 Okay, well, almost exactly 100 years ago this year, a tiny party of about 50 members was founded on a rickety boat in Shanghai. And over the next few decades, that tiny party would grow to become one of the biggest in the world and it would change world history. This was, of course, the Chinese Communist Party. And everyone knows that they took power in the Chinese Revolution in 1949. If you don't know about that, you can come to the session on that tomorrow, which I'm also talking on. But what people don't know so much about is the revolution of 1925 to 1927, which really you need to understand in order to understand the events of 1949. And by the time that revolution, the earlier one in the 20s, broke out, Chinese society had been in turmoil for about 80 years. Ever since Britain, and to some extent, France dragged China into capitalism, into the world market with literal gunboat diplomacy. And that happened in a very interesting way. Britain literally prized open the Chinese market because China, you know, China obviously was one of the world's oldest civilizations or class society, but it was a pre-capitalist class society. And the Chinese ruling class was quite happy with that and didn't see the need to trade with the rest of the world. So China was quite sealed off from the world and they didn't feel a need for British goods, essentially. They didn't see a need to trade with Britain. But Britain saw the need to trade with China, partly to enrich itself, but also there was many things that China produced, like silk, that Britain coveted. And actually, Britain had a big trade deficit with China as a result. China wouldn't buy anything off Britain. The one thing Britain thought that China, that Britain had that China would like, or there would be a big market for, was opium. And so that's why they're called the opium wars, which you might have heard of. Britain literally sailed gunboats up Chinese rivers and forced the Chinese regime at gunpoint to agree to buy or to make legal the purchasing of opium within China, so that Britain could sell it opium on a vast scale and eliminate its trade deficit and obviously make a lot of money in the process. For that reason, Queen Victoria is known to many as the world's biggest drug dealer, which is entirely accurate. And that trade was utterly corrosive for Chinese society. Obviously, the opium addiction that spread through society was itself corrosive, but the social relations, the traditional social relations of Chinese society were also corroded by the cheap commodities that Britain now sense China's way, which pauperized large, vast swathes of the Chinese population, producing landlessness as peasants basically were up to their eyeballs in debt, lost their land and then went to the cities. It's a familiar story, it's not just a part of China's history, but the same thing for many colonial or ex-colonial countries. And in reality, the regime would have been overthrown at that time. There was actually the biggest, the bloodiest civil war of the 19th century. In fact, I think the bloodiest war of the 19th century, the Taiping Rebellion, which probably would have overthrown the regime, but Britain propped up the regime actually, which is a very interesting fact, which we'll return to later. By the end of the 19th century, British and other foreign capitalists held all of the commanding economic positions in the Chinese economy. And they blocked off the development of an indigenous capitalist class in China that could compete with other countries. And the wealth that's a layer of the Chinese society did of course accumulate was not through their own production, but was basically through merchants trading with the West. They're known as a compredor bourgeoisie. That is a bourgeoisie with no independence from the imperialists which dominate over them. And in most cases, these merchants were actually from the previous ruling class. In other words, the pre-capitalist ruling class, they were landlords. And they used the wealth that they accumulated by trading with the West or acting as an intermediary to actually purchase more land and to enhance their traditional status as landlords. And therefore obviously remain part of the old regime. And as a result of their land purchases, more land was not cultivated and more cheap labor descended into the cities. And really from this point onwards, revolution was on the agenda for China. But the question was, what would the character of that revolution be? Now the fact that the British, as I mentioned, propped up the old regime, again at gunpoint, defeating the Taiping rebellion in that way really tells you everything I think about the problems of the Chinese revolution at this time. Because the Chinese capitalist class, if you can even call them that, were as I explained really part of the old ruling class. And they were thoroughly dependent upon the foreign capitalists for their power and their wealth. They had no interest in conducting a revolution, even a bourgeois revolution. They were pretty happy with the status quo, essentially. And as Trotsky explained in his theory of permanent revolution, once capitalism develops in countries such as Britain and France, it creates a world market. And the world market becomes a sort of, as Trotsky called it, an independent reality. And in other words, it is more than the sum of its parts. The world economy is not just the result of adding up so many different national economies in a mechanical fashion. The world economy exerts a decisive influence over the individual economies, the national economies, if you like, that make it up, including even the more powerful countries. Think about it as like the arm on your body. It's part of the rest of your body. It cannot be an arm without being linked to the rest of your body. Any economy in the world market, once the world market comes into being, becomes dependent on the rest of the world market, becomes linked into it and doesn't make any sense outside of that. And what that means is that countries that are late to capitalist development cannot repeat the historical process, the events that took place in countries like England and France. In other words, they can't have a bourgeois revolution. Their social development of those countries is fundamentally altered by the existence of imperialism and the world market, which has really created the capitalist class in countries such as China. And this is really, this is very important to understand both the 25 revolution and the 1949 one. By the beginning of the 20th century, dissatisfaction was, you know, with the whole situation within China was extreme. And there was a firmament in society and especially amongst the intelligentsia, the intellectuals, especially young ones. It was a discussion about how to revive Chinese society, the profound sense of shame and of humiliation, because obviously