The Kuomintang has 300,000 members. The fact is that to have to resort to such sophisms as equating the Kuomintang with soviets shows that soviets are knocking at the door and that they cannot be driven off by doctrinaire schemas about whether it is October or not October. Premature insurrections erupt more easily and frequently in cases where the masses lack an authoritative organization that embodies their revolutionary will. That is to say, the absence of soviets in the major revolutionary centers will lead to chaotic, premature, and pointless outbreaks as a result of the unorganized state of the class struggle and the absence of correct political leadership. This has always been the case.
Every revolutionary experience testifies to it.
The first and most urgent thing they will do is provide an organization for the workers and help them in organizing their fraternization with the soldiers. The first order of business for the soviet of workers' deputies of a given industrial city or region should be to draw into its ranks soldiers' deputies, representatives from the garrisons. Failure to organize soviets of workers' and soldiers' deputies will mean turning the soldier into cannon fodder for Chiang Kai-shek and setting the stage for a bloody massacre of the workers like the one that occurred in Shanghai. It is necessary that the petty artisans, small shopkeepers, and the city's oppressed lower strata in general be drawn into the soviets. This will facilitate the workers' revolutionary envelopment of the army.