Max Shachtman was one of the original founders of the Trotskyite movement in the United States. He was a pragmatist, an opportunist even among opportunists, who led the first major split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1940. At that time, he broke with the orthodox Trotskyite position that the USSR should be understood as a “degenerated workers state” and that it instead had come to be ruled by a new “bureaucratic collectivist” class.

Under the cloak of the theory of the “degenerated workers state” the Trotskyites kept up the pretense of support for the Soviet Union while making every effort to subvert and delegitimize it. Shachtman abandoned that pretense and raised the slogan of “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but international socialism.” Shachtman instead said the Trotskyites should form a so-called “Third Camp” equally opposed to both. In reality, however, the Third Camp Trotskyites aimed most of their fire at the communist movement and the Soviet Union.

Shachtman didn’t limit himself to opposing socialism in the USSR. He also opposed national liberation here in the United States. Shachtman wrote an entire book devoted to denying the right to self-determination for the African American Nation in the Black Belt. In his essay “Race and Revolution” from 1933, while Communist-led sharecroppers were militantly resisting Jim Crow terror in the Deep South, Shachtman argued that national self-determination for African Americans was a “reactionary utopia.”

Later, two other figures rose to prominence among the Trotskyites that would come to shape Shachtmanite Trotskyism as it developed: Hal Draper and Tony Cliff. Draper was part of the group who split with Shachtman from SWP, while Cliff was a founder of British Trotskyism.

To put it briefly, Hal Draper argued that so-called “Stalinism” (that is, Marxism-Leninism) represented “socialism from above” whereas Trotskyism represented “socialism from below.” According to Draper, “Stalinism” imposes socialism on the masses “from above” while Trotskyism seeks the “self-emancipation” of the masses, “from below.” Of course, this is nonsense, as anyone with experience with either can attest.

Anyone who has ever encountered Trotskyism in practice can attest to its commandist, rule-or-ruin methods among the masses. This is what working class “self-emancipation” by the Trotskyites looks like! On the contrary, the Marxist-Leninist organizational method of the mass line, based on the principle of “from the masses to the masses'' represents the dialectical method of leadership, where correct ideas are drawn from the felt needs of the masses, concentrated and honed by theory, and then propagated among the masses through struggle. This is the way to build towards revolution. “Socialism from above” and “socialism from below” aren’t metaphysically separated as the Trotskyites would have it, but are dialectically intertwined.

Tony Cliff was a British Trotskyite who disagreed outwardly with Max Shachtman on many points, but truly represents an extension of his Third Camp theory. Cliff’s book State Capitalism in Russia critiques Trotsky’s theory of the “degenerated or deformed workers states” and Shachtman’s theory of “bureaucratic collectivism” in favor of the theory that the socialist countries are “state capitalist.”

According to Cliff, the socialist countries are “state capitalist” because the Law of Value still operates, they still engage in commodity production, and surplus value still exists. Cliff argues that a “permanent arms economy” prevents cyclical crises, ignoring the fact that constant military spending isn’t sufficient to prevent crises of overproduction in the imperialist countries. Regarding countries like Cuba and China, that Trotsky would call “deformed workers states,” Cliff says they are undergoing “deflected, state capitalist, permanent revolution.”

The simple truth is that Cliff argues from an idealist position. He fails to understand, as outlined by Marx in “Critique of the Gotha Program” and further explained by Lenin in The State and Revolution, that socialism cannot help but carry forward elements of capitalism. In reality, however, the fundamental contradiction of capitalism is the contradiction between socialized production and private accumulation. This contradiction is at the heart of the crises that plague capitalism over and over again. The reason the socialist countries don’t experience these crises is that this contradiction largely no longer exists in socialist countries, or where it does it is only on a very small scale. The commanding heights of the economy in the socialist countries are controlled by the state, and the value created by the workers goes primarily into the betterment of society rather than the pockets of the members of the capitalist class.

