by Chris Harman
Student demonstrations became the catalyst for unleashing the feelings of millions of people. They passed resolutions, flocked to meetings and demonstrations, boycotted Japanese goods and backed a student-led general strike in Shanghai. Students, the professional middle classes and growing numbers of industrial workers were convinced that something had to be done to end the carve-up of the country between the imperialist powers and the economic decay of the countryside.
There was already a ‘renaissance movement’ among groups of students and intellectuals. It believed there had been moments in China’s past when ideas comparable to those of the Western Enlightenment had begun to emerge, only to be strangled by the forces of Confucian orthodoxy. It set out to build on these alternative traditions, in the words of one of its leading figures Hu Shih, to ‘instil into the people a new outlook on life which shall free them from the shackles of tradition and make them feel at home in the new world and its new civilisation’. 135 This mood swept through the hundreds of thousands of students and teachers in China’s ‘new style’ educational establishments. 136 They received some encouragement from Chinese capitalists and often identified with Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang. But at the same time, the Russian Revolution was having a major impact on some intellectuals and students, who began to ask whether Marxism could make sense of what was happening in their country. The interest in Marxism grew as China’s nascent working class was increasingly involved in strikes and boycotts which grew in intensity, ‘affecting all regions and all branches of industry’. 137
A series of strikes in 1922 showed the potential of the new movement. A strike by 2,000 seamen in Hong Kong spread, despite a proclamation of martial law, until a general strike by 120,000 forced the employers to capitulate. A strike by 50,000 miners in the British-owned KMAS in northern China was not as successful. The mine’s private police, British marines and warlord armies attacked the miners and arrested their union leaders. Nevertheless, support for the strike from workers, intellectuals and even some bourgeois groups enabled the strikers to hold out long enough to win a wage rise. Chinese police broke up the first big strike by women workers – 20,000 employees in silk-reeling factories – and brought the leaders before a military tribunal. Clashes between British police and workers in British-owned factories in Hankou culminated in a warlord shooting down 35 striking rail workers and executing a union branch secretary who refused to call for a return to work. Such defeats halted the advance of the workers’ movement, but did not destroy the spirit of resistance. Rather they led to a hardening of class consciousness and an increased determination to take up the struggle when the opportunity arose.
This happened in the years 1924–27. Canton in the south had become the focus of the nationalist intellectuals. Sun Yat-sen had established a constitutional government there, but its hold on power was precarious, and he was looking for wider support. He asked Soviet Russia to help reorganise his Kuomintang and invited members of China’s recently formed Communist Party to join. The value of this support showed when ‘comprador’ capitalists connected with British interests tried to use their own armed force, the 100,000-strong Merchant Volunteers, against him. The Communist-led Workers’ Delegate Conference came to his rescue. Its Labour Organisations Army helped break the power of the Merchant Volunteers, while print workers prevented newspapers supporting them.
The power of combining workers’ protests and national demands was shown again later in 1925 outside Canton. A general strike shut down Shanghai after police fired on a demonstration in support of a strike in Japanese-owned cotton mills. For a month union pickets armed with clubs controlled the movement of goods and held strikebreakers as prisoners, while there were solidarity strikes and demonstrations in more than a dozen other cities. Another great strike paralysed Hong Kong for 13 months, raising nationalist demands (such as equal treatment for Chinese people and Europeans) as well as economic demands. Tens of thousands of Hong Kong strikers were given food and accommodation in Canton, where:
The responsibilities of the strike committee went far beyond the normal field of activity of a union organisation … During the summer of 1925 the committee became, in fact, a kind of workers’ government – and indeed, the name applied to it at the time … was ‘Government No 2’. The committee had at its disposal an armed force of several thousand men. 138
The strike helped to create an atmosphere in which the nationalist forces in Canton began to feel they were powerful enough to march northwards against the warlords who controlled the rest of the country. The march, known as ‘the Northern Expedition’, began in the early summer of 1926. Commanded by General Chiang Kai-shek, its organising core was a group of army officers straight out of the Russian-run Whampoa training academy. Members of the workers’ army created around the Hong Kong strike rushed to volunteer for it.
The march north was a triumph in military terms. The warlord armies, held together only by short-term mercenary gain, could not stand against its revolutionary enthusiasm. Workers in the cities controlled by the warlords went on strike as the Northern Expedition approached. In Hubei and Hunan the unions armed themselves and became ‘workers’ governments’ to an even greater extent than those in Canton during the Hong Kong strike. 139 By March 1927 the expedition was approaching Shanghai. A general strike erupted involving 600,000 workers, and an uprising by union militias took control of the city before Chiang Kai-shek arrived. 140 Power in the city passed into the hands of a government controlled by the workers’ leaders, although it included nationalist members of the big bourgeoisie. For a few days it seemed as if nothing could stop the advance of revolutionary nationalism to destroy the power of the warlords, break the hold of the foreign powers and end the fragmentation, corruption and impoverishment of the country.
