Chinese writers partially rehabilitate Trotsky LI XIANRONG, a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has recently published a book entitled Critical Biography of Trotsky. The work, which was commissioned by the Institute for Research in World History, a subsidiary of the Academy of Sciences of the People's Republic of China, has not yet reached the West.
But another important member of the CCP has just published a review of the book in the journal, Shijie Lishi (World History), No. 7, 1985 which has shown up in Europe, the United States and Hong Kong. The article, "My View of the Critical Evaluation of Important Figures in World History," constitutes a complete juridical rehabilitation of Leon Trotsky in relation to the "crimes" attributed to him by Stalinist historiography, as well as his partial political rehabilitation as the founder of our movement.
The authors of the book and the article are not obscure individuals but important cadres of the CCP, and these publications should be seen in the far broader context of a critical examination of the entire past of the international communist movement. The rehabilitation indicated by the lifting of the bans on the publication of such texts, then, undoubtedly represents the opinions of at least some, if not all, of the CP's leadership.
We are publishing below an analysis of these documents, as well
CHINA revolutionary and workers' movements. For the first time - if one leaves aside the special case of the Communist League of Yugoslavia -a Communist Party in power, the largest Communist Party in the world, is going much further than Nikita Khrushchev at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU.
This party is no longer content to pillory Stalin in general terms for his crimes against the communists. It is rehabilitating the most eminent of those victims. What Khrushchev either did not dare to do, or could not, despite the implicit promises made at the Twentieth and Twenty-Second Congresses of the CPSU, the Chinese Communist leaders are doing today. Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev and their comrades are again presented as authentic communists.
The conflict between the Stalinist faction and the other factions within the CPSU and the Communist International is presented as a clash inside the party, not as a battle with an enemy and/or agents. All of the blood let by the Stalinist faction - a million communists murdered - and all of the mud slung at the victims is thus losing all of its adhesiveness, all of its class justification.
Although Zhu Tingguan does not explicitly recognize it, the conclusion is inevitable: the massive and barbaric repression carried out by Stalin against his political adversaries inside the communist movement was criminal. (1) It delivered a terrible blow to the interests of communism, to the workers in the USSR and to the the workers in the USSR and to the world proletariat.
It is, moreover, a conclusion already reached by some of the leaders and ideologues of Eurocommunism and by some other Communist parties such as the Mexican one, which had, on this point at least, agreed with the Eurocommunists.
The use of the formula, "inner-party struggle," to characterize the political struggle between the Stalinist faction, the Trotskyist faction -later the unified Trotsky-Zinoviev Left Opposition - and the Bukharinist faction, is not accidental. It harks back to two famous articles by Mao Tse-tung: On the Historical Experi ence of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and On the Contradictions Within the People, written shortly after the Khrushchev revelations to the CPSU Twentieth Congress.
In these articles Mao made a judgement implicitly supporting the denunciation of Stalinist methods.
1. It seems that Li Xianrong may have been even more explicit on this point in his book by describing Trotsky's assassination as a "vile crime." But verification of this point will have to wait until the book becomes available.
11 as a translation of the article that ERNEST MANDEL
Zhu Tingguan's article, judging from this translation, and Li Xianrong's book, according to Chinese readers, who are for the moment our only references, categorically reject the accusations made at the Moscow Trial against Leon Trotsky and his comrades, that they were spies, agents, counterrevolutionary renegades, or even objective tools of imperialism and counterrevolution. These authors condemn his assassination for what it was — a murder - and implicitly attribute the responsibility for it to his "persecutors," Stalin and his accomplices.
They also categorically reject the version that is to be found in The History of the Communist Party. (Bolshevik) of the USSR: a Short Survey, of Trotsky's role in the Russian and international workers' movements, in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, as well as in the building of the Soviet state. the soviet state.
International Viewpoint 19 May 1986 appeared in Shijie Lishi.
This book was officially adopted by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1938 and has been the international Stalinist bible on the question of Trotsky and Trotskyism for more than two decades. It inspired the Maoists in China even as recently as the 1970s. It is now judged contemptuously to be a falsification of history, pure and simple.
