PDF-Version: Prometeo – The Tactics of the Comintern 1926-1940

In March 1926 the 6th Enlarged Executive met in Moscow, and Bordiga would conclude his intervention by declaring that the time had come for the other parties in the International to repay the Russian Party for having given them so much in the ideological and political spheres, and ask specifically that the Russian Question be put on the agenda of discussions for subsequent meetings of the International.

If from a formal point of view this proposal was accepted, and there was lengthy discussion of the Russian Question at the 7th Enlarged Executive and the successive plenary session of the ECCI, nothing substantial came of it since the parties belonging to the International all united around the theoretical, political and disciplinary solutions previously put forward by the Russian Party. These solutions were entirely at odds with the founding principles of the Communist International and led to those fundamental changes at the heart of the Russian Revolution which would lead to the ruthless repression of the architects of the revolution and the overthrowing of Soviet Russia, eventually to become one of the main instruments of the counter-revolution and of preparations for the imperialist 2nd World War.

Thanks to Zinoviev’s “bolshevisation” which had triumphed at the 5th World Congress in 1924, the fact is that by 1926 every party had already had radical modifications made to their leading cadres. Those currents which in 1920 with the rise of the International had flowed organically towards the same revolutionary outlet which had been affirmed in such a decisive way by the October victory in Russia, would find representatives of other tendencies stepping into their shoes. These parasitic tendencies, who just like horseflies (mosche cocchiere)[1] had hitched themselves to the victorious cart of the Russian revolution after contributing nothing to the formation of the communist parties, and lain dormant inside them waiting for their hour to strike, would inevitably rally to the cause of the encroaching counter-revolution, then in its preliminary stages, and help in the job of smashing the cadres of the International.

If we have recalled the Italian Left’s proposals which Bordiga brought before the International’s 6th Enlarged Executive, we have done so to underline the fact that this current had already had a presentiment about the seriousness of incipient events and the central point on which they pivoted: the radical changes brewing in Soviet Russian politics.

The meeting of the 6th Enlarged Executive would also be the last time the Italian Left was allowed to put forward its views as a member of the International and the Party. Within a year it had been expelled from the International along with every other opposition current, and the new conditions of admission would become recognition of the theory of “Socialism in One Country”, representing a clear departure from the programme on which the International had originally been founded.

The enslavement of the Comintern to the interests of the Russian State was now a fait accompli, and rather than working towards the uniquely communist goal of real revolutionary struggle against capitalism, the Comintern now started to use the communist parties of the various nations as pawns in Russia’s diplomatic chess game with the other powers. Eventually, whenever required by diplomatic considerations, the most bankrupt compromises would be struck with the forces of centrist opportunism and the bourgeoisie.

This study, which simply aims to provide facts about the Comintern’s tactics from 1926 to 1940 and doesn’t claim to be an exhaustive treatment of such a huge subject, restricts itself to outlining the main features and progression of these tactics which we list as follows:

Anglo-Russian Committee (1926)

Russian Question (1927)

Chinese Question (1927)

The Tactic of the Offensive and Social-Fascism (1929 – 1933)

The Tactics of Anti-fascism and the Popular Front (1934 – 1938)

The Tactics of the Communist Parties during the 2d Imperialist World Conflict.

1. The Anglo-Russian Committee

In 1926, an extremely important event shattered not only the analysis of the situation given by the International’s 5th Congress (1924), but also the policies for Russia and other countries which derived from it. The global situation had come to be characterised by the “stabilisation” formula. Whilst the formula itself didn’t exclude the possibility of a new revolutionary wave, the tactical consequences which followed on from it in fact fell far short of preparing the International for a revival of the proletarian struggle, and the International party became the prisoner of a set of tactical and organisational formulations which couldn’t just be dropped or changed overnight.

The political process isn’t made up of a mass of different tactical devices such that the party can apply a corresponding tactic to each situation like a doctor after diagnosing an illness. The Party, a living factor of historical evolution, is inevitably shaped by the tactics and politics it employs and is equipped to intervene in a revolutionary situation only insofar as it has made the necessary preparations beforehand. If there is no preparation, clearly the party, trapped in an inappropriate political procedure, will end up getting hemmed in by it and deprive itself of the opportunity of leading the proletarian struggle.

Now, when “stabilisation” was discussed in 1924, obviously the formula wasn’t limited to a purely statistical and technical explanation of economic evolution, rather it referred, on the strength of the indisputable observation that the revolutionary wave had receded after the defeat of the German Revolution in 1923, to a political conclusion which had the additional merit of being in perfect harmony with the tactical decisions of the Comintern. These tactical decisions, in their turn, hinged on the fundamental objective of maintaining communist influence over the broad masses, and since in said unfavourable climate it was only possible to establish contacts with the masses by entering into political relations with the social-democratic organisations who were benefiting from the revolutionary ebb, the formula of “stabilisation” included the tactic of “meshing” with the leaderships of the social-democratic parties and trades unions.

When a huge miners’ strike broke out in Britain in 1926, the International had to therefore accept the consequences of previously established tactical premises. The trade-unionist leaders in Britain hastened to establish permanent treaties with their Soviet counterparts, and the Anglo-Russian Committee was forced to assume the role events had dictated.

When the strike turned into a general strike the economic analyses of the 5th Congress fell apart, and yet the tactics derived from them were kept. The International found itself not only prevented from exposing the counter-revolutionary role of the trade-unionists to the masses, but also forced to carry on maintaining solidarity with them throughout this important proletarian agitation taking place in one of the main sectors of world capitalism.

In order to get a better grasp of the International’s tactical answers to this question we should remember that the right-wing Bukharin-Rykov tendency had triumphed in Russia at the same time. This tendency, which emerged within the general framework of a political line which linked the fate of the Russian State to the fate of the world revolution, now made the politics of the communist parties depend on the necessity of that State. Thus Bukharin was able to justify the tactics adopted by the Anglo-Russian Committee as in the “diplomatic interests of the USSR” (May 1927 meeting of the International Executive).

Suffice to recall that at the Berlin conference of the Anglo-Russian Committee in April 1927 (following the Conferences in Paris, July 1926, and Berlin in August 1926) the Russian delegation, who had recognised the General Council as “the sole representatives and spokesmen of the English trade-union movement”, set itself the task of “not undermining the authority” of the trade-union leaders even after the open betrayal of the social-democratic leadership during the General Strike. And it is not superfluous to recall that as soon as English capitalism had managed to liquidate the General Strike it would repay the Russian leaders for having been so obliging with its customary gratitude: by having the Baldwin Government, directly in London, and indirectly in Peking, launch an offensive against the Soviet diplomatic deputations.

In the review edited by the Italian Communist Party in Paris, Lo Stato Operaio (number 5, July 1927) there is an article on “The Executive [of the International] and the Struggle against the War” which engages in polemics against the Russian Opposition. About the Anglo-Russian Committee, we read: “This tendency [the Opposition -ed.] is revealing itself ever more clearly in the criticisms aimed at the Anglo-Russian meeting. Due consideration must be given to the Berlin meeting of the Anglo-Russian Committee and it should be weighed up attentively in an unhurried and unprejudiced way. When the ARC met in Berlin, it was at an internationally crucial juncture. The Conservative Government of England was getting ready to break with Russia. The campaign to isolate Russia from the rest of the civilised world was in full swing. Was the Russian trade-union delegation well or badly advised to make some concessions at that time with the aim of avoiding a complete rupture with the English trade-unions?”. This document poses in interrogative form the question: how good were the tactics adopted by the Russian trade-union delegation in Berlin? But, as we have seen, Bukharin was much more explicit when he affirmed that in the diplomatic interests of the Russian State the Anglo-Russian Committee shouldn’t be disbanded, even if it was a committee which had served to cover-up the trade-union leaders’ sabotage of the General Strike by officially affording them recognition as the “sole representatives of the English trade-union movement”.

Even official documents posed the problem in an unequivocal way: a powerful proletarian movement would be sacrificed because the defence of the Russian State required it.

Incidentally, here is new evidence of the role played by the ARC within the English movement. In an article by R. Palme Dutt on the subject of the Plenary Assembly of the English Communist Party which appeared in the review L’Internationale Communiste (number 17, 15/8/28 ), we find the following assertions: “We have here a decisive change in the attitude of the Communist Party towards the masses. Until now the Party has played the role of independent critic and agitator (and therefore of ideological leader) in a movement led by the reformists. From now on the party’s task is to fight the reformist leaders in order to put itself at the head of the masses”, and in a note the author adds: “Sometimes it is said that we have passed from the slogan “struggle for the leadership” to “change of leadership”. Not at all. In fact the slogan “change of leadership” had already been adopted before the new tactic, even when we were fighting against the new tactic, and it meant one thing: that we must substitute the “right” of the Labour Party with the “left” of the same party. At the moment the party is fighting for its own interests, and not to correct the errors of the Labour Party. It is necessary to regroup the masses behind the Communist Party and the elements which are associated with it (minority movement etc.). It is in this sense that the slogan “change the leadership” is valid for the present period”.

The Party’s role in 1926 was therefore that of acting as “ideological head” of the movement led by reformists and “correcting the errors of the Labour Party”. As for the “New Tactics”, which will be just as harmful for the proletarian movement as the Anglo-Russian Committee, we will refer to that in the chapter on the “offensive” and “socialism”.

