This massive collection of texts by and on Chinese Trotskyists continues Gregor Benton's longstanding work to bring this important left opposition tradition to light. The simplified narrative of the Chinese civil war as struggle between the Nationalist Party on the right and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the left has remained dominant in part because of the lack of sources on alternative currents, and Prophets Unarmed more than any other work will help remedy that situation. The collection, divided into eighteen parts, is made up of autobiographies, introductions, letters, speeches, articles, and obituaries from Chinese Trotskyists and their interlocutors, including Trotsky himself, as well as some secondary writing on them.
Chinese Trotskyism emerged following the failure of the First United Front with the Nationalists in 1927, seen by the Trotskyists as the defeat of the revolution. While the Soviets and Stalin blamed Chen Duxiu, then head of the party, Trotsky, Chen, and a minority of other Chinese communists undertook a deeper reevaluation of CCP strategy. Instead of a strategy of political alignment with the bourgeois Nationalist Party, critics called for clearer anti-capitalist politics formed out of a closer and more open alliance with workers and peasants. This also stemmed from a different analysis of Chinese society: instead of semi-feudal and semi-colonial, Chinese society was capitalist, and socialist revolution should grow out of national revolution, according to Trotskyists. Yet as they were pushed out of the CCP following 1927, they also lost access to Soviet funding for political activities. The formation of organized opposition was, therefore, difficult, made even worse by repression from all sides and internal squabbling and factionalism (of which we hear a lot in these accounts). As a leader of the Trotskyist “Left Opposition” in the early 1930s, Chen was arrested along with other by the Nationalists in 1932. Following these arrests, China's Left Opposition was never able to come together again as a significant political force. As the title of the collection suggests, unarmed prophets failed in a time of militarized politics. Following the CCP victory in 1949, a mass arrest of Chinese Trotskyists occurred in 1952, with many remaining in jail or labor camps until the end of the 1970s.
The long introduction by Benton and a translation of Wu Jimin's 2008 study (part one of the collection) provide a detailed introduction to the tradition. These are particularly useful, as it would be quite hard to follow the events discussed in the rest of the texts without them. As Benton's introduction and Wu's book make clear, their publishing on the tradition is in part a call for the CCP to rehabilitate the Chinese Trotskyists, something that seemed possible in more open moments of the reform period, though the process was never carried through.
The bulk of the collection is made up of autobiographies by Chinese Trotskyists, although they are cut up and rearranged into chronological and topical sections. Thus for most periods of the 1920s through the 1940s, the reader will encounter accounts from two or more participants in the movement (usually Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin, and sometimes Chen Duxiu or others). This juxtaposition provides multiple and sometimes conflicting narratives of the emergence, development, and repression of the movement. Particularly fascinating, for example, are the accounts of Chinese communist students in Moscow, which not only allows us to see how Chinese students understood the factionalism of the Soviet party, but also gives new detail to the factional maneuvering within the CCP in relation to that of the Soviets. In a different register, the autobiographical narratives also provide detail of the daily life struggles of committed revolutionaries under intense pressure, attacked from all sides.
The divides within the Chinese Trotskyist movement—the main one coming in 1941—are very clear within the collection, although it focuses more on the work of Chen, Wang (who moved into Benton's home in 1975), and Zheng than of their main rival Peng Shushi. As discussed in part ten, their respective understandings of World War II and the return of the Civil War in its aftermath hardened their bitter conflict, which was also expressed through the different connections they made to the divided international Trotskyist movement, their analysis of Stalinism and the Soviet Union, and different evaluations of Chen's political trajectory. As the emphasis of the volume is on their politics, it unfortunately contains few translations of theoretical articles by Chinese Trotskyists analyzing Chinese society. Nor does it contain their analysis of post-1949 Chinese society, as Benton's interest is in their writings “as an active political force rather than as a detached commentary” as they became following the victory of the CCP (p. 1).
The Chinese Left Opposition was the largest outside of Russia (p. 30), but at the time of the book's publication only one remained alive. Even as Trotskyists and their ideas were repressed in the PRC and remain unrehabilitated, similar criticisms of the CCP resurfaced in the late 1970s and early 1980s and even more recently in the 2000s, with a small number of young Chinese interested in Trotskyism. Benton is to be commended for bringing this material together in an accessible volume.