China, it was traditionally one of the most powerful and advanced nations in the world. Initially, probably the most common idea in this layer was that China needed to have a bourgeois renovation. It needed to model itself and modernize itself on the model of the more advanced capitalist countries like Britain and France, which were dominating it. You know, in other words, to have a parliamentary democracy since that seemed to be so successful for them. It became apparent quite quickly, however, this could not be achieved through a peaceful reform. The old regime, which, as I said, was propped up by the British would not agree to dissolving its power and its privileges, would not be enlightened in that way. That became obvious. That was the easy solution, but it was obvious that it wasn't possible. Then obviously others began to think, well, we need a bourgeois revolution and we need to overthrow this regime. And at the end of the 19th century, such a party dedicated to that cause was founded in 1894. Sun Yat-sen founded what would later be called the Guomandang, which basically means the Chinese Nationalist Party. To carry out this classic task of the bourgeois revolution of freeing China as a nation from foreign domination, creating a modern market and a modern bourgeois democracy, that was essentially its plan. And it actually led a so-called revolution in 1911, the Sinhai Revolution, which did lead to the abdication of the emperor of China. But in reality, this was no revolution. It was just a palace coup. There was no real mass movement. There was no mass organization throughout Chinese society that overthrew the old regime and renovated society with a new state and new institutions. Not at all. In fact, the emperor abdicated, but the emperor was allowed to keep all of his privileges, remain in his palaces. Everything was kept as before. There was also only four years old. So obviously he didn't exactly negotiate that himself. But anyway, no democracy. In fact, the country arguably went backwards after this so-called revolution because it broke up into warlordism, which of course is the exact opposite of what the bourgeois revolution is supposed to do. It's supposed to unite the country to knock down feudal barriers between petty principalities. And yet actually after 1911, China broke down into warlordism and there was really no national state to speak of. And therefore the likes of Sun Yat-sen, who were directly involved in this sham of a revolution, were in reality discredited. And by the way, it also reflected what? The lack of a real national bourgeois class behind the likes of Sun Yat-sen that had an interest in doing this. There really wasn't a layer like that across Chinese society. Hence the fact that they reduced themselves to a palace coup. Anyway, it was a sham and it discredited those people. And that layer of particularly young intellectuals, students who were searching for a way out, a way forward for China. In their eyes, these people were discredited and this method was discredited. These in fact, bourgeois democracy in general was discredited. And the killing blow really to the idea of bourgeois democracy and following in the path of Britain and France was the end of World War I. At that time, you course, you had Woodrow Wilson's ideas of self-determination. And so China threw itself onto the scales of World War I in the last year of it on the side of Britain and France, clearly thinking, well, those were going to win. And therefore if we side with them, we will be looked upon favorably in the treaties afterwards and we'll get back our territories essentially. But as you probably know, that was betrayed in the Versailles Treaty and actually China, the Chinese territories that were owned by Germany, such as Shandong, which is near to Shanghai, was given over to Japan. And the concessions that countries like Britain and France and America had, that is parts of cities such as Hong Kong that were reserved only for Westerners, those were maintained or even expanded. And that obviously disgusted such people and they hardly wanted to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Britain and France when they'd just been betrayed by them after having supported them in the First World War. And so people were looking for more radical ideas. And their figurehead started to emerge in the figure of Chen Duxiu, who had for a while been searching himself for how to renovate and liberate Chinese society. And he was looking at all kinds of ideas, liberal ideas, also ideas from China's history. But he ended up concluding, for the similar reasons of what I just described, that a radical break with the past was needed. Alongside this, China's industrialization had now begun in the 1910s. That's really when industrialization and the working class first began to appear in China. Now it's true that Western imperialism held China back and distorted its development, prevented the development of an independent capitalist class. But they did still export capital to China like they do all over the world. They set up factories within China. And of course they did so with the latest technology. They didn't say, well, China's not had a bourgeois revolution yet and it's several hundred years behind us. So we better start out with the kind of factories that we started out with. 300, no, obviously they created the latest factories with the latest technology in order to maximize their profits. But that meant, of course, that you had in small pockets of Chinese society a very modern working class using modern production techniques in large factories. And this was particularly accelerated by the First World War because the West was sort of distracted and there was actually some space for Chinese capitalists to begin developing their own industries. And by the end of the First World War there was as many as two million industrial workers in China. Also quite a few, a few hundred thousand of them actually went over to Britain and France in the war effort to basically to work in factories there. And obviously they worked alongside British and French workers who were maybe trade unionized and they learned about trade unions. And socialism. And then, of course, the final piece in the jigsaw is the Russian Revolution in 1917 which took place in a country that has a large border with China. And here was something that was in even more modern, more radical set of ideas than Western liberalism and was not tainted with the crimes of imperialism. In fact, the Bolsheviks were fighting against imperialism quite militantly. And that was clearly quite an inspiring and exciting prospect for many people and they put their words into action. So for example, where is the West carved up bits of China as I've described? The Bolsheviks issued the Karakhan Manifesto which actually relinquished territories that the Tsarists had acquired within China. And