2. The Russian Question

In 1926-27 Russia was going through a severe economic crisis. As early as 1923-24, two opposing positions had been defended within the Russian Party: that of the right-wing Bukharin-Rykov who, breaking with the prejudicial conditions set by Lenin in the NEP (see “Tax in kind”), advocated support for the expansion of the capitalist strata, especially in the countryside; the other of the Trotskyist left who, on the basis of Lenin’s formulations, tended to establish an economic plan centred on strengthening the state and socialist sector to the detriment of the private and capitalist sector.

The Russian party is moving on to the fight against Trotsky, but the ruling bloc that goes from Bukharin-Rykov to Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev if it proceeded together in the fight against the alleged “Trotskyism”, does not reach a unity of views on the positive side of the solutions to be adopted in the face of the serious economic problems that had given rise to the establishment of the NEP. The right wing launches the word “enriching peasants”, which openly threatens the monopoly of foreign trade, but it fails to set up an economic and political plan clearly oriented towards the annihilation of the prejudicial conditions laid down by Lenin in the NEP, nor does it differ clearly from the centre then played by Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev (to limit itself to the most important Russian leaders). As always, the Right has no need to be clear and relies above all on the direct impulse of events, which, in circumstances unfavourable to the revolutionary movement, can only be favourable to it. The essential thing for it is the fight against the proletarian tendency, and for this purpose it uses the centre, which will be more able to carry out this counter-revolutionary task than it is.

The years 1926 and 1927 saw a situation in which the different currents within the Russian Party did not confront us in view of particular solutions to be adopted in the face of the serious economic problems in which Russia finds itself, but the debates were mainly about general and theoretical issues. The practical solutions will intervene later, at the XVI Conference of the Russian Party (1929), where the first five-year plan will be decided. In 1926-27 the struggle was limited to the essential task of the hour: to dispel any proletarian reaction within the Russian Party. According to the report of the plenary meeting of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the Russian Party (see Workers’ State of September 1927) and

“The opposition is divided into three groups:

1st was an extreme left-wing group headed by their team mates Sapronov and Smirnov;

2nd the group that accepts the hegemony of Trotsky and which include, among the most well-known, Zinoviev, Kamenev, etc..

3rd, a group that strives to take an intermediate position between the opposition currents and the Central Committee (Kasparova, Bielincaia, etc.)”.

With respect to the first group, the following points in the official document characterise its analysis of the situation:

(a) the struggle within the party has a class struggle character, between the party’s worker side and the army of officials;

(b) this fight cannot be confined to the party itself, but must concern the large, partyless masses, the support of which the opposition must win;

c) it is possible that the opposition will be defeated; it must therefore constitute an active framework, which will also defend the cause of the proletarian revolution in the future;

d) the Trotsky Zinoviev bloc does not understand this need, it tends to compromise with the Stalin Group, it does not have a clear tactical line; having mistakenly signed the declaration of 16 October 1926 of obedience to the Party, it must trample on its commitments; the hesitations of Trotsky and Zinoviev must be denounced and exposed like those of the Stalin Group;

e) in recent years, the capitalist elements of production have developed more rapidly than the socialist elements; given the technical backwardness of the country and the low level of labour productivity, it is not possible to move to a true socialist organisation of production without the help of technically advanced countries or without the intervention of the world revolution;

(f) The main mistake in the party’s economic policy is to reduce prices, which benefits not the working class, but all consumers, and therefore also the bourgeoisie and the small bourgeoisie;

(g) the liquidation of party and working-class democracy in 1923 was the prelude to the establishment of a rich farmers’ democracy;

h) in order to change this state of affairs, it is necessary to move on to the organisation of large state-owned farms with perfect production techniques for processing agricultural products;

i) the GPU, instead of fighting against counter-revolution, fights against the justified discontent of the workers; the red army threatens to turn into an instrument of bonapartistic adventures; the C.C. is a “Stalinist” fraction which, starting the liquidation of the party, will lead to the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat; the system of the Soviets must be “restored”.

This current is considered by C. C. “a group of enemies of the party and the proletarian revolution”. The same C. C. states that it “is firmly constituted in the illegal fraction not only in the sense of the Party, but in the very sense of the Trotsky-Zinoviev fraction. It turns out that one of the groups in this fraction, the Omsk group, had planned to prepare for a general strike throughout Siberia and halt the activities of the large electricity companies in the region”.

As for the Trotsky-Zinoviev Group, the same document from the C.C. of the Russian Party writes:

“The Trotsky-Zinoviev Group is responsible for the most violent attacks against the C. C. and its political line, and for the most brazen fraction activity developed during 1927, openly violating the solemn commitments made in the declaration of October 16, 1926.

In recent times this group has concentrated its attacks against the party line in international politics (China, England) speculating on the difficulties that have arisen in this field. It has responded to the preparation of the war against the USSR with declarations which represent a sabotage of the action that the Party carries out for the mobilization of the masses against the war and for the resistance. Of this kind it is the affirmation that the C.C. of the Party is on a plan of Thermidorian degeneration, that the course of the party politics is “national-conservative”, that the line of the party is a line from “old peasants”, that the greatest danger threatening Russia is not war, but the internal regime of the party etc.

These statements were accompanied by acts of violation of discipline and open fractionism: publication of fraction documents, organisation of fraction circles, conferences, etc., Zinoviev’s speech against the C.C. in an assembly without party, Trotsky’s attitude at the executive meeting, accusation of “thermidorism” brought by Trotsky against the Party in a C.C. control meeting, public demonstration against the Party at the departure of Smilga from a Moscow station. Finally, a campaign of petitions against the C.C. was organised, circulating a document signed by the 83 main exponents of the opposition. Furthermore, the Trotsky-Zinoviev Group has maintained its relationship with the extreme left group excluded from the German Party (Maslov-Fischer).

All this shows that the Trotsky Zinoviev group not only violated all the commitments made in its declaration of 16 October 1926 but: 1) went down a path that leads to being against the unconditional defense of the USSR in the fight against imperialism; the accusations of thermidorism levelled against the C.C. have as a logical consequence to proclaim the necessity of the defense of the USSR only after this C.C. has been overthrown; 2) has set itself on the path that leads to the splitting of the Comintern; 3) has set itself on the path that leads to the splitting of the Russian Party and to the organizing of a new party in Russia”.

As far as the intermediate group is concerned, the C.C. of the Russian Party considers it

“a group of undisclosed opposition, probably indicating a certain loss that has arisen in some of the less self-confident elements in the face of the serious difficulties of the moment”.

All this quotation allows us to realise the seriousness of the situation in Russia at this time. Although there are evident exaggerations in the way of presenting the points of view of the extreme left fraction and of the Trotsky-Zinoviev fraction, it is clear that not even what the C.C. accuser writes authorises the conclusion that the two opposing groups could be equalled to the mensheviks and the counter-revolutionaries.

As for the positions defended by the right, they were undoubtedly the vehicle for a restoration of the bourgeois class in Russia according to the classic type of reconstitution of an economy based on initiative and private property. But history had to exclude this possibility. In the phase of monopolistic imperialism and state totalitarianism, the overturning of Russian policy will take place along the other path of the five-year plans, which we will talk about later, and state capitalism.

But, as we said, before reaching this decisive step, it was necessary to definitively win the battle against the different opposition groups, a battle that was in fact directed against the Party itself and against the International, since it concerned the fundamental point of Marxist doctrine: on the international and internationalist notion of communism.

The C.C. resolution referred to above was a ‘half measure’ since the issues had not been definitively resolved. It was in December 1927, at the XV Congress of the Russian Party, after the failure of the trial of strength attempted by the opposition with the demonstration in Leningrad, that the problems will be fully addressed.

The great battle of the XV Congress took place around the new theory of “socialism in one country” and the incompatibility between belonging to the Party and to the International and the rejection of this thesis.

On this fundamental point the 7th Enlarged Executive (November-December 1926) expressed itself in these terms:

“The Party starts from the point of view that our revolution is a socialist revolution, that the October revolution is not only the signal for a leap forward and the starting point of the socialist revolution in the West, but: 1) represents a basis for the future development of the world revolution; 2) opens the period of transition from capitalism to socialism in the Union of the Soviets (the dictatorship of the proletariat), in which the proletariat has the opportunity to successfully build, through a just policy towards the class of peasants, the complete socialist society. However, this construction will only be achieved if the strength of the international workers’ movement, on the one hand, and the strength of the proletariat of the Soviet Union, on the other, are so great as to protect the State of the Soviets from military intervention”.

It should be noted that the realisation of the “complete socialist society” no longer depends, as in Lenin’s times, on the triumph of the revolution in other countries, but on the ability of the international workers’ movement to “protect the State of the Soviets from military intervention”. The events have shown that it will be the two most powerful imperialist states, Great Britain and the United States, that will ” protect ” the Russia of the Soviets.

Both at the 7th Enlarged Executive and at the other numerous meetings of the Russian Party and the International Executive, the Russian and international proletariat lost its battle. The consecration of this defeat took place at the XV Congress of the Russian Party (December 1927) when the incompatibility between belonging to the Party and the denial of the “possibility of the construction of socialism in a single country” was proclaimed.

