PARTISAN REVIEW
ripe for proletarian revolution. Have been for years. The masses are
on the road. But their own conservative bureaucratic machinery is
holding them back. It's not the workers who are incapable, but their
leaders who are paralyzed. That's why we need a new International.
Agitation, mass strikes, ultimatums, and the rotten capitalist system
would crumble.
INDOCHINESE STUDENT: Our Indochinese party will·find the way to rev–
olution. For us the true International is the one you and Lenin con–
ceived.
It
points the way to permanent world revolution.
TROTSKY: Don't be deceived by the smallness of our numbers. It's not
clear at the moment where revolutionary strength realIy lies. My
feeling, comrades, is that we can reckon with no immediate successes
in our metropolitan centers. The coming imperialist war will perhaps
destroy us all. But the basic situation stays unchanged. The peoples
at whose cost the war is being waged will fight for their freedom.
Look at China. There a new sort of revolutionary movement has
already begun. Mao Tse Tung is building up his army of peasants
deep in the interior. And, while Chiang Kai-shek wages his bourgeois
nationalistic battle against them, Mao is busy forming soviets of
peasants and sharing out the land.
INDOCHINESE STUDENT: You yourself once calIed the peasants the pack–
horses of civilization. You too thought it impossible that the country
people could ever form a communist party.
TROTSKY: I was afraid that Mao Tse Tung's revolution was too much
concerned with the interest of the peasants, and was losing sight of
the workers. That revolution which came to the towns from the coun–
try would lead to violent clashes with the industrial proletariat. The
revolution can succeed only when the workers fight together with the
peasants.
GERMAN STUDENT: For that view the Comintern demanded your head.
INDOCHINESE STUDENT : For us the Chinese revolution provides the
model. In Viet Nam there is little difference between workers, peas–
ants, students. We alI possess nothing. The word proletariat has a
wider meaning for us than for you in Europe. Our first cadres and
soviets were formed in the villages and plantations as welI as in the
factories and harbors. In order to quelI the revolts the French direct–
ed their air attacks against the peasants. The colonists know that in
our country the enemy is everywhere.
FRENCH STUDENT: The things that are happening in Viet Nam, in
China, are in line with the theories of permanent revolution. They
skip the bourgeois democratic phase. Surprise guerrilla actions alI the
time. Yet still both Mao Tse Tung and the Indochina party stick out-
