COMMUNIST REVIEW - Theory and discussion journal of the Communist Party of Britain
25 June 2024
Predicting the future can be a risky business. Of course, gamblers do it all the time; but, at this stage, just 10 days before the outcome of the general election is known, the chances of Labour having a majority are, typically, 20 to 1 on. All other odds are even further the other way. There is no point in placing a bet. The big bookmaking firms will have their ears to the ground, relying on much more information than just the published opinion polls. So, barring any disasters, it would seem fairly secure for me to say that, by the time you read this, the Tories will be out and Labour in.
Labour will be in office, but not actually in power. The ruling class of finance and monopoly capitalists will still be calling the shots. They have decided that the Tories are a toxic brand, and that Labour, cleansed by the Starmer clique of much of its left wing, is going to be able to protect their interests.
So there won’t be much change on key issues such as peace in Gaza and Ukraine, NATO, the economy, energy bills, benefits and public services. Labour leaders have been quite specific about that already. Despite that, there is a lot of hope among workers that things will be different. But hope doesn’t pay bills, and inevitably disillusionment will set in.
The recent elections to the European Parliament have demonstrated the dangers of such disillusionment. Social-democratic parties, so long pillars of the establishment, have lost out while far-right parties have made dramatic advances. The same sort of outcome is likely in Britain, if the trade union and labour movement does not mobilise to win genuinely progressive policies from the Labour government. Already we have seen indications of a potential alliance between the Tory rump and Farage’s poujadist Reform UK.
The content of this issue of CR was decided well before the date of the general election was known. It was partly inspired by the Communist Party’s call, in November 2022, for a united front of working-class organisations and the left to challenge the ruling class offensive by capitalist monopolies and their government. That government may have gone, but the ruling class offensive still remains, although under Labour it may appear to be a little softer.
In our lead article, Alex Gordon sets the Party’s call, for a united front against monopoly capitalism and war, in the context of the historical development of the united front policy in Britain and in the international communist movement. He elaborates how the rise of fascism led the Communist International, under Georgi Dimitrov, to develop the united front into the core of the Popular Front strategy.
The risk of outright fascism is today rather less, but far-right policies provide not only a diversion but a basis for attacking democratic rights. Meanwhile, global corporations have become dominant, and “A united front of the working class is the prerequisite to lead an anti-monopoly alliance against imperialism’s drive to war and disastrous path to climate destruction.”
The second article, from John Foster, gives a historical overview of the application of Popular Front and anti-monopoly alliance strategies. With a number of examples, he illustrates the dialectical interaction between the two, but also in both cases how the capitalist state will attack the base of unity within the working class and its potential for mobilisation. He emphasises the need to neutralise the coercive forces of the capitalist state, and to think about a concrete demand, such as the need for solidarity strikes, that would anticipate the state’s likely response.
Both authors refer to statements made by Comintern general secretary Georgi Dimitrov at the 7th World Congress of that body in 1935. Dimitrov’s opening report is well-known; less so his reply to the discussion, extensive extracts from which we reproduce in this issue of CR. It is particularly pertinent because he deals in detail with the close relationship between the workers’ united front and the anti-fascist Popular Front, showing that there is no “Chinese Wall” between them, and whichever is built first depends on local circumstances.
We follow that with a several other contributions to the Second International Meeting of Theoretical Publications of Left Parties and Movements, which we featured in the last issue of CR. Of these, the speech by MIkhail Kostrikov, of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, is particularly interesting, since it locates the overthrow of socialism in the Soviet Union to the failure to recognise and deal with the persistence of petty-bourgeois attitudes in society and the Communist Party. This was something which Lenin warned against repeatedly.
Two more articles complete this edition of CR. We start a new political education column with Ruth Pitman writing about the importance of political education for Communists, outlining the sort of political education that we need, and the role of the Communist Party’s Political Education Commission, which she convenes. Then in her Soul Food column, Fran Lock takes us past the general election into the “dream of a better world” with some poems commenting caustically on the state of society and politics today. “Poetry”, she says, “can be a bridge between personal feelings and political engagement; poems can transform those feelings into provocations, calls to arms; they can give us great purpose.”
With this edition of CR we start bimonthly publication. Party members paying by direct debit will find an increase of 50p on their monthly payments, although for logistical reasons the July top-up will be delayed to August, to make a £1 increase for that month alone. For subscribers by the Party shop, an annual subscription (6 issues) will cost £18 plus the postage addition.
Notes and References
1 https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics, accessed 25 June 2024.
IN NOVEMBER 2022, as strikes across Britain caused the largest loss of working days to industrial action for 35 years, the Communist Party Executive Committee called for a united front of working-class organisations and the left to challenge the ruling class offensive by capitalist monopolies and their government.
The Party called for “a united front at national level, fighting to bring down a corrupt government [prioritising] military spending, nuclear weapons and war over the health, heating and housing needs of the people.”