But this defeat was to have decisive consequences both in Russia and in the world communist movement. The battle of the classes does not admit intermediate paths, especially in the climaxes, such as those of our time. The proclamation of the theory of socialism in a single country, because it could hardly be resolved in the extraction of Russia from a world in which – after the defeat of the Chinese revolution – capitalism passed everywhere to counter-attack and, for the very fact of breaking the necessary link between the struggle of the working class of each country against their capitalism and the struggle for socialism in the bosom of Russia, denied the factor of the proletarian class, had inevitably to admit another, on which Russia was increasingly relying: world capitalism. Evidently, this shift in the Russian state was possible only under two conditions:

1) that the communist parties would cease to pose a threat to capitalism;

2) that within Russia the principle of the capitalist economy – the exploitation of workers – be re-established.

In this chapter we will deal with the second point; in the following chapters the first.

* * *

On the basis of a logic that we would like to call “chronological”, the opinion has been formed that the line of degeneration of the Russian state starts from the adoption of the NEP in March 1921 and inevitably arrives at the new course introduced after 1927.

This opinion is superficial and does not correspond to an analysis of events conducted according to Marxist principles.

We must make it clear that the economic manoeuvre was necessarily required by events, by the insurmountable difficulties in which the proletarian dictatorship found itself, and it was possible precisely because it was being carried out under a regime of proletarian dictatorship. This obviously does not mean that the bourgeois economic forces did not grow and that the relationship of political forces did not tend to change: however, this change in relations to the advantage of the bourgeois forces, brought about by the NEP, could become dangerous and lethal for the proletarian dictatorship in Russia only if the international power relationship had moved, as happened, towards the prevalence of the bourgeois reaction and the outflow of the revolutionary wave. Otherwise, the momentary recovery of the bourgeois forces would have been overwhelmed by the proletarian dictatorship which had maintained its political positions.

Lenin’s position, since 1917, is based on these main considerations:

1) an absolute political intransigence which will lead the Bolshevik Party to adopt the positions of the most open struggle against all bourgeois political formations, including those of the extreme social-democratic left. It is well known that, in January 1918, Lenin, after having analysed the results of the elections for the Constituent Assembly not according to the trivial criteria of parliamentary democracy, but according to the opposite classist criteria, and after having ascertained that the Bolsheviks were a minority from the arithmetical and global point of view in the country, were, however, a majority in the industrial centres, moved on to the violent dispersion of this Assembly elected on the basis of democratic principles.

2) a wise economic policy that delimited the possibilities of the proletariat – and as a consequence of the Class Party – in connection with the concrete possibilities offered by the modest degree of development of the forces and of the production technique. The Lenin programme simply involved “control of production”, which meant the permanence of the capitalists at the head of the industries.

This apparent contradiction between an economic policy of concessions and an extremely intransigent general policy is inexplicable if we do not place ourselves – as Lenin constantly did – on an international level and therefore do not consider the Russian revolution in connection with the development of the world revolution. If, from the Russian national point of view, concessions in the economic field are inevitable because of the backwardness of the country’s industrial development, from the political point of view, on the other hand – since the experiment of the proletarian dictatorship is a function of international events – the most intransigent policy becomes not only possible but necessary, since it is, in the final analysis, an episode in the world struggle of the proletariat.

Lenin acted in function of Marxist principles both in 1917 when he limited himself to the “control of the industries”, and during War Communism between 1918 and 1920, and when he recommended in March 1921 the policy of the NEP. The whole of its policy stems from an international approach to the Russian problem and NEP itself will be considered inevitable because of the delay in the revolutionary rise of the world proletariat, while on the other hand the fundamental conditions will be specified within which the concessions contained in NEP’s policy must be strictly maintained.

It is known that Lenin, replacing the tax in kind (the farmer became free to dispose of the remaining product after the transfer of the share devolved to the state) to the system of requisitions (which deprived the farmer of any possibility of disposing of his product) and authorising the re-establishment of the market and small industry, divided the Russian economy into the two socialist and private sectors. The first sector – the state sector – had to engage in a speed race against the second in order to defeat it in the economic field thanks to the superiority of work performance and increased production.

However, the socialist status given to the state sector did not in any way mean that the state form was sufficient to determine the socialist nature of this sector. Lenin insisted a thousand times that the chances of success of the state sector did not result in any way from the fact that, instead of the private sector, it was the state that managed the industry, but from the fact that this was a proletarian state closely linked to the course of the world revolution.

Lenin established the NEP in March 1921. It was in 1923-24 that the first results of the NEP manifested themselves and at the same time the struggle within the Russian Party showed that the forecasts based on a development of the socialist sector to the detriment of the private sector were not confirmed by events. While Trotsky recommended measures to develop the socialist sector and fight against the reborn bourgeoisie, especially in the countryside, the right wing of Bukharin saw no other solution to the economic problems than greater freedom in favour of the capitalist elements of the Soviet economy.

In 1926-27 the battle took on, within the Party and the International, the proportions we have mentioned and the defeat will be total for the left-wing elements who can only remain in the Party on the condition of abjuring the international and internationalist principle of the struggle for socialism.

Historical evolution does not obey formalistic criteria to such an extent that a restoration of the economic principles of capitalism could only be considered possible in Russia through the re-establishment of the classical form of individual property. Russia was to find itself in 1927 and later increasingly in a world situation characterised, as in the last century, not by the reflection of liberal economic principles in the private appropriation of means of production and surplus value, but by another situation which knew state totalitarianism and the subjugation to it of all forms of private initiative.

After the defeat of the Left in the Russian Party, we do not see – because of the characteristics of the general historical evolution – a triumph of the Right, but the fact that the solution to the economic problems can only be achieved through a fight against the capitalist stratifications that arose during the NEP.

But between the policy of the NEP and that which was then to triumph, the five-year plans, is there or is there not a solution of continuity? In order to answer this question, we must first consider that, as Charles Bettelheim demonstrates in his book “Soviet Planning”, the NEP had not achieved its objectives either in the political field, since it had led to a hypertrophy of bureaucracy, or in the economic field, since instead of having ensured the victory of the socialist sector, it had led to a strengthening of the private sector, or, finally, in the more general economic field, since 1926-27 had experienced a serious economic crisis in Russia.

In the presence of what Bettelheim will qualify as “the failure of the NEP” the question arises whether 1927 should inevitably mark the time of the reckoning and if, due to the very unfavourable international circumstances, no further possibility existed to hold the proletariat to the Russian state. But we must not deal with this problem, our task being mainly to provide information on the course of events.

The indisputable fact is that the reinstitution of the economic principle of capitalist exploitation is consecrated by the Five-Year Plans, the first of which will be decided at the XVI Conference of the Russian Party in April 1929 and approved by the V Congress of the Soviets in May 1929; the fundamental point of these Plans is that of reaching first and then continuously exceeding the production indexes, taking as points of reference both the period prior to 1914 and the results obtained in other countries. In a word, what will be the substance of the new Soviet reconstruction? Official documents make no secret of this: it is a matter of reconstructing an economy of the same type as the capitalist economy and it will be described all the more as ” socialist ” the higher the summits reached by production are.

The economic plan conceived by Lenin and approved at the IX Congress of the Russian Communist Party in April 1920 imposed the whole problem on the increase of the consumer industry: this meant that the essential aim of the Soviet economy was the improvement of the living conditions of the working masses. In contrast, the theory of the five-year plans aims at the higher development of heavy industry at the expense of consumption. The outcome of the five-year plans in the war economy and in the war was therefore as inevitable as the corresponding structure of the economy in the rest of the capitalist world.

Corresponding to the substantial modification that will occur in the purposes of production, which will be solely those of a constant accumulation of capital in heavy industry, another modification will be made in the conception of “socialist industry” whose distinctive criterion will be established in the non-private and state form: the master state will become the god to which will be sacrificed not only the sacrifices of millions of Russian workers who will have to revalue zealously in the quantity and quality of production in order not to incur the accusation and condemnation of “Trotskyites”, but also the corpses of the architects of the Russian revolution.

The economic principle of the increasing exploitation of workers, typical of capitalism, will be re-established in Russia, in parallel with the general laws of historical evolution, which lead to a growing and totalitarian intervention of the State. The right-wing man, Bukharin, and his companion, Rykov, will also be executed. Who triumphs in Russia is who must then triumph in all countries: state totalitarianism, and the consequence can only be the same in Russia: the preparation and gigantic participation in the Second World War.

The Italian Left, seeing the substance of political evolution in Russia from the very beginning, did not allow itself – like Trotsky – to be trapped by the state form of property in Russia and as early as 1933 it raised the need to assimilate Soviet Russia to the capitalist world by advocating the same tactic during the imperialist conflict, where it would inevitably have been conducted by the theory of “socialism in a single country” and by the theory of the five-year plans.

3. The Chinese Question (1926 – 1927)

“If the British reactionary trade unions are prepared to form a coalition with the revolutionary trade unions in our country (Russia) against the counter-revolutionary imperialists in their country, why would this bloc not be approved?”

(Stalin at the joint session of the C.C. of the Russian Party and the Central Control Commission, July 1926). Rightly Trotsky replied:

“If the reactionary trade unions were able to fight their imperialists, they would not be reactionary”.

If Chang-Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang were willing to fight for revolution… But the stacks of murderers who ended the epic struggle of the Chinese workers had to lugublously prove that Chang-Kai-Shek and Kuomintang could not be anything other than the executioners of the proletariat and the peasants of that country.

