A tactic affirmed at the 3rd Congress of the Communist International that sought to generate slogans capable of mobilizing the masses that still remained embedded in the trade unions and social democratic political parties – organizations committed to the defense of the state and the capitalist order.
The question of the United Front
The need for unity of action that workers demand is not the product of their regimentation by the state, but of the very nature of the class (centralism). The regimentation that boasts of being "unitary" therefore cannot be confronted simply by denying the need for unity or by asserting that it is enough for the workers now regimented to follow the communists. Such a tactic, the doctrinaire one, harms the movement as a whole.
It is another matter that this need for centralization is used by the trade unions -which are part of the state- and by the left of the political apparatus as a brake on the movement, by equating class unity with unity among themselves. That "unity within regimentation" can only take shape around slogans that lead nowhere or that run counter to the interests of the workers.
The question of the united front is thus the question of how to drive the most dynamic and conscious sectors of the class, through a course of action and therefore through concrete slogans, from the false unity of the left-unions trap to unity around a political orientation independent of the state.
The Third International and the United Front
The foundations of the United Front
It is from this perspective that the Bolsheviks put the United Front to the International, at its third congress, as the tactical basis of the moment.
The Party must take the initiative in securing unity in the present struggle. Only in this way will the Party draw closer to those two thirds who do not yet follow its leadership, who do not yet trust it because they do not understand it. Only in this way can the Party win them.
If the Communist Party had not broken drastically and irrevocably with the social democrats, if it had not become the Party of the proletarian revolution, it could not have taken the first serious steps along the road of revolution. It would have remained a parliamentary safety valve under the bourgeois state. Whoever does not understand this does not know the first letter of the ABC of Communism.
If the Communist Party did not strive to build an organizational path at the end of which joint coordinated actions between communist and non-communist masses (including those who support social democracy) were possible at any moment, it would expose its inability to win -on the basis of mass actions- the majority of the proletariat. It would degenerate into a Society for communist propaganda; it would never develop into a Party that fights for the conquest of power.
It is not enough to have a sword, it must have an edge; the edge is not enough: one must know how to use it. After separating the communists from the reformists, it is not enough to fuse the communists together by means of organizational discipline; it is necessary that this organization learn to guide all the collective activities of the proletariat in every sphere of the class struggle. This is the second letter of the ABC of Communism.
L. D. Trotsky at the Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International of March 1922.
At that moment, the central thesis underlying the United Front is that, in the context of the world revolutionary wave, the mere movement of the class favors the development of its consciousness and therefore the development and growth into a mass party of the Communist Party as the "highest form of class organization" (Lenin).
Circumstances, therefore, make joint actions on a series of vital questions entirely possible between the workers united around each of these three organizations [centrist, social democratic and communist parties] and the organized masses that support them.
The Communists, as we have already said, not only must not oppose such actions but, on the contrary, must take the initiative, precisely for the reason that the more the masses are drawn into the movement, the greater their self-confidence will be; the mass movement will have more confidence in itself and will be more capable of marching resolutely forward, no matter how modest the initial slogan of struggle. And this means that the growth of the mass content of the movement makes it revolutionary and creates far more favorable conditions for the slogans, methods of struggle and, in general, for the leading role of the Communist Party.
The reformists fear the powerful revolutionary spirit of the masses; their most cherished arena is the parliamentary tribune, the trade union offices, the courts of justice, the antechambers of the ministries.
On the contrary, what interests us, apart from any other consideration, is to drag the reformists out of their paradise and place them beside us before the masses. Using a correct tactic, we can only win. The communist who doubts or fears this is like the swimmer who approved the theses on the best way to swim but does not want to risk diving in.
L. D. Trotsky at the Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International of March 1922.
The United Front and the role of communists in the unitary organizations created during the Second International
When the United Front is affirmed as a tactic by the Third International, it is a synthesis of the political practice carried out by the Bolsheviks in Russia between 1905 and the October revolution. It is then meant to be used as a guide on a much broader stage, but one with which it shares a fundamental element: the existence of a diverse organized class fabric, ranging from trade union branches and workers' societies to mutual aid societies, cooperatives and educational associations, in which the communists have large minorities but not the organizational leadership.
There are two keys here:
1 The United Front tactic is not considered the main question, nor is it going to be judged by its results, wherever the communists form tiny propaganda groups. Because, as Trotsky says in the same text: "In cases where the Communist Party still remains an organization made up of a numerically insignificant minority, the question of its conduct on the front of the mass struggle does not take on a decisive political and organizational significance."
2 The United Front tactic is going to set aside the class nature of social democratic politics and of the trade unions. As Lenin himself had insisted again and again -with particular clarity in "Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder"- in the Bolshevik view that fabric, which Trotsky would later characterize as "proletarian democracy", is a terrain of political combat, and throwing out the dirty bathwater of its reactionary leadership along with the baby of its organizational and educational function for the class would be an unforgivable leftist error.