that you can imagine kind of effect that that would have on your psyche. You've only seen your country exploited by these European powers and suddenly a new regime comes along is fighting against those powers and actually gives you bits of your country's territory back. That was clearly gonna have a massive impact. And so it did. And in 1919, Chengdu Xu, who I already mentioned and also Li Dajiao got together and approached the common turn in order to find the Chinese Communist Party. And it's important to point out that these are the ideas, these are the experiences that formed the basis of the Chinese Communist Party. And yet Stalinists would have you believe that Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution which is essentially what I've been describing in terms of the inability of the bourgeoisie of a colonial country to carry out a revolution because of their dependence on imperialism and also the development of a modern working class very rapidly in a few key cities meaning that the working class would play a key role. Those are the ideas of the current revolution and obviously Stalinists would have you think that this is a kind of weird kind of development of that is exclusive to Trotskyism that has actually nothing to do with genuine Marxism. That's what they would say. But it's precisely those ideas and those experiences that inspired the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, in its founding statements, its founding program in 1921, its stated aim was explicitly to rid China of as they called it its bourgeois regime. They didn't say feudal regime, where they said it was classified as a bourgeois regime and by means of overthrowing, as they say, the capitalist state by the working class in alliance with the peasants, which is of course what took place in Russia. That was what they said. They didn't say in 50 or 100 years this might be possible after we've had a bourgeois revolution. So that's important to understand that. Within only a handful of years, the Communist Party of China became a mass party and it actually founded most of the country's trade unions, which is enormously significant. England went through, sorry, I should say mass trade unions, which happened in China in the early 1920s. That is to say only about 20 to 30 years after England had its first mass trade unions, which were not created until the end of the 19th century. England went through a very lengthy process of literally hundreds of years of gradually developing the working class movement. Things like Luddism, for example, were tried and the trade unions for much of the 19th century were quite small craft unions. And of course there was utopian socialism in countries like England and in France, but not in China. They went straight to the ideas of communism, straight to the most advanced socialist ideas that existed, straight to the communist international and to mass trade unionism, which was founded by the Communist Party. And of course, why not, right? Just as you wouldn't set up, if you're an imperialist, you wouldn't export your capital to China. And as I said, create a 200 year old factory on the model of England from 200 years before, you'd create the most modern factory using the most modern techniques. Similarly, if you establish a working class movement with a new rapidly growing working class, you would go straight, you wouldn't repeat all of the mistakes in the less, you know, you learn the lessons and you go straight to the most advanced ideas that the working class had generated, which is exactly what they did. And I think the existence of a mass communist party and mass trade unions shows that really the driving force of the Chinese revolution would be and could only be the working class. And yeah, as I said, they created mass trade unions. On May day in 1924, one year before the revolution kicked off, in Shanghai, 100,000 workers marched through the streets under the banner of the trade unions and the Communist Party. And twice that number did the same thing in Guangzhou. So again, clearly this underlies the point that I'm making. Now, and the revolution itself, everything about how the revolution took place and how it was started only underlines the point that it was the working class that's initiated and led this process. The kind of first kind of the prologue, if you like, to the revolution was the May 4th movement of 1919 in which some student protesters against imperialism were attacked and the working class all over the country struck in response and they actually freed the jail protesters by storming the prison. And then the revolution proper begins with the May 30th movement in 1925, which took place because strikes had been taking place at a Japanese-owned cotton mill in Shanghai. And one of the Japanese foremen shot dead one of the workers. And then there were student solidarity protests that took place. And in response to those, the British police shot and killed several student protesters, which sparked off a massive nationwide anti-imperialist movement with mass strikes taking place all over the country. These were not led by the bourgeoisie, they were led by the working class using working class methods right from the beginning. Now, the demands that the workers raised were not explicitly socialist in most cases, they generally be called for a shorter working day, maybe higher wages, but most of the demands were anti-imperialist and they were, if you like, formally acceptable to the bourgeoisie, but that's to be expected at the beginning of any revolution, be it in a developed capitalist country or in a colonial country, to be honest. But the point is not so much the demands, but the methods and the classes that were using those methods. And once again, the working class, using working class methods, which has a decisive effect. Of course, many Chinese capitalists didn't particularly like imperialism either and I'll come on to why a little bit later with some examples. Then they obviously wanted their own independence and they wanted to be able to compete with the best foreign capitalists. But when their own workers are striking, that obviously is a little bit concerning from a bourgeois point of view and it kind of cuts short their sympathy for such a movement or rather their ability to lead such a movement. They're hardly gonna want to encourage such a movement against imperialism when it seems to be led by communists and when there is mass strikes of hundreds of thousands of workers, many of whom will be your own workers in your own workplace. There's an inherent logic to these events. There's an objective dynamic to them, which is independent of the ideas and the perspectives of the participants involved. Now, at this point, it all seems very clear and it seems as if the coming Chinese revolution is proceeding along much the same lines of the Russian revolution, which