The Programme of the Early Comintern, and the Transitional Programme (17/18)
The approach of the Stalinists to the Popular Front was not an error, but a conscious betrayal of the working-class and proletarian revolution. It is the inevitable consequence of the adoption of the Theory of Socialism in One Country, which meant, in practice, the sabotage of proletarian revolution everywhere else, in order to seek the support of democratic imperialism, or at least to dissuade it from intervention in the USSR. The Stalinists, as in Spain, also sought to avoid proletarian revolution, because they feared that, in practice, what this meant was that forces to their Left would also overtake them. In particular, in the 1930's, they feared that it would be the Trotskyists that would gain in power and influence, which would undermine the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow itself.
That the Spanish Socialist Party should align itself with the bourgeoisie was no surprise, because, even though, verbally, it stood on the Left of European social-democracy, in practice, it continued to act as with all social-democratic parties, as a defender of bourgeois property and interests. Social democracy is the ideology of the middle-class which simply transfers its role in society as a mediating, and managerial layer into an ideology, which seeks simply to operate the mechanism of capitalism and bourgeois society more efficiently, and, thereby to conciliate the interests of workers and capital within that framework. But, the actions of the other workers' parties such as the centrist POUM, and the Anarchists are different, they represent not a simple betrayal of the working-class, as in the case of the Stalinists and Socialists, but an error. It is an error, nevertheless, that flows from their own inadequate petty-bourgeois politics.
I want to begin by looking at one of the arguments used by the POUMists to justify their support for the Popular Front, because it relates to the series I have been writing on Economic Romanticism, and also, thereby, the arguments put forward today by the “anti-imperialists”. In the age of colonialism, Spain was a major colonial power. It, at least, equalled England in that respect, with large colonies in the Americas, as well as in Asia and Africa. But, emphasising the difference between colonialism, based upon mercantilism and the power of merchant and financial capital in alliance with feudal landed property, as against imperialism, based on industrial capital, by the 19th century, Spain's power had waned. In the 1930's, Spain was one of the less developed capitalist economies in Europe. This fact was used by the POUMists to argue that this meant that the Spanish bourgeoisie was not like the bourgeoisie in other developed European countries, and that the situation in Spain was more akin to that of a colonial country engaged in an anti-colonial struggle. This is the same argument that the “anti-imperialists” use today to justify their own popular front type alliances with the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist regimes and movements. It is completely false.
Trotsky's rejection of the POUM's argument that the special conditions justified a bloc with bourgeois parties is set out in Trotsky's article “The Treachery of the POUM”, written in January 1936. In it can be found Trotsky's condemnation of the same kinds of petty-bourgeois demands that had been put forward by the Narodniks and criticised by Lenin.
“How ironical is the name “Marxist Unity” ... with the bourgeoisie. The Spanish “Left Communists” (Andres Nin, Juan Andrade and others) have more than once tried to parry our criticism of their collaborationist policies by citing our lack of understanding of the “special conditions” in Spain. This is the customary argument put to use by all opportunists – for the first duty of a genuine proletarian revolutionist lies in translating the special conditions of his country into the international language of Marxism, which is accessible even beyond the confines of one’s own country. But today there is no need of these theoretical arguments. The Spanish bloc of the tops of the working class with the left bourgeoisie does not include in it anything “national,” for it does not differ in the least from the “People’s Front” in France, Czechoslovakia, Brazil or China. The “Party of Marxist Unity” is merely slavishly conducting the same policy that the Seventh Congress of the Comintern foisted upon all its sections, absolutely independently of their “national peculiarities.” The real difference in the Spanish policy this time lies only in the fact that a section of the London International has also adhered officially to the bloc with the bourgeoisie. So much the worse for it. As far as we are concerned we prefer clarity. In Spain, genuine revolutionists will no doubt be found who will mercilessly expose the betrayal of Maurin, Nin, Andrade and Co., and lay the foundation for the Spanish section of the Fourth International!”
Trotsky points out that the bourgeoisie in Spain, or in colonial countries is not below the position of the bourgeoisie in Russia, in 1917, and yet the Bolsheviks saw no basis for an alliance with that bourgeoisie, quite the contrary. But, even were it the case that the bourgeoisie in Spain or some other colonial or less developed country were below that of the Russian bourgeoisie, in 1917, there is no basis for any such alliance, Trotsky says, because as Lenin set out in the Theses On The National and Colonial Questions,
“the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form.”
In other words, here, Lenin sets out the basic principle of the United Front, as against the Popular Front. The communists wage a determined struggle against the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois movements that attempt to portray themselves as something they are not, in order to garner the support of the proletariat. They forge temporary unity in revolutionary action, but the communists refuse to merge with these other forces, or, thereby, to subordinate their politics or organisation, which is the hallmark of the Popular Front. Not even such unity in action is possible unless the communists are able to bring together and train the proletariat and peasantry for such revolutionary activity, and that revolutionary activity is from the start stated clearly as being aimed not only against any colonial power, but also against the national bourgeois-democratic movements that ultimately act as the local agent of that colonial power, in opposition to the revolutionary proletariat. That is in complete contrast to the policy of the Popular Front, which is itself based upon the Stalinist stagist theory, in which the proletariat is required to subordinate its own revolutionary ambitions to those of the bourgeois-democratic or national revolution, having to postpone its own struggle to some unknown future date.
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