In November 2023 the Communist Party’s 57th Congress adopted a Political Resolution For a United Front against Monopoly Capitalism and War!:
“… a United Front would build on the increase in trade union and class consciousness brought about by escalating strikes since 2021. It would assist development of a new political consciousness among organised workers and in their communities; … recognition would grow of the leading role of monopoly corporations – both domestic and transnational – in the sustained and widening ruling-class offensive …. New forms of organising could emerge, perhaps along the lines of ‘councils of action’ and ‘unemployed workers centres’, bringing together trade union and campaigning groups on local issues related to poverty, housing, public services, local facilities, affordable energy, the right to food, community safety, anti-racism, women’s rights and the environment.”
Based on the conditions prevailing in Britain – a collapse in the labour share of income, the longest era of economic stagnation in modern capitalism, record monopoly super-profits, and structural inequalities created by 40 years of authoritarian, neoliberal state policies – the Communist Party called for a united front of organised labour with movements for social, racial, climate and economic justice.
The tactic of class alliances in which the working class plays the leading role is intrinsic to the united front strategy, building on the concept of the Worker-Peasant Alliance developed by Lenin in Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. The hackneyed ultra-left caricature that counterposes the ‘proletarian united front’ to a ‘bourgeois popular front’ ignores the role of the anti-imperialist united front in the national liberation struggles of colonised countries, and the united front of the working class, as the leading force in the anti-fascist popular front.
The Communist International (CI) envisaged Communist Parties in advanced capitalist countries leading a united front of workers’ parties and trade unions to break the masses from reformist illusions and make the working class the leading force of an anti-monopoly alliance, to include workers in the informal economy, small and medium-sized business owners squeezed by banks and monopolies, intellectuals, peasants, subsistence tenants, landless labourers and tribal farmers who constituted a majority of the world’s population.
The united front tactic originated in Weimar Germany and subsequently developed as the strategic international policy of the CI. In Britain, imperialism’s deep roots, this presented significant difficulties, provoking outright hostility from trade union leaders and anti-communist bans from Labour in government after 1924.
Beyond the imperialist core, the CI called on Communists to pursue an anti-imperialist united front in colonial and semi-colonial countries, to form alliances with emerging national bourgeoisies for a democratic revolution for political independence from imperialism, and to organise workers and peasants to struggle for their class interests.
Britain’s status in 1920 at the centre of a world system of imperialism, characterised by economic crisis, colonial wars and oppression, militarism, and imperialist rivalry, meant that abstract appeals for unity with Labour leaders who embraced imperialism, to win state power, could neither be a basis for working class unity in Britain, nor unity with movements for national independence and colonial freedom across her empire.
Debates on the CPGB’s attitude to parliamentarianism and Labour Party affiliation dominated its founding Communist Unity Convention (31 July-1 August 1920). Lenin’s view prevailed:
“I personally am in favour of participation in Parliament and of adhesion to the Labour Party on condition of free and independent Communist activity.”
The closing session of the CI Second Congress on 6 August 1920 approved CPGB affiliation to the Labour Party by 58 votes to 24 with 2 abstentions. On 10 August 1920, the CPGB applied for affiliation, receiving the reply that its aims did not accord with the constitution, principles, and programme of the Labour Party. Labour leader Arthur Henderson, whom Lenin had called on workers to support “as the rope supports a hanged man” was unsurprisingly firm on the matter.
By 1922, the Labour Party Executive recommended Conference to reject CPGB affiliation. Harry Pollitt (a delegate from the Boilermakers’ union) heavily lost the vote, with Frank Hodges, secretary of the Miners’ Federation (MFGB), describing Communists in a racist outburst as “intellectual slaves of Moscow – taking orders from the Asiatic mind” and Ramsey MacDonald vehemently opposing affiliation.
Pollitt called for the CPGB to continue its campaign for affiliation, to fight bans on Communists and demand united front action against the capitalist offensive. At the November 1922 general election, the CPGB urged a vote for Labour and stood six Communist candidates. JT Walton Newbold was elected in Motherwell without Labour opposition, and Shapurji Saklatvala won North Battersea as the official Labour candidate. The united front bore its first fruit in the election of two Communist MPs.
However, in October 1923, Rajani Palme Dutt, the closest the CPGB had to a theorist, warned:
“This transformation of British Labour politics can only take place as the result of a very patient and widespread explanation of the real position of the British working class, of the plans of the imperialists, and of the future prospects awaiting the workers. Socialist propaganda is still almost exclusively national in character (‘Britain for the British’) with an added dose of ‘internationalism’ as a kind of preventive against war and thus wholly unsuited to modern conditions.”
The 1923 Labour Party Conference again rejected CPGB affiliation. At the December 1923 general election Baldwin’s Conservatives ran on a manifesto offering tariff protection but lost their majority. In January 1924 Ramsey MacDonald formed the first minority Labour government with Liberal support.
Labour’s 1924 Conference rejected CPGB affiliation and voted to ban Communists from membership. Nevertheless, eight Communists stood at the 1924 general election, of whom four were Labour candidates. Saklatvala was re-elected in North Battersea.