of course had only taken place less than 10 years before. And it was led by the Chinese Communist Party which was founded to carry out the same tasks as in Russia. Now, the Chinese Communist Party was a very young party, as I've mentioned. And if you think the essence of a Bolshevik Party which they were trying to be is a catered organization, right? It's to develop, it's not just a sort of general left-wing organization. It's the whole point of a quite distinctly communist organization whose purpose, apart from taking power, is to educate people in the most scientific and clearest ideas of Marxism that is possible. But obviously that wasn't the case for the Chinese people because it only existed for four years and even its leading members like Chen Duxiu couldn't really be described as a cater of Marxism. He'd come to Marxism very late in life and he was a brilliant person, but his grasp of Marxist theory was a little bit limited because of this and he was much more of an all-rounder. He also wrote poetry and did all kinds of other things. So this is the nature of the leading members of the Chinese Communist Party. Now, that wouldn't necessarily have been a problem because he had the communist international. The whole purpose of having an international communist organization is of course to generalize the political lessons of the working class throughout the world and to concentrate them in a leadership that can then help to spread those ideas and speed up the development and avoid mistakes being repeated, right? So with the help of the common term leadership in Moscow, perhaps the weaknesses within China could have been overcome. But of course, by 1925, arguably the lead, well not arguably, definitely the leadership of the common term in Russia was not only not superior to the likes of Chen Duxiu in China, but was actually far worse than it because of course Stalin was now in the saddle, right? And this really meant the end, the death of internationalism. In fact, it's turning into its opposite because his position of socialism in one country really meant what? Peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world. That's what it meant. We're gonna build socialism allegedly within one country. So we need peace and quiet. We need to be able to carry out trade deals with the capitalist powers. We need, we can't be constantly at loggerheads with them trying to organize revolution in their countries which is only gonna scupper trade deals with them, right? What we need is to sort of gradually, peacefully get on with things, just leave it in the hands of the bureaucracy. We know what we're doing. That's the kind of mentality that's the thinking behind socialism in one country. And so of course, its attitude towards revolutions elsewhere was always gonna be at best one of irritation essentially and ignorance. And at worst, one of outright betrayal because these revolutions were inconvenient would scupper the short-term interests of this bureaucracy. And so it became rather than sacrificing the Russian revolution for the sake of the world revolution which is how Lenin put the question of an international policy. It was sacrificing the world revolution in the interests of the Russian bureaucracy. And the way that Stalin and his ilk looked upon the revolution in China was of mistrust. From their point of view, China wasn't a European country. It had no history of a working class of a socialist movement. It was brand new and it was still under the thumb of imperialism. From their point of view, like the Chinese, first of all, a bureaucrat looks down on the working class anyway and sees the working class movement as something to be controlled and something to be highly suspicious and fearful of because it's something that might get out of hand. What you want to do as a bureaucrat is arrange things in offices basically, have diplomatic meetings and set things up and have negotiations. Having stormy events involving millions of workers who might do all kinds of things not under your control is not how you look at things. Especially when it's in a different country that you don't know is completely alien to you. That was how I think Stalin looked at the revolution in China. And he was interested in securing Russia's position on the world stage. And so he looked at the Chinese Revolution and what he thought was that the Chinese working class can't lead a revolution in China. And he reverted to a Menshevik position, a two-stage position of, well, the first thing they'll have to do is have a bourgeois revolution. But Guam and Deng was a very famous party now led by Zhang Jiexi after Sun Yat-sen had died the previous year. He seemed a respectable, serious, well-known figure, a military man commanding the military of the forces of the Guam and Deng. And basically, yeah, that seemed like we should do a deal with this guy. And I also think their mentality was because they controlled this state, a very large state in Russia, I think they also kind of tended to, they didn't look at history and society in the way Marxist does, as having its own laws that have to be obeyed, that can't be ignored, you know? They looked at it really as we are in charge of a mighty state apparatus. We've got a mighty communist international movement under our control. So we can almost kind of change history. We can kind of throw our bureaucratic weight onto the scales of history and make it move in our direction, the kind of subjectivist outlook of this kind of idea that we can order society around essentially. The same mentality was on display with the forced collectivization, this idea that you can just by order make society do what you wanted to do. It reflects the bureaucratic mentality and it's false. And so their attitude was, look, we've got a Chinese Communist Party. We've got our influence also as a state. We can use that to sort of as a bargaining chip to get what we want out of Chiang, so Zhang Jiexi, also known as Chiang Kai-shek. So they basically insisted that the Chinese Communist Party support Zhang Jiexi and the Kuomintang and they used that basically as a bargaining chip with him to get him to be their man in China and that he would then come to power and Russia would have a friendly guy within China and that would be a blow to imperialism and it would help, everyone would have to sit up and take notice of the Soviet Union basically. That was how they looked at it. They wanted to control everything by agreements from offices essentially. And this is completely, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party were opposed to this. There's lots of evidence to show they didn't agree with it. Chen Jiexi did not agree with it. Their whole point of founding the party was to fight against the Kuomintang and to fight against the idea of a bourgeois revolution which had been discredited. It's very interesting to look at the terms