Some groups out there today are able to recognize the obvious about the so-called Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) -- that they are a revisionist and comprador party that, after a decade of heroic struggle for liberation that nearly succeeded, has now abandoned people's war, dismantled the popular government they had established in the liberated areas, jailed the People's Liberation Army in cantonments, and which is working vigorously, with the full support of the imperialists (including the United States) to disband the PLA altogether and integrate its fighters into the nation's regular army in exchange for a seat in the country's bourgeois parliament -- while others prefer to champion their path as some sort of major ideological breakthrough. It is painfully obvious that the Nepali "Maoists" are surrendering, not advancing in their revolution. One thing I have noticed though about those who champion the Prachanda Path to nowhere is that they usually come back to a certain particular comparison: the Second United Front in the Chinese people's war. Comparison is regularly drawn between the Second United Front on the one hand and the 2006 peace agreement between the then-CPN(M) and the Nepali parliamentary parties on the other. (After all, wasn't it Mao who had the revolutionary soldiers remove the red stars from their caps, etc.?) What these fools somehow don't realize is that the Second United Front was a failure!
The idea of the Maoist block of 4 progressive classes is that you can not only establish a temporary unity toward a particular set of objectives (as the various revisionist groups tell us the Nepali "Maoists" are doing), but also that you can ultimately resolve the contradictions therein non-antagonistically. The block of 4 classes is, in that way, a permanent alliance.
Going back to the historical case of China, if one actually reads the contents of the Maoists' writings throughout the Second United Front period, one sees that they saw Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang as a relatively unified whole. They believed the entire organization to be essentially patriotic and thus part of the block of 4 progressive classes. That's why during the said period they sought to form a coalition government with the Kuomintang as the expression of people's democracy applicable to China. Yes, they wanted to include even Chiang and his group within the KMT as part of that coalition government. It wasn't that they recognized Chiang and those around him within the KMT to be reactionary foreign puppets and were just seeing them as sort of a "lesser evil"next to Japan; they genuinely believed that Chiang and Co. were patriots with serious progressive potential.
However, tt was not factually the case that the Kuomintang as a whole was a nationalist bourgeois party. The KMT government was a one-party state. That doesn't mean the contradictions of bourgeois economic interests...the differing political positions resulting from market competitions, etc....disappeared in the KMT-ruled part of China because they had that political set-up. Rather, it meant that these differing political perspectives, including both patriotic and comprador ones, were basically suppressed into one party organization in their political expression. In other words, the KMT always featured both patriotic sections and comprador sections. So there was always a sort of good side and a bad side to them. Looking back historically, we can identify, for example, that Sun Yat-Sen was a patriotic KMT element, whereas Chiang Kai-Shek was really a foreign puppet.
That the theory of the Maoists on Chiang and his group of compradors was wrong is borne out in events. While the Chinese Maoists sought to maintain this united front with the KMT under Chiang's leadership, in reality Chiang, really from 1939, had dissolved it in practice by resuming the civil war on a low level and approaching that, rather than the war of resistance against Japan, as their primary war effort. (We'll recall that, at a certain point, Chiang had even threatened to surrender to Japan if Amerika didn't step up its assistance to the Kuomintang government.) So the 8th Route Army was fighting a more or less offensive war against Japan while simultaneously being forced to fight a more or less defensive, low-level war against Chiang Kai-Shek's forces. After World War 2's conclusion (which the Chinese Communists hadn't expected would come as soon as it did), they attempted a rapprochement with the KMT in earnest that very much resembled what the Nepali "Maoists" are doing right now: they reached an agreement in January 1946 to form a coalition government with the KMT under Chiang's leadership and to unify their armies. This is a topic most "Maoists" I know carefully dodge because frankly it was obviously a huge mistake!! And no, it wasn't an agreement reached in cynicism, as our media insists. It was sincere. Mao was submitting to the Soviet Union's new 30-year trade agreement with the KMT-led government. The breaking point of the agreement was Manchuria. The Soviet Union basically handed the Chinese Communists the manufacturing center of Manchuria on a silver platter and this stirred up the ire of Chiang, who in turn responded by sending in 1.6 million troops to conquer the liberated areas and destroy the Communists. At that point, the Chinese Communists hardly had any alternative but to jettison the Second United Front and shift the strategic focus from from the maintaining of world "peace" under imperialist domination to that of liberation against the new, Western-backed puppet government.