In his book “The Communist International after Lenin”, Trotsky rightly characterises the general situation in China in the following terms: “Land ownership, large and medium, is intertwined in the most intimate way with the capitalism of cities, including foreign capitalism” (pg. 277 of the French edition Rieder), “An extremely rapid internal development of the industry based on the role of commercial and banking capitalism which has subjected the country, the complete dependence on the market of the most important peasant regions, the enormous role and continuous development of foreign trade, the total subordination of the Chinese countryside to the city; all this confirms the unconditional dominance, the direct domination of capitalist relations in China” (op. cited pg. 305).

In the study that will be dedicated to Trotskyism, the journal will explain the reasons that Trotsky was supposed to bring, despite an analysis that highlighted the determining relations of the entire Chinese economic order (including feudal and prefeudal relations numerically much higher than capitalist ones), to absolutely insufficient tactical conclusions, such as the participation in the Kuomintang and the raising of that set of democratic slogans that Trotsky defended against Stalin after the definitive defeat of the Chinese revolution, after the failure of what the Comintern qualified: “The Canton Insurgency” (December 1927).

Our current, on the other hand, departing from an analysis collimating with that of Trotsky, defended the thesis of principle of not adhering to the Kuomintang and, while fighting the tactic of the Comintern of the “revolutionary offensive”, maintained integral its previous positions against the “democratic order words”, remaining firm on the the thesis that the only word to raise in the question of power was that of the proletarian dictatorship.

The events in fact had to confirm that neither a revolutionary situation existed in China after 1927, nor a democratic era of bourgeois and anti-imperialist independence in China could open after and despite the revolutionary defeat of 1926-27.

It was in 1911 that Manciano’s dynasty abdicated in favour of the Republic. And it was at this time that the “People’s Party” of the Kuomintang was founded. The policy of Sun-Yat-sen, the founder of the Party, even though he proclaims anti-imperialist pretensions for ” the independence of China “, is however forced to limit himself to verbal statements that will not worry foreign imperialisms at all. History will condemn China to being unable to rise to the role of a great nation-state and Sun-Yat-Sen is so convinced of this that, after China had taken a position for the Entente in the run-up to the 1914-18 war, in 1918 he turned to the victors for help in China’s economic development, and tried to rely on the nearest and then least intrusive imperialism, Japan, to loosen the grip of British imperialism, which held the most important positions.

In the dominance of capitalist relations in the interior of the country and in the historical framework of the financial imperialism of capitalism, which opened up no prospect of independent nation states being elevated to colonial and semi-colonial countries, Chinese events began in 1925, developed in 1926, and ended with the violent suffocation of the so-called “Canton insurgency”.

Can these events, which take on above all the military aspect of a march that starts from the South and goes from victory to victory towards the North, to the point of conquering the whole country, be characterised as a “democratic-revolutionary, anti-imperialist war of the Chinese bourgeoisie”? Obviously, during these tumultuous events, there were attacks against foreign concessions, but, apart from the fact that these attacks never responded to decisions of the centre of the Kuomintang, but were the result of local initiatives which, on the other hand, as events diminished, were even disavowed by the central management of the Kuomintang, the problem was different and it was a question of characterising the whole by what it had really revealed and not of adding up the episodes which had no decisive influence on the general course of events.

At the end of 1927, the victory of the counter-revolution was decisive, and this victory was not unfortunately short-lived, since twenty years later we were in the same situation and, despite the Japanese defeat, there was no autonomous affirmation of the Chinese bourgeoisie, if it can dispute with France the rank of the IV or V among the five Great, it cannot, however, prevent China, after the defeat of the revolutionary movement of 1926-27, from being reduced to becoming an immense territory where the clash manifests itself among the great foreign capitalisms, but not on a front that sees the Chinese bourgeoisie rise up against all of these capitalisms. Against Stalin and also against Trotsky, the answer of history is absolutely unequivocal; it was not, in 1926-27, a revolutionary anti-imperialist war susceptible to evolve into a frankly proletarian and communist movement, but a gigantic uprising of hundreds of millions of exploited who could find only in the proletarian vanguard the guide that, establishing the proletarian dictatorship in China, would have intertwined with the development of the world revolution.

The role of Chang-Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang could not be that of the French bourgeoisie of 1793, but that of the Noske and their companions in the most advanced countries. From the beginning, they represented the bank of defence against the gigantic revolt of the Chinese exploited and the Kuomintang was the effective instrument of this cruel and victorious resistance of the Chinese and world counter-revolution.

As for the Chinese bourgeoisie, like the bourgeoisie of India and other colonial and semi-colonial countries, its function was not to tend towards national autonomy, but to get stuck with the organisation of the dominant imperialist and foreign bourgeoisies. Chang-Kai-Shek had to show a terrible brutality against the Chinese proletarians as soon as circumstances (the descent of the revolutionary flow) allowed it, at the same time as an angelic genuflection ability towards the most powerful foreign imperialisms.

On the other hand, at the 7th Enlarged Executive at the end of 1926, the Chinese delegate Tang-Ping-Sian declared in his report on Chang-Kai-Shek:

“In the field of international politics, he has a passive demeanour in the full sense of the word. He is not prepared to fight against English imperialism; he is prepared to compromise with the Japanese imperialists under certain conditions”.

And Trotsky specifies suggestively:

“Chang-Kai-Shek made war on the Chinese militarists, agents of one of the imperialist states. It is by no means the same thing to wage war on imperialism” ( Trotsky, op. cit., p. 268).

At the bottom of the struggle between the revolutionary masses and the counter-revolution, the war that the generals of the South and of the North will find, fundamentally, no other explanation but that of seizing the risen proletariat and, secondly, of tending towards the unification of China dispersed in the thousand provinces under central authority. Central authority, we repeat, without any prospect of raising China to the level of a great and independent nation state.

Moreover, the imperialisms will not set their preferences in a decisive way on one or the other general, but, conscious of the revolutionary reality in China and of the danger that it represents for their class dominion in the world, they will let the counter-revolutionary intervention of the International develop in full. After the interruption caused by the war, the interweaving of capitalist relations was re-established, starting from the metropoles, the Chinese bourgeoisie was annexed and its dominion extended over the immensity of the Chinese lands.

* * *

From a programmatic point of view, the International had, as a fundamental document, the Theses of the Second Congress (September 1920). The last paragraph of the 6th “supplementary” thesis says:

“Foreign domination constantly obstructs the free development of social life; therefore the revolution’s first step must be the removal of this foreign domination. The struggle to overthrow foreign domination in the colonies does not therefore mean underwriting the national aims of the national bourgeoisie but much rather smoothing the path to liberation for the proletariat of the colonies”.

One can see that the perspective that permeates many documents of the foundation of the International, which is also contained in the same “Manifesto” (when Marx speaks of the bourgeoisie that digs its own grave extending its dominion to all countries) has not been confirmed by events. In fact, faced with a movement of the magnitude of that of China in 1926-27, which will see hundreds of thousands of workers and armed peasants, a movement that has the unquestionable connotations of indomitable historical forces, if the alleged goal of liberation from foreign rule had been likely to determine the events we would have witnessed a struggle of these masses that, under the direction of the indigenous bourgeoisie, would have come to a decisive blow against foreign imperialism, or this same movement that, bypassing the primitive bourgeois direction, would have taken the strength of a proletarian revolution interwoven with the world revolution.

Now not only the impact against the imperialisms did not occur, but the historical function of the Chinese bourgeoisie has proved to be exclusively that of a powerful counter-revolutionary bastion to tame the masses with terrible violence, and this while foreign imperialisms could not but rejoice in the excellent work done by their commissioners: the Kuomintang and all its tendencies, the right wing of Chang-Kai-Shek, the center of Dai-Thi-Tao, as the left self-styled communist led by delegates of the Communist International in China.

The theses do not limit themselves to formulating a perspective, but, after formulating the guiding criterion for the analysis of historical situations, they determine guarantees which, it goes without saying, have been shamefully betrayed by the International.

As a guideline, Point 2 of the cited “Theses” states:

“As the conscious expression of the proletarian class struggle to throw off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, and in accordance with its main task, which is the fight against bourgeois democracy and the unmasking of its lies and hypocrisy, the Communist Party should not place the main emphasis in the national question on abstract and formal principles, but in the first place on an exact evaluation of the historically given and above all economic milieu. Secondly it should emphasise the explicit separation of the interests of the oppressed classes, of the toilers, of the exploited, from the general concept of the national interest, which means the interests of the ruling class. Thirdly it must emphasise the equally clear division of the oppressed, dependent nations which do not enjoy equal rights from the oppressing, exploiting, privileged nations, as a counter to the bourgeois democratic lie which covers over the colonial and financial enslavement of the vast majority of the world’s total population, by a tiny minority of the richest and most advanced capitalist countries, that is characteristic of the epoch of finance capital and imperialism”.

As for the guarantees, the 5th Thesis says:

“A determined fight is necessary against the attempt to put a communist cloak around revolutionary liberation movements that are not really communist in the backward countries. The Communist International has the duty to support the revolutionary movement in the colonies only for the purpose of gathering the components of the future proletarian parties – communist in fact and not just in name in all the backward countries and training them to be conscious of their special tasks, the special tasks, that is to say, of fighting against the bourgeois-democratic tendencies within their own nation. The Communist International should accompany the revolutionary movement in the colonies and the backward countries for part of the way, should even make an alliance with it; it may not, however, fuse with it, but must unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement, be it only in embryo”.

