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.
