The term ‘United Front’ is frequently used on the Left. In common English usage the term is no more than an agreement between two or more individuals or parties to agree to work in common over some issue. When people on the Left use it they may mean simply an agreement to work in common with others over a specific issue, but they usually refer to the United Front in the context of unity of a Left grouping with other forces rather than, say, the unity of Blair with Bush. In Marxist literature the term is frequently used and it does have a very precise meaning.

The United Front as a Tactic Adopted by the Comintern

Whilst the term may have been used by socialists as long as there have been socialists, I would argue that it has come to be defined in terms of the adoption of the United Front tactic by the early Communist International, specifically the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Comintern.

The First Communist International was formed in 1919. The context was the victorious Russian Revolution and the bloodbath of the First World War. The leaders of the Second International had promised to oppose any imperialist war, but when the imperialist scramble for territory started they abandoned their internationalism and adopted chauvinism and nationalism, they urged workers to go and be slaughtered as the capitalist class of the various imperialist nations tried to carve up the world.

In most countries the new Communist Parties were either tiny or they only represented a minority of the organised working class. The tactics of the United Front were adopted in this situation. The tactics are most clearly spelled out in these two documents from 1921. The second being the clearest summary of the tactic of the United Front.

Fourth Congress of the Communist International, Appendix to the Theses on Comintern Tactics; Theses On The United Front Adopted by the EC, December 1921
http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/4th-congess/united-front.htm

On the United Front: (Material for a Report on the Question of French Communism) March 2, 1922
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotskv/works/1924/ffyci-2/08.htm

Some Observations on the United Front

1. The first thing that should be pointed out is that what is being described here is a “united socialist front” or a “united workers front” – that is unity of working class organisations in the context of the class struggle against the capitalist class. The United Front in this context is most definitely NOT the unity of communists with any other groups in society other than with other workers organisations for the purpose of obtaining class unity to fight for working class interests.

2. The United Front is a tactic to be used in the context of the relationship of a mass communist party with a mass reformist party. It doesn’t apply if the communist party is numerically tiny – as the leadership of the struggle will remain with the reformists. Nor does it apply if the Communists already have the overwhelming majority of the working class with them.

3. The use of the United Front tactic does not mean that unity should be sought at any cost. The reformist organisations may accept a proposal for unity but then they are more likely to either reject it outright or make impossible pre-conditions on unity. The Communists retain the right to break the united front and take the leadership of the movement if the reformists become a hindrance to the movement.

4. The communists retain their independence and right to organise and agitate and criticise their united front partners: “any sort of organisational agreement which restricts our freedom of criticism and agitation is absolutely unacceptable to us. We participate in a united front but do not for a single moment become dissolved in it. We function in the united front as an independent detachment.”

5. “Does the united front extend only to the working masses or does it also include the opportunist leaders? The very posing of this question is a product of misunderstanding. If we were able simply to unite the working masses around our own banner or around our practical immediate slogans, and skip over reformist organisations. whether party or trade union, that would of course be the best thing in the world. But then the very question of the united front would not exist in its present form.”

The United Front as Opposed to Reformism and Sectarianism

The United Front tactic is often mistakenly depicted as a peace pact between revolutionaries and reformists. Of course an agreement to work in unity can indeed be precisely that but it would NOT be a United Front as defined by the early Comintern. To illustrate this it is worth quoting this passage:

“The reformists dread the revolutionary potential of the mass movement; their beloved arena is the parliamentary tribune, the trade-union bureaux, the arbitration boards, the ministerial antechambers.
“On the contrary, we are, apart from all other considerations, interested in dragging the reformists from their asylums and placing them alongside ourselves before the eyes of the struggling masses. With a correct tactic we stand only to gain from this. A Communist who doubts or fears this resembles a swimmer who has approved the theses on the best method of swimming but dares not plunge into the water.”

Above all the United Front as a tactic was based on a dialectical thinking. It was a rejection of an ultimatumist approach – of the flavour of “we demand you follow us because we have the right ideas and the reformists are bastards” – and it was rooted on analysis of the balance of forces as they actually are rather than on how we would like them to be.

The United Front and the Rise of Fascism in Germany

No treatment of the subject of the United Front would be complete without briefly looking at the rise of German fascism and later the policy of the Popular Front.