Completely at odds with this falsification, the writings of CCP members, Li Xianrong and Zhu Tingguan, characterize Leon Trotsky as one of the CPU's chief leaders, who prepared and initiated the Petrograd insurrection during the October revolution, who then created the Red Army and ensured its victory in the civil war, thanks to a correct strategic orientation.
The publication of these writings, then, constitutes an important political event for the entire international
In the same vein, he violently opposed the Soviet Army's intervention in Poland when Wladyslaw Gomulka returned to power in October 1956.
Later, the Chinese leader changed his mind and rehabilitated Stalin. Was that because of the impact of the Hungarian revolution? Was he influenced by the explosion of critical and oppositional opinion in China itself at the time of the "Hundred Flowers" experience in 1957? Was it a function of the exigencies of his factional struggle inside the CCP? To analyze the stages and the motivating forces of this about face in greater depth would strain the limits of this article.
In any case, the defence of Stalin profoundly branded Maoism for two decades, from 1957 to 1977. The stance now taken by Li Xianrong and Zhu Tingguan constitutes at the very least a return to Mao Tse-tung's initial attitude toward the Khrushchev revelations - and, indeed, goes far beyond it.
Not only is the denunciation of Stalin's cult of personality vigorously seconded. But from the methodological point of view, the writers have reestablished two principles that were challenged by Stalinism, and yet which are close to the very heart of Marxism.
First of all, the Chinese authors insist on the primacy of historical truth above any considerations of state, of party or of realpolitik. They reiterate that one must "fight superstition, " "liberate thought," rigorously verify the facts, in order to be able to speak authoritatively about the building of socialism. In other words, they are sending us back to that basic principle, so often affirmed by Marx and Engels, that only the truth is revolutionary. From the Marxist point of view it is absolute nonsense to try to defend the revolution while suppressing or falsifying historical truth. Out of the dusty archives with the 1920s debates
Then, the Chinese authors refer explicitly to the international character of the revolution and the revolutionary experience. The debates that took place inside the CPSU during the 1920s are not just literary phenomena, masses of dusty archives to be classified and studied. The experience of those debates is a source of political enlightenment for all countries and parties, for all leaders, cadres and activists, who are today confronted with the problems of the survival of the revolution in the midst of a hostile capitalist environment, who are faced with class relationships 12 specific to the conditions of relative underdevelopment in their countries and with the problem of the timing and the forms necessary for building a classless society. The rigorously scientific study of this experience is therefore indispensible to better equip the communist movement to solve the problems confronting it today.
For all of these reasons we must salute the partial political rehabilitation of Trotsky by the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party as an event of great importance, one that continues the tradition of the Khrushchev report to the Twentieth Congress. In spite of all the reservations that we have and the criticisms we can offer in regard to the limits and contradictions of this rehabilitation — in spite of our overall judgement of the political and social nature of the present Chinese bureaucracy, which we are not modifying one iota - it is apparent that taking such a position greatly favors the development of critical thought in all those who look to communism and to the Russian and Chinese revolutions.
All assaults on obscurantism, on the falsification of history, on lies and calumny, all explicit challenges to the use of violence and terror to settle differences inside the workers' movement objectively constitute a step toward the liberation of that movement from the bureaucratic straitjacket that keeps it from achieving the worldwide victory of socialism.
Leon Trotsky (DR) That these blows are more necessary now than ever before is shown by the tragic experiences of Grenada and South Yemen - citing only the most obvious recent cases. They suffice to justify this programmatic thesis of our movement.
The publication of the "Critical Biography of Trotsky" and the favorable commentary accorded it by the revue Shijie Lishi are not isolated phenomena. Since 1978 in the People's Republic of China, a partial thaw has occurred where literary and ideological pluralism is concerned. It has increased the latitude accorded to publications without, however, establishing complete freedom or removing censorship. Some critical Chinese authors - notably those in the New Democratic Movement - continue to be victims of banning and suppression; some of them are stagnating in prison. The possibilities for public debate remain very limited, but they are nevertheless more extensive than at the time of the cultural revolution or during the first decade after the victory of the Chinese socialist revolution in 1949.
