Socialist Action /January 1999
Our Readers Speak Out
Dear editor,
I want to congratulate you for your October 1998 issue-especially Paul
Siegel's "American Aurora" and the editorial on Clinton's crimes.
Both these and the rest of SA's articles were written in working-class
language, which makes your paper readable and accessible to plebian/proletarians,
contributing to an understanding of what the class struggle is all about....
In regard to the article by Wang Fanxi in your November 1998 issue: Granted
that Trotskyists were persecuted by the Stalinist Chinese Communist Party
and imprisoned by the Mao regime later on. And now the CCP's impasse has
become anti-revolutionary to say the least.
But Chaolin, possibly like Peng Shu Tse and other Trotskyists, seems
to have ignored "China shakes the World" Edgar Snow, Owen Lattimore,
plus even a film with actor Randolph Scott ... [regarding] how to kick ass
during World War II against the Japanese invaders in the north of China.
At that time, Mao's position was to fight the anti-imperialist war against
invasion from the Japanese army first; and secondly attack the bourgeois
Kuomintang-and then onward to a socialist emancipation of China a la Lenin.
And I don't doubt the Little Red Book on that.
We of the China position in the ex-Socialist Workers Party uphold these
facts of struggle. History must not be ignored.
Edgar Swabeck
Venice, Calif.
The editor replies:
Even after World War II, the Chinese Communist Party viewed the socialist
revolution-in agreement with the dictates of world Stalinism-as coming at
the end of a prolonged two-stage process.
The first stage of the process, said Mao, would be limited to the struggle
for a "democratic" capitalist state in China. A socialist revolution
would be postponed to the future.
See, for example, Mao's April 1945 pamphlet, "On Coalition Government,"
cited in Tom Kerry's "The Mao Myth" (Pathfinder Press).
In accord with this strategy, the Maoists sought a coalition government
with the pro-capitalist Kuomintang after World War II. This was a policy
for disaster; an earlier attempt to ally with the Kuomintang, in 1927, had
resulted in the near destruction of the Communist Party. After Kuomintang
leader Chiang Kai-shek broke the alliance, his troops slaughtered thousands
of workers.
But after the war, despite prodding by Washington, Chiang rejected the
Maoists' initiatives. This forced the Communist Party to confront Chiang
militarily, and to win state power in its own name.
Socialist Action /January 1999 |