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   Vol.65/No.44            November 19, 2001 
 
 
'We do not put all wars
on the same plane'
Leon Trotsky explains
why socialists defended China
in 1937 Sino-Japanese War
  
In July 1937 Japanese imperialism launched an invasion of northern China, an assault that started the Sino-Japanese War. What stance to take on this political development was a major political question of the day. The Chinese government at the time was headed by the reactionary Chiang Kai-shek, who had come to power in 1927 after crushing a massive revolutionary upsurge by workers and peasants.

Leon Trotsky, a central leader of the Russian Revolution exiled by the Joseph Stalin regime in Moscow, called on "all workers' organizations, all progressive forces in China, without abandoning their political independence," to carry out to the end "their duty in the war of liberation, regardless of their attitude toward the government of Chiang Kai-shek."

Many tendencies developed in the communist movement internationally arguing for one approach or other toward the war and China's resistance to the Japanese invasion. These included sectarian forces in the U.S. working-class movement who claimed that Trotsky's approach was a capitulation to the reactionary regime in China and that what was involved was a "war between the Japanese emperor and Chiang Kai-shek." They and others argued that the war of resistance under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek could not be progressive and advocated a defeatist policy toward the regime in the war.

Trotsky answered this argument in a September 1937 letter to Diego Rivera, who had been a member of the Mexican Communist Party. Printed below is an excerpt from the letter, which appears in the book Leon Trotsky on China under the title "On the Sino-Japanese War." The book is copyright © 1976 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Footnotes are by the Militant.
 

*****

BY LEON TROTSKY  
We do not and never have put all wars on the same plane. Marx and Engels supported the revolutionary struggle of the Irish against Great Britain, of the Poles against the tsar, even though in these two nationalist wars the leaders were, for the most part, members of the bourgeoisie and even at times of the feudal aristocracy...at all events, Catholic reactionaries. When Abd-el-Krim1 rose up against France, the democrats and Social Democrats spoke with hate of the struggle of a "savage tyrant" against the "democracy." The party of Léon Blum2 supported this point of view. But we, Marxists and Bolsheviks, considered the struggle of the Riffians against imperialist domination as a progressive war. Lenin wrote hundreds of pages demonstrating the primary necessity of distinguishing between imperialist nations and the colonial and semicolonial nations which comprise the great majority of humanity. To speak of "revolutionary defeatism" in general, without distinguishing between exploiter and exploited countries, is to make a miserable caricature of Bolshevism and to put that caricature at the service of the imperialists.

In the Far East we have a classic example. China is a semicolonial country which Japan is transforming, under our very eyes, into a colonial country. Japan's struggle is imperialist and reactionary. China's struggle is emancipatory and progressive.

But Chiang Kai-shek? We need have no illusions about Chiang Kai-shek, his party, or the whole ruling class of China, just as Marx and Engels had no illusions about the ruling classes of Ireland and Poland. Chiang Kai-shek is the executioner of the Chinese workers and peasants. But today he is forced, despite himself, to struggle against Japan for the remainder of independence of China. Tomorrow he may again betray. It is possible. It is probable. It is even inevitable. But today he is struggling. Only cowards, scoundrels, or complete imbeciles can refuse to participate in that struggle.

Let us use the example of a strike to clarify the question. We do not support all strikes. If, for example, a strike is called for the exclusion of Negro, Chinese, or Japanese workers from a factory, we are opposed to that strike. But if a strike aims at bettering--insofar as it can--the conditions of the workers, we are the first to participate in it, whatever the leadership. In the vast majority of strikes, the leaders are reformists, traitors by profession, agents of capital. They oppose every strike. But from time to time the pressure of the masses or of the objective situation forces them into the path of struggle.

Let us imagine, for an instant, a worker saying to himself: "I do not want to participate in the strike because the leaders are agents of capital." This doctrine of this ultraleft imbecile would serve to brand him by his real name: a strikebreaker. The case of the Sino-Japanese War, is from this point of view, entirely analogous. If Japan is an imperialist country and if China is the victim of imperialism, we favor China. Japanese patriotism is the hideous mask of worldwide robbery. Chinese patriotism is legitimate and progressive. To place the two on the same plane and to speak of "social patriotism" can be done only by those who have read nothing of Lenin, who have understood nothing of the attitude of the Bolsheviks during the imperialist war, and who can but compromise and prostitute the teachings of Marxism. The Eiffelites3 have heard that the social patriots accuse the internationalists of being the agents of the enemy and they tell us: "You are doing the same thing." In a war between two imperialist countries, it is a question neither of democracy nor of national independence, but of the oppression of backward nonimperialist peoples. In such a war the two countries find themselves on the same historical plane. The revolutionaries in both armies are defeatists. But Japan and China are not on the same historical plane.

The victory of Japan will signify the enslavement of China, the end of her economic and social development, and the terrible strengthening of Japanese imperialism. The victory of China will signify, on the contrary, the social revolution in Japan and the free development, that is to say unhindered by external oppression, of the class struggle in China. But can Chiang Kai-shek assure the victory? I do not believe so. It is he, however, who began the war and who today directs it. To be able to replace him it is necessary to gain decisive influence among the proletariat and in the army, and to do this it is necessary not to remain suspended in the air but to place oneself in the midst of the struggle.
 

*****

1. The Berber tribes of the Rif region of Morocco revolted against Spanish colonial rule in 1921 under the leadership of Abd-el Krim. At that time the Republic of the Rif was founded with Abd el-Krim as its president. Overcoming tribal rivalries, Krim began organizing a centralized administration based upon traditional tribal institutions. The Riffians defeated the Spanish forces in 1924, and attacked the French sector the following year but were defeated in 1926 by a combined Spanish and French military force of 250,000 troops. The French and Spanish imperialists saw the Riffian movement as a threat to their colonial possessions in North Africa.

2. Léon Blum was the central leader of the French Socialist Party in the 1930s and was prime minister of the Popular Front government that came to power in 1936 in the midst of a massive upsurge of French workers. The regime collapsed in 1937 after following a policy of subordinating workers' interests to those of a "progressive" section of the wealthy ruling minority and losing its attractiveness as a stopgap solution for the French capitalist class.

3. The Eiffelites were followers of Paul Eiffel, leader of a tiny political grouping within the workers movement in the United States. They publicly challenged Trotsky's stand on the Sino-Japanese War.  
 
 
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