United front and popular front today

Picture: A Stalinist graphic hails the “united front”, but by the time it came into use the Stalinists were pushing “popular fronts”, something quite different.

In Solidarity 751 we carried some classic Marxist texts on “Popular Front” and “United Front”, and in this issue we have another classic, theses by Trotsky from 1922.

What is the relevance today?

The gist, as one of the texts in Solidarity 751 put it, is: “The united front consists in an agreement reached between two or more parties and organisations, which have different programs, for joint action on specific issues. In this agreement there is absolutely no question of a common political program...” We are for united fronts.

“The People’s Front, on the other hand, is not merely, not even primarily, an agreement for joint action on specific issues. It first and foremost involves the acceptance by all members of the People’s Front of a common [bourgeois] program”. The classic Popular Fronts, France and Spain in the 1930s, were political blocs with bourgeois parties deliberately and explicitly relegating independent workers’ struggles to a later “stage”. We are against popular fronts.

Or, more precisely, we are for united-front policies, and against popular-front policies. United fronts and popular fronts are not so much “things” which we approach with some sort of stethoscope-type device to see which sort of “front” each “thing” is, but different policies which may be pursued by a working-class party (or smaller agitation-and-education group). As the texts in Solidarity 751 explained, those different policies — working-class-based “march separately, strike together” vs class-coalitionism — are much older than the terms “united front” and “popular front” coined in the 1920s and 30s.

Debate about this is often confused today, and the 1920s-30s language is used inconsistently.

At his “Claim the Future” Labour left conference on 19 July, John McDonnell MP called for a “Popular Front” of the Labour left with the Greens and the Sultana-Corbyn project to combat the far right day to day. But that isn’t a “Popular Front” in the sense of an alliance with a bourgeois party to chain socialists to a limited bourgeois-democratic program “for now” and relegate working-class struggle to the “next stage”. If it can be done, for example by developing active local anti-fascist alliances of the left and labour movement, it will be good.

The Greens are not a working-class party? Indeed not. But they are not an anchored bourgeois party, either, and allying with them on the streets against fascists, for example, would be nothing like deferring politically to an anchored bourgeois party. Given the realities of the Labour Party today, and indeed of the smaller “left groups”, “purism” here would be pharisaical. The problem is elsewhere: even after their new left shift, or where in other countries they have long been “left”, it is rare for Greens to engage collectively in street protest, picket lines, etc.

On the other hand, Jon Lansman, a figure on the Labour left for decades, and now in the new “Mainstream Labour” group, is arguing for a deal to stop Reform in the 2029 election, with Labour divvying up seats to contest with a range including Lib-Dems, SNP, Plaid. Back in 1920 Lenin suggested the then-revolutionary Communist Party propose to the Labour Party “workers’ primaries” in constituencies to decide whether a CP or Labour candidate against Tories and Liberals in the official election. But Lansman’s proposal goes beyond that to actual “Popular-Frontism”, erecting a barrier to even notional or fragmentary working-class socialist policies in the election.

The “Republican Front” policy in France, where the Communist Party and Socialist Party withdraw voluntarily in run-offs to back “centre” candidates against the far-right, is similar.

Then again, the so-called “New Popular Front” (NFP) in France is not quite what the name says. None of its component parties is a workers’ party with previous socialist policies now silenced for the alliance; none of them is an anchored bourgeois party. The problem with the NFP is rather than it has been only an electoral deal (divvying up seats), not a frame for local committees of action.

Builder

The Socialist Workers Party has long promoted itself as a builder of what it calls “united fronts”, and the Counterfire group split from it in 2010 wanting to be even more so. Some of those “united fronts” have elements of Popular Front in them. Unite Against Fascism, an ancestor of Stand Up To Racism, got future Tory prime minister David Cameron as one of its sponsors. But they most resemble another model, the Stalinist fronts.

In the 1950s and after, Stalinist (official “Communist”) parties would have small armies of full-time employees, financed by USSR aid, constructing “peace movements” and “friends of the Soviet Union” groups, with conferences, international junkets, and so on.

The model had actually been pioneered during the Stalinist “Third Period” when, alongside refusal by Communist Parties to push for unity on the streets with Social Democrats against fascism, the Stalinists also had a well-funded contingent, around Willi Münzenberg, who organised showy “anti-fascist” conferences with platforms full of individual liberal celebrities (and divorced from day-to-day workplace or street activity).

Those “fronts” served a purpose for the Stalin regime in wooing some liberal allies, and possibly for individual CPers in enabling them sometimes to appear as respectable liberals and thus find circles of people they could “talk to”. But they were manipulative and could not serve socialist education or mobilisation.

The SWP and Counterfire do not have a government to fund their “fronts” (Stand Up to Racism, Stop The War, People’s Assembly, etc.), and so the main function of those “fronts” is to give their socialists another (liberal) “hat to wear”, or to enable them to act as contracted-out backroom organisers for mobilisations with official union sponsorship.

Some of the mobilisations are useful, or at least the best available given that the unions will not do the work directly, and there is no sizeable party able to do it. But they also act as a diversion from the task of rousing the unions.

On the other side, some anti-fascist or trans rights activists these days will refuse to work with Labour Party activists however anti-fascist or pro-trans they may be. That is a reprise of the anti-united-front policy the Stalinists had before the “popular fronts”.

The Labour Party is bad? But the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Germany backed the Brüning rule-by-decree regime there from 1930 to 1933. It ran the state police force in Prussia (by far the largest of the German states). When bourgeois politicians in behind-the-scenes talks suggested restoring the monarchy to stabilise Germany, the SPD assented with the proviso that a suitable member of the royal family be chosen, to be a “constitutional” monarch.

For sure, the whole temper of politics then was more left-wing than now, and the SPD had working-class members who considered themselves Marxists. But if today’s Labour people, faded and demoralised as they mostly are, should be excluded from activity, then the SPD would not qualify either. Nor would the French Socialist Party of 1922, about which Trotsky was writing in his theses of that year.

The circumstances have changed hugely since Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848, but the basic approach was outlined vividly there:

“The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement”.

They would ally with the Chartists in England, for example (who, as it turned out, were already in decline then, and had always included middle-class sections) and the so-called Social Democrats in France. Marx and Engels criticised the “sectarian socialists” (Owenites, etc.) for refusing to do so.

“In Switzerland, [the Communists] support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.

“In Poland, they support the party [i.e. loose trend] that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846...

“But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the... workers may straightway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy” — i.e. bourgeois democracy and civil liberties, though we now know that the bourgeoisie can use modes of rule more “absolutist” and dictatorial than any 1848 “old regime”.

We seek broad unity in action, but never shelve or silence or postpone our efforts to advocate and explain working-class socialism.