Labour’s first minority government fell after nine months over the botched prosecution of JR Campbell, editor of the CPGB’s Workers’ Weekly paper, for publishing a ‘Don’t shoot!’ appeal to British soldiers. Labour’s subsequent election chances were scuppered by the Daily Mail’s publication of the ‘Zinoviev Letter’, a ‘red scare’ forgery by Secret Intelligence Services, which hardened Labour leaders’ hostility to the CPGB and demonstrated the state’s intent to suppress the Communist Party. In October 1925, twelve CPGB leaders received prison sentences of 6 to 12 months for Incitement to Mutiny.
CPGB united front work focussed increasingly on trades unions, founding the National Minority Movement in 1924, not to organise independent revolutionary trade unions or to split revolutionary elements away from existing organisations affiliated to the TUC, but to convert the revolutionary minority within each industry into a revolutionary majority.
The TUC’s betrayal of the miners in May 1926 confirmed the General Council’s wretched tactical and political leadership of the General Strike. In response, the CPGB launched a ‘new period’ of political struggle from 1927 lasting until 1932, abandoning united front work in favour of the CI’s new ‘Class against Class’ line, seeking to establish ‘independent leadership’ of the working class.
The new line coincided with the collapse of the CPGB’s very modest membership from 10,730 in October 1926, to just 3,200 by December 1929, less due to political disagreements with the new line, than the destruction wrought on staple industries such as mining, shipbuilding, and engineering where Communists were concentrated.
The Wall Street Crash in October 1929 and the Great Depression accelerated monopoly capital’s turn to fascism in Europe. At the CI Seventh Congress held in Moscow from 25 July to 20 August 1935, General Secretary, Georgi Dimitrov called for “unity of action of all sections of the working class in the struggle against fascism”, with the united front of the working class as the leading force in an anti-fascist Popular Front:
“… it cannot be seriously supposed that it is possible to establish a genuine anti-fascist Popular Front without securing the unity of action of the working class itself, the leading force of this anti-fascist Popular Front. At the same time, the further development of the united proletarian front depends, to a considerable degree, upon its transformation into a Popular Front against fascism.”
The CI developed the united front from a ‘tactic’ to become the core of a Popular Front strategy in the face of deepening imperialist crisis and the rise of fascism. Dimitrov defined the class character of fascism thus:
“Fascism is not a form of state power ‘standing above both classes − the proletariat and the bourgeoisie’ − as Otto Bauer has asserted. It is not ‘the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state’, as British socialist Brailsford declares. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organisation of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.”
In Dimitrov’s formulation, fascism is “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”11
“Fascism tries to establish its political monopoly by violently destroying other political parties. But the existence of the capitalist system, the existence of various classes and the accentuation of class contradictions inevitably tend to undermine and explode the political monopoly of fascism. Hence, under the blows of class contradictions, the political monopoly of fascism is bound to explode.”
By exposing fascism’s contradictions, the CI opened a perspective for mobilising the mass of working people for a struggle against fascism through “formation of a wide anti-fascist People’s Front on the basis of the proletarian united front” with “the unity of action of the working class itself, the leading force of this anti-fascist Popular Front”.
Paul Levi and the origins of the united front policy
The united front’s origins lie in the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), led by Paul Levi following the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919.
In A Letter to the German Communists, Lenin described the KPD’s position as “particularly difficult”. The Social-Democratic government’s crushing of the Spartacist uprising “blinded people and prevented them from keeping their heads and working out a correct strategy with which to reply to the excellent strategy of the Entente capitalists, armed, organised and schooled by the ‘Russian experience’, and supported by France, Britain and America. This hatred pushed them into premature insurrections.”
Levi developed the united front policy between March 1920 and January 1921 as a tactic to move German mass workers’ organisations towards revolutionary demands and to regroup revolutionary Marxists in the CI. The bitter fruits of the failure to apply the tactic led to Levi’s expulsion from the KPD in April 1921 and defined his subsequent political degeneration into social democracy.
From 13-17 March 1920 Germany experienced an attempted military coup (the ‘Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch’) triggered by the Versailles Treaty demands to dissolve the Freikorps, which had captured Riga in the Wars of Intervention against Soviet Russia in May 1919. The coup was defeated by a general strike on 19 March called by Carl Legien, president of the social-democratic General Federation of German Trade Unions (ADGB). Legien’s conditions for ending the general strike included:
“Dissolution of all the counter-revolutionary military formations unfaithful to the Constitution and their replacement by formations recruited from the ranks of reliable republicans, particularly the organised workers, employees and civil servants.”
On 24 March Levi was released from Moabit prison. In response to the general strike call on 13 March, the KPD Central Committee had argued, “the proletariat will not lift a finger for the democratic republic”. Levi sent a furious letter denouncing this attitude.
“… the KPD is threatened by moral and political bankruptcy. I cannot understand how people can write, ‘The working class is unable to act at this moment.’ … having denied the ability to act, the next day the party puts out a leaflet ‘Now the German proletariat must finally take up the struggle for the proletarian dictatorship and the communist Soviet Republic.’ … our ‘big shots’ break the neck of the general strike organisationally and politically. They also do it morally. I consider it a crime, to now break up the action by stating, ‘The proletariat will not lift a finger for the democratic republic.’ Do you know what that means? This is a stab in the back of the biggest action of the German proletariat!”
