[104-10173-10134.pdf — page 131]
2politics being pursued by the Communist Intomational and the Communist party in China. I cannot bagin here to give a summary of outs of these distortione (which I verbally cated to you by the dozen), ranging from particular incidents (the wilfully false picture givon of the cutton mill strike in Shanghai in January 1932, dren to the point of trans.osing it to February to heighten the impression given of the workers' role in the Thanghai war) to high-flown generalizations like the statement recently made before the plenum of the B.C.C.I. that the C.C.P. has "won over the majority of the Chinese working class and the pousantry"..... In denying the presence of a might revolutionary upsurge (1.6., a vast organized march toward the sel- zure of power), I respect facte made still cloarer perhaps when compared to the facts and figures of the monster mass movements of the 1925-27 period. The tragic errore of the communist leaderonip in 1927. were primarily responsible for the decapitation of that great movement and because no lessons have been drawn from these events to this very day, these errors, monstrously accumulated, are still responsivio for the tragedies of today. But for the purpusus of our com- parison herë, let us take for example the single fact that in 1926 in Greater Shanghai, there were 257 atrikee. In 1932 there were 82. Let us remember that on the eve of the workers' sóizure of power in Shanghai in March, 1927, there were more than 800,000 workers, handicrafts- men and petty traders out on the streeta fighting with arms in hande for demando of a far-reaching political character. A close check for the entire country in the latter half of 1933 showed me that less than one- thirtieth of that number wore engaged in strikes and other disputes during any given month and that almost invariably the demands were defensive demands against waga oute and lockouts. Moreover, the lack of cohe. Bivo leadership often in departments of the same factory or in one or more of a group of factories- or even sometimes lack of even the most element lementary organization has in almost every case led to deadening failure and relatively easy betrayal by the yellow "labor leaders" and mediators" of the Kuo Min Tang. In 1925 thẻ shooting of thirteen students by British police in Shanghai vào the touch-off for a general strike which paralyzed the city and mich was seconded by vast sympathy strikes which broke like a series of tidal waves over the entire o country. In January 1932, when the Japanese: imperialists used the Shanghai International Settlement as a base for operatione which cost the lives of tone of thousands of Chinese, not a single strike interrupted the normal course of the public or other services in that settlement.. In the factories there were no strikes but a large scale lockout to which the overwhelming majority of Shanghai's workera subaitted without protest.... In the asse of the widespread but isolated and individual cases of peasant uprisings, and this includes the Red armies in Kiangai, these struggles await the leadership of a strong working clase movement before they can have a success issue. The Red armies in their restricted and surrounded areas and with their mougre resources have fought heroically against the Kuomintang attacks upon them. But until the Kuo Min Tang is shaken from its bulwarko in the imperialist- controlled working class centers, their prospect of revolutionary triumph remaine necessarily dim. No revolutionary purpose is served by taking refuge in the fiction that these araten have proletarian loudership because individual workers, undoubtedly