An analogous process unfolded when Mao took power in China at the head of a peasant army in 1949. Up to the Russian Revolution, even Lenin denied the possibility of the victory of the proletarian revolution in a backward country. The Revolution of 1944-49 did not proceed on the model of 1917 or of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27. It was a peasant war, which took place because of the complete incapacity of the bourgeoisie to carry out the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution – the ending of landlordism, national unification and the expulsion of imperialism – and ended in victory for the Chinese Stalinists. This was a gigantic step forward for the Chinese people and for the oppressed workers and peasants of the entire world. Indeed, after the Russian Revolution, the revolution in China represents the second greatest event in human history. A mighty nation of 800 million people, who had been treated by their foreign masters as dumb pack animals, was suddenly propelled to the forefront of world history, which it still occupies.
For all its world-shaking significance, the 1949 Revolution was not at all like the October Revolution. The programme of the Chinese Stalinists in 1949 was not fundamentally different to that of Castro a decade later in Cuba: 50 or 100 years of national capitalism and an alliance with the national bourgeoisie. Hence the belief of many American bourgeois that they were ‘agrarian reformers’. Only the Marxist tendency in Britain argued against the Stalinists and others when we explained not only the inevitability of Mao’s victory and the establishment of a deformed workers’ state, but also the inevitability of a split at a certain stage between the Chinese bureaucracy and Moscow. This was at a time when Mao and the Chinese Communist Party had the programme of capitalism and ‘national democracy’.
Power was gained through the peasant war by giving land to the soldiers in Chiang Kai-shek’s army. Then, once military victory was achieved, landlordism and capitalism were abolished, but in a peculiar Bonapartist fashion, without the direct conscious participation of the working class. This was later accepted as something normal, and even taken as the model for the revolution in colonial countries. But it was completely removed from the conceptions of Marx and Lenin. Never before in history had it even been theoretically posed that a peasant war on classical lines could lead to a workers’ state, however deformed.
The workers in China were passive throughout the civil war for reasons we will not enter here. In fact, what we have here is a perfect example of one class – the peasants in the form of the Red Army – carrying out the tasks of another – the working class. It is not the first time that this has happened in history. The German Junkers carried out the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution in Germany, and the same tasks were carried out by the feudal regime in Japan. But when one class carries out the historical tasks of another, inevitable distortions arise. Certain things flow from this fact.
In the past the peasant army was the classical instrument, not of socialist revolution, but of (bourgeois) Bonapartism. In typical Bonapartist fashion, basing himself on the peasant Red Army, Mao balanced between the classes in order to consolidate himself in power. He leaned on the workers and peasants to perfect a state in the image of Moscow, after which he could snuff out the bourgeoisie quite painlessly. As Trotsky put it, to kill a lion you need a gun, for a flea, a fingernail will suffice! Having balanced between the bourgeoisie, workers and peasants to prevent the workers from taking power, Mao and the Stalinist leadership could then expropriate the bourgeoisie. They could then turn on the workers and peasants to crush whatever elements of workers’ democracy had developed.
The bureaucracy then developed a totalitarian one-party dictatorship, centred round the Bonapartist dictatorship of a single individual – Mao. Of course, such a regime had nothing in common with a healthy workers’ state, let alone socialism. It had nothing in common with the methods of the proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917, where power was exercised by the proletariat through the elected workers’ and soldiers’ soviets. The Maoist regime was deformed from the outset, as a hideous one-party totalitarian state. The Chinese Revolution of 1949 began where the Russian Revolution had ended.
Not for nothing has Marxist theory given the task of achieving the socialist revolution and the transition to socialism to the working class. The emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves! This is not an arbitrary affirmation. It is a product of the unique role in production of the proletariat which gives it a specific consciousness possessed by no other class. Least of all can the peasant small proprietor develop this consciousness. A revolution based on that class by its very nature would be doomed to degeneration and Bonapartism. It is precisely because a proletarian Bonapartist dictatorship protects the privileges of the elite of state, party, the army, industry and the intellectuals of art and science that it succeeded in so many underdeveloped countries in the post-war period.