Levi continued,
“I thought we were clear and in agreement about the following: If an action breaks out – even for the most stupid goal! (the November Revolution had no reasonable goal, or rather no goal at all) – we must support that action and raise it above its stupid goal by means of our slogans, [to] bring the masses closer to the real goal through intensification of the action! And not cry at the beginning ‘we will not lift a finger’ if we do not like the goal.”19
Die Kommunistische Internationale, the German-language organ of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, republished Levi’s letter to combat sectarianism and ultra-leftism in the KPD. Lenin’s ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: an Infantile Disorder, published in June 1920, is partly a commentary on these events.
Thus encouraged, on 26 March 1920 Levi published in Die Rote Fahne a ‘Declaration of “Loyal Opposition”’ to Legien’s proposed reformist workers’ government. He wrote:
“4. For the further conquest of the proletarian masses for communism, a state of affairs in which political freedom can be enjoyed without restriction, and bourgeois democracy cannot operate as the dictatorship of capital, is, from the viewpoint of the development of the proletarian dictatorship, of the utmost importance in further winning the proletarian masses to the side of communism.
5. The KPD considers the formation of a socialist government excluding the bourgeois-capitalist parties a desirable condition for the self-affirmation of the proletarian masses and their maturation for the exercise of the proletarian dictatorship. It will play towards the government the role of a loyal opposition, as long as the government provides guarantees for the political activity of the working class, as long as it combats the bourgeois counter-revolution with all the means at its disposal and does not hinder the social and organisational strengthening of the working class.
By ‘loyal opposition’ we mean: no preparation for a violent revolution, obviously retaining the party’s freedom of political agitation for its goals and slogans.”
The KPD Central Committee rejected Levi’s Declaration by 12 votes to 8. Defending Levi in this “dispute over tactics” in Die Kommunistische Internationale, Miechislaw Bronski used the expression “United Front” (Einheitsfront) for the first time:
“The united front, once created, which enabled the workers to develop their power to an unprecedented extent, cannot be wiped out by counter-revolutionary measures by the bourgeois-socialist government”
Shortly afterwards Clara Zetkin used the phrase, when writing about the Kapp Putsch,
“The social-patriotic masterminds deliberately sought to obscure and conceal the significance of the revolutionary united front of the proletariat”.
Levi’s position was opposed within the CI by Béla Kun, Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek, with Radek warning of “the danger of communist possibilism”. Critically however, Lenin endorsed Levi’s position in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder:
“This [Declaration of ‘Loyal Opposition’] is quite correct both in its basic premise and practical conclusions. The basic premise is that at present there is no ‘objective basis’ for the dictatorship of the proletariat because the ‘majority of the urban workers’ support the Independents. The conclusion is: a promise to be a ‘loyal opposition’ (i.e. renunciation of preparations for a ‘forcible overthrow’) to a ‘socialist government if it excludes bourgeois-capitalist parties.”
Lenin added:
“That is sufficient ground for a compromise, which is necessary and should consist in renouncing, for a certain period, all attempts at forcible overthrow of a government which enjoys the confidence of a majority of the urban workers.”
Results of the united front
The value of Levi’s united front approach became apparent in June 1920. Levi and Zetkin were elected to the Reichstag as the KPD polled 442,000 votes (2.1%). The SPD vote halved to 5.6 million (21.7%) from 11.5 million in 1919. However, the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) received 4.9 million votes (17.9%) becoming the second largest group in parliament with 84 seats. With 700,000 members and over 50 daily newspapers it also became the world’s largest socialist party.
In July 1920 the USPD sent four observers to the CI Second Congress in Moscow. The USPD delegation split with Däumig and Stoecker agreeing to the CI’s 21 Conditions for Admission, while Crispien and Dittmann opposed. Levi argued to the USPD that their party could not merely stand with the masses, but had to lead them to a revolutionary seizure of power:
“What really is the deep meaning of the controversies with Dittmann and Crispien yesterday? It is the fact repeated until we were tired of it: ‘We had a relationship with the masses, we stood where the masses stood, our attitude was approved by the masses.’ This is a fundamental error concerning the role of the party towards the masses. For, true as it is that the party cannot wage the revolutionary struggle without the masses, it is just as fatal for a party to confine itself to ask, ‘What are the masses doing?’ and at every point to say only what will flatter the masses. That has up till now been the political method of the USPD.”
The USPD’s Halle congress (12-17 October 1920) was addressed in a four-hour speech by Grigori Zinoviev, recently arrived from the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East, as well as by Menshevik leader, Julius Martov and German Social-Democrats. A majority of USPD delegates (including a young Ernst Thälmann) voted to join the CI.