After the "liberalization" instituted by Deng Xiaoping, some of the authors banned in the USSR and in most of the other workers' states -once again with the honorable exception of Yugoslavia - began to be published in China, albeit on a limited scale. Contrary to the periods of "liberalization" in the USSR (the International Viewpoint 19 May 1986
Khrushchev era), in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (1968-69), in Poland (1980-81) and partially in Hungary, this opening in China was available not only to novelists and petty-bourgeois scholars and ideologues, but also to Marxist and anarchist authors who were considered to be nonconformist and to the left of the CCP officials. Thus, specific works by Bakunin, Bukharin, Kropotkin, Luxemburg and Kardelj, still banned in the USSR, have appeared in the People's Republic of China.
This lifting of the prohibition likewise applies to works by authors associated with the Trotskyist current as well as to the works of Leon Trotsky himself. Trotsky's My Life, Diary in Exile and Results and Prospects have been published in China. And apparently The Permanent Revolution is on its way to publication.
Among other works published in China are: Isaac Deutscher's biography of Stalin; Pierre Frank's History of the Fourth International and Ernest Mandel's Marxist Economic Theory, Late Capitalism, Critique of Eurocommunism, (published in a run of 6,000 and with a favorable commentary printed on the cover), and Theories of Transitional Societies (combining The Political Economy of the Transition Period and On Bureaucracy), of which 10,000 copies were published. Publications thaw necessary for modernization
This thaw belongs in the political context of Deng Xiaoping's overall orientation. The policy of modernization and accelerated growth implies a rapprochement with the intelligentsia who were repressed during the cultural revolution, and a strengthening of the technocratic layers of the bureaucracy, as well as of the "scientific" currents. It is impossible to carry out such a rapprochement and to succeed in a policy of modernization without increasing the latitude for discussion and debate, and consequently the variety of publications.
More generally, since the rupture with the "gang of four" and orthodox Maoism, the leadership of the Chinese CP has been facing a serious problem of historical identity. (2) It no longer considers itself either Maoist or Stalinist, but only Marxist. Between Marx and contemporary reality there is obviously a gap that the leadership hopes somehow or other to fill up with a critical investigation of the contributions made to Marxism not only by Lenin, but also by Luxemburg, Gramsci, Mao and the principal
International Viewpoint 19 May 1986
Yugoslav theoreticians. This can lead in both good and bad directions, but it involves a tolerably objective approach. Trotsky is no longer excluded a priori from possible reexamination.
He is explicitly mentioned in this context .by Su Shaozhi, the director of the Mao Tse-tung Institute of Marxist-Leninist Thought of the Academy of Social Sciences of the People's Republic of China and, so it seems, a member of the Central Committee of the CCP. He declared:
"The discovery and publication of an enormous body of literature and other data concerning the history of the international communist movement - that is the publication of the deleted parts of the text of the previous editions of Lenin's Works; of the daily records written by Lenin's secretary during his illness; of Lenin's will; of the memoirs of some famous persons and their letters to family members; of the original data regarding some major events; of many unofficial histories whose authenticity we should naturally ascertain have made it possible to reassess many important events and personalities in the history of the international communist movement.
"This means reassessment of, for instance, war communism,' the 'new economic policy,' Stalin's road to and his revolution from top to bottom, the truth of the magnification of the scope of the Soviet struggle against the counter-revolutionaries, the historical role of the Third International, the relationship between Trotsky and the Fourth International and the theories of Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolay Bukharin and Antonio Gramsei.