But these hopes were to be dashed, just like the similar hopes in Ireland and India, and for similar reasons. The victories of the Northern Expedition depended on the revolutionary mood encouraged by its advance. But the officers of the army were drawn from a social layer which was terrified by that mood. They came from merchant and landowning families who profited from the exploitation of workers and, even more, from the miserable conditions of the peasants. They had been prepared to use the workers’ movement as a pawn in their manoeuvres for power – and, like a chess piece, they were prepared to sacrifice it. Chiang Kai-shek had already cracked down on the workers’ movement in Canton by arresting a number of Communist militants and harassing the unions. 141 Now he prepared for much more drastic measures in Shanghai. He allowed the victorious insurrectionary forces to hand him the city and then met with wealthy Chinese merchants and bankers, the representatives of the foreign powers and the city’s criminal gangs. He arranged for the gangs to stage a pre-dawn attack on the offices of the main left-wing unions. The workers’ pickets were disarmed and their leaders arrested. Demonstrations were fired on with machine-guns, and thousands of activists died in a reign of terror. The working-class organisations which had controlled the city only days earlier were destroyed. 142
Chiang Kai-shek was victorious over the left, but only at the price of abandoning any possibility of eliminating foreign domination or warlord control. Without the revolutionary élan which characterised the march from Canton to Shanghai the only way he could establish himself as nominal ruler of the whole country was by making concessions to those who opposed Chinese national aspirations. Over the next 18 years his government became infamous for its corruption, gangsterism and inability to stand up to foreign invaders.
The episode was tragic proof that middle-class nationalist leaders would betray their own movement if that was the price of keeping workers and peasants in their place. It was also a sign of something else – an abandonment of revolutionary principles by those who now ran Russia, for they had advised Chinese workers to trust Chiang even after his actions against them in Canton.
The experience of the nationalist revolution in Egypt was, in its essentials, the same as that in China, India and
Ireland. There was the same massive ferment in the aftermath of the war, and a de facto alliance in 1919 between the nationalist middle class and groups of strikers in industries such as the tramways and railways. Repeated upsurges in struggle forced a limited concession from Britain – a monarchic government which left key decisions in British hands. Yet the main nationalist Wafd party turned its back on workers’ struggles and formed a government within the terms of this compromise, only to be driven from office by British collaborators because it did not have sufficient forces to defend itself.
Mexico’s revolution
Across the Atlantic, Mexico had experienced a similar upheaval as the world war erupted in Europe. It had enjoyed nominal independence since the end of Spanish rule in 1820. But a narrow elite of criollos , settler families, continued to dominate the great mass of Indians and mixed-race mestizos , and the 33-year, increasingly dictatorial presidency of Porfirio Diaz saw growing domination of the economy by foreign capital, mostly from the US. The rate of economic growth was high enough by the first years of the twentieth century to make some people talk of a Mexican ‘miracle’, 143 even though great numbers of Indians were driven off their traditional communal lands and workers (who numbered 800,000 in 1910, out of a total workforce of 5.2 million 144 ) suffered a deterioration in living standards. 145 Mexican capitalists prospered in these years as junior, and sometimes resentful, partners of the foreigners. But then world financial crisis hit Mexico in 1907 and devastated its dreams of joining the club of advanced countries.
Francisco Madero, the son of a wealthy family of plantation, textile mill and mine owners, was able to gather middle-class support for a campaign to oust the dictator and provide a focus for mass discontent. Armed revolts broke out, led in the north of the country by former cattle-rustler Francisco Villa, and in the south by a small farmer, Emiliano Zapata. The dictator went into exile and Madero was elected president.
But demands from Zapata’s peasant army for division of the big estates upset many of Madero’s wealthy supporters – and the US government – even more than the behaviour of the departed dictator. A long and bloody series of battles followed. Madero’s army clashed with the peasant armies of the north and south before Madero was murdered by his own general, Huerta, with the backing of the US ambassador. Two wealthy members of the middle class, Carranza and Obregón, formed a ‘Constitutionalist’ army to uphold Madero’s approach. Zapata and Villa defeated Huerta, and occupied Mexico City.
A famous photograph of November 1914 shows Zapata and Villa together in the presidential palace. This was the high point of the revolution, yet also its end. The leaders of the peasant armies were incapable of establishing a national power. They had no programme for uniting the workers and peasants around a project for revolutionising the country, although Zapata later came close to arriving at one. They evacuated the capital, retiring to their local bases in the north and south to put up ineffectual resistance to Constitutionalist generals who refused to implement genuine land reform.
The result was not immediate counter-revolution, as occurred 12 years later in China. Carranza and Obregón continued to use the language of the revolution, to resist pressure from the US, and to promise concessions to the masses. It was not until Zapata was murdered in April 1919 that the Mexican capitalists again felt secure. Even after that middle-class politicians continued to exploit the feelings raised by the revolution for their own purposes, running the country as a virtual one-party state through an Institutionalised Revolutionary Party. Yet Mexico remained safe for capitalism.