On 4 December 1920, the left majority of USPD fused with the KPD to form the Unified Communist Party of Germany (Vereinigte Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, VKPD). Levi’s united front tactic had transformed the KPD into the world’s largest Communist Party outside Russia. The VKPD, with Paul Levi and Ernst Däumig as co-chairs, briefly grew to 350,000 members before its disastrous ‘March Action’ in 1921.
Levi’s ‘Open Letter’ published in Die Rote Fahne on 8 January 1921 was the first developed statement of this ‘United Front Policy’ (Einheitsfrontpolitik). The ‘Open Letter’ to all workers’ organisations, parties and trade unions proposed a series of joint demands: higher pensions for disabled war veterans, elimination of unemployment, squeezing monopolies, reopening businesses, factory-committee control of food, raw materials and fuel, peasants’ councils and agricultural workers’ control of sowing, harvesting and marketing of farm products, disarming and disbanding of bourgeois paramilitary organisations, workers’ self-defence, amnesty for political prisoners, and opening trade and diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia.
Predictably, the leaders of the organisations to whom it was addressed rejected Levi’s overtures, and his opponents in the CI criticised the ‘Open Letter’. Lenin however called it “perfectly correct tactics”, adding: “I have condemned the contrary opinion of our ‘Lefts’ who were opposed to this letter”.
On 10 June 1921 Lenin wrote to Zinoviev:
“The tactic of the Open Letter should definitely be applied everywhere. This should be said straight out, clearly and exactly, because waverings in regard to the ‘Open Letter’ are extremely harmful, extremely shameful and extremely widespread. We may as well admit this. All those who have failed to grasp the necessity of the Open Letter tactic should be expelled from the Communist International within a month after its Third Congress.”
On 21 January 1921, as VKPD representative to the Livorno congress of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), Levi had opened the debate on expelling reformists. However, he was dismayed at the CI representatives’ crude tactics in arguing for expulsion not only of Filippo Turati’s right-wing faction, but also of centrists representing a majority of organised Italian workers led by Giacinto Serrati. A left-wing minority led by Amadeo Bordiga broke away from the PSI to form the Italian Communist Party (PCI).
Unlike at the USPD’s Halle Congress in October 1920, or the Tours Congress of the Section Francaise de l’lnternationale Ouvrière (SFIO) in December 1920, where a majority of delegates voted to affiliate to the CI, in Livorno the PSI (already affiliated to the CI since 1919) split with the majority leaving the CI. Levi wrote:
“… there exist two ways to achieve a higher degree of communist experience in these mass organisations connected with the Third International. One involves new splits; the other implies that we train politically the masses who have found their way to us, experience with them the present age, the revolution, and in this way reach a higher stage together with and within the masses.”
At a VKPD Central Committee meeting on 24 February 1921, Levi criticised the role of the CI’s representatives in Livorno. He narrowly lost a vote on the issue and resigned from the Central Committee along with Ernst Däumig, Clara Zetkin and three others. Lenin’s response to Levi’s resignation was scathing:
“I consider your tactics in respect of Serrati erroneous. Any defence or even semi-defence of Serrati was a mistake. But to withdraw from the Central Committee!!?? That, in any case, was the biggest mistake!”30
With Levi out of the VKPD leadership, his opponents deployed Zinoviev and Bukharin’s ultra-left ‘theory of the offensive’ to ‘force’ a revolutionary crisis in Germany. On 16 March 1921, the SPD governor of Saxony ordered police to occupy a Communist stronghold in the Mansfeld-Eisleben mining district. KPD leaders seized this opportunity to call an armed general strike from 20 March, the so-called ‘March Action’. On 24 March, KPD militants tried to occupy factories and bloody clashes took place with non-Communist workers, who were branded ‘scabs’. 200,000 workers went on strike, but in Berlin support was almost non-existent. On 1 April the KPD called off the strike having achieved nothing but the deaths of its most loyal members. In the subsequent crackdown the KPD and its newspapers were banned, and its leadership arrested. KPD membership collapsed from 375,000 before the ‘March Action’ to 140,000 by November 1921.
Levi castigated the ‘March Action’ in a pamphlet written on 3-4 April 1921, Our Path: Against Putschism, calling it “the greatest Bakuninist putsch in history to date. […] To call it Blanquism would be an insult to Blanqui.” His conclusion was:
“‘Never again in the history of the Communist Party must the Communists declare war on the workers. […] The Communist Party is only the vanguard of the proletariat, and never a bludgeon against the proletariat; it cannot march out if it has lost its connection with the main force.”
On 4 May 1921, Levi elaborated the theoretical basis for the united front at a meeting of the VKPD Central Committee, arguing that Marxism developed in Russia differently from in Germany, where by 1920 workers were already organised in reformist parties and unions. The task of Communists in Germany was to win them over. Hence a united front because
“it is only possible to approach organised masses of workers if one does not just fight against them, but if one relates to their own ideas, even if these are mistaken, and helps them to overcome the error by their own experience.”