Of course, problems exist in the socialist countries. Contradictions continue in the period of the socialist transition, including classes and class struggle. But socialism’s reason for existence is to eliminate those problems step by step. This demands a scientific and materialist approach, starting not with ideals, but with the way things really are.

In the United States, the most significant group to come out of this current was the International Socialist Organization (ISO), a group that constantly placed itself on the wrong side of nearly every struggle. The ISO were Third Camp Trotskyites who drew heavily from Draper and Cliff. They opposed the anti-imperialist struggles and the socialist countries internationally, and took either a rule-or-ruin approach to the mass struggles here, or merely shouted from the sidelines. Like the SWP in the 1930s, with its dissolution and entry into the Socialist Party to commandeer the SP or steal away its members, history has repeated itself with the ISO. The ISO likewise dissolved itself in 2019, and by now most of its former members are hiding out in the social-democratic big-tent organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

These modern-day Shachtmanites now try to inject their petty bourgeois ideology into the people’s struggles through DSA. For example, in an article from June 23, 2023 in The Tempest, entitled “Time for DSA’s internationalists to show solidarity with Ukraine,” they argue for the U.S. State Department’s line of support for the U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia and argue in favor of U.S. taxpayer money funding arms for Ukrainian forces. This position only diverts money away from people’s needs at home while supporting the imperialist war waged by the United States. It is shameful for so-called “socialists” and “internationalists” to support the cynical scheme to send the Ukrainian people to die as proxies for the hegemonic ambitions of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class and their NATO allies. U.S. imperialism is the main enemy of the working class and oppressed people of the world. This is a point these “third camp” Trotskyites emphatically refuse to understand.

From every angle, beginning with Trotsky himself and moving through Cannon and Shachtman to Draper and Cliff, Trotskyism again and again presents itself as a lapdog of the U.S. ruling class against socialism and anti-imperialist struggles. Under the cover of its demand for “socialism from below” it opposes socialism everywhere it exists. While pretending to uphold proletarian democracy, it approaches the masses with a sectarian and dogmatic rule-or-ruin attitude. It is an ideology that has failed to lead a successful revolution anywhere, and it is a trap laid at the feet of the workers movement. It is an important task of Marxist-Leninists to expose the true nature of this ideology everywhere it rears its head.

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As we wrap up our series on Trotskyism, let’s turn to the sad and shameful record of Trotskyism in the United States. This article will look at the Socialist Workers Party.

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is the oldest Trotskyite group in the United States, tracing its origins back to the expulsion of the Trotskyites, who were led by James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman, from the Communist Party in 1928. They formed a group called the Communist League of America, which shortly thereafter merged with the American Workers Party to form the Workers Party of the United States. That organization dissolved itself and entered the Socialist Party of America (SP) in its entirety, attempting to try to take it over or pull activists away from it.

It didn’t take long before the Trotskyists were expelled from the SP and formed the Socialist Workers Party in 1938. By 1940, the SWP would split, with Max Shachtman taking a sizable minority with him to form a new Trotskyite organization called the Workers Party.

The great U.S. communist leader, William Z. Foster, wrote about the origins of the Socialist Workers Party in his important 1952 book, The History of the Communist Party of the United States. He explains that the formation of the SWP was rooted in the expulsion of the Trotskyites from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the Comintern in 1928. It will be worthwhile to quote Foster on this at length.

“At the time of the sixth congress of the Comintern in 1928 Trotsky was in exile, as a criminal against the Revolution. He made an appeal to the congress to try to get it to repudiate the decision of the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union. The congress, however, overwhelmingly rejected this insolent proposal. Nevertheless the scheme found a secret supporter in James Cannon, one of the Communist Party delegates from the United States. Upon Cannon’s return to this country he began at once to spread clandestine Trotskyite propaganda with his friends. They advocated withdrawal from the existing unions, abandonment of the united front, and carried on a bitter factional struggle. The Bittelman-Foster leaders, learning what was going on, preferred charges against Cannon, Max Shachtman, and M. Abern, and all were promptly expelled by the Party as splitters, disrupters, and political degenerates. About 100 of Cannon’s followers were also finally ousted from the Party.

