic struggle of the proletariat and to liquidate the revolutionary unions."

This quotation gives one an idea of the chaos that reigns in the minds of the leading functionaries of the Chinese party. They have destroyed Trotskyism "ideologically" — that goes without saying — but immediately following this destruction, reservations of a "semi-Trotskyist character" rise anew. Such things have happened time and again. These reservations have arisen even among a "number of leading comrades." That also has happened before.

What are these new semi-Trotskyist reservations? They manifest themselves, first of all, in the demand to begin an "immediate struggle for power on a full national plane." But the Left Opposition since the fall of 1927 has advanced the exact opposite demand: to withdraw the slogan of armed insurrection as an immediate slogan. Even today our Chinese comrades put on the agenda not the armed uprising, but the mobilization of the masses around the social demands of the proletariat and the peasantry and the slogans of revolutionary democracy; not adventurist experiments in the countryside, but the building up of the trade unions and the party! If Pravda is not indulging in slander (which is very likely), if the new opposition really voices demands "to cease the economic struggle of the proletariat and to liquidate the unions," then this is directly contrary to the proposals of the Left Opposition (Bolshevik-Leninists).

We read further on that the new opposition ignores "the necessity of consolidating the Soviet power in the regions already occupied by the Red Army." Instead of such consolidation, it is as though the opposition were calling for a general national uprising. This too has nothing in common with the position of Bolshevik-Leninists. If the Chinese "Red Army” is regarded as the weapon of a proletarian uprising, then the Chinese Communists must be guided by the laws of every revolutionary uprising. They must take the offensive, extend their territory, conquer the strategic centers of the country. Without this, every revolutionary uprising is hopeless. To delay, to remain on the defensive instead of taking the offensive, spells defeat for the uprising. In this sense, the new opposition, if its point of view has been correctly stated, is far more consistent that the Stalinists, who believe that "Soviet power" in the countryside can be maintained for years or that Soviet power can be transported from one end of the country to another in the baggage car of the partisan detachments labeled the "Red Army." But neither position resembles our own; both flow from a wrong point of departure. They renounce the class theory of soviet power. They dissolve the revolution into provincial peasant revolts, linking up the entire fate of the Chinese Communist Party with them in an adventurist manner.

What does the Communist Party represent? Quite unexpectedly we learn from this article that the Communist Party in the fall of 1930 numbered about "200,000 members." The figure is given without explanation. Last year, however, the Chinese party numbered only about six to seven thousand members. If this tremendous growth of the party during the last year is a fact, then this should be a symptom of a radical change in the situation in favor of the revolution. Two hundred thousand members! If in reality the party were to number fifty, forty, or even twenty thousand workers, after it had experienced the second Chinese revolution and had absorbed its lessons, we would say that this is a powerful force, and invincible; with such cadres, we can transform all of China. But we would also have to ask: Are these twenty thousand workers members of the unions? What kind of work are they carrying on within them? Is their influence growing? Are they linking up their organizations with the masses of the unorganized and of the rural periphery? And under what slogans?

The fact is that the leadership of the Comintern is concealing something from the proletarian vanguard. We can be certain that the lion's share of these 200,000 — let us say from 90 to 95 percent — come from regions where the detachments of the "Red Army" are active. One has only to imagine the political psychology of the peasant detachments and the conditions under which they carry on their activity to get a clear political picture: the partisans, most probably, are almost all enrolled in the party, and after them the peasants in the occupied regions. The Chinese party, as well as the "Red Army" and the "Soviet power," has abandoned the proletarian rails and is heading toward the rural districts and the countryside.

In seeking a way out of the impasse, the new Chinese opposition advances, as we have read, the slogan of a proletarian uprising on a national plane. Obviously this would be the best outcome, if the prerequisites for it were to exist. But they do not exist today. What, then, can be done? We must develop slogans for the interval between revolutions, the length of which no one can tell in advance. These are the slogans of the democratic revolution: land to the peasants, the eight-hour workday, national independence, the right of national self-determination for all people, and, finally, the constituent assembly. Under these slogans the provincial peasant uprisings of the partisan detachments will break out of their provincial isolation and fuse with the general national movement, linking their own fate with it. The Communist Party will emerge, not as the technical guide of the Chinese peasantry, but as the political leader of the working class of the entire country. There is no other road!