On 15 April 1921, the KPD had voted to expel Levi for indiscipline, and to demand his resignation from the Reichstag. On 29 April the CI Executive Committee (ECCI) had approved Levi’s expulsion.15
Three Internationals
The first four Congresses of the CI, held annually from 1919, divide into two phases. The 1st and 2nd focussed on the programmatic and organisational break with social democracy, including the 21 Conditions for Admission to the Communist International. The 3rd Congress, held from 22 June to 12 July 1921 in Moscow, after the disastrous ‘March Action’ in Germany, adopted the slogan “To the Masses”. The ECCI warned:
“The March battles teach another lesson …. It is vital to prepare the broadest sections of the working masses for the future battles by carrying out increasingly intense and extensive revolutionary agitation on a day-to-day basis, and by organising struggles around slogans which are clear and accessible to the broadest proletarian masses.”
Communist Parties were instructed to make agreements in their countries with parties of the Second and ‘Two-and-a-Half’ Internationals for united action to defend workers’ interests while retaining independence and freedom to criticise. On 2 April 1922 a Conference in Berlin of the Second, ‘Two-and-a-Half’ and Third Internationals agreed to establish a Steering Committee to organise a General Conference of workers’ organisations and issue a joint call for mass demonstrations against unemployment and for united action against the capitalist offensive.
However, ECCI representatives to the Conference (Radek and Bukharin) agreed to allow representatives of the other Internationals to prepare a report on the political situation in Georgia where the Bolsheviks had overthrown a Menshevik government in March 1921 and to attend a trial in Moscow of 47 Social Revolutionaries (SRs) accused of conspiring to assassinate Bolshevik Party members. Lenin’s criticism of these concessions was reproduced in the CPGB’s Communist Review in June 1922:
“[T]he CI has made a political concession to the international bourgeoisie and obtained no concession in return.”
On 21 May 1922, parties of the Second and ‘Two-and-a-Half’ Internationals called a world congress at the Hague and excluded the Communists. On 23 May at the second meeting of the Three Internationals’ Steering Committee, the Second International proposed a Committee on Georgia, while the ‘Two-and-a-Half’ International opposed an early General Conference of workers’ organisations, the ostensible purpose of the meeting. The Third International representatives withdrew from further participation. In May 1923 at a Conference in Hamburg the Second and ‘Two-and-a-Half’ Internationals merged to form the Labour and Socialist International (LSI) with Arthur Henderson, former Labour Party leader, as chairman of its Executive Committee. These setbacks for the united front policy confirmed a widening organisational and political rift between the CI and the LSI, not only centred on class conflict in Europe, but increasingly framed by attitudes towards imperialism and suppression of anti-colonial movements in Ireland, India, North Africa, Iraq, the Caribbean, Korea and China.
The Anti-Imperialist United Front
The 4th Congress of the CI in Petrograd and Moscow, from 5 November to 5 December 1922, restated the call for a united workers’ front against international capital in Theses On The United Front:
“… the [ECCI] finds that the slogan of the Third World Congress of the Communist International, “To the masses!”, and the overall interests of the Communist movement, require that the Communist Parties and the Communist International as a whole support the slogan of a united workers’ front and take the initiative on this question into their own hands.”
The Theses on the Workers’ United Front were intended to apply the lessons of Germany to the imperialist countries. Of equal significance, however, were the Theses on the Eastern Question adopted at the same Congress, which identified
“… a shift in the social basis of the revolutionary movement in the colonies. This shift tends to intensify the anti-imperialist struggle. And its leadership is thus no longer automatically held by feudal forces and the national bourgeoisie, who stand ready to compromise with imperialism. […] The rise of indigenous productive forces in the colonies stands in irreconcilable contradiction to the interests of world imperialism, whose very essence is to take advantage of the variation in the level of development of productive forces in different arenas of the world economy to achieve monopoly superprofits.”
The CI adopted the slogan of ‘The Anti-Imperialist United Front’, to be used by Communists in colonial and semi-colonial countries.
“The slogan of the proletarian united front was advanced in the West during a transitional period of gathering forces together organisationally. So too in the colonial East at present, the slogan of the anti-imperialist united front must be emphasised. […] And just as the slogan of proletarian united front in the West contributes to exposing social-democratic betrayal of proletarian interests, so too the slogan of anti-imperialist united front serves to expose the vacillation of different bourgeois nationalist currents.”
The policy of anti-imperialist united front meant
“… a determined struggle for comprehensive democratisation of the political order, in order to rob politically and socially reactionary forces of their points of support in the country and provide working people with organisational freedom in the struggle for their class interests (for a democratic republic, agrarian reform, tax reform, administrative reorganisation on the basis of extensive self-government, protective labour legislation, restriction of child labour, protection of mothers and children, and so on).”
The 4th Congress set out “The Task of Winning the Majority”:
“In the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the CI has the following two tasks: 1) to establish the nucleus of a Communist Party, representing the interests of the proletariat as a whole; 2) to give full support to the national-revolutionary movement against imperialism, to become its vanguard and within this national movement to initiate and develop a social movement.”
Today, the world’s largest Communist Party, the Communist Party of China (CPC) views the united front tactic of strategic alliances both as critical to its early struggle for survival and successful fight to establish the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and in its ongoing work to build Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Soon after the party’s foundation in 1922, CPC leaders debated and agreed the united front concept.
