India, China and the war in the Far East¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter argues that the Second World War in the Far East has created revolutionary opportunities in India, China, and Japan, but that the betrayal of the Indian national movement by its bourgeois and petit bourgeois leadership, aided by Stalinist and Labour Party figures, has temporarily postponed the explosion. The core narrative thrust is that the mass revolutionary struggle of the Indian workers and peasants—400 million slaves of British imperialism—was deliberately emasculated by a senile and corrupt leadership that feared the social consequences of a genuine uprising. The chapter claims that this capitulation to British military rule was made possible by the treachery of Stalinist and so-called socialist leaders in India, combined with the numerical weakness and isolation of the Indian Trotskyists from the masses. It insists, however, that the coming revolutionary struggles in Europe will reopen the floodgates of the Indian revolution, at which point the Bolshevik-Leninists of India will provide the necessary leadership.
The text draws on the classical Marxist distinction between bourgeois nationalism and a class programme. It counterposes the latter to the former, arguing that only under working-class leadership, at the head of the peasantry, can the necessary social measures be taken: expropriation of the land, freeing peasants from landlords and moneylenders, national control of resources, and the establishment of a democratic regime. This alone, it claims, will achieve genuine national emancipation and secure allies among British workers and soldiers. The chapter is explicitly polemical against the Churchill government, the Stalinists, and the Labour leaders, whom it denounces as agents of the ruling class actively assisting in the continued subjugation of India. It calls on British Trotskyists to oppose imperialist oppression, fraternise with the revolutionary Indian people, and expose these betrayers.
Turning to the Far East, the chapter argues that the war will bring revolution to Japan, whose regime rests not on popular support but on the military caste. The early victories against the Allies will fade as war burdens crush the impoverished population, and the blows of Yankee imperialism will crumble the archaic dictatorship. The proletariat, as in Italy, will have the final say. On China, the chapter claims that the heroic national liberation struggle has been merged into the inter-imperialist war for Pacific domination. While alliance with the Allied imperialists may later subordinate China to American imperialism, it does not at this stage alter the fundamental character of China’s war for national liberation, which British workers must support. The Chinese Trotskyists, while fighting in the army of national liberation, must explain to workers and peasants that only under working-class leadership can landed estates be broken up, the nation united in real democracy, and a united Chinese socialist soviet republic established.