The following passage on China in the 20's illustrates fairly concisely the progressive role of a national democratic revolution and how this stage can prepare the ground for socialism, although not itself socialist. >>> How can and must the question of the capitalist and socialist paths of China's development be posed in reality? Above all it must be made clear to the vanguard of the Chinese proletariat that China has no prerequisites whatever economically for an independent transition to socialism; that the revolution now unfolding under the leadership of the Kuomintang is a bourgeois-national revolution, that it can have as its consequence, even in the event of complete victory, only the further development of productive forces on the basis of capitalism. But it is necessary to develop no less forcefully before the Chinese proletariat the converse side of the question as well: The belated bourgeois-national revolution is unfolding in China in conditions of the imperialist decay of capitalism. As Russian experience has shown -- in contrast, say, to the English -- politics does not at all develop in parity with economics. China's further development must be taken in an international perspective. Despite the backwardness of the Chinese economy, and in part precisely due to this backwardness, the Chinese revolution is wholly capable of bringing to political power an alliance of the workers and peasants, under the leadership of the proletariat. This regime will be China's link with the world revolution. In the course of the transitional period, the Chinese revolution will have a genuinely democratic, worker-peasant character. In its economic life, commodity-capitalist relations will inevitably predominate. The political regime will be primarily directed to secure the masses as great a share as possible in the fruits of the development of the productive forces and, at the same time, in the political and cultural utilization of the resources of the state. The further development of this perspective -- the possibility of the democratic revolution growing over into the socialist revolution -- depends completely and exclusively on the course of the world revolution, and on the economic and political successes of the Soviet Union, as an integral part of this world revolution. <<<< But through an irony of history, not even a progressive national democratic revolution, let alone a socialist revolution, is longer possible in one country. Yoshie did not pick up the questions in my oringinal thread on the Current Implications for South Africa, that if there is still some logic in a national democratic struggle within an individual country, its problems of retaining sufficient surplus within its borders in the much more fluid international economic economy, requires a global democatic revolution in political economy. But is the spirit of that proposition any different from the spirit behind the passage on China above? Chris Burford London