The application of these fundamental directives during the course of the Chinese events would certainly have determined a progressive clarification of some of the hypothetical elements contained in the Theses, which was, on the other hand, clearly provided for in the first line of the 2nd Thesis that we have reported, where it speaks of the necessity of “a clear notion of the historical and economic circumstances”. This notion could only lead to the recognition of the exclusively counter-revolutionary character of the Kuomintang and the absence of any historical possibility of anti-imperialist struggle in function of the development of those economic forces (Thesis 6).

Our current, in violent opposition to the direction of the International and against Trotsky himself, supported the thesis of not joining the Kuomintang from the beginning, qualifying this “People’s Party” for what it was in reality and for what it should then cruelly reveal itself after the massacres of the proletarians and peasants of 1927. It was linked to what Lenin said in 1919 when he wrote:

“The strength of the proletariat in any capitalist country is much greater than what the proportion between the proletariat and the total population implies. This is because the proletariat economically commands the centre and the nerves of the whole system of the economy of capitalism and also because in the economic and political field the proletariat expresses under capitalist domination the real interests of the enormous majority of the workers” (“Complete Works”, vol. XVI, pages 458, quoted by Trotsky in “The International after Lenin”). And as for the capitalist nature of economic relations in China, let us remember what we have already said by marking our agreement with the analysis made by Trotsky.

Let’s see now, briefly, the tactical approach of the International. It can be summarised in the formula of the “bloc of the four classes” (bourgeoisie, peasants, small urban bourgeoisie, proletariat), a formula that was expressly drafted in the resolutions of the International.

The magazine of the Communist International in its No. 5 of March 10, 1927 (note, a month later only Chang-Kai-Shek will unleash terror against the proletarians of Shanghai), contains a particularly evocative article by Martinov. After having stated that

“China’s national liberation must necessarily, if successful, turn into socialist revolution, that China’s liberating movement is also an integral part of the world proletarian revolution, differing in that respect from the earlier liberating movements that were an integral part of the general democratic movement”,

after having therefore given this movement, which is of “national liberation” only in the heads of the leaders of the International, a much more advanced characteristic than that which preceded it in the history of the formation of the bourgeois nation-states in Europe. Martinov arrives at the confusion that while

“In Russia, in 1905, the initiative of the leadership emanated from the proletarian party” and “the Russian liberal bourgeoisie, during a certain time, dragged on, striving at every temporary stop of the movement to conclude an agreement with the Czarist autocracy”, In China, “the initiative emanates from the industrial bourgeoisie and bourgeois intellectuals” and therefore “the Chinese Communist Party must strive not to create obstacles [our emphasis] to the revolutionary army against the great feudal lords, against the militarists of the North and against imperialism”.

Stalin, for his part, wrote in a polemical article against the Russian opposition (see Workers’ State of May 1927):

“In the first period of the Chinese revolution, in the period of the first march towards the North, when the national army approaching the Yang-Tze passed from victory to victory, a powerful movement of workers and peasants had not yet developed and the indigenous bourgeoisie [with the exception of the “compradors”] marched together with the revolution. This, then, was the revolution of a single front that extended to the whole nation [our emphasis]. This does not mean that there were contrasts between the indigenous bourgeoisie and the revolution. This only means that the indigenous bourgeoisie, by giving its support to the revolution, strove to exploit it for its own purposes, directing its development essentially in the line of territorial conquests and trying to limit its development in a different direction”.

The events had to cruelly prove through the unleashing of terror, starting from April 1927, that the “revolution of the single front of the entire nation” was in reality the incorporation of the masses that would be submitted to the direction of the generals, and that finally there was clear, strident, violent opposition between the “military march to the North under the direction of the Kuomintang” and the class struggles of Chinese workers and peasants. All the lactic matter in the Comintern will finally be summed up in the directive that Martinov had specified:

“Do not create obstacles to the revolutionary army” (see quotation above).

Finally, with regard to the tactical approach of the International, we recall the declaration of Tan-Pin-Sian to the 7th Enlarged Executive:

“As soon as Trotskyism arose, the Chinese Communist Party and Youth immediately unanimously adopted a resolution against it”.

It is well known that under the label of Trotskyism were included all the tendencies that opposed the direction of the International. If we have quoted this quote, it is to prove that the Chinese Party had been energetically “purified” to be able to carry out, with full success, its counter-revolutionary policy.

* * *

The second half of 1926 and the first quarter of 1927 will see the greatest explosion of the Chinese events. Throughout this period – which is frankly revolutionary – the International violently opposes the tendencies that are manifested in the bosom of the proletarian vanguard towards the constitution of the Soviets; it is firm on the directive of the bloc of the four classes.

The Russian delegation in China, which was living in direct contact with the events, will write a letter[2] addressed to the Centre of Moscow, criticising the Chinese Party’s policy and showing how much counter-revolutionary vigilance had been exercised in carrying out the tactical measures that were to lead to the collapse of this grandiose movement. It says so:

“According to the report of the Chinese Communist Party of 13 December 1926 on the dangerous tendencies in the revolutionary movement, the statement asserts that “the greatest danger consists in this: that the movement of the masses progresses towards the left” [emphasis added].

On the question of the relations between the Party and the masses, one can deduce what they were from this passage:

“The relations between the party leadership, the workers and the peasants were formulated in the best possible way by Comrade Petrov, a member of the C.C., on the occasion of the examination of the question of the recruitment of students for the special course [communist university of workers of the East]. It would have been necessary to obtain the following breakdown: 175 workers and 100 farmers. Petrov told us that the Central Committee decided to appoint only students and intellectuals”.

On the peasant question:

“At the December Plenum [1926 ED.] of the C.C., with the participation of the representative of the E.C. of the C.I., a resolution was adopted relative to the peasant question. In this resolution, there is no word about the programme and the fight against agriculture. The resolution only responds to one of the most irritating questions, the question of peasant power, and it responds negatively to it: it says that the slogan of peasant power must not be launched in order not to frighten the small bourgeoisie. From this comes that the organs of the Party have ignored the armed peasant”.

[In fact, they did not ignore it because they pushed the armed peasants into the arms of the generals of the Kuomintang, ED.]

On the question of the workers’ movement:

“More than one million organised workers are deprived of an executive centre. The trade unions were detached from the masses and, to a large extent, remained staff organisations. Political and organisational work was always and everywhere replaced by constriction and the main fact was that reformist tendencies grew within as well as outside the revolutionary trade union movement. Cordial familiarity with entrepreneurs, participation in benefits, participation in raising labour productivity, subordination of trade unions to employers and leaders are the usual phenomena”.

On the other hand, refusal to defend the economic demands of workers. Fearing the elementary development of the workers’ movement, the Party allowed compulsory arbitration in Canton and later in Hang-Kéou (the very idea of arbitrage belongs to Borodine, official delegate of the C.I.). Particularly serious is the fear of the leaders of the Party of the Non-Industrial Workers’ Movement. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of workers organised in China are non-industrial workers.

The report of the C.C. to the Plenum of December 1926 says:

“It is extremely difficult for us to define tactics towards the middle and lower middle classes, because the strikes of the workers working for the craftsmen and the strikes of the employees are only conflicts within the same class. And both sides in the struggle (i.e. the entrepreneurs and the workers) being necessary for the single national front [the front of the revolution, as Stalin says, see quotation above ED.], we can neither support either contender, nor remain neutral”.

On the army:

“The characteristic of the Party’s demeanour towards the army was given by Tchou-En-Lai in his report. He says to the members of the Party: ‘Go into this national-revolutionary army, strengthen it, increase its combat capacity, but do not lead any independent workers’. Until recently, there were no cells in the army. Our fellow political advisers were exclusively concerned with the political-military work of the Kuomintang”.

And beyond:

“The December C.C. Plenum took the decision to create cells in the army, cells formed only of commanders with the prohibition of letting the soldiers enter”.

The straitjacket around the masses of insurgent Chinese workers is solid and, unfortunately, indestructible. The whole movement is incorporated in the framework of the unity of all, exploited and exploiters, for the insistent war of “liberation”. In the bosom of the “purified” Party, the proletariat is rejected at the last level, after the intellectuals, in the trade unions it is proclaimed that the struggle between capitalist entrepreneurs and the proletariat is a conflict “within the same class”, the armed peasants must be disciplined within the “national” army, while the “communist” cells are reserved for the officers.

The slipknot was ready. It was pulled on Shanghai on 12 April 1927 when Chang-Kai-Shek unleashed the terror against the masses.

Before moving on to the treatment of the following events, it is necessary to highlight the spontaneous coupling, it should be said (to use the terminology used by Engels in the study on the development of the class struggle) natural between the mass movement and the Communist International. This was to respond to the many builders of revolutions, parties and Internationals who swarm a little everywhere in other countries, and who fortunately do not arrive in Italy to make themselves known, who would like to give the impression that the Left would have made the mistake of not separating themselves from the International before and founding another organization.

The Chinese revolutionary movement is part of the same historical complex that had its origin and in October Russian and Communist International. The precedents (the German defeat of 1923 and the events within the Russian party) explain why this counter-revolutionary direction had become an inescapable historical necessity. And this same counter-revolutionary direction should not directly evoke the antagonist force susceptible to overpower it, but only determine the premises for a much more distant reconstruction of the international body of the proletariat, so distant that even today the historical possibilities do not arise, nor can they be determined by revolutionary militants.