demanded by the Kuomintang also because they did agree to this cooperation but they demanded that the members of the Chinese Communist Party that join the Kuomintang to support them would join only as individual members, not as a party, not as a tendency and they were denied the right to criticize the leadership. And this is a clue as to the counter-revolutionary nature of this organization. And you might think it was a united front, sorry, the Communist Party in a united front with a less revolutionary organization. Don't we support the united front? Isn't that a tactic that we follow? Well, yes, but what the united front actually means when it is applied correctly is an alliance with first of all the workers, maybe yes, a reformist organization but a working class one which the Kuomintang was not. With the aim of what? Discrediting and destroying the authority of the reformist leaders of the working class by having collaboration with that party and exposing how weak and prevaricating the leaders of the reformist organizations are and therefore opening up a dialogue, a practical dialogue with the workers who support the reformists and winning them over to a revolutionary position. But this was clearly the opposite because they agreed to not be allowed to criticize the leadership which is the very opposite of what you want from a united front. And it was the whole policy that was the common turn from Moscow insisted upon was one of kind of pleading really with the Chinese bourgeoisie to fulfill its historic role of carrying out a bourgeois revolution. And obviously if you have to plead with a class to do what it's supposed to do according to as you interpret the laws of history, then it's really a clue that you've misunderstood the laws of history because a class doesn't have to be begged and cajoled and given all kinds of bribes in order to do something. You know, the leadership of the bourgeois revolution in England and France fell to the bourgeoisie not because things were arranged bureaucratically in that way, but because that was the only and it really was a national revolutionary class with an interest in overthrowing feudalism. And also because there wasn't a well organized working class for them to fear. So they didn't have to worry about organizing a revolution. But clearly that was the case in China and they were clearly afraid of the Chinese Communist Party hence this stipulation that they mustn't be allowed to join as a bloc and to criticize the leadership. And unfortunately and tragically this wrong footed the Chinese Communist Party. As I mentioned, they had founded the unions. You had the revolution was kickstarted with mass strikes throughout Chinese society. And following those mass strikes, the working class in Guangzhou and in Shanghai actually took over the control and running of those cities for a time. I'll just give a quotation from Harold Isaacs who wrote a very important book on the Chinese Revolution. He says, in Guangzhou, the workers cleaned out gambling and opium dens and converted them into strikers dormitories and kitchens. An army of 2,000 pickets was recruited from among the strikers and a solid barrier was thrown around Hong Kong. The movement was by all accounts superbly organized. Every 50 strikers named a representative to a strikers delegates conference which in turn named 13 men to serve as an executive committee. Under the auspices of this body, actually the first embryo of workers power in China, a hospital and 17 schools for men and women workers and their children were established and maintained. A striker's court was set up which tried violations of the boycott and other offenders against the public order. So not only had Soviets effectively been created in China but actually the working class was actually in power in one of the key cities of China which is really even more advanced than the workers of Petrograd managed before the Bolsheviks took power in 1917. And a very similar situation took place in Shanghai. And I'll just give another quotation from Wang Fanshi who was a Marxist involved in the events at the time. He says, the following, I took part in lively mass meetings of the strikers. I remember vividly to this day the activities of the local strike committee branches in Guangzhou. In every branch there was a long table covered with red cloth and on the walls were pictures of revolutionary leaders framed in red. I was amazed to see how knowledgeable and capable the Guangzhou workers were. The strike committee was in fact rivaling the authority of the national government in a situation of dual power and had even taken the law into its own hands. This was the first time I understood what the theory of the hegemony of the working class meant in practice. Now this is really astonishing stuff. We should also be careful and not get ahead of ourselves and think that they could have taken power in China at that time. These were the most advanced sections of the Chinese working class and obviously Chinese society was overwhelmingly peasant. It's not to say that if they had the right policy within a few months they could have taken power. I don't think that that was the case but you can see the real dynamics of the revolution which class was leading it and what kind of activity, what kind of program they had and they needed in order to continue the revolution. And the Guangdong played no role in this whatsoever. However, because of the lack of leadership in these cities and particularly in Guangzhou there was an amazing organization but no political leadership to it because of the line that the Communist Party had. As a result they were able to sort of take, basically come to power in Guangzhou and in the surrounding province of Guangdong. And of course once they did take power they changed absolutely nothing, right? They are, by the way there is this, sorry I'll come on to that later, but yeah, they didn't, they changed nothing. They didn't, obviously they didn't abolish capitalism. They didn't put the working class in power. And in fact they complained about the role of the working class in a very telling and significant statement that should have been understood by Stalin and all the other communists. They actually issued a statement from the Central Executive Committee on the all-class nature of the revolution as they put it, and it says the following. Whether or not the revolution will be a success will depend on the measure of support given to it by the manufacturers and merchants. Whether or not they can effectively support the revolution will depend upon the willingness of the peasants and laborers to treat them as their allies. In order to carry out this policy the national government is, i.e. their government, which was not actually in power nationally, but anyway, is ordered to prohibit laborers and employees from making excessive demands and interfering in