For the International, the United Front will therefore consist in organizing "red fractions" in every kind of organization created by the workers during the previous historical period, with the aim of steering them to place themselves at the head of unitary struggles. To renounce trade unions or cooperatives because their leaderships were reactionary and their very nature did not make them revolutionary bodies would mean renouncing the main path by which the great masses of workers become conscious.
The degeneration and contradictions of the United Front tactic
The United Front will generate all kinds of contradictions as soon as an ebb of the world revolutionary movement sets in... that is, practically as soon as it is announced.
With bureaucratic forces permeating the Russian party from the state management machinery of the enterprises, and the large European parties from the trade unions, the United Front will gradually be assimilated to an alliance between communist and social democratic parties... which proved disastrous in every case. Suffice it to recall how the socialist leadership turned the Workers' Alliances of 1934 in Spain into a tool for derailing the revolution under way into a mere lever for a cabinet change.
The fact is that this degeneration of the original concept had soon led to the acceptance of the slogan of the "workers' government". In reality, this slogan was the mechanical translation of a concrete experience of the Russian Revolution.
When in 1917 the Bolsheviks put forward the idea of a Menshevik government (expel the capitalist ministers from the government), they did so taking into account, on the one hand, the deceptive faith that the masses had at that moment in the Mensheviks and in bourgeois democracy; on the other hand, they took into account the nature of the contradictions between the Mensheviks and the old classes, which would make the former, without will and without desire, grant greater freedoms to the masses and to the revolutionary vanguard in particular, which would allow the masses to condense their experience into organic forms and rise to higher stages of struggle.
The existence of the soviets, legally permitted by the Kerensky government and in which the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks took part in a united front, made this development possible.
Open letter to the Internationalist Communist Party, French section of the Fourth International, by Natalia Sedova, Benjamin Péret and G. Munis (June 1947)
But in 1923 the "workers' governments" being proposed did not involve strengthening soviets that did not exist. That is why, when we read today the debates on the "workers' government" slogan at the Fourth Congress, the arguments can only seem to us pure centrist scholasticism. But it is also true that today we see it with hindsight, knowing that for the Russian bureaucratic forces it was their first great triumph in the International. They hoped for relief in the trade war through the formation of "left-wing" governments in the industrialized European countries. No one managed to understand it that way at the time.
Nevertheless, it was the first great step on the road towards the definitive subordination of the interests of the world revolution to those of Russian state capitalism. A subordination that would crystallize around the slogan of "socialism in one country" and that would consistently turn the United Front into the Popular Front.
But... can the degeneration of the United Front tactic be equated with its uselessness?
The United Front after the destruction of the mass organizational fabric created by the Second International
The destructive work of the counterrevolution
The period 1933-1937, that is, the years that begin with the rise of Nazism to power in Germany in the face of the KPD's inaction and end with the defeat of the Spanish Revolution, the first counterrevolution led and organized by a "communist" party, the PCE, does not only mark the definitive passage of the Stalinist Comintern to the counterrevolution and the opening of the possibility of a new world imperialist war.
The defeat of the great revolutionary wave of 1917-37 materialized in the systematic destruction of the organizational class fabric built during the Second International, the end of that space of "Proletarian Democracy" that had nourished the Second and Third Internationals and of which only shreds remained when the Fourth was founded.
The second postwar period
At the end of the war it will be the left of the Fourth International that demands an end to the by then utterly untenable slogans of the united front and the "workers' government", which the left of the Fourth International had been criticizing since the Spanish Revolution.
At that moment, in the hands of the leadership of a Fourth International in full opportunist degeneration, the slogans had become electoral support "from outside" for the CPs and SPs. The communist left of the Fourth would then recall that no parallel is possible with the Bolsheviks' "workers' government" slogan of 1917, and that an electoral government of the forces that had organized the counterrevolution and the war can contribute little or nothing to the workers' coming to consciousness.
Stalinism is today absolutely incompatible with any proletarian democracy. Wherever organs of revolutionary power have arisen, from Spain to Warsaw, Paris and Milan, it has hastened to destroy them. Stalinism cannot allow revolutionaries to speak.
The tactic of a united front with it and the PC-PS-CGT government cannot in any way facilitate the creation of organs of proletarian democracy and power, and any Stalinist government or government under Stalinist influence carries with it an imperious tendency to physically annihilate the revolutionary vanguard. It is therefore urgent that the PCI and our international movement withdraw these two now outdated slogans. Is the example of Eastern Europe not eloquent?
On the other hand, the proletariat today does not suffer from any real illusion about bourgeois democracy, social democracy or Stalinism. What it does suffer from is the fact of finding itself trapped by the organic apparatuses of both tendencies, Stalinism first and foremost. The non-existence of a revolutionary organization that would inspire it with confidence and combative assurance contributes more than a little to this; that is, our present policy contributes to it directly or indirectly.
