The Programme of the Early Comintern, and the Transitional Programme (12/18)
But, the fundamental theoretical premise upon which Paul bases his argument is itself wrong, as I have indicated above. In 1848, as Marx pointed out, such a popular front with the forces of petty-bourgeois democracy led to the defeat of the proletariat across Europe. Marx and Engels, as Engels states, joined the bourgeois Democrats for the simple reason that their own political forces were tiny. They needed to “gain the ear” of the workers, in order to win them away from their existing affiliation to the liberal and social democrats. As I will indicate later, its the same reason that, in the 1930's, led the Trotskyists into “The French Turn”, whereby they entered the socialist parties, and it is the reason Marxists are in the LP today. But, they did not do that, by abandoning their own programme and organisation. What would have been the point? As Marx and Engels point out, they were able to do that as a wing of the Democrat party openly, but had such open activity not been possible they could have retained their organisation in secret.
The Communist International discusses the Workers Government in several contexts. Firstly, it cannot be divorced from the United Front tactic, which again Paul confuses with the Popular Front. Trotsky discusses the United Front tactic as follows:
“In cases where the Communist Party still remains an organisation of a numerically insignificant minority, the question of its conduct on the mass-struggle front does not assume a decisive practical and organisational significance. In such conditions, mass actions remain under the leadership of the old organisations which by reason of their still powerful traditions continue to play the decisive role.
Similarly the problem of the united front does not arise in countries where – as in Bulgaria, for example – the Communist Party is the sole leading organisation of the toiling masses.
But wherever the Communist Party already constitutes a big, organised, political force, but not the decisive magnitude: wherever the party embraces organisationally, let us say, one-fourth, one-third, or even a larger proportion of the organised proletarian vanguard, it is confronted with the question of the united front in all its acuteness.
If the party embraces one-third or one-half of the proletarian vanguard, then the remaining half or two-thirds are organised by the reformists or centrists. It is perfectly obvious, however, that even those workers who still support the reformists and the centrists are vitally interested in maintaining the highest material standards of living and the greatest possible freedom for struggle. We must consequently so devise our tactic as to prevent the Communist Party, which will on the morrow embrace the entire three-thirds of the working class, from turning into – and all the more so, from actually being – an organisational obstacle in the way of the current struggle of the proletariat.”
(The term centrist, here, means wavering between reformism and revolutionary politics) But, the basis of this United Front is that it is a united front in action. The Comintern stresses the need for the Communist parties wherever it is adopted to be mature, cohesive and disciplined so that they are not drawn into opportunism as a result of any such alliance. It is a tactic designed to expose the bourgeois nature of the reformists and centrists the better to win over the workers in their entirety to the Communist Party, and that cannot be done by surrendering your own independent organisation or principles.
“We broke with the reformists and centrists in order to obtain complete freedom in criticising perfidy, betrayal, indecision and the half-way spirit in the labour movement. For this reason 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. It is precisely in the course of struggle that broad masses must learn from experience that we fight better than the others, that we see more clearly than the others, that we are more audacious and resolute. In this way, we shall bring closer the hour of the united revolutionary front under the undisputed Communist leadership.”
(ibid)
Of course, Paul says that the Left is free to raise its own demands. The problem is that he then wants them to refrain from doing so in order to build this broad illusory unity!
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