“Upon their expulsion the Trotskyites formed themselves into an opposition league, which, after several internal splits and two slippery amalgamations–first with the Musteites in 1934, and the second with the Socialist Party in 1936–finally emerged, in January 1938, as the Socialist Workers Party … The reason-for-being for this party, which is the American section of the so-called Fourth International, with its pathological antagonism toward the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, is to serve as a tool of reaction. It carries on its counter-revolutionary work against the Party and the U.S.S.R. under cover of a cloud of super-revolutionary phrases.”

The Socialist Workers Party today is similar, except to say that it is even smaller, more sectarian, and more irrelevant than ever. It still opposes Marxism-Leninism and socialism under the cover of an attack on “Stalinism,” and it still opposes national liberation struggles in the name of “permanent revolution.”

As a result of its role in the 1934 Teamster strike in Minneapolis, the SWP managed to stay afloat throughout the 1930s. It also grew as a result of its entry into and then expulsion from the Socialist Party, by taking part of their membership with them in the split. After that, the SWP was the largest Trotskyite grouping in the world, and the most prominent force in Trotsky’s “Fourth International.”

The SWP began to decline in strength when Max Shachtman led a large split in 1940. He argued that the mainstream Trotskyite view of the USSR as a “degenerated workers state” was wrong, and that the Soviet bureaucracy formed a new ruling class. Shachtman called this “bureaucratic collectivism.” While the SWP gave lip-service to defense of the Soviet Union as they attacked and denounced in the same breath, Shachtman and his followers abandoned the pretense, instead arguing for a Trotskyite “third camp” opposed to both capitalism and the USSR.

Today, the SWP tails behind the most backward section of the U.S. working class. Take for example, the article in the SWP newspaper, The Militant, entitled “Biden brags about ‘State of the Union’ as boss attacks on workers grind on,” from February 27, 2023. There, they decry “Democrats’ ‘woke’ anti-woman policies on gender and promotion of ‘critical race theory’ — policies that are detested by millions of workers.” These and their many statements like them are bare-faced repetitions of transphobic, right-wing talking points that shamelessly attempt to pit LGBTQ people against women, alongside far-right attacks on education and the Black Liberation movement.

In another article from June 12, 2023, ironically entitled “A genuine revolution means leading masses in their millions,” SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters repeats again the right-wing talking point that schools “teach those whose skins are white that they are racists by birth,” raising once more the boogeyman of the Republican far right, Critical Race Theory, to unite with the reactionaries. She goes on to bemoan being called a transphobe for “defending the biological fact that there are two sexes.” She doesn’t stop there, however. She digs in even deeper, saying, “Whether under the flag of ‘cancel culture,’ ‘critical race theory,’ the anti-Jewish ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ movement or something else, these are reactionary forces alien to the working class and its allies,” repeating the Zionist lie that support for the liberation of Palestine is antisemitic.

This should all come as no surprise from Trotskyites, but it is still appalling to see people who call themselves socialists and who claim to speak for the working class carry water for the most reactionary elements within the U.S. ruling class, and to try and help them spread their poisonous ideology amongst the workers movement.

The Socialist Workers Party was always a sad shadow of the genuine communist movement in the United States, and it has only fallen farther and farther as it tries to desperately find its footing in a world where it has lost any scrap of relevance. In 2019, a U.S. Trotskyite group, the International Socialist Organization, dissolved itself. Hopefully the SWP isn’t far behind.

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By now it should come as no surprise that Trotskyism, with its ultra-left emphasis on “pure proletarian revolution” originating in Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution,” that Trotskyism’s errors extend to the national question.

