The Stalin school of falsification - Marxists Internet Archive

Stalin School of Falsification -- Chapter 10
TROTSKY: The tone is suited to the seriousness of the question. You consolidated Amsterdam, and you
weakened yourselves. The General Council is now more unanimously against us than ever before.
It must he said, however, that the scandalous directive I just read expresses much more fully, clearly and
honestly the actual standpoint of those who favored the preservation of the Anglo-Russian Committee
than does the scholastic hocus-pocus of Bukharin. The Moscow Committee taught the Moscow workers
and the Political Bureau taught the workers of the entire Soviet Union that in the event of a war danger
our working class would he able to seize hold of the rope of the Anglo-Russian Committee. That is how
the question stood politically. But this rope proved rotten. Saturday's issue of Pravda, in a leading article,
speaks of the "united front of traitors" in the General Council. Even Arthur Cook, Tomsky's own beloved
Benjamin, keeps silent. "An utterly incomprehensible silence!" cries Pravda. That is your eternal refrain:
"This is utterly incomprehensible!" First you staked everything on the group of Chiang Kai-shek; I mean
to say Purcell and Hicks, and then you pinned your hopes on "loyal" Wang Ching-wei, that is, Arthur
Cook. But Cook betrayed even as Wang Ching-wei betrayed two days after he had been enrolled by
Bukharin among the loyal ones. You turned over the Minority Movement[60] bound hand and foot to the
gentle men of the General Council. And in the Minority Movement itself you likewise refuse to
counterpoise and are incapable of counterpoising genuine revolutionists to the oily reformists. You
rejected a small but sturdier rope for a bigger and an utterly rotten one. In passing across a narrow and
unreliable bridge, a small but reliable prop may prove one's salvation. But woe to him who clutches at a
rotten prop that crumbles at a touch-for, in that case, a plunge into the abyss is inevitable. Your present
policy is a policy of rotten props on an international scale. You successively clutched at Chiang
Kai-shek, Feng Yu-hsiang, Tang Cheng-chih, Wang Ching-wei, Purcell, Hicks and Cook. Each of these
ropes broke at the moment when it was most sorely needed. Thereupon, first you said, as does the
leading article in Pravda in reference to Cook, "This is utterly incomprehensible!" in order to add on the
very next day, "We always foresaw this."
WHAT ABOUT CHINA?
Let us take the entire tactical, or rather strategical line in China as a whole. The Kuomintang is the party
of the liberal bourgeoisie in the period of revolution -- the liberal bourgeoisie which draws behind it,
deceives and betrays the workers and peasants.
The Communist party, in accordance with your directives, remains throughout all the betrayals within the
Kuomintang and submits to its bourgeois discipline.
The Kuomintang as a whole enters into the Comintern and does not submit to its discipline, but merely
utilizes the name and the authority of the Comintern to dupe the Chinese workers and peasants.
The Kuomintang serves as a shield for the landlord-generals who hold in their grip the soldier-peasants.
Moscow -- at the end of last October -- demands that the agrarian revolution be kept from developing so
as not to scare away the landlords in command of the armies. The armies become mutual insurance
societies for the landlords, large and small alike.
The landlords do not raise any objection to their military expeditions being called national revolutionary,
so long as the power and the land remain in their hands. The proletariat, which composes a young
revolutionary force in no wise inferior to our own proletariat in 1905, is driven under the command of the
Kuomintang.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1937-st2/sf10.htm (3 of 10) [06/06/2002 15:07:07]