"The publication of the works Lenin wrote shortly before his death and the related background material has all the more aroused the interest of people in his thinking in the evening of his life. During later years Lenin found that, despite the great successes of the cause initiated by the October Revolution, it suffered from quite a few defects and inadequacies, and that is why he raised the questions of democratizing the organs of the proletarian dictatorship and the Soviets, of opposing bureaucratization and over-concentration of powers and of giving full play to the role of cooperatives. Stalin deviated from Lenin's thinking on these questions and this led to serious tragedy for the Soviet party and state as well as for Stalin himself." (3)
At the same time, this course is fraught with danger for the bureaucratic faction in power. There is the danger of ultraleft reactions from conservative layers and/or Maoists, who stress that such openings may unleash differentiations that run the ricknanding un inexplosions. risk of ending up in explosions. And there is also the danger of popular rebellions (both urban - by workers and students - and rural, on the part of the poor peasants) against the growing inequality brought on by the economic liberalization."
Under these conditions, in order to protect the bureaucracy, the trend toward freedom of discussion, of publication and of opinion is, then, still very limited. Deng Xiaoping adroitly applies the old adage: "Cover your left; cover your right." But at the same time, especially in a country like China, it is impossible for the central apparatus to exercise absolute control. Because of that, the limited thaw, following its own logic, is partially autonomous from the not always clearly expressed intentions of the supreme leaders.
The rehabilitation of Bukharin had "removed the roadblocks" that obstructed the objective study of the history of the CPSU in China. But does Bukharin's rehabilitation lead logically and inevitably to Trotsky's? The cadres of the Chinese CP are hesitant. They do not seem to have received precise instructions on the subject. Hence the occasionally opaque style and the constrained if not plainly contradictory phrases that we find in Zhu Tingguan's article.
This is all the more the case where Trotsky is concerned. Although this question is less explosive for the bureaucracy as a whole in China than in the USSR, it entails no fewer consequences for the appreciation of the history of the Chinese CP itself, at least from the 1950s until the "Hundred Flowers" episode, or even later.
As Zhu Tingguan himself recalls, Chen Duxiu quickly rejoined Trotsky and the Chinese and international Left Opposition after their expulsion from the Communist International. In fact, Chen Duxiu is a pivotal figure in the history of the Chinese CP, one of the central personnages in all of Chinese twentieth-century history. It was he who introduced Marxism to China. He was a sort of Chinese Plekhanov. He was a passionate advocate of China's assimilation of Western culture, a culture which he believed had Marxism as its logical outcome. In this sense he can be considered the "ancestor" of Deng
The members of the "gang of four" including Mao's widow, Jiang Qing, were brought to trial in the early 1980s as part of the process of the reevaluation of Mao's role and ideas that the Chinese Communist party was engaged in at that time.
3. Su Shaozhi, "Developing Marxism under Contemporary Conditions, published in commemoration of the centenial of the death of Karl Marx and translated in "Marxism in China," edited. and with a preface by Ken Coates, Nottingham, England, The Spokesman, 1983, pp. 33-34.
13
HAD DIA BI
UNAR AREAT
Mao's portrait still hangs even after "deMaoisation" (DR)
publication of all of his main works and those of his principal allies would be viewed by Peking as a major obstacle on the road to normalization of its relations with Moscow. So, again, an intermediate solution has been chosen.
Zhu Tingguan's article reveals once again the inevitable contradictions inherent in all attempts to step back from Stalinist slanders of the antiTrotskyist, proto-Stalinist positions that gained currency in the USSR in 1923-27 under the impetus, first of Zinoviev and Radek, and later of Bukharin and Rykov.
Such attempts insist on the necessity of basing judgements of Trotsky and Stalin on rigorously and scientifically verified documents and historical evidence. But they continue to reproach Trotsky for being opposed to the building of socialism in the USSR. And they do this without USSR. And they do umis without referring to the many documents written by him, alone or in association with his political allies between 1923 and 1928, which clearly demonstrate that he was the principle proponent - and with his allies, the principle author - of the country's modernization and industrialization.