But, before we can get into Trotsky’s view on the subject, what is the national question? When Marxists talk about the “national question” we’re talking about the analysis of the problems posed to the revolutionary movement by the materialist process by which nations form and develop, and the role that plays in revolutionary change. Practically, we’re talking about how the proletarian revolutionary movement should relate to oppressed nations and nationalities.

Marx and Engels wrote about this in relation to a number of important issues while they were alive, especially concerning the Irish and Indian struggles for national liberation against the British Empire, and in the context of the Black liberation struggle, especially in relation to the abolition struggle and the U.S. Civil War. Their support for these struggles was unequivocal. Lenin and Stalin further developed Marxist-Leninist theory on the national question. Lenin and Stalin understood that it was necessary for communists to support self-determination for oppressed nations as an essential element of the struggle against our common enemy, monopoly capitalism, or imperialism. African American Marxist-Leninists like Harry Haywood and Claudia Jones applied these theories to the concrete analysis of the national question in the United States.

In 1933, Trotsky says plainly, in “The Negro Question in America,” “The Negroes are a race and not a nation.” In almost the same breath, Trotsky claims to support self-determination for African Americans. But if Black people in the U.S. are not a nation, what could this possibly mean? Lenin was crystal clear on the meaning of self-determination, practically: “The right of nations to self-determination means only the right to independence in a political sense, the right to free, political secession from the oppressing nation.” Trotsky would have us believe there is some other kind of self-determination, some kind of racial, rather than national, self-determination. For Trotsky, the slogan of “self-determination” should be used as “transitional demand” to recruit Black workers to the cause of a purely proletarian revolution. This isn’t support, but rather it is the cynical manipulation of the demand for Black self-determination. He pays lip-service to self-determination but robs it of its meaning in order to twist it to his own aims.

The U.S. Trotskyite theoretician Max Shachtman isn’t any better on the question. In some ways he’s even worse. He likewise states, in his pamphlet Race and Revolution from 1933, “The American Negroes do not constitute a nation separate and apart from the rest of the population of the country.” His conclusion is that African American liberation in the Black Belt is a “reactionary utopia.” He is opposed even to Trotsky’s lip-service to self-determination. At least, unlike Trotsky, he doesn’t mince words.

Shachtman argues that an oppressed nation must be distinct in every way from the nation that oppresses it. It is not enough for Shachtman, for example, that the African American people speak a common language (English), but rather they must speak a common language unique to them. The same holds true of culture, economic life, and so on. He also gives a lot of weight to the migrations of African Americans out of the Black Belt South, in order to deny that this is their historically constituted national territory. But would anyone deny that Ireland and Palestine remain the national territory of the Irish and Palestinian people, despite migrations resulting from the oppression of imperialism and its lackeys in Ireland and Palestine? Only the imperialists and their agents would make such a claim.

To the Trotskyites, the question of Black liberation or Chicano liberation is a race question. It is a question of overcoming racial prejudice to unite the multinational working class against the capitalist classes and strata, large and small. It is a purely ideological struggle, with no real material basis. Further, by limiting the question to a question of race, the Trotskyites fail to comprehend the inherently anti-imperialist nature of the national liberation struggles. They call the national bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie reactionaries, and would exclude them from being allies in the united front against monopoly capitalism.

We have already seen how the Trotskyites demand for pure proletarian revolution has led them astray on the issues of the alliance with the peasantry and the united front. Their wrong views on the national question are a branch from the same poisonous weed. The only way the working class in the United States will win socialism is to build a united front against monopoly capitalism, and the cornerstone of that united front is the strategic alliance between the multinational working class and the movement of oppressed nationalities for national liberation. There is no path for victory that does not include support for the self-determination of the African American Nation in the Black Belt South, the Chicano Nation in Aztlan in the Southwest, and the Hawaiian Nation. By denying that essential point, the Trotskyites would set the proletarian revolution up to fail.

