Trotsky and the CPC Entry into the Guomindang

This document will take up just one point in the lengthy 31 August critique of the ICL’s Ninth International Conference by the IBT, namely, Trotsky’s attitude toward the Communist Party of China (CPC) entering the Guomindang (GMD). There can be no debate among Trotskyists that the CPC’s liquidation into the bourgeois nationalist GMD, ordered by the Comintern (CI) under Stalin and Bukharin, paved the way to the slaughter that smashed the Communists in 1927. The problem with the IBT lies elsewhere. They present Trotsky’s opinion in his 1937 letter to Harold Isaacs that entering the GMD was “not a crime, possibly not even a mistake” as contrary to the urgent struggle he waged against the Comintern’s disastrous course. It was not, and understanding this has direct bearing on how Trotskyists should intervene today to fight for leadership of the struggle for national liberation.

Let’s “unpack” this question. In the Manifesto adopted at its Second Congress in June 1922, the CPC, then numbering about 200 members, resolved to “invite the GMD, other democratic parties, and all revolutionary socialist groupings to…establish a democratic united front to continue the fight against the warlords” (printed in The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party, Tony Saich, ed., 1996; all other CPC citations are from this source). This was a necessary course for a small propaganda group that needed to connect with China’s young proletariat. In line with the Second and Third CI congresses, the Manifesto declared that in the course of the democratic movement, the nascent bourgeoisie “will come into opposition to the proletariat. Therefore, the proletariat must deal with the bourgeoisie immediately, establishing ‘a proletarian dictatorship in alliance with the poor peasants’.”

Shortly after this congress, Maring (Sneevliet) traveled to China as CI representative with instructions from Karl Radek that turned the CPC’s principled tactic on its head. Declaring that the CI Executive Committee “sees the Guomindang party as a revolutionary organization,” the directive ordered the Chinese comrades to “support the party Guomindang and specially this wing of the party which represents the proletarian elements and the manual workers.” The vehicle would be entry into the GMD by every single CPC member. Finding no takers among the CPC leaders, Maring invoked Comintern discipline to force this down their throats. Clearing up any ambiguities, the Manifesto adopted at the CPC’s Third Congress in 1923 declared: “The GMD should be the central force of the national revolution and should assume its leadership.” This bald statement that Communists should not fight for leadership of the national-democratic struggle meant complete subordination to the GMD.

That was the anti-Leninist policy Trotsky opposed when he voted in 1923 against the entry. This prefigured his struggle against the CI leadership after the outbreak of the Second Chinese Revolution in 1925. In that period, the CPC grew into a small mass party with a base in the proletariat. The immediate task was to break the party’s subordination to the GMD and act as an independent vanguard. After an all-out fight for that course, Trotsky drew the conclusion from the 1927 disaster which is quoted in the IBT’s article: “Never and under no circumstances may the party of the proletariat enter into a party of another class or merge with it organizationally.”

This vital lesson does not contradict Trotsky’s point to Isaacs almost a decade later. The key passage in that letter is Trotsky’s conclusion to his saying that entry per se was not a crime: “The question is what was their purpose in entering and what was their subsequent policy?” Indeed, that was the whole problem! The purpose and policy that was adopted sacrificed the political independence of the CPC, directing it to build the party of the national bourgeoisie as the supposed natural leader of the revolution. But for the IBT, the crime was to seek to build an anti-imperialist united front in the first place.

As the IBT knows, that was also the old ICL position (see, for example, “The Origins of Chinese Trotskyism,” Spartacist No. 53, Summer 1997). In fact, the CI’s policy for China was a negation of the anti-imperialist united front, which is premised on the communist vanguard never surrendering its own banner. As for Trotsky flat-out declaring in 1926 that participation in the GMD was “perfectly correct” when the CPC was just getting off the ground, I believe this was one of his maneuvers inside the Joint Opposition with Zinoviev and others. As our 1997 article pointed out, Trotsky later regretted some of the compromises he made in maintaining that bloc.

The IBT article includes Trotsky’s punchline to Isaacs about the purpose of entering the GMD but does not address this at all. I don’t find that surprising, since this could raise questions about the IBT’s opposition to our tactical approach toward oppressed countries. This is most clearly seen in its objections to Spartacist South Africa’s critical support to the left-populist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in 2024. The IBT states that Trotsky’s “highly contingent” positing of CPC entry into the GMD is inapplicable to “South Africa with a well-developed, long-standing militant workers’ movement numbering in the millions—a society very different from China in the early 1920s.”

This misses the point entirely. As in China a century before, in South Africa today there is no independent proletarian party—not a propaganda circle but an actual party—to lead the anti-imperialist struggle. This leaves many militants fed up with the African National Congress and its partners to turn to the EFF, attracted by its demands addressing the felt needs of the black masses and drawing a line against the imperialists and their domestic frontmen. Yet the EFF’s electoralist strategy cannot achieve those demands. By driving home that contradiction through active intervention, we can begin to crystallize a proletarian pole, advancing a class-struggle strategy for the EFF’s radical demands against its own leadership (along the lines of Trotsky’s advice to his South African comrades in 1935). The alternative, as the SSA comrade reported at the conference, is what passes for Trotskyism in South Africa: small, isolated groups that shout Marxist truisms about the class line but refuse to get in the trenches to contest the EFF leadership. That policy is as much a capitulation to the EFF tops as outright endorsement of their nationalist populism.