Chang-Kai-Shek’s violent action of April 12, 1927 closes the phase of the greatest revolutionary intensity in China. The Eighth Enlarged Executive of the International in May 1927 and the Chinese Party’s C.C. Plenum of August 7, 1927 will mark a turning point in international tactics.

When the situation goes left, as until April 1927, bloc of the four classes, channelling the movement of the masses under the discipline of the Kuomintang. The situation shifted, it went to the right, the international went to the left and in the two meetings indicated the first signs of what was called the “insurrection” of Canton in December 1927 were already seen.

The united Kuomintang leads to the anti-worker terror of April 1927. A split will take place in the “People’s Party” and a left-wing Kuomintang will form in Ou-Thang. The communists even enter the government while Stalin proclaims that

“the basis of the Chinese revolution consists in the agricultural upheaval”.

The C.C. of the Chinese Party in the cited session declares that

“There is an economic, political and social situation that is favourable to the insurgency and that since in the cities it is no longer possible [Chang-Kai-Shek, thanks to the tactics of the Comintern, was in charge of realizing this impossibility ED.] to unleash revolts, it is necessary to transport the armed struggle to the countryside. It is here that the hotbeds of the uprising are to be found, while the city must be an auxiliary force”.

And the said C.C. will conclude:

“it is necessary, wherever objectively possible, to organise insurrections immediately”.

The result of this turning point, characterised on the one hand by an analysis that considers the existence of a revolutionary situation at the same time that denies it as far as the city is concerned, and on the other hand by the participation of the Communists in the government, should not have taken long to manifest itself through the terror of the left-wing Kuomintang against the peasants who continued the struggle.

* * *

This led to the “insurrection” in Canton in December 1927. Political elements of evaluation, preceding this “insurrection” we will find them in the Plenum of the C.C. of the Chinese Party of November 1927, with regard to which the resolution of the Canton of the Province of Kiang Sou of the Chinese Communist Party, of 7 May 1929, provides interesting indications.

Let us remember that the sacrifice of the masses to the Kuomintang had led to the violent crushing of the workers’ movement in the cities, that the sacrifice of the peasant masses to the Kuomintang on the left had led to a similar violent repression of the peasants in Hounan. And so it was that we began moving towards the final chapter of December 1927.

Was it really an “insurrection”? The IXth Enlarged Executive of the International to be held shortly after, in February 1928, would render

“N. responsible for the fact that in Canton there was no elected soviet” (underlined in the text of the resolution).

In the communist movement no doubt could exist that the soviets appear only in the course of a revolutionary situation and that therefore either political conditions exist that determine them, and then they can only be elected, (apart from the formal and trivial question of the election, what interests is that they are the spontaneous product of the movement of the risen masses), or they do not exist and the name of Soviet that will be attributed to artificially constituted bodies, will not correspond at all to a real possibility of the exercise of power by the proletariat.

But, in fact, we were witnessing only the maturation of the new turning point of the International whose primitive elements are found in the 8th Enlarged and in the meeting of the Chinese Party’s C. C. in August 1927. The “insurrection” will be decided by the central bodies just when the possibilities for its triumph will no longer exist. It is then only that one will speak of the Soviet, of that same word that had been rigorously banned in the midst of the revolutionary offensive of the masses, in the second half of 1926 and in the first quarter of 1927. The proletarians of Canton (note that it is precisely the least proletarian city in China) will be hit against all the tendencies of the Kuomintang and the “insurrection” limited to a single centre, historically isolated (since the revolutionary movement was clearly in descent), could not but be rapidly liquidated. In the meantime, the International could achieve a third counter-revolutionary decoration (after those of Chang-Kai-Shek and Hounan) since a mortal blow will be given to the revolutionary aspiration of the Chinese masses who must now be convinced of the impossibility of realizing their Soviet power.

Here, in the tactics followed in Canton, we have an anticipation of the tactics that will be followed in all the countries, from 1929 to 1934, of that tactics of the “revolutionary offensive” that we will talk about in the next chapter. At that time, our current could only limit itself, on the one hand, to pointing out that the proletarian movement could only encounter the violent opposition of all the ruling classes of the country and of all their political formations, even in colonial China, to underline the reasons for the immediate defeat due not to the fact of the unworkability of the proletarian power, but to the fact that these directives had been given not when the objective conditions for the revolutionary victory existed but when they had been sacrificed by the counter-revolutionary tactics of the discipline to the Chinese bourgeoisie.

From 1928 the situation in China will take a step backwards. The fragmentation will become even more serious than before the revolutionary movement of 1926-27, the generals will constitute their particular areas, and will also rise the “Communist China”. These are some of the most backward regions in China, where, together with the rudimentary forms of the primitive economy, there is a need to exploit the masses even more intensively than in other areas. The “communist” ruling clan will establish together with the payment in kind of wages (a real market does not exist and the current system is that of bartering), the compulsory conscription extended to the entire population, since the army has not only the military task of defending “the communist country”, but also the other economic and social product sharing. And the hypothesis of seeing a mobilization of the masses in defence of these extra-reactionary regimes cannot be excluded at present, should the evolution of the capitalist world cross a phase of conflict between the United States and Russia in the territories of Asia.

In the situation that arose after the “Canton Insurgency”, a violent controversy will arise between our fraction and Trotsky. The respective fundamental positions are not new, but prolong, in the Chinese question, the differences that were determined at the IV and V International Congress. In the new circumstances that evidently no longer allowed to launch the slogan of the proletarian dictatorship, Trotsky argued that an intermediate slogan should be raised in the question of power: that of the Constituent Assembly and of a democratic constitution in China. Our current, on the other hand, maintained that if the non-revolutionary situation did not permit the raising of the fundamental slogan of the dictatorship, if, therefore, the question of power no longer arose in immediate form, this did not mean that the programme of the party had to be completely reaffirmed on the theoretical and propaganda levels, while the withdrawal could only take place on the basis of the immediate demands of the masses and their corresponding class organisations.

In the course of all this controversy of rumours, it came to our knowledge that an opposition had arisen within the Trotskyist organization itself, but there was no possibility of establishing links with these militants; in fact, while the possibilities of communications were extended, the forms of the cloistered solidification of the non and counter-revolutionary organisations were also extended, and these formed a wall against the institution of links between the forces of the Revolution.

We were keen to give – within the limits of an article – the most documented report on these formidable events which, in an extremely backward economic environment, had shown the revolutionary possibilities of the proletarian class even in far-off China. As in the advanced England, with the Anglo-Russian Committee, so also in China the International showed to be the decisive instrument of the counter-revolution since it alone had the authority and the possibility to fight a revolutionary movement of incalculable historical importance and that had to end in a disastrous failure of the communist movement.

4. Tactics of the Offensive and Social Fascism (1929-1934)

In the bosom of the socialist parties of the Second International, both before 1914 and immediately after the war, between 1919 and 1921, the communist parties were founded in all countries, the reflection in the organisational field, of the political positions of the reformist right and of the revolutionary left, was opposed and consisted in a unitary attitude of the first, a splitter of the second. In Italy it was the abstentionist fraction that – in strict accordance with the decisions of the 2nd International Communist Congress of September 1920 – took the initiative of splitting the “old and glorious Socialist Party”. While all currents of this party, reformist right and maximalist left, including Gramsci and the Ordine Nuovo, were for unity “from Turati to Bordiga”.

The Communist International – under the leadership of Lenin – correctly followed Marx’s method in the construction of the fundamental organ of the proletariat class: the class party. This can only arise on the basis of a rigorous definition of a theoretical program and a corresponding political action which finds in the organisation of the Party, exclusively limited to those who adhere to this program and to this action, the instrument suitable to determine that shifting of situations which is allowed by the degree of their revolutionary maturation. That both the right and all other intermediate political currents are for unity should not come as a surprise, since they ultimately act along the lines of preserving the bourgeois world. On the contrary, the Marxist Left cannot tend towards the upheaval of this bourgeois world other than the condition of realising its premise in the ideological, theoretical and organisational fields through that decisive split which determines the historical autonomy of the proletarian class.

In the Third International the process manifests itself in a different way. The influence at first, and later the capture of this organisation by capitalism, was accomplished through the expulsion from its bosom of any current that did not bow to the counter-revolutionary decisions of the ruling centre. The fact that determines this modification is the presence of the proletarian state which – in the current historical phase of state totalitarianism – cannot tolerate any stumbling block, obstacle or opposition. If it is true that the bourgeois-democratic state can still tolerate those discussions or oppositions which, since they take place on the outskirts of its activity, can never upset the evolution determined by the fulcrum found in the process of development of financial monopolism, as regards both the proletarian state in the process of degeneration and the bourgeois state in the fascist type (resulting from the most advanced stage compared to the democratic one of the struggle between the classes), the dictatorship of the ruling centre is completed with the exclusion of any possibility of opposition of tendencies acting also in the peripheral field.