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Trotskyism disagrees with Marxism-Leninism on a number of important theoretical points. These disagreements aren’t limited to the field of theory but have a real practical impact on the movements of working class and oppressed peoples. In our day-to-day struggles, we see them come up again and again. Practically, the question of the united front illustrates very clearly the glaring difference between Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism. This is a question of extreme theoretical importance, with tremendous practical consequences, so we should examine it closely.

What is the united front? It is the organizational expression of a broad unity of action by diverse forces against a common enemy. The purpose of the united front, the reason for its existence, is to unite the many to defeat the few.

In order to defeat the monopoly capitalist class – the imperialists who seek to plunder and rule the world through monetary influence and force of arms – the masses in their millions must unite broadly in order to attack the enemy from every angle. This requires a broad unity, beyond the tight, militant discipline demanded by revolutionary communists. We can and must unite millions of people – everyone whose material interests are opposed to those of the monopoly capitalists. One certainly doesn’t have to be a communist to understand that the interests of the monopoly capitalists are opposed to our own.

We can and must fight together with the mass organizations of the working class, such as the trade unions. And we must also unite broadly with classes outside of our own. Building the strategic alliance between the working class and the movements of oppressed nationalities is essential to building the united front against monopoly capitalism. Thus, we should build and unite with the Black and Chicano liberation movements, including uniting with the national bourgeoisie who wants to fight back against the imperialist system at the core of national oppression. We must also seek to unite with progressive forces among the petty bourgeoisie, a doomed class crushed daily under the weight of the monopoly capitalists.

The Trotskyites aren’t interested in this kind of united front, this uniting broadly with different class forces who are materially at odds with the monopoly capitalists. As always, they want pure proletarian revolution, and their understanding of the united front reflects that. To them, the united front should be a unity of socialist forces dominated by the Trotskyites. It is a unity of working-class forces arrayed against all other classes and strata. This is what we saw in how they addressed the Bolshevik revolution in opposition to the peasantry, and the Chinese revolution as well.

The united front, properly understood, means that there are many contradictory forces at work, all seeking to lead it based on their own material interests. Thus, the communists must strive to maintain the independence and initiative with the united front, and should strive to lead it in a revolutionary direction. But how should communists exercise leadership in the united front? Through persuasion and example, and through the use of the mass line.

Mao Zedong explained the mass line like this.

“In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily ‘from the masses, to the masses’. This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through. And so on, over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer each time. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge.”

Understanding the mass line is crucial to understanding how communists should relate to the mass organizations of the united front. We have to understand, as Mao put it, that the masses are composed of advanced, intermediate and backwards elements. The advanced are the activists who want to fight to make things better. The intermediate are the broad group who are not yet active, but aren’t opposed to progress. The backwards are the reactionaries who push back against change, oppose progress and champion the ideas of the enemy among the masses.

The role of communists among the masses is to organize and unite with the advanced, active fighters. These are the people who are articulating the masses' felt needs. Together with the advanced, we can develop organizations, struggles and campaigns around these felt needs in order to mobilize the broad intermediate section of the masses while isolating or winning over the backwards in the course of the struggle. By doing this, we can win important victories and land blows against the enemy. Through the course of these mass struggles, we can raise the level of consciousness and organization among the masses. By helping to lead and sum up these fights, we can win the advanced fighters over to Marxism-Leninism and build communist organization. This is the correct, Marxist-Leninist method of leadership.

The Trotskyites utterly fail to understand any of this. To the Trotskyists, what does united front organizing look like? They have two main, interrelated methods: entryism and commandism. What does this mean?

