The latest Chinese events have authorised the hucksters of centrism to improvise once again, a new edition of the fundamental formula of the organisation of struggle in the insurrectionary period of the proletariat and peasantry.

This new edition would consist in wanting to represent the uprisings and guerrilla warfare as the central and radiating focus of proletarian struggles. The insurrectional problem is re-presented today in the same form as in the memorable period of 1927.

Yesterday, during the ascendant period of the revolutionary wave, while the proletariat of Shanghai, of Canton, Hankou broke into the struggle in a decisive manner, assuming an eminently proletarian character vis-à-vis all its overt and disguised adversaries, the CP and the C.I. failed in their work of directing these movements by enslaving them and handing them over into the hands of the various generals who then had to ineluctably decimate them with machine-gun fire.

When these forces represented and assumed the sole guarantee to develop and concentrate the insurrectionary positions towards the definitive tasks of the proletarian class, our strategists fell in line and delivered the proletarian movement into the hands of the big and small bourgeoisie. When all the preconditions existed for launching the watchword for the establishment of Soviets in China, our opportunists confused the proletarians by presenting the organisations of the Kuomintang as a form of sovietist organisation appropriate to the Chinese situation.

The various somersaults for which they were responsible will remain memorable and impressed into the memory of all proletarians.

Certainly they tried and try to justify their past positions through a false representation of what were the developments of the proletarian struggle in China by confusing the proletarian masses through a number of falsifications and hiding, within the limits of their possibilities, all the susceptible elements tending to represent them to the proletarian vanguard as the true perpetrators of the Chinese revolutionary catastrophe.

In 1925, at the first manifestation of a vigorous beginning of class struggles in China, we witness the most conscious and evolved fraction of the nascent Chinese bourgeoisie crystallise on concrete positions and on a programme that was called Sun-Yat-Senism. But during the struggles of the Cantonese proletariat against the leaders of this new theory, it was possible to demonstrate the deep chasm separating the exploited masses against their new dispossessors. Instead of taking advantage of these episodes of the class struggle to direct and clarify the masses on the new course of the future struggles by presenting them in their true nature, and showing the reactionary character that these reactionary forces would assume toward the proletariat and the great peasant mass in the course of its liberating struggle, we witness the formation of a bloc on positions suggested by the future executioners of the vanguard of the proletariat, positions that were suggested to them by the development of the proletarian forces, in order to dominate and maintain their hegemony in future developments. How have the official leaders justified, and how do they continue to justify, this compromise?

Their documents are edifying: already they repudiate from this period the positions of principle established by the 2nd Congress of the C.I. It is sufficient to compare the theses of the plenums of the C.I. where the bloc with the bourgeoisie, participation in the Kuomintang government, and all its responsibilities, is claimed, with this passage from the theses of the 2nd Congress of the C.I.: ‘the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e. those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form’.

It is in this period that we witness the open unmasking of all the opportunist and liquidationist survivals that hid under the cloak of the communist parties.

While the Chinese proletariat in its large industrial centres was intervening as an active and independent class force, setting its immediate struggles not on the petty-bourgeois angle of the march against the North, but rather on some of its own partial demands such as the eight-hour day, wage increases, the right of trade union organisation, armed pickets, the C.I., instead of intervening in these struggles as the directing element which, with clear vision, directs these masses in their movements, guiding them towards its final objectives, we witness the famous watchword that defined the left Kuomintang as the driving force of the Chinese revolution.

These liquidators have a fine time writing that Tchang Kai-Shek and Feng-Uung-Sang have betrayed the revolution, that these generals presented yesterday as the true leaders of the Red Army have gone over to the camp of the counter-revolution. No, if these generals have betrayed, they have not betrayed the revolution as they never represented it, and always fought it, but they betrayed the fallacious hopes of our petty bourgeois disguised as communists.