It is well known that, at the time of Lenin, the Russian Party had intense discussions in its midst and that, until 1920, even organised fractions could exist in its midst. But then it was the period in which the adaptation of the politics of the proletarian state to the needs of the world revolution was anxiously sought. Then the problem was reversed and it was a matter of adapting the politics of the Party to that of the State, which increasingly obeyed the contingent, changing and contradictory needs of its alignment with the general cycle of the historical evolution of the international capitalist regime, in which it was about to be incorporated.

The ruling centre must have absolute and monopolistic control of all the organs of the state; it begins with the expulsions from the party, and will end with the summary execution not only of those who unswervingly oppose the established course of the counter-revolution but even of those who try to save their lives with the abjuration of their previous opposition. In spite of these understandings, the various opposition groups within the Russian Party have been wiped out by violence and terror. Trotsky, for his part, remains firm in his uncompromising opposition to Stalin; but, since he follows the course of the Russian revolution in the pattern of the French revolution, he considers that the reversal of the function of the Russian state from revolutionary to counter-revolutionary can only come about with the appearance of Russian Bonaparte. Until this apparition, since there is an impossibility of intense industrialization of Russia and the inevitability of the military attack of the rest of the capitalist world against Russia presents itself, there are also the conditions to “straighten out” the International both from within and, when this will prove impossible due to the regime of purification in force in the International, even through the socialist left.

The Italian Left, instead, in close connection with the same positions of Marx, Lenin and with the indicated procedure followed for the foundation of the Party in Livorno, never entered both in the way of Zinoviev’s capitulations and in the way of Trotsky’s straightening, but from the programmatic opposition in the political field the consequent fractionist procedure descended, constantly raising the problem of the replacement of the counter-revolutionary political body with the opposite one which remained in the orientation of the world revolution.

In a word, in the socialist parties of the Second International, progressive corruption was affirmed under the suggestion of the power of inertia of the historical forces of bourgeois conservation, which tried to attract in their group also the Marxist and proletarian tendency, keeping it within the “United Party”. Instead in the communist parties, because of the existence of the “proletarian” state, the bourgeois pollution could only come about thanks to the disciplinary elimination first, then violent of any tendency that did not adapt to the changing needs of the counter-revolutionary evolution of this state: of those oriented towards the left as well as of the others on the right; after the Zinoviev process there will also be that of the right-wing Rykov and Bukharin.

On the political level, then, while the process of development of the reformist Right follows a logical chain that allows us to find, in the theoretical assault of Bernstein and revisionism at the end of the last century, the premises of the betrayal of 1914 and of the Noske in 1919, as far as the degenerative course of the Communist International is concerned, we will see a succession of political positions in violent contrast with each other. Trotsky sees, at the dawn of the “third period” of which we are particularly concerned in this chapter (at the time of the Sixth Congress in 1928), a leftist orientation capable of evolving towards a “straightening” of the International; our current instead sees it as a moment of that development process that was to lead the communist parties to become one of the essential instruments of world capitalism, a process that was destined to reach its completion unless it was broken up thanks to the victory of the fractions of the Marxist left within the communist parties.

Furthermore, our current did not derive from the growing distance between the degenerative politics of the International and the programs and interests of the proletarian class the conclusion of the necessity of the construction of the new parties. The fact that this distance worsened while the historical process did not determine the opposite reaffirmation of the proletarian class, pushed us not to commit adventures like the one predicted by Trotsky who went so far as to support, after Hitler’s seizure of power in January 1933, the entry of the opposition into the socialist parties. Our fraction continued to prepare the conditions for proletarian recovery, through a real understanding of the evolution of the capitalist world, into whose orbit Soviet Russia had also entered.

We have already seen in the chapter devoted to the Chinese events of 1926-27 that the characteristic of the tactics of the International is given not only by positions that are merely opportunistic, but by positions that are violently opposed to the immediate and finalistic interests of the proletariat. The International cannot remain halfway, it must go all the way: this is required by the needs of the counter-revolutionary evolution of the state that is in its bosom and that, after the triumph of the theory of “socialism in a single country”, after having broken with the interests of the world proletariat, cannot remain suspended in the air, and must turn directly and violently towards the opposite interests of the conservation of the capitalist world.

When the revolutionary possibilities existed in China, until March 1927, the politics and tactics of the discipline of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie were preconceived; when these possibilities no longer existed, one oriented oneself towards the Canton insurrection of December 1927; thus completing that political course that was to lead to the crash of the Chinese proletariat.

In 1928, the formidable economic crisis that broke out the following year in America matured and subsequently spread to all countries. The tactic of the International remains; in 1928, still impregnated with the criteria followed in England with the Anglo-Russian Committee and in China with the bloc of the four classes.

The “insurrection” of Canton is still just an episode, which as we saw in the previous chapter, is even criticised – albeit muted – by the Enlarged Executive of February 1928. The events, however, had to show that it was not at all an incidental episode but a forerunner that characterises well the tactics of the “third period” that is established only in the following year. In the meantime, the tactic of “republican discipline” (which goes by the name of the “Clichy tactic “) was applied in France, leading the Communists to ensure the election of the socialist and radical-socialist senators against the right wing of Poincaré and Tardieu; in Germany, the policy of the “popular” referendum against allowances to the principles; while the Italian Party – in correlation with the policy followed in the first period of the Aventine in June-November 1924 – launches the directive of the “Anti-Fascist Committees” (a bloc that postulates the accession of socialists, reformists and all opponents of fascism). The C.C. of the Party writes on the other hand in a letter direct to our current and published in No. 4 of August 1, 1928 of Prometeo (foreign edition):

“We must also put ourselves at the head (underlined in the original) of the struggle for the republic, but give this struggle, immediately, a class content. Yes, we must say, we too are for the republic guaranteed by an assembly of workers and peasants”.

The Italian republic has come and it – as we all know – is “guaranteed” by the assembly of workers and peasants, who in the Montecitorio barracks are anxiously watching over the success of the reconstruction of capitalist society after the upheavals caused by war and military defeat.

In 1928, therefore, the International remained within the framework of the tactics of 1926 and 1927 and acted as the left wing of the political formations of bourgeois democracy.

Then we move on to a radical change.

We begin by examining the theoretical aspect of the new tactic, which on a progressive scale will be decided by the 9th Enlarged Executive (March 1928), the 6th World Congress of the International and the simultaneous 4th International Congress of the Red Trade Union in the summer of 1928, the 10th Enlarged Executive of July 1929 and finally the 11th Enlarged Executive of 1931.

In the “Resolution on the role of the Communist Party in the Proletarian Revolution” the 2nd Congress of the International had warned:

“The notions of Party and class must be distinguished with the greatest care.

The “tactic of the third period”, after completely distorting the criteria of delimitation of the class, reaches the demagogic identification of the class in the Party.

In the economic and social field, Marxism delimits the class according to the foundations of the capitalist regime of the salaried and considers that those who live on their wages belong to it.

The transformation is now radical: those who make up the class in a prevailing way are the part of the workers hit by the violent economic crisis, that is, the unemployed, to whom Nazi demagogy also addresses. The Party, as a consequence, does not establish a plan for the total mobilisation of the proletariat, but limits its action to the mobilisation of the unemployed. Correspondingly, the disorganised are considered more conscious than the workers within the trade unions and the “Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition” is founded, while all work within the trade unions led by the “social-fascists” is neglected. The proletariat is thus divided into two: the part controlled by the Party, which then includes the vanguard, is divided from the rest of the working class and launched into offensive actions, which were to offer the best conditions for the success of capitalist repression.

In the more forthrightly political field, the new tactic does not aim at hitting the capitalist class as a whole, but isolates one of its forces, the social-democratic one, which will be qualified as “social-fascist”. In Germany, where then it is the pivot of the evolution of world capitalism and where the liquidation of the democratic personnel is being prepared to replace the Nazi one while the corresponding modification of the structure of the capitalist state is underway, the Comintern, instead of setting the class action of the proletariat against capitalism, calls the masses to fight against “social-fascism” in isolation as the number one enemy, which was to make the Communist Party a supporter of Hitler’s attack. And when he takes the initiative of a “popular” referendum to overthrow the social-democratic government of Prussia, the Party actually tends towards the same goal because it does not make his intervention in the referendum a moment of general action against the capitalist class, but remains within the framework of the struggle against “social-fascism”.

On a more general political level, the politics of the Party are synthesised in the formula “class against class”. The proletarian class is now constituted by the Party from which all the annexed formations emanate (revolutionary trade union opposition, anti-imperialist League, Friends of the USSR and the many other collateral organisms): everything that is outside the Party and its annexes (and let us not forget that all the Marxist currents had been expelled from the Comintern) is the bourgeois class or, more precisely, the “social-fascism”. The mass organisms no longer derive from the bases of the capitalist economy but result from the initiative of the Party, while the union fractions are practically eliminated and lack their reason for being, given that the unions – acting outside the orbit of the Party – are “social-fascist” organisms.

It was in this period that the great divinity of the “political line of the Party” rose. How far away we were from Lenin’s time when the tactical positions of the Party were subjected to the verification of events and anxious attempts were made to determine their validity! By now the “political line” was consecrated a divine institution and became a crime not only to contest its infallibility, but also not to understand its hidden meaning. This was absolutely impossible, since the “political line of the Party” obeyed only the indicated necessities of the adaptation of the Russian State to its new role of instrument of the world counter-revolution, and who could reflect its vicissitudes was only the managerial centre at the head of this State. The result was abrupt and repeated turns that regularly let fall into the hell of those guilty party leaders who, for not having completely abandoned the faculty to reason and reflect, proved not to be “real” Bolsheviks because they were not able to defend today with equal enthusiasm the opposite of what they said yesterday.

