ABSTRACT
This article summarises in thesis form the positions that Chen developed in his letters and articles before and after leaving prison: that the revolution is nowhere imminent; that war will merely simplify the structure of imperialism, not destroy it; that the bourgeoisie still has some progressive role to play; that Bolshevism has paved the way for Stalinism; that democracy is a universal mode of politics; and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is equal to the dictatorship of the Communist Party. Proletarian dictatorship is the very opposite of proletarian democracy, and thus of socialism, which is the economic complement of full democracy. Capitalism, in contrast, is the economic complement of limited, i.e., bourgeois, democracy. Chen adds that colonial peoples cannot hope to win national liberation in the absence of social revolutions in the metropolitan countries.