Leon Trotsky, writing in Moscow in 1927, drew the lessons from these revolts in what we now call the Third World, building on Marx’s comments on Germany after 1848 and his own analysis of Russia after 1905. Previous commentators had noted the ‘uneven’ development of capitalism – the way it took root in some parts of the world before spreading elsewhere. He shifted the emphasis to ‘ combined and uneven development’. 146
Trotsky’s argument ran as follows: the rise of capitalism had created a world system with an impact even on the most economically backward regions. It tore apart the traditional ruling classes and undermined the traditional middle classes. Control by colonial ruling classes, foreign capital and competition from industries in already advanced countries cramped the development of native capitalist classes. The middle class looked to break this obstacle to its own advance by fighting for a fully independent national state. But doing so risked stirring into action classes that it feared, for modern transport systems and enclaves of modern industry had created combative, literate working classes and dragged millions of people from the isolation of their villages. Fear of these classes led the ‘national capitalists’ and much of the middle class to forget their hostility to the old ruling classes or colonial powers. Only ‘permanent’ revolution, in which the working class took the initiative and drew behind it the bitterness of the peasantry, could fulfil the national and democratic demands to which the national bourgeoisie paid lip service.
This had happened in Russia in 1917. But it did not happen elsewhere in the Third World. The world’s most powerful imperialism at the end of the world war, Britain, was scarred by the revolts in Ireland, India, China and Egypt, coming at a time of great industrial unrest in Britain itself and revolutionary upheaval across Europe. Yet it kept a colonial empire which had expanded to take in Germany’s colonies in Africa and most of the Ottoman Empire’s Arab possessions. French, Belgian, Dutch, Japanese and an increasingly forthright US imperialism were likewise preserved, adding to the ability of capitalism to re-establish its stability.
Chapter 5
The ‘Golden Twenties’
The ‘new era’, the ‘Jazz Age’, the ‘Golden Twenties’ – this was how media and mainstream politicians extolled the United States of the 1920s. It had emerged from the war as the world’s biggest economy, prospering while Britain and Germany tore at each other, buying up many of Britain’s overseas investments and continuing to grow until output in 1928 was twice what it had been in 1914.
The growth was accompanied by a seemingly magical transformation in the lives of vast numbers of people. The inventions of the 1890s and early 1900s, which had previously been restricted to small minorities of the rich, now flooded into mass use – the electric light, the gramophone, the radio, the cinema, the vacuum cleaner, the refrigerator, the telephone. Henry Ford’s factories were turning out the first mass-produced car, the Model T, and what had been a rich man’s toy began to be seen in middle-class streets, and even among some sections of workers. Aircraft flew overhead with increasing frequency, and reduced the time of the cross-continental journey from days to hours for the fortunate few. It was as if people had been plucked overnight out of darkness, silence and limited mobility into a new universe of instant light, continual sound and rapid motion.
The phrase ‘Jazz Age’ gave expression to the change. There had always been popular musical forms. But they had been associated with particular localities and particular cultures, since the mass of the world’s peoples lived in relative isolation from one another. The only international or inter-regional forms of music had been ‘classical forms’, provided for relatively mobile exploiting classes, and sometimes religious forms. The growth of the city in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had begun to change this, with music and dance halls, singing clubs and printed sheet music. However, the gramophone and radio created a new cultural field receptive to something which expressed the rhythms of the industrial world, the tempo of city life and the anguish of atomised existence in a world built around the market. Jazz, or at least the watered down jazz that formed the basis of the new popular music, could take root in this. It was created out of a fusion of various African and European ‘folk’ idioms by the former slaves of the American South as they toiled to the dictates of commodity production. It was brought North with a huge wave of migration from the cotton and tobacco fields to the cities of the world’s most powerful capitalism. And fro
m there it appealed to millions of people of all sorts of ethnic backgrounds and in all sorts of countries, carried forward on the tide of capital accumulation.
All this happened as recession and unemployment became a mere memory and people began to take ‘prosperity’ for granted. The US economist Alvin H Hansen expressed the prevailing wisdom when he wrote in 1927 that the ‘childhood diseases’ of capitalism’s youth were ‘being mitigated’ and ‘the character of the business cycle was changing’. 147 Another economist, Bernard Baruch, told an interviewer for the American Magazine in June 1929, ‘The economic condition of the world seems on the verge of a great forward movement’. 148
The conflicts of the past also seemed a distant memory to the middle classes. The defeat of the steel strike in 1919 had destroyed any will by the American Federation of Labor to expand beyond the narrow ranks of skilled workers. A series of police actions ordered by Attorney-General Palmer and future FBI boss J Edgar Hoover had smashed the old militants of the IWW and the new militants of the Communist Party. Workers who wanted to improve their own position saw little choice but to put faith in the ‘American Dream’ of individual success – as future Trotskyist strike leader Farrell Dobbs did when he voted Republican, planned to open a shop and aspired to be a judge. 149 Leading economists, businessmen and political figures such as John J Raskob, chair of the Democratic National Committee and director of General Motors, declared that ‘everybody ought to be rich’ and claimed they could be if they put a mere $15 a week into stocks and shares. 150
