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more detailed discussion of Wang from International Viewpoint, an organ of the Usec Fourth International: http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article251 <http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article251>a excerpt pertinent to this discussion: Quixotically, Wang and Chen Duxiu tried to win armed forces to a policy of resistance combined with rural revolution. The CCP, hundreds of times bigger and with a decade of military experience and some Soviet support, effortlessly eclipsed them. After the war, the Trotskyists resumed their campaign for radical democracy and class struggle in the cities. They were as if blind to Mao’s peasant armies, poised by 1949 to seize power everywhere on the mainland. Wang spent the first years of his exile reflecting on the causes of the Maoist victory and the Trotskyist defeat. In a departure from Trotskyist orthodoxy, he found that a real revolution had indeed taken place under Mao. He criticized his own group’s failure to develop armed forces and mobilize the peasants as one part of their activities. Yet he continued to question the overwhelmingly military thrust of Maoist strategy, which he feared in some ways was just another link in China’s endless chain of wars followed by tyrannical restorations. Instead, he argued for the centrality of the industrial workers and the intelligentsia, new urban classes that offered a way of unlocking the cycle with an experiment in democratic communism. Other Trotskyists around Peng Shuzhi, in exile in the United States, denounced Wang for ’capitulating’ to Stalinism. The row was symptomatic of the Trotskyists’ fractiousness, which left them even more vulnerable to their many enemies. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