The dispute with the Stalin and Bukharin factions in the CPSU did not turn on the necessity for the building of socialism, but on its time scale, the most adequate forms for it to take and its outcome in the medium term. A resolute advocate of the commencement and even of the acceleration of the building of socialism in the USSR, Trotsky was an equally determined adversary of any capitulation to the international bourgeoisie and to all precapitalist tendencies in the USSR. At the same time, he defended the classical Marxist premise that this process was not going to result in the advent of a classless society within the narrow national framework of Russia alone. This result could only be achieved on the international scale.
In other words, the dispute was not between the advocates and the opponents of building socialism in the USSR. It was between the advocates and the opponents of the revisionist hypothesis that the building of socialism could be brought to fruition in one country. Implicit in this dispute, moreover, was another one - the debate over the definition of socialism itself.
Is socialism simply the suppression of the private ownership of the means of production? This definition is totally opposed to the Marxist tradition, in which the suppression of the private ownership of the means of production is only one characteristic - necessary but insufficient - of the advent of socialism, the fis International Viewpoint 19 May 1986
Xiaoping in the intense struggle between the "Occidentalists" and the "traditionalists" that took place within the progressive Chinese intelligentsia throughout the twentieth century. But Chen Duxiu was more than a theoretician. He was first and foremost the real founder of the Chinese workers' movement and later the Chinese Communist Party, which he headed for eight years as general secretary. It is impossible to discuss Trotsky and Trotskyism in China without at the same time taking up Chen Duxiu and Chinese Trotskyism. And it is impossible to carry out an. objective evaluation of Chen Duxiu -just as of Stalin, Bukharin and Trotsky - without making a critical judgement about the second Chinese revolution of 1925-27 and of the course imposed on the Chinese CP by the Communist International during that revolution, and without assigning exact responsibility for the April 1927 defeat in Shanghai.
This is explosive material for the leadership of the CCP. Of course, while appearing to maintain a general continuity with Mao, the party is not necessarily incapable of undertaking this critical examination of the second Chinese revolution; the future Maoist faction was not directly implicated in the events that led to the disaster of April 1927. It is also significant that although the article by Zhu Tingguan continues to accuse Chen Duxiu of having formed a "liquidationist clique in opposition to the correct line of armed struggle defended by Mao Tse-tung," this accusation relates to debates concerning the period after the 1927 events and not to the events themselves.
The same article abandons the accusation long directed at the 14
Chinese Trotskyists that they were agents of the Kuomintang and even spies for Japanese imperialism. The CCP cadres today explicitly reject this charge brought against Chen Duxiu and attribute it to Kang Sheng, a famous factional adversary of Mao's.
Moreover, two works by early Trotskyists have also been published in China, albeit in strictly limited editions and with circumscribed distribution. These are the Memoirs of Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi's Memoirs of a Revolutionary. There is also a partial rehabilitation of Chinese Trotskyists implied in the recent positions taken on the question of Trotsky. The place of Trotsky in Chinese-Soviet talks
Finally, we must not overlook the international aspect of this process, that of the relationship between Peking and Moscow. The Deng leadership team is engaged in delicate, protracted negotiations with the leaders of the Soviet bureaucracy. The question of Trotsky also takes its place in that context.
These steps toward the limited rehabilitation of Trotsky and the old Bolsheviks are a discreet way of exerting pressure on the Kremlin. The Chinese bureaucracy is reminding Moscow that with the resources at its disposal, it could make a real nuisance of itself to the Gorbachev team inasmuch as the latter did not, contrary to some expectations, announce a return to the Khrushchev policies in this area at the recently held CPSU Twenty-Seventh Congress.
On the other hand, a complete rehabilitation of Trotsky and the
phase of a communist society. The latter is characterized further by the disappearance of society's division into classes, by the withering away of the state, the disappearance of commodity production and social inequality - particularly in regard to effective access to the means of production and of subsistence - and the consequent eradication of the alienated and alienating character of work.