Stalin and the Comintern

Lominadze, in the course of his struggle against Stalin, circulated a conversation he had had with him about the Comintern: "The Comintern represents nothing and it ekes out its existence only because of our support." Stalin, as is his custom, denied he had said this. All those who know Stalin and his attitude toward the Comintern, however, do not doubt for a moment that Lominadze was telling the truth.

By this we do not want to imply that Stalin's statement corresponds to the reality. On the contrary, the Comintern lives irrespective of the support of Stalin. The Comintern lives by virtue of the ideas on which it is based, by virtue of October, and, primarily, by virtue of the contradictions of capitalism. In the past — and we hope in the future — these factors have been stronger than the bureaucratic financial noose which Stalin calls support.

But the "aphorism" which we have quoted expresses better than anything else the real attitude of Stalin and Co. toward the Comintern and supplements perfectly the theory of socialism in one country.

In 1925, when the kulak course of that policy was in full bloom, Stalin did not feel at all ashamed to express his contempt for the Comintern and for the leaders of its sections. When Stalin with Zinoviev's consent proposed at the Politburo to pull Maslow out of the archives and send him to Germany, Bukharin, then a follower of Stalin and Zinoviev but not taken into confidence about all their plots, objected: "Why Maslow? … You know this person very well. … It is impossible, etc. …" To which Stalin replied: "They have all been baptized with the same holy water. In general there are no revolutionaries among them. Maslow is no worse than the others."

During a consultation concerning a certain concession [to foreign capitalist investors], one of the members of the Politburo remarked: "To grant it for forty or for fifty years makes no difference. We must assume that by that time the revolution will not have left any trace of the concessionaires." "The revolution?" Stalin rejoined. "Do you think the Comintern will accomplish this? Forget it. It will not bring about a revolution in ninety years." Is it necessary to recall once again the contemptuous remarks of Stalin about the "emigres," that is, about the Bolsheviks who had worked in the parties of the European proletariat?

Such was the general spirit in the Politburo. A haughty and contemptuous attitude toward the West European Communists was required for good form. "Do you really think that Purcell and Cook will make the revolution in England?" asked the Oppositionists. "And you perhaps think that your British Communists will make the revolution?" was Tomsky's retort.

The attitude toward the Communist parties of the East was still more contemptuous, if that is possible. Only one thing was required of the Chinese Communists: to keep quiet so as not to disturb Chiang Kai-shek in the performance of his work.

It is not at all difficult to imagine the juicy expression this philosophy takes from the mouth of Voroshilov, with his inclination to all types of chauvinism. In the sessions of the delegation of the Russian Communist Party, immediately preceding the plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in 1926, Voroshilov "defended" Thälmann with his characteristic competence, almost like this: "Where can they find better ones? They haven't any revolutionaries. Of course, if we could give them our Uglanov, he would conduct their affairs in an entirely different manner. For them, Uglanov would be another Bebel." This became a winged phrase. Uglanov in the role of a communist Bebel in Germany! At that time Voroshilov apparently had not foreseen that Uglanov would some day become a "pillar of the kulaks" and an "agent of the saboteurs." Yet even today Voroshilov himself does not doubt that the 1925 policy was the best of all policies.

So we see that Lominadze has reported nothing new. His testimony only bears witness to the fact that the attitude toward the Comintern expressed within the top inner circle has not changed after all these years. And how could it? Lominadze's testimony fades, becomes absolutely superfluous before the fact that the leadership of the international proletarian vanguard is today wholly abandoned to the Manuilskys, the Kuusinens, and the Lozovskys, the people who in the USSR are not and cannot be taken seriously.

No. The Comintern does not live because of the support of the Stalinist bureaucracy, but despite it. The sooner it frees itself from this support, the sooner it will regenerate itself and rise to the level of its historic tasks.

The Growth of Toadyism

In Pravda on December 28 of last year a collective article was published, a huge special feature section, devoted to — what would you expect? — "the anniversary of Comrade Stalin's speech at the First Conference of Marxist Agrarian Specialists." This special feature, like the similar earlier article by a certain Borilin, is, if not a striking, then certainly a vile document of academic careerism, a "platform" of small people who are transforming Stalin's scandalous speech at the conference into a cover for their own trivial slander, denunciations, intrigues, and lustful ambitions.