Yesterday it was indispensable for the proletariat to go through the experience of governments set up by the leaders of the traditional organizations in order to understand that revolution was the only possible way out. Not today.
Open letter to the Internationalist Communist Party, French section of the Fourth International, by Natalia Sedova, Benjamin Péret and G. Munis (June 1947)
In other words, the underlying problem is that that fabric of "Proletarian Democracy" no longer exists, but only "organic apparatuses" tightly controlled by Stalinists and social democrats and, alongside them, the "great void" produced by the "non-existence of a revolutionary organization" which, for its part, cannot feed on what does not exist.
And if we go a little further, a somewhat deeper formulation gives an idea of the gravity of the situation. The most solid part of that class fabric had been made up of trade unions. But the trade unions are no longer, and can no longer be, class organizations with more or less reactionary leaderships and tendencies: they are purely and simply an apparatus of state capitalism.
That is to say, the situation from the end of the world war onwards not only demonstrates the counterproductive and reactionary character of the United Front slogan understood as an alliance with, or external support for, Stalinists and social democrats. It also leaves it without an object: there is no class fabric in which to exercise it in the way the Bolsheviks had done, and without it revolutionaries are confined to the role of "propaganda groups". The kind of groups that the doctrine of the Third International had never considered to have any chance of even contemplating such a tactic, since they had no real influence on the course of the class struggle.
The FOR and the propagandist movements of the second half of the 20th century
To get out of this spiral, the revolutionaries of the second half of the 20th century went back to working on the basis of the experience of the Bolshevik party. It was assumed that, after an initial phase as a propaganda group, the militant nuclei would grow through mass struggles and strikes and that, eventually, they could support and be supported by various relatively stable organizational expressions of the class: communist groups in workplaces, neighborhood collectives, committees for specific purposes, etc.
In practice this orientation meant working while ignoring the need for an organizational fabric beyond the propaganda group itself, taking it for granted that it would emerge as a sediment of the succession of struggles or that it would spontaneously take on new forms without it being the militants' task to foster one form or another. Numerous councilist tendencies even appeared that openly denied the need for, and possibility of, organizational expressions of the class beyond the development of its organs of struggle.
The main reason is that from the early sixties onwards (the Asturias miners' strike, the United Kingdom, northern France...) mass strikes reappear outside of, and often against, the trade unions. Their global proliferation makes it possible to imagine a development of the organization of the class exclusively through struggles. But when that great irregular wave of strikes and mobilizations, which would last until the end of the 80s, is exhausted, so too will be the revolutionary propagandist organizations of the period.
Can the United Front have any tactical use in the present?
Nor were there many elements to reflect on the alternatives. Only very specific experiences of the Spanish Communist Left in the 1930s -experiences never developed afterwards by internationalists in other countries- pointed to paths that united propaganda with the organization both of organs of struggle and of a class "fabric".
Significantly, however, these experiences were based on a particular practice of the United Front, which was addressed in every sphere and at every moment to the workers as a whole, combining slogans that alienated the struggles from their theoretical social democratic organic leadership while at the same time promoting an organizational fabric for the workers as a whole that was of direct use to them (the House of the People, the school, trade committees -assimilated to trade unions but without organic structures of their own- and the workers' cooperative).
What did "United Front" mean in that experience? In reality, a way of posing the slogans and tasks that the revolutionaries set themselves, and those they set for the struggles, opposed both to that of the Workers' Alliances of the time and to the restrictive conception of the "propaganda group".
What we learn from all the accumulated experience is that without slogans that address the immediate and concrete needs of struggles and reflection, propaganda groups can only be moralizing groups, abstract preachers of communist morality with no practical consequences.
And even if they provide useful slogans for each stage of struggle, if they do not promote and support minimal independent organizational foundations of every kind -associations, struggle committees, solidarity networks, neighborhood groups, etc.- they will place the most spirited workers before the dilemma of atomization or regimentation, demobilizing in the immediate term and weakening the struggles of the future.
In the eyes of a worker convinced of the need to fight but not politically trained -the state of class consciousness to be expected when there is neither an extensive class fabric nor a continuum of mass struggles- it will always seem more "viable" to join a sterile, falsely red fraction of a trade union than to preach the mass strike; to enter a neighborhood patronage network than to stimulate debates on the root of the housing question; etc.
In the long periods without great class mobilizations, the political cupellation of the workers is born in minority collective efforts that give collective answers to the concrete and universal needs of the workers "negating the present state of things". And in that framework the United Front is above all a technology for elaborating slogans that direct that concrete grouping towards the class as a whole, giving rise to independent and higher forms of organization and struggle.