These debates continue to have burning immediacy. It is impossible to deal with them responsibly without the publication of all the important documents of the period in question as well as of the later period in which the earlier events are discussed. If Zhu Tingguan takes seriously the importance he ascribes to the verification of historical sources, he would advocate the publication in China of all those documents originally appearing both in the USSR and abroad. He would begin with: The New Course and Whither Russia: Toward Capitalism or Toward Socialism? by Leon Trotsky, The New Economics by Preobrazhensky, The Professional Dangers of Power by Rakovsky, the principal speeches and articles of Zinoviev, Kamenev and their comrades on the question of socialism in one country; the principal articles and speeches of Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, Yakolev and others who replied to the Opposition; the chief works relating to the workers' struggles (including strikes) and the differentiation of the peasantry in the USSR between 1923 and 19291932.
Zhu Tingguan asserts that Trotsky "degenerated into an anti-Soviet exile" after 1928. But he recognizes at the same time that Stalin had "excessively broadened the inner-party struggle." By stating this he has said both too much and too little. Does this "broadening" imply the use of inadmissible methods of repression in 1924 against the Opposition - methods that were never employed in Lenin's time -long before the bloody purges of 1936-38, or does it not? Questions that must be answered
Were Trotsky, his wite and son exiled from the USSR by Stalin and his acolytes, against their will and despite their vehement protests, or were they not? How can he be reproached under these conditions with his exile for which he bears no responsibility? How can he be characterized as "anti-Soviet" without specifying the political and analytical positions on the nature of the USSR that he held after 1928; without making clear particularly that he remained a stalwart supporter of the military defence of the Soviet Union until the end of his days; without publishing all of his writings on the USSR beginning with The Revolution Betrayed, The Fourth International and the USSR and The Defence of Marxism?
For the same reasons the accusation of "anti-party factional activities" hurled at Trotsky, as well as the charge that he had "split" the Russian and international communist movement, is meaningless. Should he have capitulated to Stalin's acts of repression and his crimes - crimes not only against those in opposition but against all communists and against the entire Russian and international proletariat? That is the real question!
Let us remember that neither Trotsky nor the Opposition ever refused to recognize the discipline of the party or of the Communist International before their expulsion; that they never refused to apply the majority decisions of the party congresses and the Central Committee.
The only thing they demanded was the right to defend their opinions within the party, a right that had been self-evident in Lenin's time. When the Tenth Congress of the CPSU banned factions — not on principle, but as a temporary measure - Lenin immediately carried out his promise made to the Workers Opposition of that period to publish 250,000 copies (enough for every member of the party) of that Opposition's documents.
Stalin, on the contrary, refused to publish the "Platform of the United Opposition" before the Fifteenth Congress in 1927. The Opposition itself was therefore obliged to publish it in accordance with democratic centralism. Rather than intolerable factionalism, this action was an attempt to return to Leninist organizational norms.
What Trotsky and the Opposition found unacceptable was not the demand to respect discipline, but the requirement that they declare themselves mistaken, although to do so would be totally at odds with their convictions. This organizational and political innovation — to oblige party members to take positions inside the party that were contrary to their convictions — could only lead to duplicity, to the destruction of cadres, to bureaucratic monolithism, to obscurantism and to the demoralization of the entire party. That is exactly what happened. A thousand times Trotsky had reasons to oppose this Stalinist principle, which was totally foreign to the spirit and the practice of Marx and Lenin.
The Chinese Communists are in a rather uncomfortahle nosition. in rather uncomfortable position in this regard. For Stalin and Khrushchev had many a time demanded of them -beginning with Mao Tse-tung himself - the same sort of capitulation. It is to the credit of the Chinese that they refused, and, indeed, without making such a stand, they could not have been victorious in the Chinese revolution of 1949. It was for this reason that the Soviet bureaucracy has resorted to repression and economic and military pressure against the People's Republic of China. In this "factional struggle" the Chinese CP has been 100 per cent right to oppose this pressure. We were, and we continue to be, completely on its side in this matter.