Ultimately, they claimed that the government of Hankéou represented a stage in the dictatorship of the proletariat, that the launching of the slogan of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ Soviets would have represented an open struggle against the said government and would have completely destroyed all chances of the proletarian class seizing power. The Menshevik position of 1917 was this time applied and defended under the Bolshevik mantle. What were the Mensheviks and a part of the Bolsheviks saying during October 1917? The main thrust of their arguments consisted in portraying the coalition forces of the counter-revolution as sufficient to sweep away every immediate and independent attack by the proletariat against bourgeois power.

They fought with the prospect of the development of the proletarian movement, conceiving it as a succession of progressive stages which would have ultimately lead the proletarian class to more favourable positions than those of October 1917. We know how Lenin fought this counter-revolutionary and anti-dialectical conception which, had it triumphed, would have betrayed the Russian revolution from its very beginning as it was to betray the Chinese revolution.

It can be said that we have witnessed in China a triumph of Martinovist policy conducted this time under the label of the ‘Leninist’ method. The history of proletarian movements has never witnessed such a monstrous swindle.

Having insufficiently and briefly recalled these episodes of the Chinese revolution of 1927 and particularly of the theory of the 4 classes that underpinned all the analyses and positions taken by the centrist leading body, let us now see what difference there is with the new position today.

This time the only difference that exists consists in wanting to make the journey in reverse, while keeping yesterday’s conceptions in full.

It is said: the heroic rearguard of the proletarian struggles of 1927 that retreated to the mountains was able, at the cost of great sacrifice, to prepare itself for the counter-offensive and today has succeeded in conquering and sovietising eighty million people; it today, through this struggle, is the vanguard of future proletarian struggles.

Please, impromptu publicists, what are the new forces that make you conclude this? On the basis of what theory do you arrive at overturning the hegemony of the driving forces of a revolution? It is certainly not in the documents of Lenin or Marx that you have drawn these new findings, but they are inscribed in all of the political and literary activity of the Martinovs.

Was it not perhaps the Mensheviks who, during the Russian revolution of 1905, supported the theory of the hegemony of the peasant mass in predominantly agrarian countries? Was it not perhaps the entire struggle waged against this theory, by the Bolsheviks and particularly by Lenin, that was to then make possible the victorious outcome of the Russian October?

Certainly, we understand that our new edition Martinovists are embarrassed to respond to some precise demands and find it much easier to take advantage of certain aspects of an armed struggle that has been going on for a long time in the regions of Kuang-Toung by a large number of peasants who, organised in secret societies, fight boldly against the landowners under the banner of various mottos such as: ‘He who does not work does not eat’, ‘take from the rich and give to the poor’, etc., etc. In Hay-Fing there has always existed a poor people’s party (this city is one of the peasant centres) that wanted to become the vanguard of the workers’ revolution, in reality however it was merely a manifestation, appropriate to the Chinese situation, of certain anarchist conceptions.

Now even assuming that said societies have changed their formulations and replaced them with that of the Soviet, with this they have not advanced an inch from their primitive position. Lenin has taught us that the appearance of the Soviets implies in itself the proletarian insurrection leading to the seizure of power. Now what proletarian positions remain in the large industrial centres? It is true that we are witnessing an initial revival on the part of the Chinese proletariat, but does this perhaps mean that all the preconditions are in place for launching the call for the constitution of the Soviet? It is common to all that the constitution of the Soviets in the agricultural and rather backward regions of China demands the support and leadership of the industrial proletariat as a first step. The peasant mass deprived of its leadership, the proletariat, is doomed to defeat and to the degeneration of its movements into reactionary and conservative movements even if these movements carry as their emblem, the constitution of the Soviets.

But it would be asking too much of centrism to keep faith to the fundamental postulates of communism. Stalin in 1927, relying on the ‘it is said’, waged a ruthless struggle against the opposition because then ‘it was said’ that the government of Hankou was the antecedent of the proletarian government.

Today at the 16th Russian Congress he has declared that ‘it is said’ that China’s 80 million peasants have organised the Soviets. This ‘it is said’, while in reality the bloody and heroic struggles of 80 million peasants are being used by enemy generals who use the uniform of the Soviets to divert them today and to prepare the massacre of tomorrow. And then it will be said that today’s allies have become traitors. Therein lies the function of centrism.