factories and shops. And the class perspective of this, it couldn't really be more obvious. And it's pretty obvious they didn't really want the revolution to take place. They might take advantage of it once it was there because of the lack of leadership. But they wanted to put it to bed as quickly as possible. And the fact they had to complain about this disobedience and excesses of the workers obviously also shows you that these excesses were very real. And yet Stalin explicitly agreed with this perspective. He actually himself referred to the Guamenbang, which he invited to be a participating member in the common term, astonishing. In fact, Zhang Jiexi was given a role on the central executive committee of the Communist Party, which is mind blowing. He called it a four class party. One of those classes being the national bourgeois, which meant the bourgeois, the layers of the bourgeoisie in China that were somehow independent of imperialism and had an interest in freeing China from imperialism. As if you can divide the bourgeois class in that way. You know, as if there's somehow a section of bourgeois who are more aligned with the working class and a section of the bourgeois who have less in common with their own class than that section has with the working class. It's obviously ridiculous. It's a travesty of Marxism and it's elementary to any Marxist. You cannot have a four class party. And any revolution will either be led by the working class or by the bourgeois class. And you can't be fused together, commonly leading. So in reality, such a thing is just a mask of the bourgeois domination of the revolution or rather the bourgeois counter-revolution pretending that it is the revolution. And the important point to understand is that the Guomandang would never accept a Chinese Communist party just in the same way that the Blairites in the Labour Party would never accept the Corbyn movement. No matter how many time, no matter how many concessions they made, no matter how many times they apologized, you know, no matter how many times they said, let's all work together in a broad church. Wouldn't that be better? Wouldn't that be more reasonable? Which is basically the line that they said, which is essentially the same kind of position that the Communist Party had at the time. They would never accept it because it was called the Communist Party, because it mobilized hundreds of thousands of workers who were of their own volition, perhaps, carrying out excesses against property. They never would trust this. They didn't even believe, actually they should have believed the pleading of the Communist leadership because it was actually sincere. But they thought that was a trick and really they were just maneuvering and then they would eventually take power. And they would never accept it because of the fundamentally antagonistic class interest that the two sides represented. We also have to understand the key role of imperialism. Now Stalinists and certainly Maoists will often say and did say that when the role of imperialism on a society like China is to sort of weld the classes together in a common interest. In fact, Mao himself said this, that the main contradiction is between China and the imperialists. And therefore the class contradictions within China sort of negated or put off for a later day because we all have all Chinese people, we really have the same interest in fighting against our foreign imperialists who are dominating us. That's how they present it, right? And you can see why that might be a convincing argument to many, but it actually does the opposite. First of all, the capitalist class of the country China is created by and through the imperialists and is dependent upon them. And yes, they might, you know, chafe at some of the more outrageous things that the imperialists do and they might long to have their own power that can rival that of the imperialists. When the working class is moving and is threatening property, you better believe that they all side with the imperialists to protect their property. And the more intelligent imperialists, of course, understood this, right? They aren't as soon as they saw a communist party, as soon as they saw mass strikes breaking out, they understood what was going on and they understood how to engineer the situation to their advantage, right? Now, throughout the major cities of China, you know, there were these concessions that only Westerners could go into those British. That's the origins of Hong Kong. There were these places, the only Chinese people going there were servants, right? So even Chinese capitalists, rich Chinese people, didn't have the right to go into those. And you can see how that's an example of how they would have certainly been anti-imperialist, at least in the abstract, because that is obviously massively insulting to them. So all the imperialists had to do was end that policy, basically, and do other similar actions, which essentially is what they did. In fact, so they did end that policy. In fact, there was a particular event in early in 1926 in Shanghai, when under the leadership of the American imperialists, who were a bit more advanced and understood such thing better than the British and the French, they opened up these concessions. They had a special meeting. They invited the leading Chinese businessmen of Shanghai and they essentially said to them, these strikes are at hand, aren't they? We've got a common interest. This is a load of nonsense. Property must be protected. And I don't know if you've noticed, but we've got some very big gunboats, which will be very useful for you in defending your property against these pesky communists. So why don't we do a deal? We'll back a certain person and we'll agree to collaborate against the communists. And the Chinese merchants were only too pleased to suddenly be welcomed as equals and to find an ally in their struggle against these dangerous communists. And their man, the figurehead of that whole thinking was Jiang Jiexi, who then swiftly after that particular event in Shanghai seized power in a coup in Guangzhou. Of course, the Guangmendang was already in power there. The in-season power, he kicked out its left wing. He had hundreds of Chinese Communist Party members arrested. The strike HQ that I just mentioned in that inspiring incident of workers power was raided and the Soviet advisors, who were his own supposed advisors, were placed under house arrest. So you think at that point, it's pretty obvious what's going on, but Stalin refused to acknowledge this. In fact, he hid the news of this coup from the entire communist international for a year, which is absolutely astonishing. Obviously you couldn't do that kind of thing in today's age with the communications technology that we have, but he did. Now, why? Was he that thick that he didn't realize that this guy had just taken power and