None of this is to say that the concept of the strategic 4-class alliance was wrong. On the contrary, I would particularly highlight the emergence of the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang in 1948, which, in betrayal of their former party, joined up with the Communist-led side. This was an organization of political representatives of China's genuinely patriotic bourgeoisie. It became an important party in the revolutionary united front led by Communists. When they established a people's republic, the loyal KMT elements were not treated in a hostile way, but rather were given a position in the government alongside other loyal parties. In the mid-50s, China transitioned into socialism in earnest. This was done in a mainly non-antagonistic way wherein the assets of the remaining bourgeois elements generally were bought by the socialist state, rather than seized aggressively. Ongoing ideological struggle was a crucial part of that mixture. They had to and basically did win over even these native bourgeois elements to the idea of giving up their private capital holdings and becoming part of the workforce in a socialist economy. In that way, it can be said that the bulk of the class contradictions between the Chinese proletariat and the Chinese bourgeoisie were actually resolved in favor of the proletarian perspective in a primarily non-antagonistic way. That is a historical expression of what the progressive block of 4 democratic classes is all about. It was ultimately a successful idea.
We have to remember that all of the 4 Alls are factors in terms of who you can work with. Maoists seek the abolition of 1) all class distinctions, 2) all exploitative production relations, 3) all oppressive social relations, and 4) all the corresponding, reactionary ideas. Many would-be communists focus in only on the first two of those 4 Alls and forget about the relevance of the latter two. The native bourgeoisie of the third world is (obviously) not exploited, but it is oppressed, and this oppression can form the basis for a strategic alliance with them. Through that alliance, you can win them over more decisively to the side of the proletariat through ideological struggle with them over such matters as morality questions. Now that's not going to plausibly be as rock solid a unity as you could have between various working classes (e.g. between the proletariat and the peasantry)...these bourgeois forces do, after all, have some investment in the capitalist system and thus will tend to waver a lot more...but that is why you "lean to one side" of this united front: the side of the working classes, under the leadership of the proletariat. Yes, the third world 4-class alliance concept differs qualitatively from Lenin's conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e. it is a different form of proletarian rule): it's more fully mass-based and more strategic. It's better, in my view.
My point though for this post is that the Chinese people's war wasn't all just some smooth, 2-stage operation that all went perfectly according to plan, as so many convey it. There were major, unexpected twists and turns along the way that very easily could have led them in the wrong direction on a lasting basis. It was a complex process. And I would argue that they did not completely learn the lesson. The Second United Front was a failure for real, not incidental, reasons. It failed not because it was a bad idea, but because of the form it took. The Chinese Communists didn't seem to really much appreciate the dynamics that existed within the KMT and approach the KMT with the according nuance. Rather, they, at least initially, treated it as a unified, all-patriotic body. The Communists' petitions for the establishment of a united front with the genuine KMT patriots was a good thing, and it ultimately resulted in Chiang's arrest, precisely for treason. Sending in Zhou Enlai to negotiate Chiang's release was the mistake. As soon as he got back into safe territory, Chiang immediately placed the coup leaders under arrest. He was always insincere about the united front. (As another observation, pretty much anything "special" like this that Zhou Enlai did had basic, opportunist flaws, much like Zhou himself did.)
Now if we exclusively look back at the historical record through the narrow lenses of official history, such as recorded in Lin Biao's Long Live the Victory of People's War!, then we may fail to see these mistakes as mistakes. After all, if the principal contradiction in the world was, as the Chinese Maoists themselves concurred with the Comintern (under clear Soviet leadership) that it was at the time, between fascistic forces on the one hand and democratic forces on the other, then uniting with "democratic" comprador elements and working with "democratic" imperialists like the United States and the other imperialist Allies makes sense. On the other hand, if the principal contradiction throughout the whole imperialist era has been between the first world on the one hand and the third world on the other, then uniting with imperialists and compradors of any stripe made no sense. I would argue that the latter perspective seems to be a closer match for the historical record. It clarifies the record on this matter that has been so difficult for so many people to flesh out.
Now that we have this clearer view of the Second United Front and the actual historical implications thereof, it becomes much easier for us to see how the Prachanda Path is indeed revisionist and capitulationist: they are following the path of forming a "national" united front with traitors to their nation. All compradors are reactionaries and principal class enemies, just like the imperialists they're shielded by.
History is dynamic. We should study it that way, rather than just adopting the mindset in advance that "side X was always right and my task is to figure out how".
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