From a Marxist standpoint, it is an aberration to think that such a process is normal. It can only be explained by the impasse of capitalism in China, the paralysis of imperialism, the existence of a strong deformed Bonapartist state in Stalinist Russia, and most important of all, the delay in the victory in the industrially advanced countries of the world. The colonial countries could not wait. The problems were too crushing. There was no way forward on the basis of capitalism. Hence the peculiar aberrations in colonial countries. But the price for this, as in the Soviet Union, would be a second political revolution to put the control of society, industry and the state in the hands of the proletariat. Only thus could the first genuine beginnings of the transition to socialism, or rather steps in that direction, commence.
A similar process occurred later in Cuba, where Castro came to power on the basis of a guerrilla war. The wide support for ‘socialism’ not only among the working class, but among the peasants and wide layers of the petty bourgeoisie in the cities in colonial countries, was the expression of the complete blind alley of landlordism and capitalism in the ex-colonial world in the modern epoch. It was also a result of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions and their achievements in developing industry and the economy. It was these factors that laid the groundwork for the development of proletarian Bonapartism. In the last analysis, the state can be reduced to armed bodies of men. With the defeat and destruction of the police and army of Chiang Kai-shek, with the destruction of the army of Batista in Cuba, power was in the hands respectively of Mao and Castro. The fact that nominally Mao was a ‘Communist’ and Castro a petty bourgeois democrat altered nothing.
The rule of the Russian bureaucracy would have been swiftly undermined by the coming to power of the workers along classical lines in these countries. But in Eastern Europe and China, the old bourgeois state was destroyed, and replaced by a regime of proletarian Bonapartism. They began where the Russian Revolution had ended. The establishment of such regimes presented no threat to Moscow. On the contrary, it strengthened the stranglehold of the bureaucracy for a whole period.
Given the delay of the socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe, Japan and the USA, the colonial masses could not wait. They waged a heroic struggle against imperialism, which inevitably tended to turn into a revolutionary war against landlordism and capitalism, as in Vietnam. The barefoot army of Vietnamese peasants inflicted the first real military defeat on the USA in history. The Algerian workers and peasants succeeded, after a long and bloody struggle, in forcing French imperialism into abandoning direct rule. The failure of imperialism to crush the revolutions of the former colonial countries was to a large degree a result of the opposition of the masses in the USA and Europe. When an army has had enough of fighting, when the workers in uniform say ‘no’, no power on earth can move them. This fact explains the granting of independence to India and the inability of US imperialism to send troops to fight on the side of Chiang Kai-shek, although they did send large quantities of arms, most of which ended up in the hands of the Red Army.
The Chinese peasant revolt, which culminated in the peasant war of 1944-49 led by Mao Zedong, was in a sense derived from the defeated revolution of 1925-27. However, the role of the working class was entirely different. It was a peasant war carried out first as a guerrilla war, and culminating in the conquest of the cities by the armies of the peasants. The socialist revolution, in contrast with all previous revolutions, requires the conscious participation and control of the working class. Without it, there can be no revolution leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat as understood by Marx and Lenin, nor can there be a transition in the direction of socialism.
A revolution in which the prime force is the peasantry cannot rise to the height of the tasks posed by history. The peasantry cannot play an independent role, either they support the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Where the proletariat is not playing a leading part in the revolution, the peasant army, with the impasse of bourgeois society, can be used, especially with the existence of ready-made models, for the expropriation of bourgeois society, in the Bonapartist manoeuvring between the classes and the construction of a state on the model of Stalinist Russia. Such was the case in China, Yugoslavia, and later in Cuba, Vietnam, Burma and in the other countries of proletarian Bonapartism.
However, the victory of the Chinese Revolution, which was initially opposed by Stalin, and the overthrow of capitalism in Eastern Europe fundamentally changed the world balance of forces to the disadvantage of world imperialism. At the same time, these revolutions did not have the same effect as the October 1917 Revolution in producing a wave of revolutionary radicalisation in the advanced countries. In each case, capitalism was overthrown, but in a distorted Bonapartist manner, with the workers playing a subordinate role. In each case the regimes which were set up were closely modelled on Stalinist Russia – with all the monstrous bureaucratic deformations, police terror, inequalities and lack of freedom. Such regimes had no basic attraction for the workers of the advanced capitalist countries.