arrested his own advisors? No, I think he probably realized that this guy was a threat and not really his man. But he couldn't do anything else because within Russia, there was a life or death struggle with the left opposition, Trotsky's left opposition. And one of the key questions of that struggle was the policy on China. And Trotsky was relentlessly criticizing this policy of collaboration with the Guam and Bang and had predicted this. And you can read his writings, he very clear on what exactly what would happen, which is exactly what did happen. And he couldn't admit to that. He couldn't afford to admit and say that that had happened and that Trotsky was right because potentially it would mean his own removal from power in Russia. So he hid it basically. He sacrificed the Chinese revolution and the Chinese Communist Party in order to maintain power in Russia. And amazingly, therefore, what they did at the Chinese Communist Party did is after this, instead of issuing propaganda against Zhang Jiexi and the Guam and Bang, they actually begged for the Alliance to continue, made all kinds of offers and they ended up agreeing to restrict that no Communist Party members could take beyond a certain number of posts within the Guam and Bang. And that a joint party committee was to be set up to review all of the instructions of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and that the names of all members of the Chinese Communist Party who joined the Guam and Bang were to be given over to the leadership of the Guam and Bang. I mean, it's pretty, again, pretty obvious what was going on there. But that was what Moscow insisted that they do because Moscow had to somehow try and use its bureaucratic weight to keep that formal Alliance going to save face. And Zhang Jiexi then apologized for his error as he put it in carrying out a coup, although he didn't relinquish the power he'd gained from that coup. And he actually pleaded then for more support from Moscow, more weapons, which again, another reason not to give those weapons. If a person takes power in a coup against you, then asks you for more weapons, don't give them those weapons. Anyway, he then launched from Guangzhou, the Northern Expedition, which was basically a military plan to conquest the rest of the country from the warlords. And that was an objectively progressive thing. It was an attempt to unite the country against these feudal warlords, essentially. And of course, I think the Chinese Communist Party should have supported it, but with their own program, they should have said this should be carried out on a class basis. They should have issued a call for the workers and the peasants in the areas that the military was expanding into to strike, to weaken the regime of the warlords, et cetera. And actually, that did happen on an instinctive, spontaneous level. Lots of peasants and workers did do that. And that was why the Northern Expedition was actually very successful. But that was not actually what the Chinese Communist Party officially argued for. And then by February 1927, because of that Northern Expedition, Zhang Jiexi reached the outskirts of Shanghai, obviously a key city. As he does, the General Labor Union, which had been founded by the Communist Party, launched a general strike in order to weaken the warlords regime locally, which was back in power after their brief moment of being, the workers being in power. And to welcome in this guy that they thought was their ally, because the Communist International hadn't told them he'd actually carried out a coup against the communists within Guangzhou. So they didn't know that. And of course, this is ironic and tragic because of the fact that he had taken power in this coup. And it was, they knew nothing of this. It was inevitable that he would do the same thing in Shanghai. Now a general strike is a very profound and powerful thing if it's done in the right way. And it reveals the power of the working class. You know, basically it poses the question of who runs society. A powerful general strike shuts down everything. And it shows that the working class really has the power if it's conscious of it. But here this power was being brought into play in order to do what? To welcome the sworn enemy of that power. And that's very dangerous as it generally is to play with a general strike. Calling the masses out on such a level, you're demonstrating the threat that you pose to capitalism. You're showing that basically you are very powerful and you ought to be taken seriously. But you're not in this case doing anything to then eliminate the power of your enemy, of the capitalist class. So inevitably your enemy will then use that power against you when the time is right. And that indeed is what happened here. Zhang Jiexi actually delayed his, he stood outside Shanghai for a whole month. I'm sure it was in order to make sure that the general strike fizzled out and was crushed. In fact, it was General Li who was the warlord there, actually did crush the general strike after it fizzled out and had all kinds of disgusting things done, like parading the heads of strikers on sticks throughout the streets of Shanghai to demonstrate to, you know, don't you dare do this again. And he was actually made a general in Zhang Jiexi's army after that he took power in Shanghai. So you can see that he was very thankful for his actions. Thousands were executed, but Zhang Jiexi waited so long that the workers actually spontaneously organized another general strike within that time, an even stronger one of 800,000 workers with no arms, but they stormed police stations and other places, got arms from the police, many of the police broke ranks and joined the strike. And they took power again within Shanghai on an even more solid basis. At this point, if the Communist Party had issued a call for workers throughout China to set up Soviets and do the same thing, especially in Guangzhou, I'm sure it would have happened. Of course, they didn't do that. In fact, the Cominterns specifically instructed them to bury their weapons in case that they antagonized and provoked Zhang Jiexi, which again is an astonishing thing to do. This guy has carried out a coup against you elsewhere and your instruction is to hide, to give up your weapons so that he can execute you all the more easily. When he was about to go into Shanghai, he went to move one of his divisions outside of Shanghai because they'd gone in earlier, a few days earlier, and they'd been fraternizing with the striking workers there and he obviously feared that he couldn't rely upon them. One of his own generals sympathized with the Communist Party, heard of this and told the Communist Party, he's maneuvering against you and he's taking soldiers out because they're sympathetic to you. But rather than collaborating with this general and arresting Zhang Jiexi, they told Zhang Jiexi that he