Because the Trotskyites fail to grasp the mass line in united front work, their idea of organizing among the masses isn’t “from the masses, to the masses.” They have no real interest in the felt needs of the masses, or in the ideas of the advanced. Instead, they go into the mass organizations from outside, to seize control of them, maneuvering to dominate them and force their line onto them. This “entryism” is completely at odds with any clear understanding of the mass line in the united front. The purpose of going among the masses isn’t to dominate them and make the mass organizations into mere extensions of the communists. The mass organizations should arise from the needs of the masses, fight for what the masses want to fight for, and should have a much broader level of unity than that demanded of communist cadres. To make the mass organizations into a mere “front” of the communists robs them of what makes them useful to the masses, and what makes them valuable as an element of the united front in the revolutionary struggle. Instead, it twists the mass organizations into a shell, occupied by the parasitic, Trotskyite entryists. Once this happens, the advanced and intermediate soon abandon the organization, leaving the Trotskyites alone in their ideologically pure “mass” organization.

If this fails, the Trotskyites have another option, one that they also frequently use. Their other method is to simply form these pure “mass” organizations whole cloth. These fake mass organizations are not made up of advanced activists from among the masses, but instead are composed almost entirely of Trotskyites. They use these organizations to try to command the masses. They stand in for the masses and speak for the masses, with no real connection to the actual struggles of working and oppressed people. From here they shout their slogans and peddle their papers, not as mass line tools of organizing, but as dictates from the sidelines of the struggle. Woe to the advanced activist who wanders into one of these Trotskyite “mass” organizations. They will quickly see that their options are to join ranks with the Trotskyites or be gone. This is the way the Trotskyites organize.

The purpose of united front work is to unite all who can be united to defeat the monopoly capitalist enemy. The role of communists among the masses is a dialectical one, while the Trotskyites are mechanical in their approach. The Trotskyites seek to enforce their pure, idealistic formulas, while Marxism-Leninism seeks to transform real people in the crucible of real struggle.

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Given the trajectory of Trotsky’s line on the USSR, it shouldn’t surprising that his theories missed the mark on China as well. In fact, if they had been followed, it is clear that they would have done considerable harm to the Chinese revolution. On the question of China, there are two main things that stand out regarding the position of Trotsky and his followers. First, there is the ever present failure to grasp the national-colonial question in the era of imperialism, and second, there is the failure to understand the united front in relation to that.

The Chinese revolution, led by Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China (CPC), applied the theories of Lenin to the concrete conditions of China. Mao made a materialist analysis of the class forces at work in China in his 1926 “Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society.” That important article laid the foundation for the strategic orientation of the revolution, concluding,

“... our enemies are all those in league with imperialism—the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right-wing may become our enemy and their left-wing may become our friend but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks.”

Based on this analysis, Mao and the CPC led the Chinese masses through a long and complex revolutionary struggle from 1927 to 1949. The CPC participated in two united fronts with the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT), first against warlordism (warlords sponsored by the imperialist powers) from 1924 to 1927, then again against Japanese imperialism from 1937 to 1945. When the CPC overthrew the KMT in 1949 and declared the formation of the People’s Republic of China, they entered the period of the New Democratic revolution.

The New Democratic revolution was a transitional stage in the Chinese revolution, based on the “bloc of four classes” with the aim of overthrowing feudalism and colonialism, laying the groundwork for the development of socialism. These four classes at the core of the New Democratic revolution are the proletariat, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. Just as Lenin said about the “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” in Russia, the “People’s Democratic Dictatorship” is a particular form of the dictatorship of the proletariat in China. Based on the particularities of Chinese reality, new democracy was based on the strategic alliance of these four classes, under the leadership of the working class and the CPC.

All of this was firmly grounded in Leninist principles and the Marxist-Leninist analysis of the concrete conditions faced by the Chinese revolution, taking place as it was in a large, semi-colonial and semi-feudal country. But of course, Trotskyism takes issue with all of this, opposed the united front with the KMT, and advocated a policy of pure proletarian revolution as the way forward for the Chinese revolution.