One could, by virtue of a superficial analysis, consider that the successes achieved in the field of industrialisation in Russia, the economic and therefore military strengthening of the Russian state and the simultaneous unleashing of the “revolutionary” offensive in other countries should have led to a violent replication by capitalism against the Russian state. Not only did this not happen, but shortly after Hitler’s victory in Germany, the United States officially recognised Russia which – according to the statements of the leaders of the Comintern – was thus achieving a very important diplomatic victory, while the doors of the League of Nations – what Lenin accurately described as the “robber society” – were opening at the entrance to Russia of the Soviets. This was the logical epilogue of the course followed by the Comintern policy.

In fact, there was a very close coincidence between the successes of the five-year plans (made possible also thanks to the competition of capitalism, which imported raw materials into Russia against the export of wheat, while the rations of bread were absolutely insufficient) and the policy of the “revolutionary” offensive. In Russia, the ” colossal victories of socialism ” were in reality the result of the intensified exploitation of the proletariat, and in the other countries the proletariat class was placed – thanks to the tactics of the “third period” – in the impossibility of reacting to the capitalist offensive. And Russia’s victory in the field of industrialisation and in the diplomatic field, as well as Hitler’s conquest of power in Germany, are two aspects of the same course: of the victorious course of the counter-revolution of world capitalism, both in Russia and in other countries.

* * *

We now move on to a brief analysis of the official documents of the Comintern and the events that characterise the tactics of the “third period”. Why “third”? The VI World Congress thus specifies:

1st period (1917-23), between revolutionary victory in Russia and revolutionary defeat in Germany. That of the “acute crisis” of capitalism and revolutionary battles;

2nd period (1923-28). That of the “capitalist stabilisation”;

3rd period (which began in 1928 and was supposed to end in 1935, when the capitulation was made from “social-fascism” to the Popular Front). That of the ” radicalisation” of the masses.

Let us begin by pointing out that this schematisation of situations has nothing to do with Marxism, which does not distinguish “compartments” but represents the process of development that closely links situations and in which the Marxist criteria of the struggle of the classes allow us to perceive the favourable and unfavourable fluctuations. These move, in the period from 1917 to 1927, from the revolutionary victory in Russia, and its reflection in the foundation of the Communist International, – victory of the international and internationalist principle – to the denial of this principle, when, in the footsteps of the defeat of the revolution in China, the national and nationalist theory of “socialism in one country” triumphs.

The classification of the VI Congress leaves for example in the first period of the revolutionary advance in November 1922 in Italy, an event that had an exceptional importance not only for the Italian sector but for all the political evolution of the capitalist world.

As for the characterisation of the “third period”, the VI Congress will thus detail its analysis:

War is imminent. Those who dare to deny this imminence are not Bolsheviks. War not only between imperialisms (at this time the fundamental constellation is presented in the framework of the violent opposition of England and the United States). War also of all imperialisms against Russia: there would be “inevitably” brought both England, which will see there the “preliminary condition for its further struggle against the American giant”, and the United States which, if they do not have such an urgent interest in bringing down “socialism in Russia”, can only aim to extend their rule in this country.

The aggravation of the class struggle.

“The proletariat does not remain on the defensive, but passes to the attack”.

The more disorganised the masses are, the more “radicalised” they are.

The new role of social democracy that has become ‘social-fascist’. In 1926-27 social democracy is an ally to which (see Anglo-Russian Committee) the Comintern abandons the direction of the proletarian movements. Today it is the number one enemy. The Nazis unleash the offensive in Germany: the Party will not set up a plan to fight capitalism on the basis of class struggle, but exclusively against “social-fascism”. At the same time, since the mass trade union organisations are framed by a “social-fascist” organisational apparatus, it follows the necessity to abandon the masses that find themselves there and to move on to the construction of another organisation: the “Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition”, which defends “the political line of the Party”.

It is worth noting the flagrant contradiction between the two imminences: that of the revolution and that of the war. Heretical is whoever admits only one. The Marxist is therefore heretical, who, by virtue of the materialist interpretation of history, if he observes an imminence, can only exclude the opposite imminence and is therefore founded on the reversal of situations during the course of the historical process that leads the war to its opposite: the revolution.

Events proved that, point by point, the cornerstones of the new tactic had to be completely disproved. Indeed:

The war was not at all imminent in 1919 and, when it broke out in 1939. the constellations were completely different, England becoming the ally of the United States and these two imperialisms – the richest – becoming in turn allies of the “Country of Socialism”.

Not the working class but capitalism goes on the offensive that obtains its successes in Hitler’s victory in January 1933 and finally in the unleashing of the Second World Imperialist War.

We do not enter a “social-fascist” era, but in Germany it will be fascism that triumphs. Capitalism temporarily liquidates social democracy, except to recall it during the war, when, in cahoots with democrats and national-communists on the one hand, fascists and national-socialists on the other, the capitalist world will plunge into war in 1939-45.

* * *

Let us now move on to a brief overview of the most important facts, which marked the “tactics of the third period”.

We have already indicated that the predominant political fact was Hitler’s coming to power in January 1933. There were numerous other political demonstrations during which this tactic had the opportunity to show its “virtues”, but, within the narrow framework of this article, we can only limit ourselves to the essential and that is the events in Germany. It was in September 1930, only five months after German capitalism sacked the coalition government chaired by the Social Democrat Mueller, that the fascist advance began. Contrary to what happened in Italy in 1921-22, German Nazism follows a predominantly legalistic tactic. The democratic mechanism is perfectly suited to bringing about the conversion of the capitalist state from democratic to fascist, which is hardly surprising for a Marxist and which is also known by the current national-communist and socialist swindlers who are in government in Italy and elsewhere. Instead of attacking, as the fascists did in Italy, with violence and under the protection of the democratic police, the class fortresses of the proletariat, the German Nazis employ the method of the progressive legalitarian dismantling of the apparatus of the state of the executive positions held by their accomplices: the parties of German democracy and Social Democracy. This fact alone, of the possibility that capitalism is offered not to resort exclusively to the extra-legal action of the fascist squads, proves the profound modification carried out in the situation, in which the threat of the class party of the proletariat no longer acts.

This reality will naturally be reversed by the Comintern. An article by Ercoli (Workers’ State, September 1932) states, among other things:

“The first difference (between the Nazi assault in Germany and the fascist one in Italy – Ed.), the most important, the one that immediately catches your eye, is the one that passes between the period in which the march on Rome was completed and the current period. Then we were at the end of the first post-war period and on the eve of the period of stabilisation of capitalism. Today we are in the heart of the third period, in the heart of an economic crisis of unprecedented breadth and depth, of a crisis that has had and has its most serious manifestations precisely in Germany … In the second place it is necessary to stop the attention on the line of development of the movement of the masses” (…) “Descending Line” (in Italy), while in Germany “the decisive fights are still in front of us and the movement of the masses is developing over an ascending line, in the direction of these decisive fights”.

In reality, the decisive fighting of the masses stood neither forwards nor backwards, and just a year later Hitler was given the government by Hindenburg. The Party, which a few days earlier had organised a “colossal” event at the Sportpalast in Berlin, will completely crumble on the same day as Hitler’s ascent to power.

The essential moments of the Nazi advance are: On 9 August 1931, the plebiscite against the social-democratic government of Prussia, plebiscite requested by Hitler.

The elections for the presidency of the Reich of 13 March 1932. From the point of view of electoral tactics, the question of the party’s intervention both in the plebiscite organised by the fascists and in the elections with its own candidate, against Hindenburg and Hitler, cannot offer any doubt. The Communists could not lend themselves to social-democratic manoeuvring and had to intervene; but there were two ways of doing so. The Marxist one to make these two electoral demonstrations two occasions for propaganda aimed at mobilising the proletariat on a class basis and against the capitalist regime, which resulted in the struggle against the development that was underway in the capitalist state from democratic to fascist, a development that could not be fought except by the proletariat and its party against all capitalist forces (democratic and fascist) solidly united against the triumph of Nazism; and the one descending from the “tactics of the third period”, consisting in detaching these two electoral demonstrations from the real process in which they were stuck, making them two episodes of validation of the “political line of the party” that no longer fights the bourgeois class but only one of its forces: social-fascism. The plebiscite that the Fascists organise in order to overthrow the Prussian social-democratic government of Braun Severing becomes the “red plebiscite” to be turned to validate the “party politics”. In the presidential elections, the masses are being called upon to vote against Hitler and Hindenburg and for the leader of the Thälman party, but not for the proletarian dictatorship. But for the implementation of the “national emancipation programme”. Now, since these elections were so many moments in the transformation of the bourgeois state from democratic to fascist, the participation of the Party not in function of the fight against capitalism, but of the fight against “social-fascism”, could only lead to facilitate the said transformation of the state. That is, in the first case, it was a question of carrying out the expulsion of the Socialists from the Prussian government, in the second case, of entrusting the party with the objective of “national emancipation”. It is clear, therefore, that the Party took a position competing with that of the Nazis and, if the events of the time led to the victory of Nazism, nothing excludes that in the current situation the same program will be unaltered by the “unified socialist party” of Germany which, under the hegemony of Russian