ABSTRACT
This letter argues that there will be no revolutions after the war, mainly because of the destructive effect of Stalinism on the world workers’ movement and the likely countermeasures of the bourgeoisie, which would sooner surrender power to foreign capitalists than to domestic revolutionaries; and that a defeatist policy in the bourgeois-democratic countries can only help the Nazis. Chen expounds at greater length his theory of democracy, which — he explains — cannot be reduced to the mere existence of a parliament; indeed, the history of humankind can be viewed as the history — still in progress — of democratisation, whose ultimate product will be not the class-based democracy of the bourgeoisie but mass democracy, i.e., full democracy, a concept apparently coterminous for Chen with proletarian democracy. The Bolsheviks’ failure to understand and appreciate the rich content of democracy has led them to slight democracy and even to reject it root and branch. Their attitude led ultimately to Stalin, who is a product, not the initiator, of the Stalinist system. Chen goes on to reject the orthodox Trotskyist view of the Soviet Union as a workers’ state, albeit degenerated and bureaucratised, that revolutionaries must support against the bourgeois states. (Chen had first questioned in a letter dated May 15, 1934, to the International Secretariat of the Left Opposition the theory that the Soviet Union was a workers’ state. 64 ) Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini are the three main bulwarks of reaction, to the destruction of which all efforts should be bent. And the best prospect for proletarian revolution lies in the defeat of Germany, though even there liberal forces will rise before socialist ones.