had done this. They betrayed him to Zhang Jiexi, which is incredible. And eventually, of course, he did manage to march into Shanghai. The workers are confused, didn't understand what the threat that this presented and he massacred them. He killed 12,000 workers, it's thought, in Shanghai in a month and overall over the year in his two coups, about 300,000 workers were killed by the Guomandang. He is known for having said at the time that he would rather kill 1,000 innocent men than allow a single Communist to escape. And he did all of that, why? To prove to his backers in the bourgeoisie that he was their man to stamp out all of this nonsense from the Communists. They could trust him. He was a tough guy, essentially. And this defeat really marks the end of this glorious but tragic episode of the Chinese working class. And particularly, what we have to understand not only the false policies of the Communist Party imposed from Moscow, but also the false response to this defeat really guaranteed its defeat and also led to the peculiar development that is known as Maoism. Because under the common tense domination, the members of the Communist Party were prevented from understanding this defeat and learning from it. Of course, many of them did, right? There's a lot of the Communists in China could see that they pursued a crazy policy and many of them became Trotskyists, including Chengdu Siu, the founder of the Chinese Communist Party. He became a Trotskyist, as did many of the others. But they were all expelled under Moscow's insistence. So all of the best Communists, essentially, the ones who learnt the lessons, who could have helped re-educate the party were expelled and driven out. Many of them were actually betrayed to the police of the regime, of Zhang Joshu's regime and obviously killed or imprisoned. And again, that's because Stalin could not admit that he was wrong because it would have fatally undermined him within Russia. And so, basically, this led to further errors where essentially the way that Stalin explained these defeats was a hilarious kind of retrospective, just because he basically said, no, no, we foresaw all of this and we knew that Zhang Joshu would betray it and now this just marks the new stage of the revolution and we'll go on the offensive against him and to prove that this was a sincere view and it was all foreseen and expected, he then ordered that the Chinese Communist Party carry out insurrections in cities and towns across China, all of which were disastrous because they weren't built for and they were at the wrong time and they were deeply ironic. The most famous one is the Canton Commune, which is Canton is another name for Guangzhou, right? So in Guangzhou, the workers were actually in power from their own mass movement. Not only a couple of years before, but the Communist Party at that time was not in favor of using and developing that power. Now they insisted that the Communist Party take power in Guangzhou and so they did with a few thousand members with no backing of the, in fact, they didn't even tell the working class of Guangzhou that they were going to do this. So they were bewildered and didn't support it and they were told to fight to the last man. So they were just massacred, all of the communists that carried that out and what specifically led to what is known as Maoism i.e. if you like the rural basis of the struggle was not at all planned, but what it was was that in Hunan province in Changsha, they carried out another one of these disastrous insurrections, adventures really. You know, went disastrously and they fled into the countryside to survive as they did elsewhere. The difference here was that Mao was in charge and Mao was from a peasant background. He knew, he was from Hunan, he knew the countryside very well and he was quite successful at managing to get them to survive in the countryside. Of course, what they should have done at that point is learn the lessons and start the difficult but necessary process of gradually rebuilding in the cities, which was entirely possible. It is possible to build an organization in underground conditions. And there were many strikes and mass movements within the cities over the next 20 years, but they had nothing to do with them because they could not admit that they'd been wrong and they could not change policy. So to present the appearance that this was all part of the plan, they remained in the countryside and survived there in these rural communes, which I don't have time to go into. One thing just to point out is what unites these two seemingly completely opposed policies of supporting the bourgeois, subordinating yourself to the bourgeois party and carrying out these hair brained insurrections against it. It might seem totally different, but both of them are united by a complete lack of confidence in the working class. In one case it's the working class can't make a revolution so we have to support the bourgeois. And the other case is we need a revolution off the shelf now so that I can look good in Moscow. So who cares about what the working class thinks or does, just do it, you know? And both of them also show a complete lack of understanding that history and society has its own laws and its own momentum that can't just be ignored. Yes, so I have to come to an end. Obviously after this, Zhang Zheshi managed to establish his regime nationally with the capital in Nanjing and then he took Beijing in June, 1928. But his regime would never establish any stability over the next 20 years. It was wracked by crisis. He actually never managed to get rid of warlordism despite the Northern Expedition and driving, allegedly driving from power. He compromised with the warlords and he would constantly have to do deals with them and make concessions to the power of the warlords locally which will have an important bearing on the events in the next revolution. And that was obviously the reason that the Chinese Communist were able to eventually take power was the utter corruption and ineptitude and general weakness and chaos of his own government which we'll discuss tomorrow. But yes, the point is that the areas of this revolution, the responsibility for which lies in Moscow produced this strange development known as Maoism not as a foresight, not as a brilliant theory of Mao which is they try to claim but really as a retroactive justification for their own errors. The lesson of that revolution of 1910 to 1907 is that the working class all over the world has tremendous power and creativity when it does move into a revolution and has the capacity to change the world and to overthrow capitalism because we can see they managed to do that in China even a local level certainly even without the correct leadership. Now the class that did that is the biggest working class in the world and just imagine what it could do with a correct leadership.