Falling out over the united front
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPaul LawsonTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
NO TACTIC has been so controversial among Marxists as the united front.
Some who claim to be Marxists (like the RCP today) write off the existing labour movement, and insist the only way forward is to make propaganda, sell newspapers and journals, and recruit to Marxist organisations. But for Socialist Outlook supporters, the united front is a central guide to socialist activity.
The united front was developed by Lenin and Trotsky in response to the situation in Europe after the Russian revolution. The revolutionary wave which followed the First World War rapidly receded.
The new mass communist parties, like those which emerged in France, Germany and Italy from the splits in the existing social democratic parties, could not conquer power immediately.
Tactics
In this situation the leadership of the new Communist International, founded on the initiative of the Bolsheviks in 1919, argued that communist tactics had to be posed in a new way.
Where mass social democratic parties existed, where the labour movement was dominated by reformism, the first task of communists was to win mass influence. Outside of a revolutionary period, this meant engaging in the day-to-day struggles of the working class, which generally had partial economic and reformist demands.
The Communist International reasoned that only a small vanguard could be won to communism through propaganda – the masses would only begin break from reformism through their own experience of the betrayals of reformist leaders.
This meant that communists had to fight alongside reformist workers in every partial and limited struggle, while explaining that the final victory of working class demands could only come through the destruction of capitalism - socialist revolution. As Trotsky put it, the task of communists was to 'share the struggle, but not the illusions' of reformist workers.
Underlying the tactic of the united front was the understanding that to win leadership communists had to recompose and renovate the existing labour movement; and that meant competing and contesting with the reformist leaders over the allegiance of the working class.
This in turn implied encouraging and supporting every move to the left, rather than passively denouncing it as impure and 'inadequate'.
Trotsky in particular fought to urge the small Marxist organisations of the 1930s, when the Communist International had been conquered by Stalinism, to turn towards every manifestation of opposition to the right wing leaders in the unions and mass working class parties.
Militant
The communist leaders who elaborated the united front approach did not regard it as a trick or manoeuvre to win over the base of the social democrats.
Rather it served a dual purpose, on the one hand responding to the need for the maximum unity of the working class in struggle, and at the same time creating the preconditions for winning over the most militant and determined reformist workers.
To carry through the united front the method of making demands on the reformist leaders was developed. Trotsky described this process as 'dragging the reformists from their asylums'.
It meant instead of just criticising the social democratic leaders, proposing concrete campaigns and demands to them, to test out their willingness to fight in practice.
The Communist International under Stalin broke with the united front most spectacularly during the 'third period' (1928-34). It was declared that social democracy had gone over to fascism and was now 'social fascist' - the main enemy of the workers.
The third period 'storm in the streets' policy was most drastically applied in Germany. As the Nazis got stronger the Communist Party concentrated its fire against the social democrats. Often Nazis and communists collaborated in smashing up social democratic meetings.
Stalin
This had a two effects. The leadership of the social democratic SPD isolated the communists by blaming them for working class disunity. This of course was hypocritical because the SPD leaders didn't want unity either; but the communists gave them a perfect get-out.
At the same time, the fight against the Nazis was severely damaged. Only in a few localities did communists and social democrats defy their leaders and fight shoulder-to-shoulder against the Nazis.
The debacle in Germany, when Hitler came to power in 1933, led to a huge lurch by Stalin - not towards the united front but the popular front. This mean Communist parties building government and election alliances not just with social democrats but bourgeois parties as well.
The united front policy of the Communist International in its revolutionary period meant not just attempting to build unity of the whole labour movement where possible, but actively building alliances between the communist and non-communist left against the right wing workers leaderships.
This was most successfully applied in Britain during the mid-1920s when the Communist Party built the Minority Movement in the unions and the National Left Wing Movement in the Labour Party.
Both won support from hundreds of thousands of workers, but were closed down by the CP as it followed Stalin's orders and turned towards 'third period' ultra-leftism.
United Left
In today's conditions the united front has to be posed in a new way. Mass revolutionary parties no longer exist; direct proposals from small revolutionary groups to reformist leaders lack credibility.
Moreover, social democracy itself has changed. In the 1920s and '30s reformist leaders claimed to be fighting for socialism, albeit by piecemeal and gradual methods.
For social democratic leaders like Kinnock, Mitterrand and Gonzalez, this is hardly true; socialism is barely mentioned by these people. While socialists can demand that these reformist leaders should break with pro-capitalist policies, this kind of demand serves a purely propaganda function. It is not a serious proposal for immediate joint action.
Today the primary axis of the united front is towards creating the maximum unity in workers struggles, the struggles of the oppressed and political campaigns.
It is here that the dispute about the united front is most acute among the far left. Because of their formal adherence to many of Trotsky's ideas, political currents like the SWP and Militant tendency pay lip-service to the united front.
Propagandism
But in practice their activity is often guided not by the strategic guide of fighting to advance the objective interests of the working class and oppressed, nor of maximising the impact of left opposition to right wing leaders, but of simply the needs of selling more papers and recruiting more members.
Sectarian abstentionism and propagandism is generally the result. A genuine united front policy today must stress the need to build the maximum unity in support of struggles, and the maximum unity of the left, in support of class struggle policies, within the labour movement.
Far too often in recent years we have seen the Militant and SWP determined to take over united campaigning bodies and utilise them as 'front' organisations.
Militant's ham-fisted insistence on organisational dominance in the Anti-Poll Tax Federation and the SWP's November 1990 coup to take over the NALGO Broad Left are typical examples.
Such antics are effectively a policy of division, of putting the interests of particular left organisations against the interests of the working class and united militant action by the left.
They have nothing in common with Lenin and Trotsky's conception of the united front.