The essence of the matter is this: It’s the same old story with Trotsky, who would have the working class stand alone, opposed to every other class. In “The Third International After Lenin” from 1928, Trotsky writes,

“The Russian bourgeoisie was the bourgeoisie of an imperialist oppressor state; the Chinese bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie of an oppressed colonial country. The overthrow of feudal Czarism was a progressive task in old Russia. The overthrow of the imperialist yoke is a progressive historical task in China. However, the conduct of the Chinese bourgeoisie in relation to imperialism, the proletariat, and the peasantry, was not more revolutionary than the attitude of the Russian bourgeoisie towards Czarism and the revolutionary classes in Russia, but, if anything, viler and more reactionary. That is the only way to pose the question.”

Trotsky here begins with an acknowledgement that the bourgeoisie of Russia and China are different, and play a different role on the stage of historical events, but then he backpedals, and treats them as if they’re the same. In practice, the bourgeoisie is the bourgeoisie, plain and simple. He makes no distinction between the Chinese comprador bourgeoisie in league with imperialism and China’s national bourgeoisie, who oppose it. And since, according to Trotsky’s abstractions, the interests of the bourgeoisie are everywhere the same, whether in Russia or in China, the task of the proletariat is, according to Trotsky, again the same: not to ally with any section of them, but to fight all of them.

The Marxist-Leninists understood that the national bourgeoisie were not a reliable ally and would try to seize the leadership of the movement themselves. Likewise, they understood that while it was in the national bourgeoisie’s interest to be rid of imperialist domination, they would not lead the country to socialism. Instead, they would lead the country to compromise with imperialism. Thus, Mao always insisted the CPC must maintain its independence and initiative in the united front, in order to be able to lead the revolution forward towards socialism.

Even so, to fail to unite with the national bourgeoisie would have had two disastrous consequences. It would have prevented the national liberation struggle from defeating the imperialist-backed warlords, and then later Japanese imperialism, militarily. At the same time it would rob the CPC of an important organizational vehicle for its own growth and development in the course of those mass struggles. The fact is, the masses had to learn that the CPC was their true leader in practice, through their experience in the united front with KMT. They had to learn it through deeds, through experiences both positive and negative, and not just through phrases and proclamations.

Essentially, the Trotskyites made three major errors in relation to China. First, they approached the problems of the Chinese revolution dogmatically, without taking into account the particularities of the time, place and conditions. Second, they sought to isolate the Chinese working class from its allies, namely the national bourgeoisie, the peasantry, and the urban petty bourgeoisie and intellectuals. And third, they approached the revolution, as always, from the sidelines, with agitation and propaganda alone, instead of utilizing the mass line to educate the masses through their direct experience.

As a result of these three errors, it advocated an adventurist and ultra-left position in China – breaking the united front and immediately forming Soviets to contend for power. These Trotskyite positions were always out of step with the experience, understanding, and organization of the masses, based on abstractions and dogma. The fact is, had the Chinese Communists followed the Trotskyites, they would have faced disaster and defeat.

Today, the Trotskyites call the People’s Republic of China a “deformed workers state.” This is following from their claim that the USSR was a “degenerated workers state.” They say it is “deformed” because, they claim, the Chinese revolution was “crippled” from the moment of its birth by the leadership of the “Stalinist bureaucracy” in the Soviet Union and the Comintern. Trotskyites today directly and openly oppose the People’s Republic of China, almost universally.

The facts about China are quite different. In short, the CPC transformed China from a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country, plundered by foreign capital and its domestic agents, into a major, independent, industrial power. They rapidly wiped out illiteracy and have since eradicated extreme poverty, accounting for three quarters of total global poverty reduction. They accomplished this on the basis of proletarian democracy and the building of a socialist economy, in line with China’s concrete conditions.

In the next articles, we will look more closely at the Trotskyite view of the national question and the united front. Whereas Marxism-Leninism succeeded in China, we again see Trotskyism fall into ultra-leftism and dogmatism, both in theory and practice, and we’ll see all of those same mistakes arise for the Trotskyites again and again.

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