In 1924 the CPC formed a “National Revolution United Front” with the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT), creating a National Revolutionary Army to fight warlords and unify China. A Military Academy was established with Soviet support at Whampoa in Guangzhou province, under the direction of the KMT’s Chiang Kai-shek, to train KMT and CPC officers including Lin Bao (later commander of the People’s Liberation Army) and Zhou Enlai. In March 1926 Chiang Kai-shek purged Communists and Soviet advisors from the Military Academy and the army in the ‘Canton Coup’, before massacring Communist forces in Shanghai in April 1927.
With the collapse of this first united front from 1926, a civil war ensued between CPC and KMT. Japan’s invasion and occupation of Manchuria in 1931 led Chiang Kai-shek to pursue a policy of appeasement with Japan until 1937, when he was forced by his own officers to agree to CPC demands for a second united front (the “Second Nationalist-Communist Cooperation”) leading to suspension of the civil war from 1937 to 1945.
Mao Zedong called the united front one of his “Three Magic Weapons” against the KMT (alongside the Party and the Red Army). The CPC’s current general secretary, President Xi Jinping, has put a priority on united front work not seen since the 1949 revolution.
Xi quoted Mao in his September 2014 speech on the importance of united front work, calling it one of the CPC’s “magic weapons”. In May 2015 Xi chaired a national conference on united front work, and in July 2015 he established the Leading Small Group on United Front Work. Today, all cadres are required to engage in “united front work” managed by the United Front Work Department of the CPC Central Committee.
Continuing relevance of the United Front strategy
The crises of the 1920s and 30s bear a superficial resemblance to recent developments since the 2007 global financial crisis. Today US imperialism’s response to economic competition is protectionism and heightened militarism. After a turning to technocratic, centrist governments in the wake of the Eurozone crisis, Italy, France and Germany, amongst other European countries, have experienced the rise of far-right political parties. In the 1930s, the solution of capitalist monopolies to economic depression was concentration of ownership to create efficiencies in production. Today, monopolies constitute the largest concentrations in human history across strategic economic sectors, from agriculture to energy, from pharmaceuticals to IT.
Yet differences are also striking. Economic stagnation in Western economies today is more prolonged and persistent than in the 1930s, if less severe. Michael Roberts describes “a Long Depression that began after the Great Recession of 2008-9, similar to the depression of the late 19th century from 1873-95 in most major economies.”
Capital in 2024 is highly globalised and mobile, hence less national. Partly for this reason, social-democratic parties are disappearing from mass politics. The rise of the global corporation and decline in political importance of national capital, means the role of parties seeking to bind the working class in a Union Sacrée with their national bourgeoisie is no longer relevant.
Above all, the rise of socialist China, the world’s leading economy in investment-led growth, technological innovation, and the largest economy since 2016 as measured by purchasing power parity (PPP), is reshaping global trade and economic geography in a way that the Soviet Union could not a century ago. This provides the basis for new alliances such as the BRICS group, encompassing around 45% of world population, 27% of gross world product, and 33% of global GDP PPP.
A united front of the working class is the prerequisite to lead an anti-monopoly alliance against imperialism’s drive to war and disastrous path to climate destruction.
Build the United Front against monopoly capitalism and war!
Notes and References
1 ‘Communists call for ‘united front’ against monopolies’, Communist Party of Britain (CPB), 20 Nov 2022, at https://www.communistparty.org.uk/communists-call-for-united-front-against-monopolies/.
2 ‘“United front can defeat the Tories” says CP’, CPB, 30 Nov 2022, at https://www.communistparty.org.uk/united-front-can-defeat-the-tories-says-cp/.
3 For a United Front against Monopoly Capitalism and War!, CPB 57th Congress Political Resolution, adopted 4 November 2023, at https://www.communistparty.org.uk/for-a-united-front-against-monopoly-capitalism-and-war/.
4 Lenin, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/tactics/
5 Lenin, Fraternal Message to the Communist Unity Convention: The Founding of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 8 July 1920, Communist Unity Convention: Official Report, September 1920, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/sep/x01.htm
6 Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: an Infantile Disorder, Ch 9, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch09.htm.
7 J Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Vol 1: Formation and early years, 1919-1924, Lawrence & Wishart, 1968, p 174.
8 R Palme Dutt, ‘The British Empire’, in Labour Monthly, Vol V, No 4, October 1923, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/dutt/articles/1923/british_empire.htm .
9 G Dimitrov, Unity of the Working Class against Fascism, Concluding speech before the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, August 13, 1935, at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/unity.htm ; see this edition of CR, p
10 Ibid, see this edition of CR, p .
11 Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism, Main Report delivered at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, August 2, 1935, ‘The class character of fascism’, at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm .
12 Ibid, ‘Fascism − a ferocious but unstable power’.
13 Ibid, ‘The anti-fascist people’s front’.
14 Dimitrov, Unity of the Working Class against Fascism, op cit, ‘United proletarian front or anti-fascist popular front’; see this edition of CR, p
15 For more on Paul Levi and the united front policy see D Gaido, Paul Levi and the Origins of the United-Front Policy in the Communist International, , in Historical Materialism, Vol 25(1), 2017 pp 131-174, at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316255744_Paul_Levi_and_the_Origins_of_the_United-Front_Policy_in_the_Communist_International.
16 Lenin, A Letter to the German Communists, 14 August 1921, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/aug/14.htm .
17 Freikorps − paramilitary militias in the German Revolution (1918–19) used by Social-Democratic Party (SPD) leader Friedrich Ebert, and Defence Minister Gustav Noske, to suppress the Spartacist uprising and carry out summary executions of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg on 15 January 1919.
18 Spartakus, ‘Der Kapp-Lüttwitz-Putsch: Brief aus Deutschland (The Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch: Letter from Germany), Berlin, April 1920’, in Die Kommunistische Internationale, Vol 2, No 10, 1920, p 157.
19 P Levi, ‘Brief an das Zentralkomitee der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands’ (Letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany), 16 March 1920, in Die Kommunistische Internationale, Vol 2, No 12, 1920, pp 147–8.
20 The November Revolution was the uprising by German workers and soldiers from 29 October to 9 November 1918, to bring an end to World War I.
21 Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag) founded by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg as the Central Organ of the Spartacus League, later of the Communist Party of Germany, was published in Berlin from 9 November 1918, but was harassed and repeatedly closed down. From 1935 it was published from Prague; and from October 1936 to late 1939, from Brussels.
22 ‘Erklärung der Zentrale der KPD (Declaration of the KPD Central Committee)’, in Die Rote Fahne, 23 March 1920; reprinted in Spartakus,1920, p 161.
23 Spartakus, op cit, p 169
24 K Zetkin, ‘Die Lage in Deutschland (The situation in Germany)’, in Die Kommunistische Internationale, Vol 2, No 12, 1920, p 157.
25 K Radek, ‘Die KPD während der Kapptage: Eine kritische Untersuchung (The KPD during the Kapp Days: A critical investigation)’, in Die Kommunistische Internationale, Vol 2, No 12:1, 1920), pp 165, 173.
26 Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: op cit, Appendix II: ‘The Communists and the Independents in Germany’, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/appendix.htm#a2 .
27 Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, USPD), founded 1917 by anti-war members of the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).
28 Minutes of the Proceedings, Second Congress of the Communist International, trans RA Archer, New Park Publications, London, p 277.
29 The Congress of the Peoples of the East (September 1920, Baku), following the CI Second Congress (July-August 1920, Moscow), was the CI’s first attempt to assemble representatives of exploited and oppressed peoples in colonial and semi-colonial countries. It marked a conscious break with the Second International’s neglect of the national and colonial question by recognising working-class revolutionaries’ duty to support anti-colonial struggles as a valuable ally in the overthrow of imperialism, see https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/baku/cpe-baku-pearce.pdf .
30 Lenin, Letter to Clara Zetkin and Paul Levi, 16 April 1921, in Collected Works, Vol 45, pp 124-125; also at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/apr/16.htm.
31 Lenin, Remarks on the Draft Theses on Tactics for the Third Congress of the Communists International, in LCW, Vol 42, p 321, and at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/jun/22.htm.
32 P Levi, In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi, D Fernbach, ed, Historical Materialism Book Series, Brill, Leiden, 2011, p 106.
33 Ibid, p 157.
34 Ibid, p 184.
35 To the Working Men and Women of All Countries, ECCI Appeal to the Proletariat of All Countries, Third Congress of the Communist International, 17 July 1921 https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/3rd-congress/appeal.htm
36 The ‘Two-and-a-Half’, or Vienna International (International Working Union of Socialist Parties – IWUSP), was founded in February 1921 by socialist, social democrat and Menshevik parties including the Independent Labour Party in Britain. It was dissolved in September 1922 with most affiliates joining the Labour and Socialist International (LSI) 1923-1940, forerunner of the Socialist International.
37 Lenin, ‘We Have Paid Too Much’, in Pravda, 11 April 1922, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/apr/09.htm .
38 Theses On The United Front, Thesis 8, 4th Congress of the Communist International, Appendix to the Theses on Comintern Tactics, adopted by the EC, December 1922, at https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/united-front.htm.
39 Theses on the Eastern Question, Thesis 1, 4th Congress of the Communist International − Resolutions 1922, https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/thesis-on-eastern-question.htm .
40 Ibid, Thesis 6.
41 Theses on Comintern Tactics, Thesis 9, 4th Congress of the Communist International, 5 December 1922, at https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/tactics.htm.
42 United Front Leading Small Group: more emphasis on CPC Politburo’s “Big United Front”, in Renminwang, 31 July 2015, at http://cpc.people.com.cn/xuexi/n/2015/0731/c385474-27391395.html .
43 Michael Roberts, Forecast 2024: stagnation, elections and AI, 2 January 2024 https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/01/02/forecast-2024-stagnation-elections-and-ai/.