We subjected Stalin's speech to detailed criticism in an earlier issue of the Biulleten ("Stalin as a Theoretician," number 14) [Writings 30]. We showed that this speech was a conglomeration of rudimentary errors from beginning to end. If you did not know Stalin and his "theoretical" level, you might have thought the speech was a crude forgery fabricated by somebody else. Larin, Kritsman, and even Milyutin — people who are ready enough to line up for the leadership — did not have it in them to swallow all of Stalin's theoretical discoveries. The journal Na Agrarnom Fronte [On the Agrarian Front] had to cautiously avoid a number of burning issues in agrarian theory simply because Stalin had trodden upon these questions with his left boot. And the young Red professors sensed this caution. They understood without difficulty that the game involved no risk for them: all they had to do was launch a campaign against Kritsman, and against Milyutin — that erudite academician of platitudes — accusing them of the mortal sin: of disagreeing with Stalin's discoveries or of not accepting them with enough enthusiasm. It was impossible for Kritsman and Milyutin to agree with these ’’discoveries,” since after all they do know the ABC's of economic theory. But they could not remain silent either. Thus, the young academicians, by means of an open attack which had been underwritten in advance, were able to — arrive at theoretical truth? No. But they could secure a place on the journal Na Agrarnom Fronte and in a number of other institutions in the bargain.

And because socialist creative work must be penetrated with the collective spirit, these prize hunters gave their slander a strictly collective character. The signatures on the article were as follows: D. Lurye, Ya. Nikulikhin, K. Soms, D. Davydov, I. Laptev, Neznamov, V. Dyatlov, M. Moiseev, and N. N. Anisimov. We spelled out these names not because they are well known to us; on the contrary, they are totally unknown. But we have no doubt that one way or another they will become well known. Indeed, the name Bessedovsky was also unknown before the man who bore that name jumped over the back fence [of the Soviet embassy in Paris]. Will these gentlemen have to leap over a fence and just what kind will it be? The future will tell. But it is absolutely clear that we have before us, in these people, an academic collective made up of a far-flung faction of toadies.

Whose Phonograph Is This?

A certain S. Gorsky, an ex-Oppositionist, repented last summer. We do not deny anyone the right to repent, or to wallow in his repentance. Nor are we inclined to object to the form that the repentance takes, for the laws of esthetics — and those of anti-esthetics — require the form and content to correspond. Nevertheless, it seems to us that there are some limits at which even debasement multiplied by light-headedness should stop. It appears that Gorsky has succeeded in overstepping all these limits. It is not a question of "Trotsky frightening people with his impossible rate of industrialization," nor of the fact that on this subject Gorsky identifies Trotsky with Groman, and Groman with the saboteurs. So far Gorsky still remains within the limits of the official ritual. It is only after he has completed the prepared section that Gorsky introduces a distinctly personal note into his repentance, dragging in the Dnieprostroi station — which Trotsky fought against and Stalin rescued. Gorsky ends his article with the following words: "Those who compared the Dnieprostroi to a 'phonograph' are dancing on their own political tomb. Unfortunately, to the tune of their music, I myself once danced. — S. Gorsky" (Za Industrializatsiia, number 2544).

What is this? It is unbelievable! One doubts one's eyes. In 1925-26 Trotsky was the chairman of the governmental commission of the Dnieprostroi Partly for this reason but mostly because at that time the leading echelons of the party held fast to the idea of a "declining curve" of industrialization, all the other members of the Politburo were unanimously opposed to the hydroelectric station on the Dnieper. At the plenum of the Central Committee in April 1926, in his programmatic speech on the economy directed against the "super-industrializer" Trotsky, Stalin declared: "For us to build the Dnieprostroi would be just the same as to buy the peasant a phonograph instead of a cow." The debates were stenographed and printed, as all the minutes of the plenums are, in the printing plant of the Central Committee. Stalin's phrase about the phonograph created something of a sensation and was often repeated in the speeches and documents of the Opposition. The phrase ended up as a byword. But since Gorsky has decided to repent completely, without omitting anything, he attributes (of his own accord or under instructions from Yaroslavsky?) the economic philosophy of Stalin, including the immortal phrase, to Trotsky.

Now, what follows from this? "Those who compared the Dnieprostroi to a phonograph are dancing on their own political tomb." On their own political tomb! But it was Stalin who called the Dnieprostroi a phonograph. Then who is dancing on his own tomb? Say what you will, Gorsky's repentance sounds dubious. Is it sincere? Is this really repentance?Isn't there something in the back of his mind? Isn't Gorsky trying to discredit Stalin in Aesopian language? And why does the editor Bogushevsky stand by and look on, Bogushevsky, who knows a few things? And what about Yaroslavsky? Why doesn't he put two and two together? All in all, what are we headed for?