ABSTRACT
Chen’s concern in this letter is to maintain the necessary distinction between Fascism and democracy, which Trotskyists like Pu Dezhi tended to view as mere variant modes of bourgeois rule. Whereas Chen wants the Allies to defeat the Fascists, Pu was prepared to see either side defeated, in the firm expectation (based on Lenin’s theories about World War One) that a workers’ rising would then follow. In this regard, there was no distinction between Pu and the Chinese Communists, who in the first stages of the war condemned both sides as predators. Chen has not yet gone so far as to equate Fascism and Stalinism, and he expresses his approval of Trotsky’s old slogan of “a united front of the international proletariat against Fascism”.