But has not the CCP contributed through that stand to "dividing the international communist movement"? Rather, does not the responsibility for such divisions fall upon those
15
Deng Xiaoping (left) with Hua Guofeng (DR)
International Viewpoint 19 May 1986
who would impose such shackles, not on those who are defending themselves against such inadmissible practices? Why would the resistance of the Chinese CP be legitimate, despite the "divisions" that it "broadened" and that of Trotsky be illegitimate solely on the basis of "divisions" and "factionalism"? Chinese charges against Soviets have far outstripped Trotsky's
Has not the CCP leadership long waged an anti-Soviet campaign of propaganda and agitation more virulent than that which Trotsky led? Has it not accused the Soviet government and state of "imperialism" and even of "fascism"? Has it not placed Soviet "expansionism" on the same plane as American "imperialism," speaking even-handedly of the two "superpowers," and viewing the USSR as the more aggressive and the more dangerous of the two? These are wild charges of which Trotsky was never guilty. Even if the present leaders of the CCP challenge these excesses, would they be ready to accuse Mao Tse-tung of "anti-Soviet agitation" and of "division of the international communist movement"? What right have they, then, to hurl these same accusations at Trotsky?
In the light of historical materialism, a more fundamental question must finally be posed. The "excessive broadening" of the struggle within the party and of the repression inside the USSR has not concerned only the oppositional tendencies, which are rather limited even if the tens of thousands of Communists are included. It has concerned entire layers of Soviet society. It has brought 16
CARDen mAĞ]
China's Communist Party repudiates both Maoism and Stalinism (DR)
about structural modification of the state and of a part of the relations of production. Leaders of industry have been proclaimed the only captains of the ship by the application of the principle of "one-man leadership."
The workers and the trade unions have lost the right of effective control over economic management. The right to strike has been suppressed. One of the most repressive bodies of labor law in the world has been in effect for more than 15 years. A bloody repression has been launched against the workers and peasants. At the same time, the bureaucracy has been provided with enormous material privileges, which continue to exist today.
Obviously, these profound political and social transformations cannot be solely or even chiefly explained by superstructural phenomena such as Stalin's cult of personality or his excessive reliance on repressive methods. These transformations signal a genuine counterrevolution.
Contrary to the former Maoist theory, the Chinese leadership today agrees with Trotsky and the Fourth International that there is no question of a restoration of capitalism, that is, a social counterrevolution, in the USSR, but, at least from that time on, what exists is a political counterrevolution, that is a Soviet Thermidor.
If one does not at least acknowledge this hypothesis - explicitly considered possible by Lenin from 1922 on — one is forced to pull back from historical materialism in favor of historical idealism to explain the evolution of the USSR since the 1920s. But if one allows the existence of a Soviet Thermidor, then Trotsky's fight against this Thermidor, far from being a sin of factionalism, was an elementary duty of a proletarian revolutionary; it was an indispensable struggle to defend the immediate and historical interests of the proletariat.
And when Zhu Tingguan asserts that "such methods of struggle used by Trotsky) are not normal in a country under proletarian leadership," that is, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, he obscures the real problem: that is, that the USSR from 1923 or 1927, to say nothing of the USSR under the Stalin dictatorship, was no longer a country ruled by a proletarian leadership, the normal dictatorship of the proletariat. While it was a dictatorship of the proletariat, it was a proletarian leadership with strong bureaucratic deformationsonce again to use Lenin's formulation. The forms of struggle employed by Trotsky in the interests of the proletariat corresponded to the precise nature of the Thermidorian power in the USSR.
The contradictions in the positions of the Chinese leadership on the question of Trotsky are difficult to resolve if the question of the bureaucracy is not addressed in a critical and scientific manner. Now the question of the bureaucracy turns back on China just as much as on the USSR. Therein lies the objective, social basis for the inadequacies in the stands taken by Li Xianrong and Zhu Tingguan. But that in no way diminishes the importance of their having taken a stand. It represents a constructive contribution in the battle of communists to restore historical truth. This battle is indispensable to the cleaning up of the political situation in all of the workers' states, indispensable to the struggle for socialist democracy, indispensable for the elimination of all bureaucratic roadblocks in the path of the building of socialism and the world revolution International Viewpoint 19 May 1986