As we have seen the United Front was “class on class” in the sense that the tactic was to be deployed to offer unity to a divided working class in the struggle with the capitalist class. In the late 20s and early 30s the policy of the Comintern had become a policy which was known as the “Third Period” policy of “class against class”, a “United Front from Below” – which as we shall see had the opposite effect to that intended by the original United Front tactic.

The policy of the Comintern in the late 20s early 30s needs to be located in what Trotsky described as the zigzag policies emanating from Moscow. The class-against-class ultra-left “Third Period” came about as a result of the abrupt change of policy which in the Soviet Union saw the sudden decision to forcibly collectivise the peasantry. The enemy in the Soviet Union became the Kulaks, the rich peasants, and the rhetoric changed from co-operation between workers and peasants to class war rhetoric against “rich” peasants. The context was a shortage of food: the alleged “grain strike” –the result was the death of millions through starvation and a massive purge and crack down in which thousands of revolutionaries were persecuted and killed. Output from industry and agriculture plummeted as a consequence of the bureaucratic terror unleashed.

To justify these extreme measures there was a rapid turn in the policies of the Comintern, with a purge against the Right opposition of Bukharin, who in the years before had been the closest of allies with Stalin in securing victory over, and the purge of, the Left Opposition. Bukharin was removed from his prominent role in the Comintern. Whilst to the Stalinists in the mid-20s it was absurd to talk of world revolution, since socialism could supposedly be built in a backward peasant economy, the position changed and it was declared that capitalism internationally was on the brink of imminent collapse. This lead to the insane logic that the greatest problem for the working class came from the reformist mass organisations which were declared “social fascist”. On the other hand the rise of the Nazis was seen almost as something to be welcomed because it was a sign of the disintegration of capitalism.

Instead of appeals for unity in action against the threat of the rise of fascism, the German Communists denounced the socialist democrats as being little different to the fascists. The “United Front from below” was NOT a United Front – it was simply a demand that social democratic workers leave their own “social fascist” organisation and join the CP.
It is in these circumstances that Trotsky valiantly fought as events unfolded (not with the wisdom of hindsight) to change the suicidal policies of the Communist party to that of the United Front. I would argue that Trotsky’s appeals for a change of course from the CP are perhaps amongst his most brilliant writings.

THE RISE OF HITLER AND DESTRUCTION OF THE GERMAN LEFT
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1930-ger/index.htm

Sadly it wasn’t until after Hitler had got power that the Communists realised the true enormity of the German disaster and only then did they abandon the divisive Third period policy. The ultra extreme Third period policies were abandoned and policy very rapidly transformed into something akin to its opposite, namely, the Popular Front.

The United Front and the Popular Front

As we have seen a United Front is a united working class front, not a coalition with bourgeois or non-working class forces. In 1935 the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations and formed a direct alliance with France. Soviet foreign policy was dominated by the desire to form alliances with capitalist countries against Nazi Germany. The international situation was thus transformed in the eyes of the Communists from one where capitalism was on the verge of imminent collapse and world revolution into one where the communists were to seek alliances with the bourgeois of Britain, America and France at all costs – the last thing they wanted was workers revolutions which would frighten off their potential allies. Thus the Popular Front came into being with disastrous consequences for the revolution in Spain.

For those interested in this period I have written a history of the British Labour Movement in the 1930s which touches on the change of policy from the Third Period politics of the early 30s to the Popular Frontism of the late 30s. The degree to which the politics of the Communists went to the Right can be seen by the fact that they urged workers to support Tories in elections against the socialists of the ILP during the war. See:
http://exeterleft.freeserve.co.uk/thirties.html

The United Front and Today

Today there is neither a mass revolutionary party and nor is there anything that can be remotely be described as the mass reformist workers parties that had once threatened to organise general strikes in opposition to the First World War. As such a key factor is missing from a “united workers front” that was advocated as a tactic by the early Comintern. Of course there are Left groups today that say they are involved in so-called “United Fronts” – I would suggest that these United Fronts have nothing in common with the term as it was used in Marxism – especially as they are not unity of workers organisations in the context of the class struggle.
Does that mean that the United Front is irrelevant to socialists today? I would say that the same dialectical thinking and methodology that lies behind the United Front tactic has great relevance today – but only by analogy .In the situation that faces us today the logic of the united front tactic draws me to the conclusion that the overwhelming need for the working class at the moment is a new workers party that unites militant reformists and revolutionaries – but that is a subject for another article.