For Working-Class Political Independence!

(Quote of the Week)

Fighting for the continuity of Marxism in countries of belated capitalist development, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky condemned the class-collaborationist program of the Third International (Comintern) under Stalinist misleadership. The bloody defeat of the 1925-27 Chinese Revolution was prepared by the Comintern’s insistence that Chinese Communists join the Guomindang, a bourgeois party, prettifying it as a “workers and peasants party.” Trotsky stressed that as part of its struggle to lead the petty-bourgeois peasant masses, the proletarian party must maintain its political independence.

The Comintern leadership has already committed not a few mistakes in India. The conditions have not yet allowed these errors to reveal themselves on such a scale as in China. One can, therefore, hope that the lessons of the Chinese events will permit of a more timely rectification of the line of the leading policy in India and in other countries of the Orient.

The cardinal question for us here, as everywhere and always, is the question of the communist party, its complete independence, its irreconcilable class character. The greatest danger on this path is the organization of so-called “workers’ and peasants’ parties” in the countries of the Orient....

Marxism has always taught, and Bolshevism, too, accepted, and taught, that the peasantry and proletariat are two different classes, that it is false to identify their interests in capitalist society in any way, and that a peasant can join the communist party only if, from the property viewpoint, he adopts the views of the proletariat. The alliance of the workers and peasants under the dictatorship of the proletariat does not invalidate this thesis, but confirms it, in a different way, under different circumstances. If there were no different classes with different interests, there would be no talk even of an alliance. Such an alliance is compatible with the socialist revolution only to the extent that it enters into the iron framework of the dictatorship of the proletariat....

Those organizations which in capitalist countries label themselves peasant parties are in reality one of the varieties of bourgeois parties.

—Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin (1928)